News Cameroon :: OPEN LETTER TO M.CELESTIN DJAMEN ABOUT THE CRITICISM AGAINST ANDRE MARIE TALLA :: Cameroon news

Son of the village, compatriot, citizen and Cameroonian politician

No cause, no matter how noble, no ambition or exaltation of any patriotism or nationalism, can justify the sacrifice of the bond of blood and the bond of land. By wanting to please too much or by prioritizing positions of pure circumstance too much, one inevitably ends up in the ruin of one’s primary identity, and in self-suicide. Moreover, self-flagellation has never led to respectability and subsequently to glory.

My dear brother and compatriot,

Mister President,

There are very few occasions when I take up my pen with such an exceptional emotional charge, and when I do, I have the strong conviction that I am registering my approach in the great book of wills of the history that posterity will inevitably remember, among the pieces of evidence of its people’s tribunal.

Peoples, communities, simply human groups, considered according to precise anthropological and social specifications, never have the same history or the same organizational and political experience. There is in the presentation, the referential expression of each group, an important feature of its past which influences, shapes and conditions, sometimes in absolute terms, its discourse, its attitude, its devotion, its alliances as well as its predispositions to all kinds. Understanding Vladimir Putin, understanding Israel, understanding the American Indians, understanding the Palestinians, understanding Mandela, and understanding Africa in the war in Ukraine, is impossible without these referential elements.
My dear brother,

I thought I heard, and I want to believe that it was an involuntary deviation or even a pure error, that you treated André Marie Talla as an ethno-fascist, basing yourself on pronunciations in the form of advice and a true historical reminder, which he would have made in front of an audience of village brothers, gathered in a ritual convention in the United States of America. Already, with regard to ethno-fascism, I do not think that you are in a position to situate its irruption historically in the language of war, between nations and within nations. Then I am not sure that you know well the hateful and barbaric extrapolation on which some sad and twisted minds relied to install it in the context of the years of ember in Cameroon, in the same way as the concept of the electoral village of the unforgettable law professor Roger Gabriel Lep. I therefore advise you, but then very fraternally, caution, especially since you do not bear, like some, the scars of the pangs of this tumultuous stage of our contemporary political tribulations.

With regard specifically to André Marie Talla’s remarks, it does not seem to me that the violent and hasty reading that you make of them fits with the personality of this highly respected icon, whose career, social and artistic symbolism as well as cultural influence, are far from a skin-deep extremist with whom you strive to identify him. There is undoubtedly, in its promotion and defense of a restricted territory, a reminder of the multiple wounds, prejudices, discriminations and marginalizations which no honest and courageous person in our country can neither deny nor contest and much less trivialize materiality.
It is right, and I take the liberty of saying here, that each human group has the responsibility to come to terms with its past, to build its present, to mourn, to immortalize its martyrs, to make its voice and its concerns, and finally to impose itself in the context of a lively competition even of a permanent palaver within the same national unit. It is also in this logic that we should not only judge and condemn, but better understand and appreciate, the outings of the versatile citizen Guibai Gatama, courageous and intrepid son of the north who, beyond everything, carries in public and at sea, the thoughts, projections, expectations and ambitions of the elite of its region.

I did not hear you raise your voice against serious remarks close to a call for civil war recently made by some SAWAS sons and daughters on the matter of the land of the project of a Hotel in Douala, nor about ‘a certain agitation of the EKANGS. Would the ethno-fascism in your universe be reduced to an unconscious victimization of the land of your navel?

You will not kill the genius of evil, by silencing the victims, and you will not build anything solid, without a real and effective inventory of the damages, sufferings, vexations and sacrifices of each other. Historical facts are stubborn, and acts, findings and political coronations are difficult to hide. Have you read Colonel Lamberton’s writings? And if you have read them, have you understood them well and integrated them into your political education, then considered in the brutal judgment made on the words of AMT? Do you want to make an inventory of the senior executives of the State apparatus, and unearth there, like a needle in a basket of rotten corn, those of whom the brave artist from the mountains speaks who has become a national cultural heritage like of the late Manu Dibango, Anne Marie Nzié and other Francis Bebey? You will quickly be upset and you will not fail to ask yourself questions about your actual membership in the national city.

I speak, assuming myself, keeping firm my status as high representative without hesitation or weakness, of a community territory that I will never betray, whose voice I take the honor to carry, and whose wounds I crystallize .

From this majestic pedestal, I challenge you about this so-called ethno-fascism, if indeed your national feeling is real and strong. I did not hear you on the drama of ASSOK, a town not far from the capital, on the road to Mfou, where for a year, people have lost everything, factories, plantations, agro-pastoral units, i.e. several billions of investments, while their property titles are in order. Are you aware ? It is still current, and nothing is done, for families who have seen their efforts of several decades stolen, ruined, looted, because of their ethnic origin. I did not hear you shouting about the fate of the traders in Douala where you nevertheless reside, fighters and resourceful people abused, pressed and oppressed by the regional trade delegate who made them his cash cows, with impunity. I didn’t hear you about the many cancellations and abusive withdrawals of land titles that were regularly obtained. And it would seem that this stems from a policy decided against a fraction of the national whole, that of which AMT speaks. We are waiting for your protests and condemnations, especially since in ASSOK, we also find among the victims, families from NOSO, who fled the terror of the Ambazonians. They have again lost everything for a second time, to the point of considering their former executioners as misunderstood angels, that is to say these Ambazonians.

Severed and exposed heads have shaped a way of being, seeing and doing for generations, and no one will argue the contrary. Remembering it is good, a lot of good really. Witness of these crimes as a schoolboy in NDOM in Bassa country then in Dschang in Bamileke country, I do not keep only a bitter memory, I make it part of my bruised flesh and my gaze on human wickedness as much as on the suffering of certain peoples, yes certain communities. Do not ask AMT to deny himself, do not forbid him to have a memory, to speak the truth, to elevate himself, to celebrate the work and to instill pride with a complete sense of preeminence in his group structurally and congenitally sanguine. It’s fair game, and without harming the truth, or upsetting the way of living together for which we are striving to build a consensus on the best institutional framework, on the best form of the State. A permanent mediation.

What we all have to do for our country for the good, will be done if and only if we have the courage to define ourselves publicly as Republicans, at the same time committed to preserving and defending what, in terms of identity specificity, corresponds to our deep history, to what bases our behavior as well as our legitimate ambitions in Cameroonian society.

I said it and repeated it to some of our brothers, businessmen and intellectuals who came as inquisitors, to question my public posture and the meaning of my fight, of my struggles. There is no need to hide to spread his opinions, and nothing will come out of ethnic masses which are limited to loose family calculations, without courage to face the reactions of the other community segments of the nation. If it is indisputable that Paul Biya has explicitly or implicitly favored the emergence of dozens of Bamileke billionaires, it is just as true that the Bamileke have been practically swept away from the public administration and the great bodies of the State, civilians and safe. Just flip side of the coin or Lambertonian curse? In any case, Cameroon is to be built and not destroyed, exactly as the Head of State insists, who owes his rise to the top, to his integrity, his loyalty, his fidelity and his availability to serve. Perhaps we did not know how to play or played badly, in a system with a complex political practice, and moreover articulated on inextricable diversities to make both Jesus Christ and Allah lose the compass.

Under these conditions, positioning oneself to see clearly, or aiming to integrate the system more favorably and reach the top, will not pass for the Bamileke, the Bamileke elites and the Bamileke politicians, by supporting violence, nor by promotion of revenge, or worse by betrayal and the sacrifice of the icons of the land of the mountains. Strategies for political change as we conceived and conducted during the so-called ember years are no longer appropriate. As a confirmed ideologue now steeped in pragmatism, Djeukam Tchameni will inform you better than anyone.

Power is negotiated, even if a misleading adage says that it is torn off. It’s a long-term job, and the worst path to failure is that of an irrelevant radicalism, without anchoring on the levers of command, and without an intelligent understanding of the games, the issues and the direct and indirect actors. . Those who consider themselves the most victims of discrimination, marginalization or exclusion should be the first to give priority to the promotion of dialogue, because nothing will tip a political system in one direction or another, if the he orientation of the critics is to install a community in power with the spirit of appropriation or revenge. That’s what I said to everyone. Some of the most stupidly radical who didn’t even greet me anymore, begin to understand, multiply the calls, and rush to my residence, pretending to have lost their phone and my contact details for a while. It is better late than never.

I understand well, too well moreover, that the formatting inherited from a painful history, leads some to self-flagellation as a guarantee of purity in order to be better accepted, and leads others to remain silent in the face of situations where people of their identity terroir, are bullied and oppressed as in ASSOK. But the vexing limits are quickly revealed when a symbol like AMT is roundly slandered and treated as a pariah of socio-political ordering, by simple recourse to abject and brutal notions, articulated on borrowed language extrapolations.

All that said, I would like to express my admiration for your quick wit, your eloquence and your keen sense of intellectual persuasion. Your debates are instructive, rich and captivating, testimony to a mastery of many subjects as well as an academic training worthy of congratulations. Even the gods fail from time to time, make mistakes, and why not you and me? The main thing is to become aware, to know how to turn the page and move forward.
Fraternally./.