POSTPONED Metropolitan Factor in the Crisis of Nation-Building in Africa: The British Incomplete Decolonization of the British Southern Cameroons

PRESENTATION POSTPONED

The nature and way of Africa’s entanglement with the West is such that Africans have often been treated as pawns and inconsequential subjects in western imperial gymnastics. Western imperial interests always took precedence over the partition and repartitions of Africa and this bedeviled the problem of nation-building in the post-colony. This paper sets out to examine British manipulation, double standards and hypocrisy during the imperial scramble for territories in Africa following the exit of the Germans after their defeat in World War I. While purporting to successively pursue the objectives of the League of Nations and the United Nations in the British Cameroons, Britain was bent on using its spoils of war to augment British colonial Nigeria. When this policy aborted in the British Southern Cameroons, Britain granted independence to the territory with vindictiveness by ‘joining’ it to neighboring Francophone Cameroon without an appropriate constitutional framework of union. This incomplete decolonization process has come to haunt post-colonial Cameroon with the rise and explosion of separatist tendencies.