Anglophone Secessionist Movements in Cameroon

Abstract

The deep roots of current Anglophone secessionist claims can be found in what is called the “Anglophone problem.” Anglophone Cameroonians feel that reunification with Francophone Cameroon in 1961 has marginalized the Anglophone minority—endangering Anglophone cultural heritage and identity—in a post-colonial nation-state controlled by a Francophone political elite. Anglophone resistance has been a permanent feature of Cameroon’s post-colonial biography. Yet only in the early 1990s did Anglophone elites mobilize the regional population, claiming self-determination, autonomy, and later outright secession. The prospects for secession appear bleak, owing to heavy-handed state repression, internal divisions within the main secessionist organization, an international and regional political architecture with a default commitment to state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and diverging views among Anglophone Cameroonians on the appropriate way forward.