The Lion and his Pride: A Review

Kathrin Tiewa, The Lion and His Pride: The Politics of Commemoration in Cameroon. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag (pb € 39.80 – 9783896458384), 2016, 253 pp.

Nations, as imagined communities are not forged exclusively by language, common origins, myths and visions. National rituals and symbols play equally important roles in reinforcing a sense of belonging amongst citizens. In Kathrin Tiewa’s The Lion and His Pride, she reflects on the significance of national holidays as framed ceremonials where state symbols are exhibited, contested and celebrated. She also demonstrates in considerable detail how this played out in Cameroon as the country commemorated the 50^th anniversary of its independence from colonial rule. Combining archival sources, interviews, textual analysis and other ethnographic methods, Tiewa weaves a superb account of the tensions and controversies that surrounded the staging of Cameroon’s Golden Jubilee.

Cameroon is a complex postcolonial state that has struggled with efforts to forge a nation out of its considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity, including two enduring colonial legacies – French and English. In commemorating its Golden Jubilee or Cinquantenaire (French), Tiewa contends that the Cameroon government “staged the idea of unity in a variety of cultural and political events during the jubilee celebrations” (18) between 2010 and 2011 and that these events prioritized and celebrated Francophone hegemony over their Anglophone counterparts – in a show of sheer power and deliberate forgetting (19). The organisers, made up exclusively of Biya’s ruling party members or bureaucrats “avoided the commemoration of conflict-ridden moments of the history of the country in order to prevent past controversies from re-awakening…” (16). But these past controversies have never really gone away because successive regimes have refused to address them in productive ways – hence the reason a civil war is raging in the Anglophone regions. Tiewa convincingly argues that the trope of unity during these celebrations was not “only used to celebrate the ruling government’s achievements in order to support Biya’s electoral campaign, but also to divert attention from existing problems such as the ‘unity question’” (19). For example, the celebrations were anchored around the so-called peaceful revolution that ushered the unitary state in 1972 (122) but Anglophone activists decry this date and the events surrounding it as the period when the federation they agreed upon with their Francophone counterparts, met its demise. To this end, neither 1^st January 1960 (the actual date of French Cameroon’s independence) nor 1^st October 1961 (the actual date of British Southern Cameroons’ independence) featured as reference points for the Golden Jubilee celebrations, but rather, 20^th May 1972. Thus, it is acceptable that the Golden Jubilee was staged in order to impose the Francophone-dominated government’s version of historical truth by emphasising the significance of unity over the actual commemoration of fifty years of independence (65).

In elaborating this myth of unity, Tiewa shows how the rituals of commemoration were performed in a variety of contexts and processes – in presidential speeches, the unveiling of an official logo (whose visibility was largely limited to the contours of the capital), the official wax print cloth, commemorative stamps (with Biya’s face coveting the highest-priced edition), and the renaming of sites in honour of either Paul Biya or the Golden Jubilee. She and her research assistants, stationed in various Francophone towns across the country, documented and reported on the Golden Jubilee celebration of 20^th May 2010 as well as the 50^th anniversary of the creation of the Cameroon Armed Forces in Bamenda later that year.

Tiewa’s work is marred by a range of methodological flaws and historical inaccuracies. I find it intriguing that whereas she and her assistants carried out surveys in the towns and cities where the jubilee events were staged and quantitative data provided (183), no such surveys are reported about the events that were later staged in Bamenda (December 2010) and Buea (February 2014). Similarly, there’s no evidence in this work that she stationed assistants in either Buea or Bamenda on 20^th May 2010 to document how Golden Jubilee activities were unravelling. Wouldn’t have the myth of unity been made more apparent and her analyses strengthened by data from the Anglophone regions of the country? In privileging data obtained not only from predominantly Francophone cities by Francophone research assistants – who mostly conducted their research in French, even in the Anglophone provinces – doesn’t her work inadvertently further the sort of Francophone hegemonic machinations she seeks to critique? Furthermore, these methodological gaps raise concerns about the data’s validity, particularly as the assistants not only helped in gathering data, but were interviewees themselves with very limited knowledge of Southern Cameroons history. Other concerns rest on a legion of historical or factual inaccuracies – more than I can exhaust in this review. For instance, she states that the SDF boycotted the presidential elections of October 1992 (186) – arguably the most controversial election in the post-1990 multiparty era since John Fru Ndi is widely believed to have won that election. She also inaccurately submits that Ephraim Inoni succeeded Achidi Achu as Prime Minister and that during the 2007 parliamentary elections, the CPDM gained eight seats bringing the “total number to nine in the regional parliament” (186) in a country where no regional parliament exists.

These flaws notwithstanding, Tiewa has added to our knowledge of the politics of commemoration and specifically how national rituals validate or in Cameroon’s case, expose the deepening fissures within the body politic. For students and scholars of Cameroon politics who missed the 2010 Golden Jubilee celebrations, this book has meticulously documented for posterity and analysed the events as they unfolded. It will also be a vital resource in comparative studies of political ritual and commemoration in postcolonial societies where nation-building efforts have either suffered setbacks or been undermined by poor governance and prolonged dictatorship.

Jude Fokwang
Regis University