Still in the Rain: On Power, Proximity, and the Myth of National Unity
Drawing on Chinua Achebe's novel, the writer observes that sixty years after independence, Cameroon remains trapped in a dynamic where a small elite occupies the shelter of state power while the majority remain excluded, yet internalize the rhetoric of necessary unity and sacrifice.
"We ignore man's basic nature if we say, as some critics do, that because a man... had risen from overnight from poverty and insignificance to his present opulence he could be persuaded without trouble to give it up and return to his original state.
A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body, and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors the whole time.
The trouble with our new nation was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say "to hell with it." We had all been in the rain together till yesterday.
Then a handful of us - the smart, and the lucky and hardly ever the best - had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in it. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that he next phase - the extension of our house - was even more important and called for new and original tactics;
it required all argument to cease and the whole people to speak with one voice. And that any more dissent outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house"
- Chinua Achebe (A Man of the People, 1966)
. 60 years after independence, we are still in the rain. Worse, some of us in the rain actually think that we deserve to be in the rain while those who are in the house deserve to be there. #ReceiveSense2020
This piece was written in early 2020, a moment of sustained political tension in Cameroon—ongoing conflict in the Anglophone regions, economic strain, and deepening public skepticism toward institutions. The invocation of national unity as justification for silencing dissent was a persistent feature of governance rhetoric.
The post cuts through nationalist pieties by naming a structural condition, not a moral failing: that those newly arrived at power will not voluntarily relinquish it, and that those locked outside often accept their exclusion as temporary or deserved. The Achebe quotation, written in 1966 at Africa's independence threshold, reads with sharper irony six decades on, suggesting not progress but stasis. The observation that some of the excluded have internalized their own marginalization remains urgent wherever power consolidates behind claims of collective purpose.