Pragmatic Intercultural Ethics and the Emerging Democracy: The Case of “The Anglophone Cameroon Crisis”

Abstract

ABSTRACT The emerging democracy in Cameroon has been experiencing unprecedented challenges in managing sociocultural/sociolinguistic diversity, thus, instigating “The Anglophone Cameroon crisis”. From the trajectory of applied ethics, this article substantially presents those challenges in their ensemble as a lacuna in intercultural governance, thereof demonstrating how the proper exploitation of the expertise of pragmatic intercultural ethics through interactive intercultural communication could help avert this crisis. By this, it is argued that using the wisdom of deliberative reciprocity, otherwise known as practical wisdom, pragmatic intercultural ethics could exploit the services of communicative ethics to contextually manage various disagreements between Anglophone Cameroon and the Government. Underscoring this insight as an indispensable but neglected pillar of emerging intercultural governance in post-colonial Africa, the author elucidates the likelihood that besides negligence and/or ignorance, the intercultural crisis in Cameroon could have been galvanized by “the happiness of the greatest number” theory. Wishing that the awareness of this pragmatic intercultural dexterity revitalizes the spirit of intercultural communication in Cameroon, the author draws the attention of their stakeholders to the wise recommendation of Plato that rulers should become philosophers – that they should seek justice more with the virtue of wisdom than with force/power.