Cameroun - Cameroon: The CL2P and the Secession War

In his last appearance on Vision 4 on December 16. 2018, Pr. Eric Mathias Owona Nguini, the Biya’s regime ideologue, criticized the United States which called for the end of massacres in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon. For a regime well known to avoid outside scrutiny and to pay foreign journalists to avoid negative headlines, Pr. Nguini rush to invoke a well-worn tenet of the Lost Cause narrative that claiming that the failure to compromise is laid at the feet of radical abolitionists and Northern politicians, including the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, who gave Southerners no choice but to secede.

While Pr. Nguini can be technically correct because, indeed, there was a failure of compromise. But lamenting it without addressing the role of slavery at its root reflects the flawed, Southern version of Civil War history that has nourished the white nationalism currently poisoning American politics.

Pr. Nguini did not mention-and nobody contradicted him at Vision 4- that Northerners were actually more than willing to compromise with the Slave states and meet many of their demands. The Compromise of 1850 even included a revamped Fugitive Slave Law that required all Northerners to assist in returning suspected runaways and denied those apprehended the right to trial — drawing howls of protests from abolitionists.

This agreement reflected most, if not all, of the slave states’ demands. It reinforced slavery’s constitutional protections and loosened its territorial limitations. Lands acquired from Mexico, except for the new state of California, would be open to slavery via popular vote.

These compromises, however, failed to satisfy slave states and their insatiable desire to dictate American domestic and foreign policy. They wanted unambiguous and eternal protections allowing for the expansion of slavery into the western territories and beyond.

The CL2P raises the question: Why do we continue to champion compromise when it was so long used to further the cause of human injustice?

In fact, this is where Pr. Nguini’s ideology veered into denial and hypocrisy. He is using the camouflage of Abraham Lincoln to pretend that Paul Biya is some kind of “Abraham Lincoln” fighting “radical secessionists.” But these “radical secessionists” are fighting against their own enslavement in the Biya’s regime, therefore, the Biya’s regime is not fighting to free the slaves in the Anglophone’s regions. The Biya’s regime is fighting to maintain an unjust and gerontocratic and paternalistic status quo. In this case, Paul Biya is not Abe Lincoln but the head of a state at war with its own people and known to lock up its critics and crush all forms of dissent through violence creating human disaster crisis along the way as vulnerable people are turned into casualties of Biya’s repressive machines.

Thus, the Biya’s regime is part of the problem here not the solution!

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