Remembering a Forgotten Statesman: 36 After Bernard Fonlon’s Passing

Hans Ngala

He is a statesman but the country doesn’t talk much about him except within Anglophone circles, but Bernard Fonlon was more than just a statesman, he was also a scholar and critique.

Born in November 1924 in Kumbo, then in the Southern Cameroons, he attended he did much of his secondary education in Nigeria like most of his generation from the Southern Cameroons at the time. He first attended Bigard Major Seminary in Enugu Nigeria where he was later expelled because the school’s authorities believed him to be too intelligent and “His brains would be more useful to the wider world than in the confines of the Priestly vocation” according to a statement from the institution back then.

While attending the Foumban Conference during which Cameroon’s Federal Constitution was drawn up and noticing the language barriers as discussions were predominantly in French, Fonlon who had obtained a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris; opted to act as a translator to facilitate discussions between the delegation from the Southern Cameroons and those from French Cameroun.

His top-notch fluency in English and French also came in handy when he was tasked by the then President Ahmadou Ahidjo with again translating Cameroon’s national anthem from French to English – one of his better known achievements.

Fonlon later served in various ministries in Ahidjo’s government, first as Minister in charge of Missions at the Presidency; Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Transport, Minister of Mines, Posts and Telecommunications and Minister of Health and Social Welfare.

The automatic telephone network system; the International Satellite Station at Zamengue; Cameroon Telecommunications (CAMTEL), the present-day Posts and Telecommunications building in Yaoundé, the project that led to the creation of Cameroon Airlines, are among his most remarkable legacies in the various ministries he headed at different times.

Fonlon’s core passion was always in academia and explains why he returned in 1971 at the age of 47, to be a university professor at the University of Yaounde.

His educational career had started when he attended Catholic primary schools, starting at College of Christ the King at Onitsha. After six years of study at Bigard Memorial Seminary, he was told by his superior that he was not ‘suitable’ for major orders. He took this reverse without bitterness, although he vowed to maintain his vows of chastity so that he could be free for any task, thus he never married nor had any children. After a spell of teaching at his old school, he was enabled to study abroad and left for Ireland in 1954. He took a first degree in modern languages at the National University of Ireland, followed by courses at the Sorbonne, a graduate education diploma at Oxford, and, finally, obtained a doctorate at the National University of Ireland for a thesis on Black protest literature in English and French.

Did Fonlon ‘Betray’ the Southern Cameroons?

After having studied in both Nigeria and France and being from the British-ruled Southern Cameroons, Fonlon felt that the right thing was for the two Cameroons to reunite, hence at the Foumban Conference, he was a strong reunificationist , also partly informed by his service in the Ahidjo administration.

Prof. Fonlon as an intellectual was a fervent advocate of bilingualism and pushed for it to be mandated in school curricula, a legacy that continues to this day.

He did his best to give the people of his native Kumbo one of the best gifts they could ask for: pipe-borne water, funded by the Canadian Government in the early 1970s. It would later become the Kumba Water Authority (KWA) one of just a few locally-owned and locally-managed water authorities without government control. And those who grew up or have lived in Kumbo prior to the Anglophone Crisis would testify to how clean water in Kumbo could be.

At the time, it would be hard to imagine that Fonlon knew that Cameroon would become as polarized as it has today. In his view, the Southern Cameroons entering into a union with French Cameroun, was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ of sorts in that no sooner had the two Cameroons reunited in 1961 than Ahidjo changed the federal constitution in 1971. According to renowned historian and University of Buea lecturer, Nfi Joseph Lon:

“…the main factor that precipitated the “death” of the federation was the discovery of petroleum in West Cameroon and Ahidjo’s determination to take total control of this new source of wealth and prevent West Cameroon from waging a war of secession as was the case with the Katanga Province in the Congo and Biafra in Nigeria” (pg.1).

The divisions that Anglophone leadership are currently facing, are divisions that go back to the 1950s and 1960s prior to independence.

Southern Cameroonian leaders at the time were divided with EML Endeley and NN Mbile favouring a union with Nigeria inspite of the prevailing feeling of “Igbo-phobia” – a hatred of Nigerian Igbos who dominated every sphere of life in the region. For his part, PM Kale took the drastic stance of favouring complete independence that was not pegged to joining either Nigeria or French Cameroun.

According to another renowned scholar, Nicodemus Fru Awasom, “when one takes into consideration the fact that French Cameroun was ten times the area of British Southern Cameroons, had four times its population, and had immeasurably greater resources and a much higher level of social and economic development”, one can then see why the erudite Professor Fonlon would idealize a united Cameroon as the crucible of African unity, as he put it.

The odds were already against the Southern Cameroons from the very beginning and because oil had not yet started being exploited in the region, there was not much of a bargaining power for the trust territory whose leaders only served in secondary positions under the Federation. So it wouldn’t be fair to blame Fonlon because one can assume (and rightly so with the above facts), that he was visionary enough to see that the Southern Cameroons could not bargain for independence on her own terms.

What would be good to do as we remember Fonlon 36 years after his death, is to live up to the principles he held dear: scholarship, integrity and morality.

Fonlon would have turned 98 today but unfortunately, he died on August 26 while on a trip to Canada to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He was 62.

Even if our country seems to have forgotten him, each and every one of us must not. We should look for something we can do to make this land of Cameroon which we call home – a better place.