Law serves utilitarian purposes. It is consciously deployment as an instrument of social
engineering. This instrumentalist use of the law means the law is deployed to socialize,
influence, condition, and orientate individual and group behaviour. The law is also used to
channel the conduct, attitude, thinking and behaviour of individuals and groups towards
predetermined political, social, economic and cultural goals. Every legal order attempts to solve
societal problems by using the threats and promises of the law to channel behaviour in new and
different ways. It is thus to the law that a government ultimately resorts to create institutions
reflective of its image.
The political, social, cultural and economic policies of French Cameroun, including its
repressive, oppressive and colonial policies, find expression in statutes, decrees, regulations,
directives and policy statements and speeches of the Yaoundé colonial regime and its field
colonial officials. This gives French Cameroun the cover to declare the just disobedience of its
arbitrary and despotic impositions as violations of what are in effect mere pretended ‘laws’.
French Cameroun rams an array of ‘laws’ down the throats of the people of the Southern
Cameroons and exacts compliance under pain of draconian sanctions, including death by
hanging. These ‘laws’ are enforced and maintained by the colonial administrative and
repressive infrastructure instituted in the Southern Cameroons. The ‘law’ of the French
Cameroun colonial authority in the Southern Cameroons is therefore gross coercion. It seeks
to promote a colonial ideology and maintains the colonial status quo. It is basically a reflection
of French Cameroun’s colonial hegemony in the Southern Cameroons.
French Cameroun has thus presumed to declare the territory and people of the Southern
Cameroons ‘illegal’, the Southern Cameroons Broadcasting Corporation (SCBC) ‘illegal,
Radio Southern Cameroons (RSC) ‘illegal’, the Southern Cameroons Diaspora ‘illegal’, the
exercise by the people of the Southern Cameroons of their right to freedom of thought and
expression ‘illegal, their freedom to receive and share information ‘illegal’, their freedom of
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movement ‘illegal’, and their unquestionable right to free themselves from French Cameroun
rapacious and violent colonialism ‘illegal’.
The ‘law’ declared by that country is first and foremost a means of exercising political,
economic, social and cultural power and control over the people of the Southern Cameroons.
It is the weapon of the colonial authorities in ensuring colonial dependency. It is a weapon that
fosters spoliation, pauperisation, a ghetto environment, and underdevelopment in the Southern
Cameroons. Its role is to conserve and perpetuate French Cameroun hegemony in, and
colonisation of, the Southern Cameroons. French Cameroun makes these laws in its
unflattering image. It shapes them. It defines them. It interprets them. It gives them meaning
consistent with its French-derived distorted world-view and its colonial project in the Southern
Cameroons. It is the ruling material force in the Southern Cameroons. It monopolises the means
of material production in the Southern Cameroons. It daily seeks to control the means of mental
production as well.
French Cameroun is undeniably the colonial authority in the Southern Cameroons,
exercising, vi et armis, a colonial sovereignty. It continues to do so in defiance of the universal
proscription of colonialism. It continues to do so in violation of the unquestionable right of the
people of the Southern Cameroons to self-determination and to freedom from alien domination.
The right to self-determination is an inalienable and continuing right under international law.
It is a pre-condition to the full enjoyment of political, civil, cultural, economic and social rights.
The 1960 United Nations binding Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial
Countries and Peoples declares that “the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination
and exploitation” amounts to a denial of human rights and to a violation of the Charter of the
United Nations. The Southern Cameroons situation calls for decolonisation of the territory from
the predatory colonial occupation of French Cameroun. Decolonisation will ipso facto put an
end to other gross human rights violations by French Cameroun in the territory of the Southern
Cameroons.
In such an inauspicious environment, it becomes the abiding right and duty of the
colonised people of the Southern Cameroons to destroy, and end forever, that colonial
condition. Part of that creative deconstruction of the colonial condition and narrative is the
demolition of the coloniser’s ‘law’ and legal infrastructure. It follows that a colonised people
necessarily have a right of resistance. Every colonised or oppressed people struggling against
colonial subjugation must necessarily defy the institutions and ‘laws’ of the colonising state.
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This includes openly defying and disobeying the colonial administrators and the colonial forces
of occupation. It further includes dismantling all colonial structures in the colonised and defiled
territory, fumigating and sanitizing the entire territory to render it clean and healthy once again.
The holy duty of any colonised people is to vigorously challenge and destroy the colonial order
imposed on them. For, colonialism is iniquitous. It is tyrannical. It is intolerable. It has
universally been proscribed. Every colonised people therefore have a plain obligation in law
and in nature to resist to the end and by every available means, to disobey and demolish, the
vile colonial order to which they are subjected.
By the Assistant secretary general SCNC UK,
PRIDE MBI AGBOR
