Uncoupling specters of coloniality in postcolonial Cameroon: literary explorations

Introduction

Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s creative oeuvre comprises eight novels: Mind Searching (1991), The Disillusioned African (1995), A Nose for Money (2006), Souls Forgotten (2008), The Travail of Dieudonné (2008), Married but Available (2009), Intimate Strangers (2010), and Homeless Waters (2011). In all these works, Nyamnjoh insists that colonialism did not end with Africa’s acquisition of formal political independence and encourages a rigorous rethinking of socio-economic and politico-cultural institutions in/of postcolonial Africa vis-a-vis Euro-North America. The resilience of colonialism in countries like Cameroon have birthed a “postcolonial neo-colonized world” (Spivak, 1990: 166); a situation where the Western and the developing worlds continue to, respectively, occupy the apex and nadir of global power hierarchy. Ndlovu concurs that a “‘postcolonial neo-colonized world’ captures an entangled situation where [Africa and Euro-North America] meet under highly hierarchical and unequal terms” (2013: 4). To him, “postcolonial neo-colonized world” ensures that “issues of African identity formation, nation-building and state-construction, knowledge production, economic development and democratization [are entrapped] within colonial matrices of modern global power” (xi). Since independence, Cameroon’s “postcolonial neo-colonized world” has been defined predominantly by the socio-economic and politico-cultural marginalization of the Anglophones by the Francophones; what Doh calls “horizontal colonialism” (1993:78). That marginalization has been thematized by Anglophone Cameroon writers in texts such as Bole Butake’s And Palm-Wine Will Flow (1990), Dance of Vampires (1995); Bate Besong’s Beasts of No Nation (1990), Disgrace (2007); Victor Epie Ngome’s What God has Put Asunder (1992); Bill Ndi’s Waves of Anger (2010), Bleeding Red (2010), Peace Mongers at War (2018); Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo (2004); and Emmanuel Fru Doh’s Before the Rainbow (2014) to name but these.

Among these writers and many budding others, Francis Nyamnjoh and Bill Ndi stand out for having produced the highest number of novels (eight) and poetry collections (more than 10), respectively, that delineate the dearth of Francophone-Anglophone interconnectedness and interdependence. Nyamnjoh’s forte further lies in the fact that he buttresses his thematization of “horizontal colonoialism” with several scholarly works such as Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd (2017) in which he excavates the stories of the Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola, to affirm the persistence of a postcolonial neo-colonized Cameroonian/African world. He does so by demonstrating that the euphoria of political independence notwithstanding, the relationship between Africa and the West continues to be defined by “a dominant colonial epistemology [that is limited in its ability to help Africans understand the world and themselves in it because] it is characterised by dualisms, a posture of universalism and alienation of alternative epistemologies” (2017: 33). He calls on Africans to fend off the one-dimensionalism of resilient colonialism and its ambitions or claims of purity and completeness, affirm that the truth is “dynamic, constantly on the move and in need of nimble-footedness to appraise and keep track of” (30) and seek “alternatives to this colonial epistemological order by understanding and embracing popular epistemologies of inclusivity” (33). In his novels especially Married but Available (MBA hereafter), Nyamnjoh delineates the complexities, ambiguities, and ambivalences of resilient colonialism and calls for nuanced and multiple angles of appreciation. His fiction celebrates the “systematic integration of conflicting and complementary epistemologies [that] will create space for socio-economic and politico-cultural perspectives of all persuasions” (58); it asserts that “epistemological conviviality and interconnection are possible precisely in light of the spirit of tolerance for which Africans are renowned, and in recognition that there are no final answers to perplexing questions in a dynamic world” (58).

MBA is set in a fictional country in which Nyamnjoh masks the identities of his characters as citizens of “Mimboland” but also gives some of them enough toponymical, anthroponomastic and characterizing allusions that reveal their identities as Cameroonians. The narrative tunnels backward and forward in history and spatiality from Puttkamerstown (Buea) to Nyamandem (Yaoundé), capturing the rulership of a power-drunk megalomaniac and kleptomaniac elite to which Cameroonians have been subjected since independence. The major critics of Nyamnjoh’s novels—Ndi, Fishkin, and Ankumah—are in general agreement that in Nyamnjoh’s MBA, not only power but also powerlessness corrupts absolutely and that far from feeling estranged from themselves or their community by coloniality, the disenfranchised “subvert the negativity of exclusion, alienation and marginalization, by empowering themselves and taking control of their lives” (Ankumah 85) through analytic approaches and socio-economic and political practices opposed to the hegemonic pillars of Western civilization and modernity. MBA tells the story of Lilly Loveless, a Muzunguland (Nyamnjoh’s pseudonym for France and the rest of the West) doctoral student (in Social Geography) who visits Mimboland to research the relationship between sex, power and consumerism in Africa. While in Mimboland, Lilly encounters and benefits from the indirect guidance of the journalist, Bobinga Iroko, and the direct assistance of Britney, a student at the University of Mimbo (UM). Together, these three, along with a cast of minor characters, delineate the power-powerlessness dynamics in Mimboland. The narrative captures Mimboland as a place where powerless nubile young university women have affairs with powerful elderly married men. The rich use their nymphomania as extravaganza of the lethal impunities of Mimboland wealth and power. Sex is fetishized and commercialized, women are objectified or thingified and relationships (even between husbands and wives) are Calibanized. For instance, Dr. Simba, the Reg of UM, has a queue of university girls at his service every day, pays them with the UM’s petrol coupons and has more children out of wedlock than he can recollect (34). Also, Lovebird Mr Moni has slept with more than 1000 women and has decided that he would like to die “on a woman and surrounded by women” (65). Names such as Dr Wiseman Lovemore, Professor Dustbin Olala, Dr Simba Spineless, Desire, Dr Sexwhale, Helena Paradise, Amanda Hope, Adapepe, President Longstay, Prime Minister Fabulous-Nobody, Samson Freeboy Bigmop, and Chief Dr. Mantrouble Anyway present characters as either victims, beneficiaries or contesters of Mimboland’s unequal power relations. Hegemonic power relations between Mimboland’s rich/powerful politicians and the poor/powerless masses demonstrate that from a larger perspective, the West is still Prospero or Crusoe and Africa/Mimboland is still Caliban or Friday.

MBA is a microcosmic testimony that since independence, Cameroonians have been grappling with several specters of colonialities—power, knowledge, being, gender, language and nature—as constituent elements of a resilient colonialism. Cameroon’s unequal encounters with the Western world, especially France, have left the country “with many untapped potentials, i.e., its possibilities, prospects and emergent [socio-economic and politico-cultural] capacities for being and becoming” (Nyamnjoh, 2015: 1). Thus, a dominant Eurocentric logic of conquest has continued to drive France’s interaction with Cameroon into zero sum games; privileging conversion over conversation and prioritizing the argument of French completeness over the argument of Cameroonian incompleteness. That narrative of French completeness is fueled by assumptions and preconceptions that Cameroon has little to offer beyond its status as a former colony. It is also energized by France’s anachronistic “benevolent discourses of the gift of civilization and enlightenment to the reluctant darkness of a [country] trapped in inertia and the emotive logic of ignorance” (1). I identify two forms of internal Cameroonian coloniality—coloniality of Anglophone Cameroonians and coloniality of victimhood—that are gradually emanating from Cameroon’s double-pronged colonization and demonstrate how they further hinder the creation of a sustainable Cameroonian socio-economic and political future. I conclude with the argument that Africans should continuously question the inherited forms of government, economy, and relations between Africa and the West, situate African politics in the context of colonialism, seek the roots of the postcolonial in the colonial, stop modeling their countries after the colonial masters, attempt to self-develop, and stop thinking about development in colonial, Western terms. To flesh out the above hypothesis, I borrow critical perspectives from Quijano (2000) for coloniality of power, Maldonado-Torres (2007) for coloniality of being, Quijano (2007), Tlostanova (2015) and Ndlovu (2015) for coloniality of knowledge, Lugones (2008) for coloniality of gender, Veronelli (2015) for coloniality of language and Escobar, 2005 and Adams and Mulligan (2003) for coloniality of nature.

Longstaycentrism (President for Life): mapping the key contours of power and powerlessness in Mimboland

This section uses the Mimboland President’s pidgin English name, “Longstay” (interpretively “president for life”) and the derivative, “Longstaycentrism” (the myopic/egocentric defense/support of President Longstay’s leadership) to map issues of power/powerlessness and coloniality of power in MBA. Quijano argues that coloniality of power identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary Third World societies in the form of the social discrimination that has outlived formal colonialism and become integrated into succeeding social orders (2000: 536). Employing Quijano’s postulation, the section argues that the Mimboland leadership’s presentation of modernity (along with that of the West), as a rhetoric of salvation hides the logic of oppression and exploitation, namely, coloniality of power with which they seek to keep control of authority. It is a relationship of one-dimensional cannibalism, a far cry from Nyamnjoh’s ethic of cannibalism as eating and being eaten. The section identifies elements of coloniality of power in MBA and demonstrates that the subjectivities/knowledges in postcolonial Mimboland are as important as they are divergent from Euro-American experiences and that from those subjectivities could emerge “de-colonial/liberating projects” that sustain the claim that other Mimbolandian worlds are possible (Mignolo, 2007: 164).

When the novel opens, in Puttkamerstown (Buea), it reveals three important issues of coloniality of power. First, we get a glimpse of Mimboland matrices of power through the narrator’s identification of two relics of Western colonialism: the “Bismarck Fountain,” and “the prestigious Lodge” (12). We are also introduced to shards of Western forms of governance that were left behind by a jangling combination of German, French and British colonialists: West Mimboland, the Federal Republic, the United Republic and Democracy. Lastly, we learn of President Longstay’s worrying pronouncements that, “democracy is a very expensive,” “as long as Nyamanden breathes, Mimboland is alive” and federalism is a wasteful nightmare (12). That jangling combination demonstrates that the postcolonial Mimboland world out there—defined/dominated by these shards, forms of governance and pronouncements—has historically used coercive violence and control over Mimbolanders and their resources “as its privileged mode of influence, to force into silence, self-repudiation or ridiculous defensiveness [Mimboland] modes of self-reproduction and ideas of the good life” (2). The shards/pronouncements impose convergence and mimicry on Mimbolanders through the prescriptive gaze of their civilizational superiority symbolized by President Longstay and his acolytes.

Furthermore, the fact that these shards have survived Mimboland’s postcolonial transformations from a federated state through a United Republic to a Republic, demonstrates the perennial nature of colonial domination. Also, President Longstay’s argument that democracy is very expensive and that when Nyamandem breathes, Mimboland is alive, is an indication that political governance in Mimboland has assumed the character of an oligarchy. Longstay’s argument reminds one of the para-military authoritarianism that the government of Cameroon unleashed on those who were advocating multiparty politics in the 1990s. That is, the para-military authoritarianism that was a core component of colonial governance with disciplining of the “natives” being the order of the day, survived formal colonialism and has continued to be a weapon of the Mimboland leadership’s suppression of the masses. Thus, African countries inherited the colonial state alongside three forms of violence: “foundational violence,” which authorized the right of conquest and had an “instituting function” of creating Africans as its targets; “legitimating violence,” which was used after conquest to construct the colonial order and routinize colonial reality; and “maintenance violence,” which was infused into colonial institutions and cultures to ensure their perpetuation (Mbembe, 2000: 6–7). President Longstay’s government has imbued Nyamandem with these forms of violence and that explains why he nonchalantly declares that the life of Mimboland depends on Nyamandem’s breathing.

Longstay conceptualizes Nyamandem as a super hegemonic power center that passes itself to the peripheries. The relationship between Nyamandem and say Puttkamerstown, just like that between Europe and Africa, is one of both unequal exchange and disparate exchange: the direct/indirect, national exchange of socio-economic and politico-cultural activities which are fetishized as superior and forced on Mimbolanders from the center, while at the same time, activities from the peripheries such as the demand for the rotation of leadership (through the institutionalization of “President Shortsays,” for instance) are fetishized as inferior and wasteful. From a coloniality of power perspective, Nyamandemness or Yaoundéness is about entanglement/entrapment that makes Mimbolanders believe that everything originates from Nyamandem and it has no outside. Versions of Nyamandemness that produce leaders like Longstay must be recalled and de-commissioned if Mimbolanders would free themselves from their own entrapment in center-periphery mythologies and open a future through pedagogies of presence (Mbembe, 2015: 6).

Coloniality of power has clogged the educational system in the UM where the government encourages the Reg and the VC to stifle Dr Lovemore’s critical research. The Reg who is academically inept practices bribery and corruption (by collecting a Prado from a UM contractor). Nyamnjoh’s focus on the Reg suggests continuity, positing fragments of continued Western-style dominance of Mimboland administration and the continued presence in Mimboland of “western” oriented administrations as a mere change of personnel within a structure of Mimboland power that remains largely colonial. The reckless abandon with which the VC, and especially the Reg, administratively controls everything and every person in the UM is an act of incorporating the suppressed students, lecturers, and administrative subordinates into a UM empire. Nyamnjoh contrasts Dr. Lovemore’s and Iroko’s dialogical way of seeing the UM as a complex center of learning to unlearn with the Reg’s monological way of seeing it as a harem for lotus eaters. The Reg’s sexual escapades and suppression of lecturers are repeated acts of conquest that remind one of colonialism. As a center for knowledge production, the UM is supposed to be a site of decolonization of coloniality of power, but for this to happen, the VC and the Reg must stop administering dictatorially. Dr. Lovemore and his colleagues must also stop teaching the way they have always taught. This is because if the VC and the Reg have been perpetrating obsolete administration, it is also likely that the lecturers are constructing/disseminating obsolete knowledges using obsolete pedagogies. Just as Mimbolanders advocate the de-commission of all forms of power in Mimboland, Nyamnjoh’s depiction of the UM administration suggests that Mimbolanders also need to de-commission knowledge churned out by the UM and question gender hierarchies that celebrate impunities of phallocracy. The UM needs to reinvent what Mbembe calls classrooms without walls in which lecturers and students are all co-learners; a university that would convene various publics to “assemblies that become points of convergence of and platforms for the redistribution of different kinds of knowledges” (2015: 6). Such classrooms would construct a polycentric Mimboland world that opens horizons of knowledge and knowing kept hostage by coloniality of power thereby creating a polycentric global knowledge landscape consisting of “a polylogue of a variety of mutual epistemological others” (Maffie, 2009: 60).

The normalization of “killability” and the struggle from “zones-of-non-being” to “zones-of-being” in the UM

Drawing on Maldonado-Torres’ sense of coloniality as primarily referring “to the normalization of murder, rape, ‘killability’ and ‘repeatability’” (2007: 255), this section argues that just as the colonizers dichotomized the colonial world into “zones-of-being” for the colonizer and “zones-of-non-being” for the colonized, Mimboland leaders have dichotomized the Mimboland world into “zones-of-being” for the leaders and “zones-of-non-being” for the masses. It also affirms that coloniality of being sanctions the permanent feminization of colonized men and the depiction of the black man “as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly White” [and] “the Black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the raping gaze of the White and as fundamentally promiscuous; as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction” (255). In the “colonies” therefore, women deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed such an act. “Raping” and “being raped” are attached to Blackness as if they were part of the essence of Black folk and Black bodies are considered excessively violent and erotic, as the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise with “killability” and “repeatability” as part of their essence. The fight against coloniality of being is, therefore, an attempt by the masses to transcend their “non-beingness” to “beingness.”

The relationship between the administration, lecturers and students of the UM is fraught with coloniality of being. During the students’ strike, the VC and the Reg transform the campus into a battle ground and the tenacious truth-seeking Dr. Burning Pen (BP) is tagged a disestablishmentarian crank and killed (354). We are told that BP was “a screaming and fearless critic who once described the UM as ‘a burial ground for enthusiasm’” (354). His murder epitomizes coloniality of being because it symbolizes the UM’s inheritance of the colonizers’ elimination of revolutionaries. The authorities of the UM kill Dr. BP in the same manner that the colonial masters killed the Rudolf Douala Manga Bells, the Ruben Um Nyobes, the Félix-Roland Moumiés and the Ernest Ouandiés during the anticolonial struggles. BP dies “fighting to make a difference and making a difference by fighting” (354). To Iroko, BP’s death keeps hope alive in a hopeless Mimboland situation (354). In a Mimboland where intellectuals like the VC, the Reg, Dr. Boiboibambeh, Honorable Epicure Bilingue, and the Minister of Forced Arms have been “silenced by the sterile politics of reckless impunity,” BP was “the rare exception who stayed wedded to the ideals of the genuine intellectual” (354). His murder bespeaks a country and a university where a reluctant, coloniality of being-infected government and its acolytes, would spare nothing to derail the decolonial train of hope and human dignity. The killers of BP could not kill his dream because in his last article in The Talking Drum, he stressed that leadership should not be about the leader but about the enabling environment that the leader creates for experts in various walks of life and for all and sundry under him or her to offer leadership. He asserted that a good leader should be one who is able to purge him/herself of the delusion that bosses are necessarily better than those under them; someone who never leads alone because he/she is more of a servant than a master (355). His swansong will continue to guide the students of the UM in their struggle to move from “zones-of-non-being” to “zones-of-being.”

The government’s promise of evacuating the campus of soldiers turns out to be a colonial cosmetic concession because in the evening of the same day, the president of the Students’ Union President, Samson Freeboy Bigmop and Chief Dr. Mantrouble Anyway, are found dead with their bodies dismembered, their genitalia and brains harvested (356). The students bear their grief in fortitude, chanting: “You can kill our leaders, but you can’t kill our spirits; our dreams of academic freedom are paramount” (356). When they gather to pay their last respects and renew their resolve, Adapepe (late Bigmop’s girlfriend) reminds them that they must step forward and take responsibility. She warns that Bigmop’s departure must not dampen their “collective resolve and bounce backability” (357). The VC and the Reg celebrate the deaths of Bigmop and Mantrouble with “a bottle of expensive champagne” (357). To the VC and the Reg, just as was the case with the colonizer, firmness and ruthlessness are the rules of the coloniality of being game. The Reg and the VC strongly believe that “for power to sleep calmly at night or to be able to go on a mission now and again without fear of losing its reigns, the flower of hatred, backstabbing and animosity must be carefully cultivated and allowed to blossom with impunity” (357). To them, the UM just like the state, “is a game to be hunted and eaten and hunters shall seek to outhunt hunters until nothing is left to hunt” (357). They have created an unconducive atmosphere in which lecturers “clamour for positions and sterile influence and poach with impunity for sex with the female students they ambush with marks” (357). In the same manner that the state of Mimboland is a place for everything but good governance, the UM is a place for everything but good teaching, learning and researching and this explains why genuine intellectuals like Dr. BP are vaporized. The assassinations of Mantrouble, BP and Bigmop affirm the topicality of Nyamnjoh’s novel by paralleling contemporary events such as the alleged assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey by agents of the Saudi Arabian government (Nyamnjoh 2019: 8).

Challenging hegemonic epistemologies, shifting the biography and geography of knowledge to embrace subjugated knowledges

To Quijano (2007), coloniality of knowledge is “[e]pistemological colonization which amounts to colonization of the mind and imagination” that affected African “modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, and instruments of formalized and objectivized expression” (169). Europeans imparted this knowledge on the colonized “in a partial and selective way, in order to co-opt some of the dominated into their own power institutions” thereby transforming “cultural Europeanization” into “an aspiration” for every African (169). That is, coloniality of knowledge consists in “the fact that all models of cognition and thinking, interpreting the world, the organization of disciplinary divisions, entirely depend on the norms and rules created and imposed by Western modernity since the 16th century as universal, delocalized and disembodied” (Tlostanova, 2015: 39). Ndlovu (2014) argues that the conquest of the African heart, mind and spirit was sustained by epistemologies of the magnetic Euro-North American schools that bewitched the African soul, combated the socio-economic and political landscape and made conquest permanent. Even though “Africans are still stuck in Euro-North American-centric thought, Africans can no longer rely solely on Euro-North American epistemology in their endeavor to create a sustainable African future” (Ndlovu 196). Thus, the hubris of Euro-North American-centric thought is both a challenge and an opportunity for Africans to fashion responses to the oppressive and imperial bent of modern Euro-North American ideals projected to and enacted in the Cameroonian world. Such responses could be animated by Mignolo’s idea of a continuously shifting biography and geography of knowledge to embrace subjugated knowledges (Ndlovu, 2014: 196).

The events in MBA constantly recall that Mimboland research has been basically extraverted. The narrator captures that extraversion through a description of the mosaic of passengers in the Air Mimbo that Loveless boards to Mimboland. In that mosaic, there are few black women (elegantly dressed, heavily jeweled, and wearing artificial hair) and many men, (mostly black Africans, with only a handful of whites whom Loveless identifies as “businesspeople, development agents, international civil servants, or husbands of Mimboland ladies”) (4). There are also a few Arabs, mostly Lebanese. Finally, there are lots of Chinese, the new conquerors of the consumer world “each with a ‘Made in China’ in their briefcases, ready to conquer every city and every village” (4). The migration of white businesspeople, development agents, international civil servants, Arabs, mostly Lebanese, and lots of Chinese to Mimboland has multiple coloniality of knowledge implications: Mimboland has not mastered the means of scientific production and development and so must rely on Western experts with Western epistemologies. Also, she imports everything from the North and China and that is why the Chinese are carrying “Made in China” products in their briefcases. This means that the UM in Puttskamerstown and the University of Asieyam (UA) in Nyamandem have not been able to implement beneficial research plans. Furthermore, the presence of white international civil servants reminds one that Mimboland intellectual products are continuously being pushed out toward the North and destined primarily for external consumption either because their epistemologies do not suit the objectives of their communities or most likely because they happen to reason like the BPs, Mantroubles, Bigmops, Irokos, Homeleys, and Adapepes who are considered thorns in the Mimboland government’s national coloniality flesh. It is therefore not surprising that when Loveless meets Honorable Epicure Bilingue on the Air Mimbo Flight, Bilingue betrays himself as an agent of the coloniality of knowledge by insisting that Loveless should come and study in Nyamandem the capital city because no serious knowledge ever comes from a periphery like Puttskamerstown: “Nothing that matters happens in the backyards. Truth hails from the centre, falsehood from the margins. That you should know, being from the mother of all centers” (4, 5). Thus, to Bilingue, the biography and geography of knowledge must always shift to the center, Nyamandem/Muzunguland thereby subjugating knowledges and vital epistemological conversations that arise from the UM margins in Anglophone Mimboland.

Bilingue’s remarks constitute an act of epistemological condescension and thus the coloniality of knowledge. They are reminders that the international scientific community is largely concentrated in the North. Just as is the case with the administration where Nyamandem is the administrative center in Mimboland, the Mimboland educational system has created a coloniality of knowledge center in the UA. If universities are supposed to be the producers of epistemologies that shape ontologies, then Bilingue’s concession that Muzunguland is the mother of all centers is proof that Mimboland ontologies are still fashioned after Western epistemologies. Thus, Bilingue capitulates that in Mimboland, knowledge got from Western universities like Sorbonne, Frankfurt, Oxford, and Harvard is unconditionally better than knowledge acquired from any institution in Mimboland. In line with coloniality of knowledge’s logic of creating centers, Bilingue admits that the UA is the Sorbonne/Oxford/Harvard of Mimboland. Such a concession is a caricature of his knowledge of knowledges because he does not realize that he has indirectly conceded that all communities should have or choose their own Sorbonnes, Oxfords, or Harvards. Thus, the fact that the UM is the Sorbonne, Oxford or Harvard of Puttskamerstown does not make it the “rat hole” of Bilingue’s description. Bilingue’s hierarchization of universities implies that in Mimboland, the UA and the UM continue to contribute toward the invention of the “other” as they operate as epistemic sites as well as technologies of subjectivation that naturalized Euro-American epistemology as universal. The same institutions are also nurseries that produce Mimboland elite and nationalists (like Dr Lovemore) who exposes the hypocrisy and double standards hidden within global imperial designs. Thus, instead of Bilingue’s selfish attempt to globalize knowledge by inviting Loveless to change her research locus from the UM/Puttskamerstown periphery to the UA/Nyamandem center, Mimbolanders need to deglobalize knowledges through epistemic decentralization/deperipherialization.

Debating the postcolonial Mimboland gender system, advocating a defeminized and demasculinized Mimboland communal integrity

Coloniality of gender refers to the fact that Western colonialism created “the very process by which females were categorized and reduced to ‘women’ [making] them ineligible for leadership roles” (Lugones, 2008:8). It marks “the emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations” (8). The imposition of a patriarchal colonial state meant that “for females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination.” It was also “the transformation of state power to male-gender power” and this was accomplished at one level by the exclusion of women from state structures” (9). Coloniality of gender is the subalternization of women through the combined processes of racialization, colonization, capitalist exploitation and heterosexualism. This section focuses on the Mimboland man’s patriarchal victimization of women and the Mimboland woman’s nymphomaniac attempts to dehumanize the male.

The objectification of women and men is central to the process of creating oppositional difference or a binary thinking between males and females in MBA. Females/Males are objectified as the Other and are viewed as objects to be manipulated and controlled. Richards argues that in Western thought objectification is a “prerequisite for the despiritualization of the universe and through it the Western cosmos was made ready for ever increasing materialization” (1980: 72). In MBA, Mimbolanders have inherited that materialization because most of the love stories are about materialism-induced fornication and adultery. Sex is banalized and men and women are presented as objects of that banality. A glaring example is the love between Dr. Lovemore (a Mimbolander) and Mrs Lovemore (a Muzungulander) who met and married in Muzunguland. Upon their return to Mimboland, Lovemore starts cheating on her and they divorce informally. Mrs Lovemore becomes nonchalantly nymphomaniac and sleeps almost with everybody in a pair of trousers. Even though cheating is a universal human frailty, there are signs that Dr Lovemore acquired elements of coloniality of gender while studying in Muzunguland. That is, in MBA there is something about the subjugation of women that is inherently Eurocentric or Muzungulandcentric because most of the lecturers in the UM—products of European education—are on sex rampage with their students. Just as African women were playthings in the hands of the colonizers, the female students have become “commodities” for lecturers’ sexual gratification. Mrs. Lovemore even tells us that Lovemore and Boiboibambeh have been sleeping with the same students (179) and that perhaps explains why Bioboibambeh betrays Lovemore during the strike. Furthermore, when we learn that Mrs. Lovemore and Boiboibambeh went for a conference in Zanzibar and ended up flirting with each other, we confirm the extent to which coloniality of knowledge engendered by such conferences has given Mimboland men the coloniality of gender with which to treat women as playthings.

MBA also delineates a form of female subjugation called “Desperately Seeking Something.” It refers to a situation where an elderly rich married man—a “Mboma” (literally any big snake such as an anaconda)—has a strong and steady relationship with a very young unmarried girl, often a high school or university student (345). One of the victims of this practice is Helena Paradise whom we are told had her first boyfriend at 12, committed her first abortion at 15, started dating the Minister of Money at 20 and the minister sent her for further studies to Muzunguland. During her sojourn there, she becomes a lesbian and confesses “L’homme ne fait pas femme, femme fait elle-même” (336). Her unconscionable attempt to fight the monster of her subjugation turns out to be a poisoned chalice that creates an even bigger monster. On her return from Muzunguland, she imports several containers of sex toys and sets up a club for women in Nyamandem and Sawang, which she advertises as a Gym and Yoga Club, but which teaches women sex techniques and how to attain orgasm. The idea of teaching women sex and orgasmic techniques is quite laudable especially in societies like Mimboland where sex education is still largely a taboo and the act of sex itself is still mechanically phallocentric. To some extent, Paradise succeeds in giving Mimboland women epileptic doses of exotic sexual pleasure. But we are told that before Mimboland women get into the Gym, Paradise imposes that they wear identical masks. Mask(ing) as object and metaphor can lend itself to multiple/complex readings. Even though the mask could positively symbolize how the women must hide who they really are in order to navigate a patriarchal Mimboland society, it could also symbolize the false fronts that some people feel they must wear in order to be accepted by society. The masking presupposes that Mimboland women are commodities that should be used for commercial purposes. Despite the fact that Paradise’s effort is a transactional and/or mutually beneficial experience for both parties, Paradise’s imposition of objectification on the women recommends a Mimbolandian detailing of what Lugones calls “the dark and light sides of the modern colonial gender system” (2008: 16) as part of a polylogue conversation and a polycentric project that would initiate pluriversal collaboration and encourage Mimbolanders to reject coloniality of gender as they recommit to “defeminized” and “demasculinized” communal integrity in a liberatory direction (16).

It is important to note that MBA is, again, more topical, considering the #Metoo Movement and the most recently reported story by Kiki Mordi of BBC Africa Eye on 7 October 2019 about sex for grades perpetuated by Drs Boniface Igbenegbu and Paul Kwame Bontakor at the universities of Lagos, Nigeria and Ghana, Legon, respectively. MBA speaks well to the intersection of sex and power that resonates globally. Such global intersections remind one of Catch and Kill, a book in which Ronan Farrow masterfully reveals Harvey Weinstein’s repugnant sexual harassment, rape and abuse to the world. Farrow’s book and MBA capture the terror and paranoia that eat away at Weinstein’s and the “Mboma’s” victims, respectively. Farrow exposes the predatoriness of one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers in the same manner that Nyamnjoh exposes that of the UM and the UA. If one considers the fact that Hollywood, the UM, the UA, UniLag and the University of Ghana are supposed to be centers of knowledge production, then one may assert that Farrow, Nyamnjoh and Mordi call on women not to continue to succumb to the culture of fear forced on them by men who wield power in destructive and gendered ways, best described as phallocracy gone berserk. Theirs are the untold stories of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation often deployed by wealthy connected men to threaten journalists and writers and evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse. They are also the stories of the women who risk everything to expose the truth and spark a global #Metoo Movement. Thus, the sexual revolution by Paradise who returns from Europe with truckloads of sex toys and sets up a sex therapy service was well ahead of its time, in that it preceded recent developments such as the human sex robots.

Questioning the supremacy of the French and English languages, advocating the right of/to languages in Mimboland

Coloniality of language refers to the colonizers’ discriminatory classification of the languages of the colonizers as real languages and the languages of the colonized as inferior. It is a form of monolanguaging that “questions the communicative interaction between people who perceive themselves as having a language in the full sense, and animal-like beings who are assumed to have no language but who can be trained to understand the former well enough to be able to follow their orders and do what they want” (Veronelli, 2015:124). Monolanguaging has an addresser (the colonizer) and the addressee (the colonized). The colonized in coloniality of language’s act of monolanguaging is someone who must understand what it is that the master wants and do it; but her communal ways of life, collective knowledges and creativity do not matter at all and therefore must not be communicated. Coloniality language dehumanizes through the erasure of the colonized’s communal languagings. This section examines the issue of “outlawed languages” within the Mimboland public sphere and advocates the reclamation of the right to use indigenous languages as forms of resistance against the linguistic hegemony of French and English.

The language of instruction in the UM is English and that in the UA is French. As a testament to Mimboland’s linguistic partition between Britain and France, the UM is found in former British-administered West Cameroon while the UA is found in former French-administered East Cameroon. This is coloniality of language because the use of these “foreign” languages as the sole mediums of instruction indicates that linguistically/epistemologically, Mimboland is still a United Nations trust territory in the hands of Britain and France. Both languages are weapons of balkanization that mirror the colonizers’ divide and rule stratagems. The institutionalization of English and French is counterproductive because it discourages, if not kills, the development of roughly 237 indigenous languages. This results in language endangerment, a process whereby Mimboland’s indigenous languages are losing grounds to French and English either because they are being spoken by fewer speakers and/or because they are heavily influenced by French and English.

Even though Mimbolanders have experienced both the splendors and miseries of colonial languages; one cannot deny the fact that the current stage of coloniality of language in Mimboland is eroding the link between indigenous languages and the nation, languages and national memories, languages and national identities. Thus, coloniality of language is creating a condition for and enacting the relocation of languages and the fracturing of Mimboland cultures. It is true that after decolonization native languages have been gaining ground as they have been linked either to state politics or to social movements in some communities, but this is not the case with Mimboland. Just as the impossibility of seeing enslaved and colonized peoples as interlocutors created a lack of communicative disposition on behalf of the master/colonizer, the relationship between those who speak French (the UA) and those who speak English (the UM) like that between Nyamandem and other parts of the country still lacks communicative disposition. To continue to deprive Mimbolanders of their numerous languages and to force the learning of English and French is to seek to deny them their peoplehood. For them to regain that personhood, they need to continue languaging in their indigenous languages side by side the languaging in French and English. In this way, multilanguaging will guide the country out of the conceptual prison in which Mimbolanders were put by linguistic colonization (Veronelli 128).

Geographies of toponymic inscription: mapping the symbolic dominance of colonialism’s commemorative place-naming in Mimboland

To Escobar, coloniality of nature refers to colonialism’s encouragement of a “classification into hierarchies, with non-moderns, primitives, and nature at the bottom of the scale; outside the human domain” (2005: 4). It encourages “seeing the products of the earth as the products of labor only, hence subordinating nature to human-driven markets”; fosters the location of “third world natures in the exteriority of the Eurocentric world”; and sanctions the “subalternization of articulations of biology and history between being, knowing, and doing” (4). Drawing on Escobar’s coloniality of nature template, this section argues that Mimbolanders need to begin to decolonize their attitudes toward nature by critically examining the language that is often used in discourses such as “wilderness,” “pristine nature,” “virgin forest” because they sanction wanton exploitation of nature and fail to acknowledge the long history of association between people and the landscapes that has been described in such alienating terms (Adams and Mulligan, 293).

In MBA, naming demonstrates how modernity and its epistemology suppressed non-Euro-American thought/histories/knowledges that had enabled Mimbolanders to coexist harmoniously with the environment. Mimboland colonization “promoted the naming and classification of both people and places, as well as nature. Landscapes were renamed, and these names were entrenched through mapping and the formal education system” (Adams and Mulligan, 2003: 24). In the novel, “place names express colonizing world views and naming practices [are] both anthropocentric and Eurocentric, registering a monological or non-interactive relationship with a land conceived as passive and silent” (Plumwood, 2003: 67). Place-names express “the dynamic of assimilation [by defining the land] in terms of colonial relationships that exhibit Eurocentricity and nostalgia for the European homeland [thereby] denying it the role of narrative subject in the stories that stand behind its name” (67–8). German, French and British-originated geographical location names such as “Zingranfftown,” “Sakersbeach,” “Puttskamerstown” “the Bismarck Fountain,” “Anglophone,” and “Francophone” were typically drawn from European centers that thought of themselves as superior, bringing “civilization” to a backward Mimboland. Through the art of naming, the Germans, the British and the French made use of, and often accentuated, divisions between privileged and non-privileged groups in Mimboland, and, for the benefit of the center. Naming created boundaries that divided Mimboland groups from one another and from their lands in ways that guaranteed a legacy of conflict and violence long after the colonizers departed.

There is a sense in which the polarization of Mimboland geography, geopolitics and geoculture into Francophone and Anglophone zones was and continues to be a Eurocentric colonial system of hegemony—a system of power relations in which the interests of the dominant party (that turned out to be the Francophone region) were and continue to be disguised as universal and mutual, but in which the colonizer (in this case Britain and France) actually prospered and continue to prosper at the expense of Mimboland. The above names are redolent of colonial administrators and systems such as Zingraff (the German), Alfred Saker (the British missionary who founded the Cameroon city of Victoria now called Limbe), Jesko von Puttkamer (the German governor of the colony), Otto Von Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor of Germany from 1815–1898), Dr. Eugen Zintgraff, (the German explorer who visited Bafut and Bali Nyonga and created ties with the fons Anumbi and Galega, respectively, in 1889), the British system, and the French system, respectively. The above names are thus toponymic symbols of the colonizers’ continued presence and consequently, continuous domination of the colonized land. In coloniality of nature terms, the names, unrecalibrated and undomesticated, continue to colonize the towns and regions as well as the inhabitants of those towns and regions. Geopolitically/Geoculturally the most damaging coloniality of nature was the balkanization of Mimboland into the Francophone and Anglophone regions because that balkanization created confrontational French and British centers that have been warring each other since independence. Even though Mimbolanders may not necessarily need toponymic cleansing; they need a re/thinking of alternative names, an “intercultural/interregional translation” (Santos, 2012: 58) that would endow neither Francophone nor Anglophone experiences/zone with the status of exclusive totality.

Special cases of interiorized violence: coloniality of Anglophones and coloniality of victimhood in Mimboland

Through the discussions on colonialities of power, being, knowledge, gender, language, and nature, this paper has demonstrated that the understanding of the Mimboland world by far exceeds the Western views about it and that emancipatory transformations in Mimboland may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric, Nyamandem-centric and Longstay-centric critical thought (Santos [2014] 2016: viii). This section discusses the coloniality of Anglophones (marginalization of Anglophones by Francophones (Francocoloniality)) and coloniality of victimhood (marginalization of Anglophones from the NW Region by Anglophones from the SW Region). For exemplification purposes, it examines the relationship between President Longstay (a Francophone) and Prime Minister Fabulous-Nobody (an Anglophone) and that between South Westerners and North Westerners settled in the South West Region, respectively.

MBA delineates Francophone dismemberment of Anglophones as well as Anglophone struggles to “re-member” and be “re-membered” through re-launching themselves from the world of “non-being” into the world of “being” and recapturing “their lost power, history, being, language and knowledge” (Ndlovu, 2015: 23). The Francophone process/project of dismemberment and exploitation of the Anglophones is captured in the relationship between President Longstay and Prime Minister Fabulous-Nobody. Although the President and the PM are the highest and second highest well-paid citizens of Mimboland, respectively, PM Fabulous-Nobody is, as his name indicates, a political “nobody” in the Mimboland administration. The PM is supposed to be the Head of Government taking important decisions, but like the colonialists, Longstay, to remake the land and its people in his image, has arrogated to himself all the power (9). Anglophone personalities such as the PM, the VC and the Reg have become “branded with a Francophone/European memory” (10). We learn that there was an Anglophone assistant lecturer who bribed his way to the top and became the third well-paid civil servant, after president Longstay and the PM but when the university authorities discovered his lies, he was fired (223). In a Mimboland where the PM is often partly in charge of the recruitment of top civil servants such as university lecturers, the insinuation is that the he was part of the bribery that made the lecturer the third highest paid civil servant. Second, that no mention is made of the sanctions that were meted out to those who accepted the bribe is an indirect allusion to the victimization of the Anglophones who are compelled to use dubious means to try to get what the Francophone-domination has undeservingly dismembered them from. The anonymization of the PM’s position is, therefore, an indication that Anglophone Cameroonians are slowly being asphyxiated as every element of their culture (language, Anglo-Saxon educational, administrative, legal, electoral and governmental systems) is systematically targeted and absorbed into the Francophone Cameroon culture.

If coloniality of Anglophones is the colonialization of a colony (the Anglophone) by another colony (the Francophone), then coloniality of victimhood is the colonialization of disadvantaged victims (Anglophones from the NW Region) by purportedly privileged victims (Anglophones from the SW Region). The expression “Cam-No-Gos” (literally settler/foreigner) is a derogatory Pidgin English appellation that has been used by South Westerners to describe North Westerners who have settled in the SW Region. It connotes an alien inferior and encroaching other and other negative connotations that are sometimes determined by the context and situation of usage. Even though the expression was coined by the Bakweris, who consider themselves the real “Sons and Daughters of the Soil” (literally indigenes), it is becoming more common for other tribes from the SW Region to use it to derogatorily describe North Westerners. The term is an alienation of the alienated, a victimization of the victim, a secondary alienation and victimization of the NW Anglophone. Coloniality of victimhood is, therefore, the South Westerner’s manner of insisting that his/her pro-establishment way is the only way for all Anglophones. It is a process of continuous alienation from the base, a continuous process by which North Westerners are forced to look at themselves from outside of self or with the lenses of a stranger. They are forced to identify with the “foreign” base as the starting point toward self, that is, from the SW self toward the NW self, rather than the NW being the starting point, from self to other selves. Anglophones from the NW are undergoing what Nkengasong calls the sixth colonialization, the first being by the Germans, the second by the British, the third by the “Awaras” the fourth by the French, the fifth by the Francophones and the sixth by the South Westerners (2004: 123–4). The narrator reveals that the VC’s decision to construct a fence round the UM is prompted by the fact that most of the houses and businesses that have mushroomed around the university are owned by “Cam-No-Gos” (24). She is particularly hostile to “Cam-No-Gos” because they support the opposition parties against the ruling PIP party for which she serves as a member of the central and political bureau (24). In the language of coloniality of victimhood, the VC asks “all ethnic strangers” to abandon their silly belief in a one-person-one-vote democracy because the outnumbered sons and daughters of the native soil “expect all strangers to listen and follow [them] to where they want” especially as a bulk of the strangers “are mere plantation laborers, loafers and criminals” (24).

The disqualification of the VC’s and the Reg’s applications for promotion to associate professorship by the National Universities Promotion Council chaired by a “Cam-No-Go” results in another instance of coloniality of victimhood. The “Cam-No-Go” chair’s decision is unequivocal: the Reg and the VC do not qualify to be even the senior lecturers that they currently are because neither has published a scientific paper in the past 10 years and “to promote them would be a further disservice to an institution that is already choking from their ill-advised appointment to its helm” (53). Aggrieved by the disqualification, the VC promises to make mincemeat of all “Cam-No-Gos” while the Reg threatens to erupt in war against the “Cam-No-Go” ingrates that suck their native soil dry with greed like leeches (53). Nyamnjoh makes a mockery of them because as university dons, they should at least know that every community has its own indigenes and aliens and that sometimes, one community’s alien could be the other’s indigene. This perhaps explains why the National Universities Promotion Council has identified them, objectively though, as the “Cam-No-Gos” of academics. They have been dismembered justly by the Council as they are dis-membering unjustly. Ironically, therefore, the “Cam-No-Gos” just like the VC and the Reg, are struggling to “re-member” or to be “re-memdered.” The inscription of Francophonism took the form of mapping, owning, naming and the institutionalization of “Cam-No-Goism” is taking the form of ethnicism. Francocoloniality and coloniality of victimhood are the most dangerous forms of colonialities because they constitute forms of interiorized violence that remind one of the events that led to African atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide. During the more than 50 years of Cameroon’s independence, the seething infernos of Francocoloniality and coloniality of victimhood have resulted in the power of Francophone culture/politics and the powerlessness of Anglophone culture/politics (Konings and Nyamnjoh, 2003). Thus, it is not surprising that since the government opted against constructive dialogue, what started in 2016 as lawyers’ and teachers’ strikes rapidly developed into an earthshaking Anglophone Crisis that has balkanized the country’s polity into unitarists, federalists, secessionists, and restorationists. Depending on the faction one identifies with in that polity, the silence, lethargic action/condemnation and/or indifference of international bodies such as the AU and the UN and former colonial masters (Germany, France, and Britain) has been read as complicity, connivance and/or betrayal thereby lending credence to the prophetic nature of Nyamnjoh’s MBA as a treatise on the implosion of Mimboland/African colonialities.

Conclusion

In the foregone discussions of colonialities of power, knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones, and victimhood, I have demonstrated that in Mimboland, each coloniality begets or is begotten by the others. I have also proven that coloniality is a narrative of the endless transgression of limits; the absence of limits to a Western hegemony that has been inherited by President Longsstay’s government. I have equally argued that the administrative machinery of Mimboland has continued to cling to Eurocentric narratives of/about power, knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones, and victimhood. Those narratives present themselves as triumphalist and continuously reinvent the West (and her micro partners like Nyamandem) as the source and the end of knowledges that matter. The sustainability of Cameroon’s political future would depend on the extent of present-day struggles waged against these colonialities as constitutive elements of a global coloniality. The arguments presented here suggest that Eurocentric, Fracophoncentric, Longstaycentric, Cam-No-Gocentric paradigms cannot guarantee a sustainable future for Cameroon. Over the years, Francophone politico-economic and socio-cultural hegemony has eliminated all possibilities of reciprocal learning involving the Anglophone region, culture and traditions in the Mimboland world. It has prevented any contextualization of Anglophone knowledge or critical dialogue with non-Francophone/Western epistemologies and ways of life, many of which respect nature, knowledge, being, gender, power, language and human beings as a socio-economic, cultural and political whole. Today Francophone Cameroon stands at a crossroads, requiring it to deconstruct a past that was built on the myth of exception and to emerge with the opportunity to formulate new possibilities for national Mimboland integration, transformation, and emancipation from global coloniality.

Enns reminds us that “[t]he most difficult challenge is to know at what point the victim must let go of victimhood, sacrifice the tremendous need for recognition and reparation, even when it is known that victimization robs individuals and communities of something that will never be returned or repaid, and never fully repaired” (2007: 35). But Fanon, who gave us probably the best description of what it means to be victimized by colonization refused victimhood and taught us how to refuse it by commanding the native to “disalienate” him/herself (1962: 75). In the Mimboland context, this would be accomplished neither in the celebration of an Anglophone identity nor in the attempt to be/become Francophone, for both are projects defined within the framework of Franco-British colonialism. The success of decolonial projects demands that Mimbolanders heed Fanon’s insurrectionary call that emerging Third World communities “[l]eave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere [and] turn over a new leaf, work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (1968: 311–12, 316). Colonialities of knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones and victimhood are only a few of the concepts that would have to feature in a Mimboland “decolonial grammar of critical analysis which would recognize its own vulnerability by being open to critical accounts based on the memories” of Mimboland’s different encounters with European modernity in the form of German, French and British colonialism and coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2003: 31). When such a grammar expands and decolonialists increasingly practice multilanguaging, both Francophone and Anglophone Mimbolanders would increasingly read Nyamnjoh’s MBA as an advocacy for being metaphorically married to their own ideas about power, knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones, Francophones and victimhood and still being pluriversally available for the best that Euro-North America can and does continue to offer.