A very British battle to be heard in Cameroon
A bit more pageantry would bring in in one corner of Africa, having English as a mother tongue has proved a curse thanks to a colonial anomaly that left a seething Anglophone underclass in a sliver of the overwhelmingly Frenchspeaking Cameroon.
The two populations live side by side, equal under the law since independence in 1960, which united the former French and British colonial territories. For the past four months, the two English-speaking regions of western Cameroon have risen up against a perceived decades-long assault by the tourists, he thinks – if elected, he wants to turn a derelict restaurant into a royal palace and throne room.
For public engagements, His Tremendousness Marcello I tends to wear a suit and a blue-and-white sash but Mr Dezzani is toying with inventing a uniform with epaulettes and braid.
The principality’s founder and first ruler was a flower grower called Giorgio Francophone elite on their language and British traditions, staging a campaign of general strikes, demonstrations and the occasional riot.
A ruthless response by the government, characterised by the killing of protesters and a two-month internet shutdown in English-speaking regions, has hardened antagonisms, pitching the West African country into crisis.
Amid growing secessionist mutterings, Britain has become more active in recent days in attempting to defuse the confrontation. Last week Brian Olley, Carbone, who styled himself His Serene Highness Prince Giorgio I and declared independence 50 years ago.
The people of Seborga insist that when the village was sold in 1729 to the Savoy dynasty, the deal was not registered properly, so that when Italy was unified in 1861, Seborga was left in a legal twilight zone.
The village’s insistence on its unique the British High Commissioner to Cameroon, met Paul Biya, the country’s 84-year-old president, and is understood to have called on him to end the use of force against protesters.
“We have raised our concerns with the government of Cameroon and will continue to raise these issues,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
But such quiet diplomacy has also angered some Anglophone activists, who accuse Britain of abandoning its responsibilities in the former British Southern Cameroons, which united with the French Cameroons in 1961.
Despite the anger, Anglophone Cameroonians, who make up less than a fifth of the county’s 23million people, remain loyal to their colonial traditions. To the bewilderment and often the derision of French speakers, they insist on forming orderly queues, referring to bars as “off-licences” and dressing up their judges and lawyers in powdered wigs. Both British common law and the GCE O- and A-level syllabus remain deeply cherished.
It is a loyalty that has rarely been reciprocated by Britain. The British Cameroons were made famous by the writings of naturalist Gerald Durrell, who visited in the Forties to search for the elusive hairy toad. But Britain generally status evokes the classic Ealing comedy in which part of London declares independence.
Mr Dezzani, who worked for pirate radio station Radio Caroline, concedes that nobody but the Seborgans themselves recognise Seborga as an independent country.
But that, he says, is not the point. “It’s important to believe in our independence wanted little to do with it. William Gladstone turned down a plea for annexation from local kings in 1884, allowing Bismark to take it for Germany.
After the First World War, Britain turned over five-sixths of the territory to France. Heartbroken local kings, like the Sultan of Bamum, protested.
“I wish to follow the King of England and to be his servant, together with my country, so that we may be freshened with dew,” the sultan wrote in a letter to George V. ‘I wish to follow the King of England and be his servant, with my country, so that we may be freshened with dew’
After independence, the British Cameroons were wooed into union with the much larger French Cameroons by a promise that they would be equal members of a federal, bilingual state – a pledge broken when the federal constitution was abandoned in 1972. Since then, English speakers say they have been shut out of jobs, denied fair political representation and deprived of revenues from oil, much of which is from former British territory. but it is also a state of mind. It’s a fantastic platform on which to attract tourism and create a model community.
“Without being too pretentious or megalomaniac about it, I think we can promote the values of peace, tolerance and openness.”
The nearest bona fide mini-nation is Monaco, just over the French border.
Matters came to a head in November when a group of lawyers staged a small protest outside the courthouse in Bamenda, Cameroon’s largest Anglophone city, to demand the withdrawal of judges who spoke no English and had no understanding of British common law. The protest was broken up with tear gas. In the past, the protests have petered out. But this movement has grown, drawing in Anglophone teachers, angered by state attempts to replace them with French speakers with no knowledge of English and the GCE syllabus. Students joined in, only to see halls of residence raided and female students beaten and sexually abused by the police, activists say.
The government admits to six protester deaths, though activists say the true toll is much higher. With force alone appearing to fail, Mr Biya has since January attempted to cut off Anglophone Cameroon by cancelling internet access to the two regions.
Now, there are signs that even French speakers are losing patience with a leader who spends so much time in Europe his people view him as an absentee landlord.
Last October a Cameroonian stood outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva, where the president is said to have spent most of the summer, and hurled insults at Mr Biya through a loud-hailer. So far, however, there is little sign that Mr Biya will relent. Most of the leaders of the protest movement have been arrested and charged with “terrorism, hostility against the fatherland, secession, revolution, contempt of the president… group rebellion, civil war and dissemination of fake news”.
Facing the death penalty, their trial before a military tribunal has shown Cameroon’s problems in microcosm. Bewigged defence lawyers, seated across the room from bare-headed Francophone prosecutors, struggled to follow French proceedings. It is a sign, Anglophone Cameroonians say, that they will never be accepted.
“The Anglophones are a people,” Henry Ngale Monono, a barrister, wrote recently in a Cameroonian newsletter. “The Francophones want us to think like them, behave like them, act like them – which is not possible.”