A Well written, amply documented Memoir!
- A review by Prof. Ndiva Kofele Kale, SDF lawyer, shadow Minister
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| Prof. Ndiva Kofele Kale |
When I found out that my boyhood friend, the Very Rev. Dr. Nyansako-ni-Nku, PCC Moderator Emeritus, would be chairing this occasion, I couldn’t help but break into a smile and crack a chuckle as I allowed myself to reminisce on how he and I have come full cycle. Fifty years ago this August, fresh out of college, contemplating our next move, the Reverend and I together with many of our college mates were members of the Buea Youths Social and Dramatic Club. We staged plays, organized debates, book reviews and even ‘tea-time’ dances. Then we were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old kids, venturing where even grown-ups feared to tread, struggling to read and make sense of Nkrumah’s Consciencism, Nyerere’s Ujamaa, Sekou Toure’s African Socialism, and Senghor’s Negritude. This Book Launch brings back many fond memories of those halcyon days!
Mr. Chairman, the organizers of this Book Launch recognize that I wear many hats: law professor, lawyer, political scientist, and politician. In the latter role, I happen to occupy the posts of Shadow Minister of Justice and National Legal Adviser (one of ten) of Cameroon’s leading opposition party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF). An occasion such as this which touches on the very essence of the intellectual enterprise—and I use the term “intellectual” in its purest sense to mean the production and dissemination of knowledge—it is of crucial importance that my political persona not be allowed to distract from the message. Therefore, the views and opinions I express here today are solely mine and do not in any way reflect the official policy or position of the SDF.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, the tradition in the Academy is that friends do not review books written by their friends. Because this gives rise to a conflict of interest which forces the reviewer friend to make a difficult choice: provide a positive review to a poorly-conceived and badly-written book in order to keep a friendship or tell it like it is and risk losing a good friend. My bona fides for reviewing this book rides on whether I should be treated as a friend of the author, therefore presumably biased, or someone who could be considered an impartial referee. The author dedicates his book “to all those who caused [him] to feel good or bad about [his] engagement in the SDF” and includes my name among a few others! So, am I a friend of the author, thus disqualified to review his work following the tradition of the Academy?
Mr. Chairman, I read the language just quoted as placing the burden on those whose names are cited to determine for themselves what side they fall on the equation. In discharging this burden, I am persuaded that for the period that I knew the author in the SDF, I may have caused him to feel good, and then again I may also have caused him to feel bad; which puts me squarely in the middle or on both sides of the fence! Mr. Chairman, being neither friend nor foe or both friend and foe makes me eminently qualified to review Professor Tazoacha Asonganyi’s book, which I will now turn my attention.
Book Review
Professor Tazoacha Asonganyi styles his magisterial CAMEROON: Difficult Choices in a Failed Democracy as a Memoir and not a biography or an autobiography. Which raises the question: what is a young man, in the prime of his life, whose productive years are still ahead of him, doing recording his memoirs now? I leave you to figure that out for yourselves after reading the book!
A biography, an autobiography or a memoir all share one thing in common: they each tell a story. Where the first two tell the story of a life, a memoir, on the other hand, more often tells a story from a life, such as the key events and critical choices made in the author’s life. But there are memoirs and then there are memoirs! Professor Asonganyi’s is not Arthur Golden’s 1997 best seller, Memoirs of a Geisha, an historical novel which tells, in first person narrative, the fictional (operative word) story of a geisha working in Kyoto, Japan, before and after World War II. Difficult Choices in a Failed Democracy is most definitely not a work of fiction, as the author himself acknowledges, “sometimes more truth can be told through fiction, especially concerning living characters” but, he continues, “there is no need for fiction in a memoir of this nature” (p. 14). So, what we are reviewing here this afternoon is a factually-based story. Aside from a few detours in chapters 1-3, 27 and 28, Difficult Choices is an account of the personal experiences of the author with respect to the “many events that shaped the life of the leading opposition political party, the SDF,” especially the difficult choices he had to make during the period he was the party’s Secretary General (SG).
For the record, SG Asonganyi’s first chance meeting with a gentleman, introduced to him as “Mr. John (EBIBI) Fru Ndi, was in London somewhere around 1978” (p. 31). Little did he know then that their paths will again cross a decade or so later, giving birth to a complex and complicated relationship that may or may not have “caused” Asonganyi “to feel good or bad about [his] engagement in the SDF;” from the moment he became a card carrying member in January 1991, militating in the Dignité Ward in the Yaounde V Electoral District; to his cooptation into the National Executive Committee (NEC) in June 1993 and finally his election as interim SG a year later (June 1994), a post he held until his unfortunate ejection in 2005.
Tazoacha Asonganyi’s Difficult Choices reminds one of the 1949 classic, The God That Failed, in which six of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century describe their experience of and disillusion with communism. They were the Frenchman André Gide, Richard Wright (of Native Son fame), Ignazio Silone (Italy), Stephen Spender (English poet, novelist and essayist), Arthur Koestler (Hungarian-British), and Louis Fischer—Mahatma Gandhi’s biographer), all former communist (or former communist sympathizers).
Like the authors of The God That Failed, it was Asonganyi’s search for the betterment of humanity that led him ineluctably to “Suffa Don Finish” in 1991. Like hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians, myself included, Asonganyi was seduced by the party’s claim that it was answering the “call of Conscience, History, and Destiny to bring true democracy and a bright and humane future for Cameroon” (p. 10). In describing his own experience in the SDF, the author also chronicles the fate of democracy, or better still the absence of a democratic culture, in Cameroon, and more especially among the country’s 200-plus opposition parties.
The memoir tracks the author’s conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with the “power to the people” ideology as practiced in the SDF. Like the authors of The God That Failed, it was this personal heartbreak and revulsion from seeing up close how certain power blocs in the SDF (the so-called “noyau dur”) made short shrift of democratic values and principles which ultimately caused Asonganyi to distance himself from the party (chap. 25 Press Conference). I might add that others like Maidadi, Sani Alhaji, Ben Muna, and Pierre Kwemo, to name but these few, simply abandoned the SDF and formed their own parties or joined the ruling CPDM, like my good friend, Martin Nkemngu. Professor Asonganyi recounts, with the precision of the scientist that he is, the tumultuous events that plagued his stewardship as the party’s SG from 1994-2005, providing essential detail and background that even the uninitiated comes out with a clear understanding of the dynamics in play within the SDF in the period under review.
He also describes the party’s origins, rising as it were from the ashes of one-party dictatorship to embrace the unfamiliar and highly nuanced multiparty ‘democratic’ system that succeeded it. The author provides a sobering and heart wrenching description of intra-party conflicts, abuse of power, duplicitous behavior of those at the helm, reckless disregard of the party’s own statutes and internal rules in the pursuit of individual self-serving goals (“’Discipline’ became an instrument for stifling debate, denying members their basic democratic rights, meeting individual agendas, interfering in the private lives of members” p. 48); but above all, Professor Asonganyi evokes the party’s discomforting contradictions:
• a party that has staked its entire raison d’être on the creation of an autonomous national electoral commission as the sole guarantor of free, fair and transparent elections in Cameroon (chap. 13) but would categorically rule out the establishment of an impartial investiture organ within the party with jurisdiction over elections and appointments (chap. 20);
• a party leadership that continues to rile against weak national institutions that have led to the rise of an imperial president, only to turn around to support and actively encourage amendments to the party’s constitution that have ended up creating a de jure and a de facto one-man rule with an accompanying personality cult for good measure (chap. 24)(what I have described elsewhere as the Der Fuhrer Prinzip);
• a party that has never ceased preaching national unity even as it continued to practice the politics of tribe and kinship (chap. 4:75; chap. 20:158-159; chap. 25:241ff);
• a party that talks reconciliation but wants to be selective on who should be welcomed back into the fold (chap. 22:189ff);
- a party that preaches “equal opportunity for all” yet plays favorites when it comes to distribution of the spoils (pp. 342-343).
But the author also acknowledges the party’s indelible imprint on the national stage; the influence it has had on our lives; and how its flaws (some built-in, others acquired along the way) continue to affect its national and international image even as it enlivens contemporary public discourse.
Does Tazoacha Asonganyi’s thorough and rigorous diagnostics of the SDF pathology reveal a failed democracy? And if so, is the failure of democracy in SDF due to structural weaknesses or attributable to the personnel charged with giving effect to the values and principles on which a democratic society is based? If the latter, is the leadership alone at fault or does the rank-and-file also share in some of the blame? Reasonable minds can quibble over the choice of Professor Asonganyi’s title for his Memoir which seems to suggest that the story from his life in the SDF is one of being witness to a failed democracy.
Accepting the Professor’s thesis, can it not be argued that the failed democracy he alludes to is more a reflection of the absence of an enabling environment that fosters the growth of a democratic culture in this country? Professor Asonganyi himself concedes on page 9 that “…when the political parties were formed, the weak institutions put in place by the one party regime … had seriously influenced the political culture of the country; and the political culture had influenced the national character.” Again on page 48, the author observes that: “… the SDF emerged from a society that did not understand the nature of democracy; it emerged from a society that bore the injustices it sought to get rid off. And so individual ambitions, little camps, little quarrels, little differences set in, and led to disciplinary procedures that were not related to principles and values, but to little self interests” (p. 48). Tazoacha Asonganyi appears to be suggesting that these negative currents worked against the emergence of a truly democratic culture in the SDF and may well account for its decline. Mind you the author does indeed talk of the “rise and fall of the SDF” (p. 14¶3).
Against this backdrop, it is only fair to ask: what did we (the intelligentsia, p. 45) really expect from the SDF? Can a leopard change its spots? To elucidate this point, permit me to borrow a quote from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, widely considered as one of Karl Marx’ most profound and most brilliant work on the philosophy of history.
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crises do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.
If Marx was right about the cyclical spin of history, then the SDF and its 200-plus sister parties in the opposition were doomed to fail from the very beginning because they started life haunted by the “spirits of the past” and weighed down by the “tradition of all past generations”; in our case, 24 years of a suffocating single-party dictatorship; dictatorships are the very antithesis of democracy. So, it should not have come as any surprise that two decades after their creation, these opposition parties, including Professor Asonganyi’s beloved SDF, would be masquerading as democratic institutions, draping themselves in the garment of “power to the people” and “equal opportunity for all” not out of conviction but, in part, for reasons of expediency; but also because these slogans are in tune with the post-Cold War Zeitgeist. Here I readily concede that Professor Asonganyi’s insights and analyses are on the button! However, to his failed democracy I prefer selective or cafeteria democracy which, by definition, allows one to pick and choose those aspects of democracy that suit their purpose while discarding those they find inconvenient. Or, at the very worst, perhaps we can talk of a defective democracy. By this I mean a democracy that is imperfect, even horribly flawed but still capable of being redeemed, if the will is there. In other words, the many defects in our democracy that Professor Asonganyi has so convincingly detailed in his Memoir are reversible and can be repaired.
If we accept, arguendo, Professor Asonganyi’s characterization of a failed democracy, then following the ordinary meaning attached to the verb “to fail” which is to “fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved,” we must conclude that the SDF, after 25 years of existence, has not succeeded in transforming itself into a truly democratic organization. In that case, two options are open to us its members. As rational people, we either can (1) proceed to jump ship and abandon the party; OR (2) stay and fight within to ensure that with time the democracy that we all so desire and the culture that comes with it will finally take root.
Faced with this difficult choice some of us, much like the characters in James Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, opted to stay and fight. As a consequence, you can understand why we reproach the Nkemngus and the Maidadis, the Akontehs, the Tabestings and the Ben Munas, and a slew of other progressive and reform-minded comrades who preferred to jump ship rather than stand their ground and roll up their sleeves for a good down-and-out brawl to the finish!
The SDF is a miniature of the greater Cameroonian society, and it mirrors all the imperfections of this country, including its lukewarm embrace of the democratic culture. Over two and half centuries ago, the Americans came together to establish the first new nation and dedicated themselves to the almost impossible goal of creating a perfect union. 240 years and counting, they are still working at perfecting that union! The SDF has only had 25 years to fine tune its democratic credentials. During this time, it must be admitted, the party has stumbled and faltered, as Professor Asonganyi’s excellent Memoir dutifully recounts. But with time, I am convinced that, the SDF can succeed in becoming a veritable political party that respects the fundamental values and principles that animate a democratic organization. For this reason, those of us who still have a soft spot for this once great party should continue to fight to re-establish its legitimacy as a first step towards regaining its lost dominance of the political landscape!
Tazoacha Asonganyi has sounded the alarm on the fate that awaits us should we continue to remain silent, pretending not to notice how our political parties, in general, and the SDF, in particular, have been systematically undermining the fundamental principles of democracy; installing in their place a reign of terror that has dampened the spirit of free-willing debate among party members, leaders and rank-and-file alike. Are we ready to heed this call to arms?
Difficult Choices in a Failed Democracy is a compelling post-mortem of Cameroon’s 25-year experiment in democratic governance. It is well written, amply documented, and conceptually challenging. And, if it is not clear by now, let me add that it is well worth reading.
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