Those who exonerated him often stated that he was only a headmaster of a semi prep school with modest education. It will be known that where someone has good intensions, education is not crucial in certain decision making. When the chiefs and kings of the region to be eventually the British Cameroons had to fight the Germans invaders, they did not need the Western sort of education. They resisted, not only for days but for years and their incantations eventually drove the Germans away. The British Cameroons should be their free exclusive nation state and not that of Yaounde (Ngoaekelle) and Parisian aliens.
Our so-called leaders were not even alert else they could have learned from Southern Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans). You will see that in 1952 when Messrs Joshua Nkomo and Jaspa Savanhu were invited to London to discuss the future of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Mr. Nkomo was just a young technical school graduate qualified as a social worker without the experience of Foncha. He knew what to do. He and his colleague walked out of the conference room in London. To them, accepting independence of Southern Rhodesia within the Federation as the British Tory Government liked would have meant the continued subjugation of majority Africans by the ruling minority whites, who were practicing separate development based on race and reverting to the 1933 status quo. Africans would not have been progressing but regressing when India in 1948 had demonstrated that it could run an independent democratic government.
The Least Developed Country in all of Western Africa
Similarly, by accepting the union with Cameroun Republic, British Cameroons (Southern Cameroons) was set back and that is why today it is the least developed country in all of Western Africa. It has no manufacturing industries, infrastructures; it is only served by one strike-prone overcrowded English University of Buea (UB). Its raw materials are being exploited by the occupying government just as in the colonial days. The British Southern Cameroons are having nothing in return. When cross-compared, the colonial days are preferred by the aged as the exploitation was not blatant and there was democracy and eventual self rule was assured. If Savanhu and Nkomo we earlier saw, had accepted the idea of the independence of the Federation of Rhodesia with a modest rule of Africans, they would have been called stooges. Then there was one representing the British Cameroons, Premier John Foncha at the Foumban Conference of July 17-21, 1961 and we have our reasons for being bitter: |
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Why did Foncha not walk out of the Foumban Conference when it was clear that, he was representing himself and not the people of the British Cameroons? He had been running an autonomous state without the heavy subsidies from outside.
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Why did he believe that he needed Yaoundé that was in the midst of a bloody civil war to govern effectively and be independent? Do you know that the total annual revenue from the Cameroons Development Corporation (CDC) that was owned by the British Cameroons was more than that of The Gambia? Gambia tried a union with Senegal (Senegambia) and it did not work, yet Gambia as small as it is, is economically and politically independent.
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Ahidjo did not hide his plan of establishing a centralized government instead of a loose federation initially advocated by the "All Party" Conference of Bamenda (26-28 June, 1961). Being a minority, why did Foncha not know that he was fighting a trailing battle and gave up sparing British Cameroons the humiliation and suppression its citizens are in today?
At the Bamenda "All Party" Conference (June 26-28, 1961) that preceded the Foumban Conference dominated by the French lawyers and Ahidjo, it was agreed that 10 years were to elapse before any major decision as unification could be contemplated upon. Then it was a dreadful gamble with people's lives.
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Why did he (Foncha), Ahidjo and the French sign the agreement at Foumban without British Representatives that had ruled British Southern Cameroons till 1954 and knew it at close quarters? The boycott of the British was in a way telling the world that they did not accept a union of Cameroon Republic and any part of British Cameroons. Did Foncha and his allies not read the body language of the British?
- If British Cameroons were to reunite with Cameroon Republic, what was the use of the partitioning of The Cameroons after the defeat of the Germans in 1915, the original colonial masters in 1919?
- Do we think in 2007 that France could ever give back Alsace Lorraine to Germany to mend fences broken during the Second World War? That could only happen over their graves. Britain could have been experiencing a revolution to contemplate having a union of British Cameroons and Cameroon Republic after a separation of 46 years. It could not have been serious bearing in mind the cultural dichotomy of the French and British in their respective spheres of influence. Foncha had no clue of what it meant for a French Cameroonian to be frenchified (Gallicized). He became a grabber with no shred of milk in his heart.
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