Am I Anglophone? Identity politics and postcolonial trauma in Cameroon at war

Abstract

I was born in the English-speaking South West Province of Cameroon and raised in the English-speaking North West Province where I was educated in a system of primary through high school studies modeled on the British education system of G.C.E. Ordinary and Advanced Levels. After my A’ Levels, I moved to the French-speaking Centre Province where I enrolled at the University of Yaounde. There I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a Licence ès Lettres Bilingues—a B.A. in Bilingual Letters (English and French)—for which I had to complete a French language immersion requirement in Douala in the French-speaking Littoral Province. After my university studies, I worked in the French-speaking West Province and English-speaking South West Province before moving to French/English-speaking Montreal, Canada where I studied Comparative Literature at McGill University and later immigrated to the United States. This essay, written in the context of the current “Anglophone Crisis” and the war taking place in Cameroon, is a personal meditation as a citizen, scholar, and fiction writer on the elusive nature of identity that the postcolonial nation-state seeks to capture, contain, and/or impose on the multiple “fragmented” selves of its citizens; identities that are by necessity in flux and as such either refuse to be contained within state-sanctioned acts of linguistic terrorism and/or restrained by socio-cultural and political repression.