Colonialities of Power and Peace in Cameroon

Disponible en français: Colonialités du pouvoir et de la paix au Cameroun

Postcolonial state in Africa, Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, coloniality of peace, decolonial peace, militarised peace

This article makes the case that the militarised model of peace favoured in the discourse around Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis falls within a hegemonic, liberal/Western conception of peace shaped by the coloniality of power. This top-down perspective makes no space for a pluriversal dialogue, which is essential for resolving the crisis. Drawing on the concepts of decolonial peace and coloniality (of power), the article outlines several pathways for enshrining peace in Cameroon – and in Africa more broadly – within African peoples’ systems of values and knowledge. The core argument is that lasting peace in Cameroon and other conflicts on the continent requires a decolonial and Indigenous approach to peace.

“May the peace be like a feather… Beautiful, soft and resistant.”

The artwork was provided by (Un)Stiching gazes. The group is an interdisciplinary collective of reflection, research and praxis, which tells and collects stories of peace and encounters in Colombia, especially after the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement. They do so through textile narrative, that is to say through threads, needles and fabrics.

Nicanor Tatchim

Nicanor Tatchim holds a PhD in political communication and media studies from the Université Paris-Est Créteil. His research interests include communication policies and devices in relation to postcolonial and decolonial issues, ethnicity and plurivocality in organizational discourse, the media and cultural industries.

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ABSTRACT

“To succeed in Cameroon as an Anglophone, you either have to go abroad or become Francophone.” An English-speaking Cameroonian made this remark (in French) on 7 Hebdo, a programme on the private television channel STV on Sunday, 24 June 2018.¹ At least two lessons can be drawn from it. First, it reflects the Anglophone minority’s frustrations in sharing a country with the French-speaking majority. And second, it highlights the need to move beyond a purely military understanding of peace in Cameroon – and Africa at large – in order to achieve lasting peace. Indeed, a doctrine of security and militarism currently governs the relationship between the territories of former British and French Cameroon.

This article problematises the colonial framework of the solutions to the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon. Indeed, how should the Anglophone crisis be defined? The choice of political and military violence seems to me an inadequate response. To what extent does it address English-speaking Cameroonians’ “discontent” [mal-être] with their coexistence with Francophones since the early 1960s, when the former British and French territories reunified and became the modern country? In other words, how does the policy of militarised peace – which has been privileged in efforts to resolve this crisis – fit within a hegemonic, liberal/Western conception of peace?

I put forward the hypothesis that the political approach to the Anglophone crisis is deeply rooted in the long history of controlling cultural and linguistic diversity – that is, the history of colonial assimilationist violence as shaped by French-style républicanisme (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006). This long history has been shaped by the ideals of equality and universalism. However, this universalism is merely one option within the pluriverse – constructed as though it were universal. In his essay “Pour un universel vraiment universel” (For a truly universal universalism), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2017) underscores the hegemonic and Eurocentric dimension of this republican universalism. This article therefore argues that a militarised peace, or one inspired by colonial law and order, is in fact “war in disguise” (Maldonado-Torres, (2020). Reframing the resolution of the Anglophone crisis from this perspective means calling into question the silencing of subaltern voices and acknowledging the pluriversality of the concept of peace.

Historicising the Anglophone crisis

On 28 June 1919, in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the League of Nations placed Cameroon – which had been under German colonial rule (as Kamerun) – under international trusteeship within the auspices of the Treaty of Versailles (Le Vine, 1934; Mveng, 1985). France was granted the mandate to administer East Cameroon, while Britain received a mandate over West Cameroon (Le Vine, 1934; Ketzmerick-Calandrino, 2024). These two (colonial) powers went on to implement their respective strategies of political and social engineering, as “this was merely a spatial extension of the colonial state” (Gonidec, 1984, p. 65). At the dawn of both declarations of “independence” – that of French Cameroon, in 1960, and that of British Cameroon, in 1961 – the “Cameroonisation” of the political leadership did not undo nearly half a century of cultural and political hegemony. The (post-)colonial authorities inherited a bi-territorialised country marked by two different sets of political institutions and laws alongside an educational and linguistic divide. To put it simply, East Cameroon had gone though Francisation while West Cameroon was Anglicised. Among other factors, this would lead to what became known in the 1990s as the “Anglophone Problem” (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 1997).

The “Anglophone Problem” refers in part to Anglophones’ feeling of being marginalised in the country they share with Francophones. After first emerging in the 1960s, this feeling only grew with the establishment of a hyper-centralised political system and a state bureaucracy dominated by a French-speaking political elite. The policies this elite put in place – aimed at neutralising the cultural and institutional underpinnings of Anglophone identity – did nothing to relieve these grievances (Nantang & Konings, 2004; Bouopda Kame, 2018). In his letter of resignation from the Constitutional Committee in December 1994, Salomon Tandeng Muna – an English-speaking figure in the Cameroonian Reunification process and later Vice President of reunified Cameroon – explained:

For thirty-four years, Anglophone Cameroonians [have seen] their lifestyle continuously eroding, their system of law enforcement and public order changed, their legal system changed, their administrative system changed, their system of development changed, their educational system threatened… My experience from forty years of political activities tells me that federalism remains the best option for maintaining a united nation and for promoting development.

Even if the restructuring of the political landscape in the early 1990s amid struggles for political and public liberalisation provided a platform for articulating the “Anglophone Problem”, the universalist républicanisme that shaped the (post-)colonial nation-state was incompatible with recognising such claims, which were dismissed as ethnocentric. This silence, if not repression, fuelled the fire of the Anglophone nationalist movement, which had already been gaining momentum by then (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 2003).

Around 2017, Anglophone nationalism evolved into an armed separatist conflict: the Anglophone Crisis. The terms “Anglophone problem” (Konings & Nyamnjoh, 1997), “Anglophone conflict” (Beseng et al., 2023), “Anglophone Question”,² and “Anglophone crisis” (Machikou, 2018; Bouopda Kame, 2018; Ketzmerick, 2022) are widely used in public discourse to describe the Anglophone discontent. In this article, I have opted for the fourth term, “crisis”, as it effectively captures the armed (separatist) phase of a historical grievance that became a public issue in the 1980s and 1990s (Tatchim, 2023, 2020). Over nearly a decade, this military phase has resulted in clashes between Cameroonian defence forces and armed secessionist groups. According to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the crisis has already claimed at least 6,000 lives and displaced more than 100,000 people, both internally and externally, with the majority seeking refuge in Nigeria.³ It is worth noting that Anglophones make up approximately 20% of the country’s population and that some perceive themselves as second-class citizens in Cameroon (Bouopda Kame, 2018; Tatchim, 2023).

Conceptual elements: Coloniality and decolonial peace

This article puts forward a historical and analytical framework to explain the coloniality of both peace and the resolution to the Anglophone crisis. It builds upon my ongoing research, which offers a diachronic reading and politico-discursive analysis of (post)colonial conflict around ethnic identity in Cameroon (Tatchim, 2020, 2023, 2024), but also in the contexts of France and the Caribbean. This work is theoretically grounded in the concepts of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) and the coloniality of peace (Maldonado-Torres, 2020; Azarmandi & Pauls 2024), which help to elucidate the colonial continuities in the governance of the state and the Anglophone crisis. The coloniality of power highlights the persistence of the colonial imaginary in postcolonial societies. This concept exposes the colonial nature of the relationship between the centre of power and the (territorial) periphery – in other words, internal colonialism (Lafont, 1971) – and sheds light on the colonial legacy embedded in the control of cultural diversity and linguistic pluralism (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006). It raises questions about the plurality of voices, particularly regarding the (inaudible) voice of the Anglophone minority since the period after “independence” and the gradual centralisation and personalisation of the state. It is within these socio-political conditions that the concept of coloniality of peace emerges, referring to an institutionalist and liberal conception of peace – a Eurocentric peace (Sabaratnam, 2013), derived from laws and policies inspired by the colonial order.

This reflection is therefore situated within the decolonial and Indigenous paradigm of peace (Fitzgerald 2024; Suffla et al., 2020). I argue that decolonial peace (Fontan, 2012; Suffla et al., 2020), rooted in the value systems and knowledge traditions of African peoples, offers a viable and sustainable alternative to the tensions between Anglophone and Francophone Cameroon. The decolonial critical framework deconstructs and sheds light on the hegemonic paradigm of peace (Ahmed, 2010) that currently informs the approach to resolving the Anglophone crisis. It is impossible to engage critically with the coloniality of peace in this crisis without exposing the forms of oppression concealed by the government’s discourse on peace and the unitary rhetoric of power.

The colonialities of power and peace in Cameroon

In Cameroon, colonisation has molded the very notion of order and peace. Given the dominance of the Francophone majority, the nation-state is an outgrowth of the French colonial state. The exercise of state power remains profoundly conditioned by coloniality, particularly in its duplicity, its deceitfulness and its approach to policing social demands (Eboussi Boulaga, 1997; Mbembe, 1993). This statement by John Ngu Foncha, the chief architect of British Cameroon’s unification with French Cameroon in 1961 and former Prime Minister of Anglophone West Cameroon, encapsulates Anglophone frustrations while giving an idea of how power is conceptualised and exercised in Cameroon:

“The Southern Cameroonian whom I brought into the Union have been ridiculed and referred to as « les Biafrians », « les enemies de la nation », « les traitres », etc. and the constitutional provisions which protected this Southern Cameroonian minority have been suppressed, their voices drowned while de rule of the gun has replace the dialogue which Southern Cameroonians cherish very much”⁴

At the level of national identity, the state has inherited the model of republican universalism, which is at odds with ethno-cultural and racial minorities (Grosfoguel, 2010).⁵ It only considers those who conform with the dynamics of assimilation to be worthy of citizenship. This model creates hierarchies between “good” and “bad” citizens and between “zones of being and non-being” (Azarmandi & Pauls 2024). The Anglophone minority falls into the latter category of “bad citizens” due to its opposition to the Francisation of Anglophone Cameroon. The classification of English speakers (and all dissident Cameroonians) as subjects is reflected in the political control over the Anglophone Problem with the systematic recourse to violence by the police and military. The first signs of “Anglophone discontent” emerged in the 1960s, driven by political homogenisation and the hyper-centralisation of the one-party state. Since then, the (post-)colonial government has consistently failed to consider an Afrocentric approach to addressing these growing frustrations, and has instead pursued a militarist policy. The “Major National Dialogue”, organised in 2019 under pressure from international partners and some domestic political parties (notably the Cameroon Renaissance Movement and the Social Democratic Front), was widely criticised as a “national monologue”, given that Anglophone separatists were excluded from the discussions. To this day, it has been a struggle to implement even the resolutions adopted at that forum, such as granting a special status and thus some degree of autonomy to English-speaking regions. Governors appointed by the central government continue to govern Anglophone Cameroon in an authoritarian and military fashion.

In its communication, the government in power uses terms such as “criminals” and “terrorists” to describe English-speaking figures, thus largely delegitimising any criticism of the regime.⁶ This status serves to justify violence against them in the name of restoring peace. Indeed, the Cameroonian state’s peace rhetoric – which criminalises all forms of dissent – echoes the colonial discourse that framed anti-colonial resistance as criminal in the 1950s and 1960s (Mbembe, 1996). The government’s strategy of communication and policy aims to erase the historical roots of the Anglophone crisis, effectively denying its ties to colonialism, ethnic identity and language (Tatchim, 2023, 2020). This is what Rolando Vázquez refers to as modernity’s desire to erase coloniality (Vázquez, 2009). Indeed, in its approach to the Anglophone crisis, the state favours a “modern”, liberal peace, which tends to abstract itself from history and project itself into the future. Modernity refuses to confront historical violence or address the wounds of the past; it perceives peace and conflict resolution mechanisms as historically linear rather than socially and culturally embedded (Azarmandi & Pauls 2024). In Cameroon, historical figures involved in the decolonisation and reunification of the Anglophone and Francophone territories have been erased – or nearly so – from national memory (Mbembe, 1986; Tatchim, 2023). No official monuments commemorate them. The state appears to be exclusively focused on the future, refusing to officially honour their legacy, let alone acknowledge the unification of two entities, the coexistence of a dual (colonial) culture and a dual model of civilisation, both Anglophone and Francophone. Below is one of the rare images that marks the reunification of the territories formerly under British and French administration. This photograph shows the two delegations of Anglophone and Francophone political leaders gathered at the Foumban Conference in the western part of the country for the signing of the Reunification Agreements in 1961.

The militarisation of peace in response to the Anglophone crisis has already caused thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of internal and external displacements. In war-torn Anglophone Cameroon, only those who pledge allegiance to the government are “spared” from the brutality of the repressive apparatus. Peace only applies to citizens who do not challenge the legitimacy of the regime that has been in power for nearly 43 years (since 1982). This reflects what Judith Butler (2009) describes as the “abyssal line” between lives deemed worthy of protection and those that might as well disappear because they are not considered lives at all. This situation not only morally justifies violence and suppresses the reality of the Anglophone “discontent” (mal-être) but also negates the history of Anglophone Cameroon. It is a negation of culture, an unwillingness to acknowledge Anglophone frustrations (Bouopda Kame, 2018; Konings & Nyamnjoh, 1997): a negation of Anglophone identity. The political system relegates Anglophone Cameroonians and all critics of the regime to a zone of non-humanity (Fanon, 1967). The colonial logic of dehumanisation legitimises police and military crackdowns, the humiliation of political dissidents and the assassination of critical journalists (Atenga, 2004, 2005). Achille Mbembe refers to this state of affairs as “necropolitics” (2000) because it uses all means necessary to build a nation-state that serves the interests of the bureaucratic elite, who are heirs to colonial power.

The way the Anglophone crisis has been handled as a matter of public policy is embedded in the long history of governing cultural and linguistic diversity – a history shaped by colonial violence and républican assimilation (Bhabha & Rutherford, 2006). A peace that is militarised or inspired by colonial law and order is no more than “war in disguise”, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres contends (2020). In other words, a pluriversal approach to peace is crucial to any vision for durable peace in Cameroon.

An Indigenous and subaltern approach to resolving the crisis

“In Africa, political and intellectual elites tend to look down on the practice of palabre, preferring instead a superficial legalism directly transplanted from the West.”⁷ This statement by the philosopher Jean-Godefroy Bidima, from the beginning of his book La Palabre: Une juridiction de la parole (Bidima, 1997), reminds us that African states have abandoned endogenous conflict resolution methods – in other words, practices rooted in the region – for colonial legal systems. What does conflict resolution look like from Indigenous perspectives, and how might these perspectives challenge liberal/Western approaches to conflict resolution? In this section, I will try to shed some light on several Afrocentric mechanisms for peace-building. I argue that in Cameroon, for example, peace and the means to achieve it should be rooted in the value systems of the Bantu, Semibantu, or Fulbe peoples – communities that make up the majority of this Central African country’s socio-anthropological landscape.

The palabre (palaver) or “jurisdiction of speech” that Jean-Godefroy Bidima describes is both a democratic occasion and a ritual for resolving disputes (Aliana, 2023). It is symbolised by the palaver tree. Traditionally located in the main village square or the “chiefdom square”, the palaver tree is where heads of families, customary leaders, and other village dignitaries convene to discuss local affairs (Seck, 2019; Bidima, 1997). The tree’s broad, everlasting shade offers a refuge for conducting these meetings in a calm, orderly fashion.

The palaver tree has historically been a central institution of social organisation and peace-building in Africa (Muzinga, 2010; Lobondala, 2016). Its importance is closely linked to the tree’s symbolism in the history of a community. It marks the place where the village’s founder – the community member’s ancestor – first settled and built his first home. The homes of his children, companions and all later arrivals were later built around it. Because of the “‘sacred status’ attributed to this site, agreements and decisions reached there after long negotiations and intense arbitrations between opposing parties are rarely contested” (Seck, 2019). The palaver tree serves as a space for reconciling two people, two compounds (extended families) or two communities. Its purpose is to preserve social harmony (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020).

Many different endogenous methods exist for resolving conflicts and (re)building peace. In his article “Conflits et paix. Les rites de réconciliation en Afrique” (Conflicts and peace: The rites of reconciliation in Africa), the sociologist Philippe Kabongo-Mbaya examines the ritual of bujilanga among the Bantu peoples of the Congo and Central Africa more broadly. During the bujilanga ritual, two conflicting parties who want to reconcile come together:

Each side brings a ram and a (male) dog. The ritual uses banana leaves and other objects, such as old brooms. Forked poles are set up and sacrificial animals are hung from them. The ceremony takes place at a crossroads. After the notables deliver introductory speeches, the animals are slaughtered and their meat is grilled and consumed according to protocol. The designated representatives are served first. Pieces of both mutton and dog meat are eaten together. These customary dignitaries take turns drinking sips of maize beer from the same bowl. They repeat the oath that binds them. The pact has been reached! It is sealed forevermore. To violate it is to invite misfortune. Once the ceremony is concluded, the participants leave the site and spend the night in the same house elsewhere. (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020, p. 71)

This type of rite is common among the Bamiléké peoples of the Grassfields region of Cameroon, and as far as neighbouring Nigeria (Dumas-Champion, 1989). Animal sacrifices – usually of a chicken or goat – accompanied by a set of related practices serves to reconcile and pacify the conflicts between the parties. These rituals sometimes also mediate relationships between the living and the dead, as ancestors are honoured, celebrated and venerated through the skull cult (Kuipou, 2015). At the conclusion of the ritual, the reconciliation between the two parties is marked by a variety of exchanges and by matrimonial alliances. The ritual takes effect within the collective imaginary, serving as a tool for preventing potential future conflicts (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020).

I argue that the colonial approach to peace in the context of the Anglophone crisis must be abandoned. After nine years of tensions and war – the armed secessionist phase began in 2016–17 – the institutional and militarised approach to peace has not borne fruit. However, Afrocentric peace is not merely discursive or a folkloric practice, as some colonial perspectives on conflict resolution imply. For example, the ndondo rite, which resembles a treaty, has allowed numerous communities on the brink of conflict to come together and form alliances for mutual protection, explains Kabongo-Mbaya (2020). This ritual “resembles a warning [because] peace and reconciliation are so fragile that they constantly demand greater fraternity” (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020, p. 74). Rituals serve as tools for rebuilding peace and restoring fraternity. They are symbolic forces that neutralise violence and its consequences in communal spaces (Seck, 2019; Kuipou, 2015). By preventing conflicts, these reconciliation rituals demonstrate a profound awareness of the sanctity of life in Bantu culture (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020). By sanctifying life, this cultural framework – through a process of mirroring – calls attention to the coloniality of Eurocentric approaches to peace that brutalise, dehumanise, enslave and use death as a means to achieving peace (Maldonado-Torres, 2008).

Through these mechanisms, African cosmologies encourage us to grasp peace from the perspective of subaltern and Global South societies rather than based on programmes imposed from outside that “too often reproduce violent power asymmetries” (Cante, 2023). This approach fosters a peace that emanates outward from popular culture – a lived peace experienced by local populations (Suffla et al., 2020). In the context of the Anglophone crisis, rethinking peace from subaltern and Indigenous perspectives would situate the peoples of Cameroon – both Anglophones and Francophones – within the dynamics of the larger African family.

Conclusion

Colonisation delegitimised Indigenous systems of conflict resolution, which must now be rehabilitated and mobilised to address the many ongoing conflicts in Africa. The ceremonial speeches delivered in these rituals, in an African context where the spoken word holds legal weight, have historically played decisive roles in resolving conflicts and keeping the peace. These words send away the violent past and bring tranquillity to the future. The brooms used in these rituals symbolise a form of cleansing or erasure of the violent past. Reconciliation marks a new, distinct era: the dawning of a peaceful coexistence. The following words, spoken during the ndondo ritual – “May all this vanish like water flowing down” (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020) – translate this flow into the vanishing of the past for everyone involved. These words neutralise “revenge”, which represents “a past that does not pass” (Kabongo-Mbaya, 2020), a stagnant past that holds both the present and the future hostage. In Africa, repairing violence by methods rooted in Indigenous cultures is neither an abstract ideal nor an unattainable aspiration. The Ubuntu model, implemented in South Africa after apartheid, is one concrete illustration of this (Munyaka & Motlhabi, 2009; Murove, 1999; Van Binsbergen, 2001).

Translated from the French by Jake Schneider.

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“Mainstream […] strategic adaptation narrows the attention of researchers and practitioners to managing future risks and immediate problem-solving solutions, with limited potential for the holistic transformation required for political and social change.”

How to cite this entry:

Tatchim, N. 2025: “Colonialities of Power and Peace in Cameroon.” Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. 17.03.2025. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/colonialities-of-power-and-peace-in-cameroon/

This entry is a result of the joint call for contributions with the Latin American Council for Social Sciences (CLACSO).

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