THE POST-INDEPENDENCE INTELLECTUALS AND SELF-CRITICISM:

The generation of intellectuals who were born after independence or who were too young to remember it are today the victims of the deception of the system that was put in place in Cameroon by the neo-colonialist Gaullist establishment in France. They are the victims of Cameroon’s legacy of broken promises and solemn dreams. This sacrificed generation grew up physically and intellectually in an epoch and environment where dreams were being realized everywhere and became certainty more than any time in the history of humanity. The 1960s-1990s were years when a man’s potentials could be exploited to attain great results and great personal heights. And today at the onset of their ripe years, the post-independence generation are faced with the harsh reality of a system which has betrayed them and left them with no promising future when they had molded their intellectual capabilities to match the great potentials that our country truly harbors, and the greater heights the true Cameroonian dream had revealed; a dream with a visible link to reality.

Yes, Cameroon’s post independent and post-reunification intellectuals feel betrayed and disillusioned today. Not only is it being made impossible for them to manifest their intellectual acquisitions, they have also been sidelined by both the system and those of the pre-independence generation who profess to oppose it, leaving them with two options in their intellectual manifestations:

• The post-independence intellectual can accept the present system and its retarding influences and anachronistic bearings and be branded a pseudo-intellectual, while benefiting from the handouts that the system can offer to collaborators or
• They can pursue the path of protest, resistance or capitulation (abandonment).

By protesting and resisting, the post-independence intellectual would be confronted by the full wrath of the system’s machinations whose end result may be frustration or elimination, while if he abandons the cause he would find himself heading towards self-worthlessness and oblivion(internal or external).

Today, the exponents of the French-imposed anachronistic system feel threatened by those post-independence Cameroonians who have not given up hope and are prepared to protest and resist the system. They feel threatened because they know that the Biya regime and the system it is guarding can only survive in a Cameroon that is devoid of alternative ideas and governance. This threat to the system emanates from the simple fact that these new breed of post-independence intellectuals suffer from the failures of the anachronistic French-imposed system (repression; improvisation; mismanagement; corruption; brain drain; discrimination; rapidly declining health, culture, morality and the disintegration of the Cameroonian society; and Cameroon’s slow acquisition of the status of a pariah state) and have acquired the priceless touch with the Cameroonian masses who have been hit the most. This extra touch has set them apart from the pre-independence intellectuals, and has created a gap, which should not be bridged for the interest of Cameroon.

Some say that it is a generation gap in Cameroon’s intellectual community, but it is more than that. It would have been a generation gap if the post-independence generations of intellectuals had wanted to do the things the pre-independence intellectuals did but in a different way (it would have meant accepting the retention of the anachronistic French-imposed system, which has clogged and cannot even accommodate the rising number of children of those benefiting from the system).

The fact that the post-independence intellectuals never benefited from the system and do not want to follow in the path of the pre-independence intellectuals and rejects the older generation’s deceptions in all its forms automatically draws open a phase of conflict. This is the conflict between the culture(corruption, dishonesty, ethnocentricism, repression, and economic, political and social degeneration) that the pre-independence intellectuals are manifesting in the French-imposed system under the Biya regime, and the new culture (freedom, liberty, unity, meritocracy, democracy, economic, social and political progress) for the future new Cameroon that the post-independence intellectuals want to implement, a new culture that embraces global civilization and promises Cameroon a place in the society of progressive nations. This new culture is embodied in Cameroon’s union nationalism whose advanced ideals are compatible with the rapidly changing world.

Rapidly, our rejection of the path taken by the pre-independence intellectuals is assuming a political content, which is strongly opposed by the French political establishment, the Biya regime, and all those who benefited and are benefiting from the imposed anachronistic system. For us to succeed and realize the new humanized Cameroon with its new values and culture, we should kill all the negative aspects of the haunting legacy of Cameroon’s pre-independence pseudo-intellectualism, because if we do not, we shall be irredeemably consumed by it.

It is not enough to criticize and discard old aspects of what is Cameroon’s intellectualism. We must be honest to ourselves and live up to the task of detaching ourselves from any self-esteem, egoism and egotism; and accept some of the errors of our ways that may even have arisen from our deep commitment to the cause for a promising future for Cameroon. Even though for now we are idealists, we are expected to be pragmatists and realists if we want the new system to work.

That is why we must question each action we have taken or are about to take, and if it is wrong, we should admit the shortcomings and finally correct it. Finally, we should not be carried by excessive rhetoric over our ideas because that necessitates frequent utterances, even in circumstances when they are irrelevant and unmeaning. And after several irrelevant and unmeaningful utterances, we may be tempted to defend them, conscious of our errors, but too proud to accept them, simply because we want to defend our egos and new positions. Such a direction would not make the post-independence intellectuals any different from the criminal pre-independence intellectuals, a sad development that would make us the obstacle to any constructive idea that the generations of the next millennium may want to implement.

February 27, 1995

Janvier Tchouteu-Chando