¹ DeLancey, Mark W., Cameroon: dependence and independence (Boulder and London, 1989), surveys the background;Google ScholarJua, Nantang, ‘Cameroon: jump-starting an economic crisis’, in Africa Insight (Pretoria), 21, 3, 1991, pp. 162–70,Google Scholar dissects the economy of the late 1980s; and Nicolas van de Walle extends that analysis into the 1990s, especially in ‘Neopatrimonialism and Democracy in Africa, with an Illustration from Cameroon’, in Widner, Jennifer A. (ed.), Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa (Baltimore and London, 1994), p. 129–57.Google Scholar

² Van de Walle, loc. cit. p. 138. This process reduced the number and narrowed the base of some 1,000 leaders earlier identified as ‘la Classe dirigeante’ in Ngayap, Pierre Flambeau, Cameroun: qui gouverne? De Ahidjo à Biya, l'héritage et l'enjeu (Paris, 1983), pp. 8ff.Google Scholar

³ Cited in Cameroon Post (Limbe), 30 05 1991.Google Scholar

⁴ How quickly and far this unrest spread can be gauged from a critical editorial in Le Messager, 18 July 1991, attacking Biya: ‘let him and his western supporters know that what is now happening in Cameroon is a popular revolt which the opposition is trying hard to contain’. My translation.Google Scholar

⁵ These details are from my Bamenda period of residence, with crowd estimates much below opposition claims. See Amnesty International Report, 1992 (London, 1992), pp. 79–81, for the situation country-wide.Google Scholar

⁶ Cameroon Post, 27 September 1991, covered this episode, confirming the accounts of my Bamenda informants.Google Scholar

⁷ For a typical reaction in the critical press about Biya's evasion of reforms, see the heading and editorial in Le Progrès (Douala), 14 01 1992, entitled ‘Trahison de la tripartite: la constitution confisquée’.Google Scholar

⁸ Cameroon Tribune, 11 March 1992.

⁹ See National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, An Assessment of the October 11, 1992 Election in Cameroon (Washington, DC, 1993), Executive Summary and Appendix XI.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Published in the Cameroon Tribune, 23 October 1992, and reproduced in ibid.

¹¹ See interview by Ndi, Fru in Africa Report (New York), 03–04 1993, p. 63.Google Scholar

¹² As in November 1993, when Fru Ndi sought refuge in the Dutch embassy after the SDF had been prevented from holding a press conference in Yaoundé.Google Scholar

¹³ The Herald (Douala), late 01 1994,Google ScholarSDF Echo (Yaoundé), 28 02–9 03 1994,Google Scholar and Jeune Afrique (Paris), 14–20 04 1994.Google Scholar

¹⁴ ‘Proceedings of the First National Convention of the Social Democratic Front, May 21–26, Bamenda 1992’, p. 29.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Official SDF documentation with its seal, including Fru Ndi's keynote Bafoussam speech and cognate material, August 1993. Reports in West Africa (London) conveyed a firmer sense of federalism as SDF policy than primary sources justified; vexing constitutional issues were being skirted more than resolved in party circles.Google Scholar

¹⁶ West Africa, 7–13 March 1994, p. 388.

¹⁷ Ndi's, Fru keynote Bafoussam speech, August 1993.Google Scholar

¹⁸ West Africa, 7–13 March 1994, p. 388.

¹⁹ The revival of anglophone politics was anticipated in DeLancey, 1989, op. cit. The tensions between the South West and North West Provinces are documented in Geschiere, Peter and Konings, Piet (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on the Political Economy of Cameroon–Historical Perspectives/Colloque sur l'économie politique du Cameroun–perspectives historiques (Leiden, 1989), Parts 1–2. Two electoral features have differentiated coast and hinterland, albeit 31 years apart. In 1961, 96,000 of the 136,000 vote margin for Cameroon over Nigeria in British Southern Cameroons came from Bamenda's six electoral districts. In 1992, during the presidential poll, Fru Ndi won 86 per cent of votes in the North West as against 52 per cent in the South West. The evidence is complex. Many anglophones now work in both the SDF and CAM; Mukong was an honoured guest at the SDF Bamenda convention in 1992.Google Scholar

²⁰ SDF Echo, 28 February–9 March 1994.

²¹ Cameroon Post, International edition, 24 February–3 March 1994.

²² West Africa, 20–26 June 1994, p. 1090.

²³ Ibid. p. 1091.

²⁴ As long ago as 1991 the régime alleged that the senior anglophone army officer, General James Tataw, was plotting against it on Nigeria's behalf.Google Scholar

²⁵ Le Messager, 27 January 1994.

²⁶ See Fatton, Robert Jr., The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal's passive revolution, 1975–1985 (Boulder and London, 1987).Google Scholar According to the Carter Center's ‘Quality of Democracy Index’, Cameroon was termed ‘ambiguous’ in its commitment to democratic transition, behind 32 other African nations, alongside (among others) Zaïre, in mid-1991 at the peak of tension. By mid-1993, following the elections, Cameroon had moved up a revised scale to the status of a ‘directed democracy’, as had Kenya, but behind 15 polities deemed to be ‘democratic’. Africa Dēmos (Atlanta), 2, 1, 1991, p. 11, and 3, 2, 1993, p. 19.Google Scholar

²⁷ Schilder, Kees, ‘La Démocratie aux champs: les présidentielles d'octobre 1992 au Nord-Cameroun’, in Politique africaine (Paris), 50, 1993, pp. 115–22.Google Scholar

²⁸ Manor, James (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London, 1991), p. 4.Google Scholar

²⁹ Schatzberg, Michael G., ‘Power, Legitimacy and “Democratisation” in Africa’, in Africa (London), 63, 4, 1993, p. 445, introducing a valuable study, couched in vernacular idioms, which argues that indigenous cultural measures of political legitimacy are preconditions for, and more important than, any forms of democracy as understood elsewhere.Google Scholar

³⁰ Mbembe, Achille, ‘Pouvoir des morts et langage des vivants: les errances de la mémoire nationaliste au Cameroun’, in Politique africaine, 22, 1986, pp. 37–72,Google Scholar and Monga, Célestin, ‘La Récomposition du marché politique au Cameroun (1991–1992)’, Groupe d'études et de recherches sur la démocratie et le développement économique et social, Douala, 1992.Google Scholar For a profile of this non-governmental organisation since its origin in 1990, see Guie, Honoré, ‘Organizing Africa's Democrats’, in Journal of Democracy (Washington, DC), 4, 2, 04 1993, pp. 119–23.Google Scholar

³¹ Vengroff, Richard, ‘Governance and the Transition to Democracy: political parties and the party system in Mali’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 31, 4, 12 1993, pp. 541–62, offers a micro-analysis with wide range and predictive features, but the parallel is limited by the demise of Mali's régime-party in 1991 and the survival of Cameroon's thus far.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² See John R. Heilbrunn, ‘Social Origins of National Conferences in Benin and Togo’, in ibid. 31, 2, June 1993, pp. 277–99; Nzouankeu, Jacques, ‘The Role of the National Conference in the Transition to Democracy in Africa: the cases of Benin and Mali’, in Issue: a journal of opinion (Los Angeles), 21, 1–2, 1993, pp. 44–50; and the on-going work of Pearl Robinson.Google Scholar

³³ See, for example, Muigai, Githu, ‘Kenya's Opposition and the Crisis of Governance’, in Issue, 21, 1–2, 1993, pp. 26–34, for Cameroon's closest parallel.Google Scholar

³⁴ Decalo, Samuel, ‘The Process, Prospects and Constraints of Democratization in Africa’, in African Affairs (London), 91, 362, 01 1992, p. 31.Google Scholar

³⁵ Fatton, Robert Jr., Predatory Rule: state and civil society in Africa (Boulder and London, 1992), pp. 60 and 77.Google Scholar

³⁶ Chazan, Naomi, ‘Africa's Democratic Challenge’, in World Policy Journal (New York), 9, 2, 1992, pp. 287 and 303.Google ScholarChabal, Patrick, Power in Africa: an essay in political interpretation (New York, 1992) in key ways echoes Chazan for Cameroon and Africa at large.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ Chazan, loc. cit. p. 291. Note also Woods, Dwayne, ‘Civil Society in Europe and Africa: limiting state power through a public sphere’, in African Studies Review (Los Angeles), 35, 2, 1992, pp. 88–91 and 97, for similarly more hopeful soundings on African civil society which Cameroon (though not cited) reinforces.Google Scholar

³⁸ Women in markets and street stalls, for instance, enforced Bamenda's 1991 general strike in those sites; their massed groups swelled the demonstrations, and one particular association warned off strike breakers and taunted and obstructed the military in open defiance (perhaps as an example of women's public sanctions identified in a growing local literature by the term ‘anlu’).Google Scholar

³⁹ Bamenda-based police warned civilians against gendarme sweeps in 1991, when Radio France Internationale also reported gunfire between local and national security forces in the vicinity of Foumban.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Chazan, loc. cit. p. 289.

⁴¹ Bratton, Michael and van de Walle, Nicolas, ‘Popular Protests and Political Reform in Africa’, in Comparative Politics (New York), 24, 6, 1992, p. 440.Google Scholar As for Cameroon, ‘Elites almost invariably prefer the status quo to the unknown’. Ibid. p. 434.

⁴² Fatton, Predatory Rule, p. 86, in a section headed ‘Exit and Anarchy: the descent into hell’.Google Scholar His scholarship on morbidity in the African state is given Cameroon specificity by Mbembe, Achille, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, in Africa (Manchester), 62, 1, 1992, pp. 3–37.Google Scholar Only slightly less bleak is the ‘escape’ and ‘exile’ language in Lemarchand, René, ‘Uncivil States and Civil Societies: how illusion became reality’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 30, 2, 06 1992, p. 187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴³ Van de Walle, loc. cit. p. 146, using Africa Confidential (London) as source. If this was anywhere near the truth in 1991, no substantial recovery since then can have occurred. Incidentally, Cameroon's football achievements in the World Cup during 1994 offered the régime few of the redeeming populist features that characterised 1990.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Cameroon Tribune, 6 October 1991.

⁴⁵ Le Monde (Paris), 31 08 1993.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ibid. 5–15 December 1993.

⁴⁷ This paragraph and the next two condense a host of materials briefly, and try to make provisional sense for Cameroon of issues that cannot be discussed at length or judged with certitude here, especially CFA devaluation and the impact on anglophone politics of what is surveyed. Key sources, often mutually at odds, include a series of financial analyses in West Africa, October 1993– January 1994; Le Monde, 13–20 January 1994; unclassified documents of US Departments of Commerce and State, February and March 1994; Jeune Afrique periodically, but especially 19–25 May 1994; Cameroon Post and The Herald, as well as other domestic opposition newspapers.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Jeune Afrique, 19–25 May 1994.

⁴⁹ West Africa, 9–15 August 1993, p. 1408.

⁵⁰ For a revealing current of informed, cautious, influential opinion in the United States, see Africa Dēmos, 3, 2, 1993, p. 17: ‘Unless Cameroon's political forces can be brought together to arrive at a comprehensive agreement about the country's future, the current political and economic drift in the nation is likely to provoke violent social conflict’. Cameroon is specified as ‘an ideal test case’ for ‘preventive diplomacy’.Google Scholar

⁵¹ This translated text of Biya's speech on 23 March 1994 is from the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Africa (Washington, DC), 24 03 1994.Google Scholar

⁵² Le Monde, 23 March 1994.

⁵³ The passages are from seminal essays of the early and mid-1980s. Richard Sklar anticipated democratic reconstruction in his 1982 speech ‘Democracy in Africa’, reprinted in Sklar, and Whitaker, C. S., African Politics and Problems in Development (Boulder and London, 1991), p. 260.Google ScholarBayart, Jean-François, ‘Civil Society in Africa’, in Chabal, Patrick (ed.), Political Domination in Africa: reflections on the limits of power (Cambridge, 1986), p. 124, drew more cautiously on events then placing régimes in question.Google Scholar