ABSTRACT
The making of contemporary Cameroon is linked to the historical processes of European colonization of Africa: the Portuguese, the Germans, the British and the French all have visible colonial legacies in Cameroon. The Germans were the first to administratively connect the different chiefdoms and kingdoms along the coast and interior of Cameroon in 1884. With the 1916 defeat of Germany in Cameroon, the colony was partitioned between France and Britain. To mitigate the challenges of Anglo-French colonial legacies, measures such as a bi-jural legal system, Francophone and Anglophone subsystems of education, French and English as official national languages were instituted. The consequence of these initiatives is that colonial ways of talking about Cameroon and categorizing its peoples have dominated post-colonial Cameroon, mainly at the expense of African indigenous practices and institutions. As a result, tensions have continued to exist because of struggles over colonially defined institutions and ways of living. Against this background, this chapter problematizes the discourse of Francophone and Anglophone in Cameroon through an examination of their relations within the same national space. In the process, a paradigm shift from the ‘problematic label’ emerges that advocates an understanding of Cameroon through the lens of its rich indigenous realities rather than its colonial past.
