Anglophone Crisis:

The position of Cameroon Bishops is actuated by political rather than Christian motivations

– Father Gerald Jumbam, Kumbo Diocese

Father Gerald Jumbam

Being “An open letter from Father Gerald to the President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon (NECC) – Archbishop Samuel KLEDA”

Your Grace,

When I yielded to the earnest desire within me that I should write you, a friend encouraged me to do so. I consented with something of the reluctance which I developed when I thought of the huge and exalted task of writing you. I rejected the thought of writing. After a little moment, I went on deep thought, meditation and personal prayer about this issue. When I felt the call, I held my pen and began writing until I arrived at this letter before you. It may happen to some persons to feel surprised that it is a priest who is writing an Archbishop. I do so with the happiness and conviction of speaking my own mind, in conscience, about a situation which touches us all in Cameroon. These are my own thoughts and solutions to our recent predicament – welling from unshakeable convictions. I have written them freely without coercion from anyone but only being guided by my conscience – a small voice telling me “Gerald tell the archbishop and the world your own convictions about the crisis bedeviling your homeland. Do so freely without any fear knowing that you and the Archbishop are just citizens and Christians seeking to know and serve God’. It is this voice in me that has enabled me to send you this letter in its entirety and helping the world also – by addressing it an open letter – to learn from its ideas. I am happy to embrace this challenge.

Opening remarks

                I wish to begin straight away by informing Your Grace of the raison d’etre of my letter. I share the conviction of the Cameroonian who has recently commented about your letter that “it is discernible from an anxious reading of the first letter of the Bishops of Cameroon, that of the Bishops of the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda and the present letter of the Bishops of Cameroon that the latest letter of the Bishops of Cameroon is actuated by political rather than Christian motivations.” To me the tone and spirit of your recent letter is not only Pontius Piloting your brother bishops of the Southern Cameroons but the silence over what you were supposed to have done and have not done, is an impeachment of your brother bishops West of the Mungo. What were you supposed to do? I fear to expose my own ignorance of Episcopal policies and proceedings, but I had thought that as leaders who feel for their suffering brothers of English speaking Cameroon, you bishops of French speaking Cameroon would write a public letter condemning the act of taking whole bishops to court. We know who is behind these things; not so Archbishop? Why are we pretending to call a spade a spade when we have been given the mandate as Apostles of Jesus (who is The Truth) to defend the truth even on to the cross. To me it has been a betrayal which the Church leaders of East Cameroon ought to hang their heads in ashamed.

                Your silence has given the impression that the Bishops of our Church prove have been disobedient to the country. Our Bishops have not been unfaithful to the State. They have been united to the State very much like a believing wife to a husband who is about to commit suicide and so as a Christian wife holding to the relationship, the Bishops have struggled recently to save not themselves, but the government from the crime of political apostasy.

                As people of the Southern Cameroons, if we act consistently with our history, we cannot be loyal subjects to the despicable and tyrannous Yaounde government. Archbishop, you speak of Decentralisation and you offer us it as the best gift you think fitting for the resolution of this crisis? We are determined to decline a gift so laden with spurious promises and deceitful propensities. And who can blame us for so doing? Who should be surprised that Yaounde would still do to Buea what it did after the Foumban constitutional conference of 1961 – turn traitor to the very constitution that bound them together as brothers with two equal strengths (and not that spurious decentralization you are talking about that wants to equate Buea with Garoua as if you do not know that Buea is the capital of a country and Garoua is a mere region of another country) or turn Cain against his brother Abel by killing everything we (Abel) had as culture, economy, jurisprudence, education, politics, military etc. the Church is the joy and happiness of all of us, and therefore, when justice cries out as it did in the Southern Cameroons (with rapes and killings and educations and military bestiality over defenseless civilians), it is the duty of the Bishops to speak out loud for the poor and the underprivileged. You spoke but we never got that loudness and that weak voice gave the Yaounde political cabal encouragement to go ahead. Our Bishops of the Southern Cameroons took the bull by the horns and spoken out loud for the poor and used history, scriptures and the Church’s social teachings to state their case because they love the Church which is people and not money.

                The world of politics has its own logic and truth that brooks no breaking. One of them is that of nemesis – that any despotism that goes up would come down. Yaounde has perpetuated that tyranny on Buea and that tyranny is about to have its nemesis. Remember history – that there are two states in Cameroon represented by Yaounde and Buea. That is why I will always equate the two capitals for that is how it was supposed to be.

                I wish to let you know something of the people of the South Cameroons which many French Speaking Cameroonians seem to be ignorant of. They are people who do not distinguish between their love of country and their love of the Church. They love those two things with their whole hearts. Their patriotism is ethical, concrete, and religiously dutiful- reason why your brother bishops of Southern Cameroons (in the example of that pragmatic culture) have spoken for their subjugated and dispossessed people against such a stinking political tyranny as Biya’s. That is why though many from East Cameroon are comfortable with the atheistic political system glorifyinglybaptizediaicite, it has been scandal of the highest order to the religious sensitivity of Southern Cameroons who like true Africans (and tinged by Anglicanism’s reverence for God and respect for the Monarch) believe that without God and indigenous culture life is impossible. We know very well that this atheism we see in Cameroon politics is not from your own ancestors but it is borrowed from France. The people East of the Mungo have been educated in Gallican opinions. We of the West have been educated in Anglican opinions. The respect of each other’s opinions from those educational systems have been what La republique du Cameroun has deprived us of, and it pains us to the marrow. That is why our teachers and lawyers took to the streets to peacefully demonstrate their anger and protest against an evil system. They were met with an autocratic response by a government you fear to criticize.

The Testimony of Early Church History

                To explain my case I make the first century of the Church my special model; it was a virgin Church, yet, a period afflicted by the political autocracy of the Roman Empire and its emperors. When Emperors Decius and Diocletian slaughtered thousands of Christians because they stood for truth, the Christian family stood courageously strong against that political cruelty. Both bishops and laity were one against such political tyranny in the example of the Bishops of Southern Cameroons with their maligned flock. They publicly and formally abjured to worship the gods of the Roman Empire’s totalitarianism. The picture is what is happening today in our land the Southern Cameroons by the colonial emperors of La Republique du Cameroun. St. Athanasius as a result would go on exile and St Chrysostom would be sent off to Cucusus to be worried to death by an empress. St. Ignatius of Antioch would be arrested by the political authorities and taken to Rome to be given to wild beasts to eat him up because of the Truth. And that is why I am angry with the behavior of the Bishops of Southern Cameroons to have allowed you walk around doing what you are doing and giving the impression like they have no authority over their jurisdictions as full consecrated bishops of Local Sees of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. If the governance of that Church called Cameroon is beyond your governance, the best thing is to inform the Pope to send a Vatican delegate to do that job. I feel you’re going round Southern Cameroons for such an exercise is the unwise thing the Bishops of that Church province have allowed to happen in recent times.

Good Shepherds lay life for flock

                Times like this are dangerous times. Times when our future is decided by a clay-footed political clique that has bastardised the fortunes of the British Cameroons to a shambolic muddle. For, if we are to score the Church leadership performance in these times, it will be clear to all that the tail has been wagging the dog.

                In moral and spiritual terms, much has been given to religious leadership, and much is expect of her. That is why the tenacity and integrity that Christian giants like Cardinal Christian Tumi and Cardinal Albert Malula, Mgr. Oscar Romero and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. have mustered in the world, take us back to the visionary words of President John F. Kennedy:

                Of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment of each of us….recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state…our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answer to four questions:

Were we truly men of courage…

Were we truly men of judgment…

Were we truly men of integrity…

Were we truly men of dedication…

                With the towering paradigm of Pope Francis in recent times, the world correctly recognizes that Christianity has the potential to lead the way as champion of mores and faith. Perhaps it would be much truer in the Cameroon context. However, the current Catholic national leadership certainly has not lived up to its possibilities, for the more part because the majority of its bishops have been intimidated into silence and inactivity. A Bayangi proverb goes that, “a man who cannot challenge what is wrong is not better than a corpse”. We are living in times where our political and spiritual shepherds have been found wanting in challenging falsehood, and therefore Cameroon has turned in to a graveyard, a cemetery of silence in the face of blatant half-truths, divide-and-rule tactics, flagrant disrespect of human rights, mass abducting and killings. The National Episcopal Council (NEC) has been silent because it concerns the British Cameroons. Though it is disgraceful, we thank them. We thank them for the powerful memento sent to the world that there are two countries in this country. It reminds us of the evil of silence before evil.

                We know very well that when the National Episcopal Council (NECC) speaks out, it is listened to by the political powers in Cameroon. When tinged by the inspiration and endorsement of Cardinal Christian Tumi in 2000, the NECC spoke against the canker warm of bribery and corruption. The whole world listened and the government of Cameroon adjusted. Those were prophetic times for the clergy. Spiritual leaders the world over are always pace-setters; their intervention on socio-political disasters has always been prototypical, precisely because it sets the tyrants quaking. With the retirement and deaths among your circles, of names like Ndongmo, Tumi, Etoga, Wouking, Verdzekov, Awah, the national Episcopal Council all this while has been a sleeping bag. Today, NEC has been a fiasco, if we must speak the truth.

                Cameroon should be courageous to accept they are flawed and stop blaming France or Britain. The Bribery and corruption that we have been African champions for more than a decade, is self-inflicted. Bribery and corruption are a moral and spiritual problem. And therefore the moral and spiritual authorities are to blame. If the Church truly cared for its members, the problem will not be happening every now and then. And the oppressed people of British Cameroons are undergoing something of a genocide now because the National Episcopal Council (NEC) is on holidays, and the world knows that too well.

                We know what the bishops of the British Cameroons have gone through from the national episcopacy because they kicked up the storm in the daring letter they wrote (despite earlier hesitations) not because they were hoping the leadership of NEC would notice, but precisely because they know that with the 2016-2017 NEC leadership in charge, every raped, maimed and unjustly imprisoned British Cameroonian might as well add NEC to their laundry list of Do-It-Yourself. The bishops of the British Cameroons came up with another communiqué by the very to the effect that they have not closed down their schools and that they are waiting for the Catholic pupils and students to return to school. But right up till now, the pupils and students have not returned, meaning that the parents have lost faith in the Church’s hierarchy. It is precisely because the Cameroon National Church lacks the courage to support what is right that people are going their own sweet ways. Is it asking too much from Church leaders to say good shepherds much lay life for flock?

The Writing is on the Wall

                If situations were still as they used to be (by bishops not being able to be taken to court in the face of a pernicious silence demonstrated by their brother bishops), I would not hold my pen to write you and I would not have the heart to write this letter to so high an authority as you. Your public silence on the matter of the Bishops of our Church Province being taken to court has provoked this letter from a priest of the Church you belong. We are not unmindful of the history of La Republique du Cameroun when it concerns bishops betraying bishops. In fact, if those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, the Christian who is ignorant of what role the Cameroon Church has played in the governing of Cameroon is even less fortunate. And the metaphor of Bishop Albert Ndongmo’s life is the one great example. Albert Ndongmo was Bishop of Nkongsamba, born to a Christian family of La Republique du Cameroun. His statements on political subjects earned him the hostility of others in the Church as well as of the government. But the best statement about the life of this Oscar Romero of Africa came from the pen of none other than the revered Albert Woman Mukong.