Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon Excerpt

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Here is an excerpt from the introduction of Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon by Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué. The book illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country.

“What the Women of a Nation Are, So Shall the Nation Be” Gendered Nationalism in Cameroon

In late December 1958, John Ngu Foncha, leader of the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP), was in a serious accident in his Land Rover while campaigning for the 1959 election for premier of the British Southern Cameroons, the region of Cameroon that came under British control when Germany surrendered it after World War I. Having broken both collarbones in the crash, he was forced to wage the last week of his campaign encased in plaster casts. He had been traversing the regions in his trusty Land Rover, campaigning in various English-speaking towns, such as Bamenda, Kumba, Mamfe, and Victoria, against Emmanuel Mbela Lifafa Endeley, the leader of the then-ruling political party, the Kamerun National Congress (KNC). [1] According to Foncha’s biographer, Endeley’s party “openly jubilated” about the accident, calling on Southern Cameroonians to reject his candidacy since “he was going to die and that people should not vote for a dying man.” [2] The statement exaggerated the gravity of Foncha’s injuries, but Foncha in his casts could do little to respond. Immobilized, he could not deliver a crucial campaign speech at the recently established Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) studio in Buea, the capital city of the British Southern Cameroons. At the time, Foncha was in Widikum, a day’s journey from Buea. Foncha asked his wife, Anna Atang Foncha, to get a pen and paper and “play the role of a secretary.” He dictated his campaign speech to her, and she personally ensured that Nicholas Ade Ngwa, an education officer in Buea, would secretly receive it so that he could read it on the radio in her husband’s stead. NBC radio transmitted the speech to Lagos, Nigeria, and, from there, broadcast it to all regions of the Southern Cameroons. The measure saved Foncha’s political career. He defeated Endeley and became the second premier of the British Southern Cameroons in 1959.

The incident occurred during British control of Foncha’s region of Cameroon, which lasted from 1922 to 1961. At the end of German rule, a League of Nations mandate put the western part of Germany’s colony under British control and the significantly larger eastern part under French rule. Both powers ruled Cameroon as part of their colonial empires. These regions were known as the British Cameroons (partitioned into Northern and Southern Cameroons) and French Cameroun, respectively, and both gained independence gradually over the course of the 1950s. Although the British governed the Southern Cameroons from their administrative headquarters in neighboring colonial Nigeria, the regions were administered separately. Nevertheless, Southern Cameroonians were essentially part of Nigeria, and they elected representatives for the Eastern House of Assembly in Nigeria until the early 1950s. [3] In 1954, Britain, having practiced indirect rule by allowing Africans to keep some administrative and legal power, gave the Southern Cameroons its own legislature, the Southern Cameroons House of Assembly. As premier, John Ngu Foncha led this institution. He and E. M. L. Ende- ley dominated the political landscape of Southern Cameroons in the 1950s. Foncha’s 1959 victory over Endeley made his KNDP the most prominent party as British rule concluded. [4]

At the end of British rule, John Foncha’s KNDP advocated for reunification with newly independent French Cameroun, renamed the Republic of Cameroon, led by President Ahmadou Ahidjo. In February 1961, Southern Cameroonians voted for this plan in a plebiscite. [5] Five months later, President Ahidjo called the Foumban Constitutional Conference, nominally to negotiate the constitution of the Federal Republic. Foncha’s Anglophone delegation came expecting to negotiate, but they were at a disadvantage, given the far greater size of Francophone Cameroon and Ahidjo’s position as representative of an already-independent state. Foncha’s arguments for a loose form of federalism availed nothing. [6] The constitution of the Federal Republic of Cameroon largely conformed to the centralized pattern that Ahidjo sought, rather than the loose framework that Foncha and his delegation had envisioned. In October 1961 the two territories together became the Federal Republic of Cameroon, the unified state encompassing the English-speaking West Cameroon State and French-speaking East Cameroon State. [7] John Foncha served simultaneously as prime minister of the West Cameroon State and vice president of the Federal Republic from 1961 to 1970; the federal structure remained, at least in name, for two more years. It was a federation of two states with a central government; each federated state had some level of political autonomy. However, between 1961 and 1972, President Ahidjo increasingly marginalized Anglophone persons, politically, socially, and economically. He banned the multiparty system in 1966, effectively prohibiting all West Cameroonian political parties. His creation of the United Republic of Cameroon, in 1972, effectively subjugated English-speaking regions under his rule.

Scholarly and popular accounts of Anglophone Cameroon’s history have generally focused on the activities of male politicians, such as John Foncha. Like Anna Foncha’s role in making her husband’s key political speech public in 1959, the political roles of Anglophone Cameroonian women have remained largely unknown. This book is about the seemingly invisible women, such as Anna Foncha, in the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement during the federal period, 1961 to 1972. The actions of the wives of political heavyweights, women state bureaucrats, and political activists reveal the roles of women in nationalist endeavors.

Scholars have ignored the role Anna Foncha played in John Foncha’s political career. Accounts typically portray her as “play[ing] the role of a secretary.” Scholarly interpretations typically mention Anna Foncha as simply John Foncha’s wife. Even a 1999 biography of her husband emphasizes her role in his domestic life; most of the material about her appears under section titles such as “Mr. J. N. Foncha Chooses a Wife,” and “Mrs. Foncha and the Children Move to Buea.” [8] A present-day blog addressing the political history of Anglophone Cameroon asserts that Anna Foncha knew little of political events in the late 1950s and 1960s because “she remained cloistered in the kitchen, while her husband debated state matters with his political colleagues in the parlour.” [9] In contrast, I argue that Anna Foncha was probably her husband’s top advisor and engaged closely with his political career. A petite woman who had been formally educated at Njinikom in Southern Cameroons and at Teacher Training Centre at Ikot Ekpene in Nigeria, she played a key role in the political trajectory of Anglophone Cameroon that went beyond transcribing her husband’s urgently dictated speech in 1958. Anna Foncha was and continues to be a political force in her own right. She founded the Catholic Women’s Association (CWA), which today has over 16,000 members around the world. Her presiding over the leading women’s organizations in the West Cameroon State, the West Cameroon Federation of Women’s Social Clubs and Associations (WSCA) and the West Cameroon Council of Women’s Institutes (CWI) further demonstrates her significance in Cameroonian politics.

This book explores the importance the WSCA and the CWI placed on women’s daily actions. It also uses the wide-ranging political activities of Anna Foncha and her various counterparts as a methodological approach, providing entrée into the gendered political history of Anglophone Cameroon more broadly. Using excerpts from the biographies of numerous women such as Anna Foncha as a unifying thread, this book reveals the link between gender, social and political identity, and nationalism, a complex construction in West Cameroon given the multiplicity of ethnic group identifications. The activities of elite Anglophone women often differed from the realm of the political as presented in previous renderings of Cameroon’s nationalist politics. Elite Anglophone women slowly entered the formal political structure as civil servants in the late 1950s, accessing political power beyond the traditional women’s societies that protected women’s agricultural and reproductive fertility. Their activities show both the possibilities that their intelligence, formal education, and social position afforded them and the limitations that their gender imposed on them, illustrating the boundaries that also constrained other women’s political participation. Unlike men, female political elites strove to wield social and political power by invoking women’s long-standing maternal authority within the home and society to legitimize their importance in varied nationalist activities. In other words, women worked to legitimize their political activities by emphasizing that they “mothered” the well-being of society and ultimately, that of the nation.

By examining the power of women’s collective political mobilization and their particular role in creating and carrying out a nationalist campaign laced with separatist undertones—or, as I phrase it, separatist politics—I describe how politically elite women exercised both individual and collective agency when driving social, political, and economic change in women’s lives in predominantly patriarchal societies. These formally educated elite women saw themselves as the leaders of nation-building agendas in the West Cameroon State as well. Consequently, they frequently focused on the actions of their formally educated counterparts, primarily women in the professional workforce, housewives, and primary and secondary school-age girls. By focusing on the actions of such women, female journalists and female political elites strove to protect class boundaries even as they sought to improve women’s economic, social, educational, and political conditions. Female political elites preserved their own social and political authority by advancing women’s rights overall and by attempting to monitor the behavior of women through advice columns, women’s organizations, and domestic science courses. As a collective unit, educated elite women advocated for and supported one another, participating in what Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg calls “affective circuits” that precipitate “emotion-laden social networks... whose malleable structure of ties creates conduits that are maintained by ongoing interaction and exchange.” [10] By focusing on the political involvement of women such as Foncha, we learn that they formed intimate alliances of emotional support to foster sisterly camaraderie. In building a community of sisterhood in which they worked together to drive particular forms of political discourse and actions, key women political elites fostered hope in politically volatile landscapes in the postcolonial era.

In the period of the Federal Republic, Anna Foncha and her counterparts were part of an Anglophone Cameroonian Christian urban elite that expressed differing European administrative ties, languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries to visualize and imagine, as Benedict Anderson might put it, a West Cameroon “nation.” In this period and ever since, the Francophone state has treated English-speaking Cameroonians as potential secessionists, subject to political surveillance as well as, at times, violence. [11] Women in the Federal Republic did not openly criticize the government in Francophone Cameroon as annexationist and hegemonic; they left this to the men. Unlike in many women’s organizations, male leadership and membership in political parties at times followed ethnic or regional boundaries. Women such as Foncha—political spouses, civil servants, journalists, and politicians— participated in a subtler ethnic politics that favored a unified Anglophone nationalism that incorporated women from varied ethnic backgrounds. They did so by calling for loyalty and encouraging women to abandon ethnic group affiliations, asking women to instead pursue unity by focusing on female solidarity, a community of sisterhood, and their mutual Anglophone heritage. [12] Nationalist aspirations, as well as personal interests, led female political elites to call on women to unify beyond ethnic group ties. Many politically elite women of the West Cameroon State were of mixed ethnic heritage, and this too may have inspired them to forge a hybrid ethnonationalism that transcended ethnic and cultural boundaries by selectively incorporating varied social and cultural practices, such as indigenous foods and cooking practices from diverse ethnic groups in Anglophone regions of Cameroon. Through “the process of ethnic formation,” such women “work[ed] out claims of identity in everyday life.”