Southern Cameroons: fifty years of subtle violence and subjugation 1961-2016
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Date
2022
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Publisher
Universty of the Western Cape
Abstract
The Southern Cameroons question which has come to be known as the ‘Anglophone problem’ has drawn international attention as a result of the physical and ‘spectacular’ violence that have recently engulfed the region. Central and essential to this study is the concept of subtle violence drawn from Kevin D. Holden’s explanation of soft subtle violence which is regarded as injury by infringement. According to Holden, one of the most common encouragements to physical violence from an apparent nonviolent past evolves as a result of withholding, neglect and indifference. Here withholding, neglect and indifference would signify injury by infringement. In the case of Southern Cameroon, subtle violence could be seen as the withholding of the rights of Southern Cameroonians, the neglect of their socio-economic and infrastructural needs, and the indifference towards their plight for equality as Cameroonian citizens by the state as inscribe in the Cameroonian constitution. Many Southern Cameroonians feel subjected to the position of second class citizens in the Republic of Cameroon because of the legal, linguistic and socio-cultural identity they inherited and appropriated as a result of colonial legacies.
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Keywords
Subtle Violence, Bushfalling, Constitution, Federalism, Colonisation