GUESS WHO IS READING US

I was in a Douala cyber recently when something struck me as being interesting. When I logged into Facebook, I realized that the previous user had not logged out before leaving. But more importantly, I noticed that the customer had been meticulously reading a group discussion on the current strike and the Anglophone problem in Cameroon.

It was the series of exchanges that were sparked by a certain Fomundam when he reacted to Hon Wirba’s parliamentary outburst by criticizing the Honourable Member of Parliament for being all wods and no action. Of course, while some of us felt that the criticisms were in order because they enabled the Honourable gentlemen not to succumb to the dreaded but very common personality cult; some Facebookers felt that the parliamentarian’s performance and motives were so spot-on that any criticism of him was an affront to the entire Anglophone people.

However, the issue was not just that the previous user of the cyber had been following the ongoing debate. It was rather the fact that all the posts on his Facebook page as I saw them, were in all in French. Fomumdam’s rebuttal was in French and all the reactions that followed it right to the most recent were equally in French. That meant that the person who had been reading them was a Francophone who had switched on the Facebook facility for translating the posts and responses from the English in which they had been initially written, into French, in order not to miss anything that was posted on the subject.

What I saw revealed to me that surely, the Francophone who had been at the computer before me could not be the only Francophone in the country interested in what was going on in the Anglophone part of the country. It reminded me of something a taxi driver said to me not so long ago. He said he had noticed that the ongoing strike action and the heightened awareness-creation it generated of the Anglophone problem had led to an upsurge in the number of Francophone Cameroonians seeking to learn English.

“That is no news because a good number of them already have children in purely Anglophone schools”, I remarked dismissively, citing the case of some Francophone colleagues of mine when I was a journalist  at CRTV in Yaounde, who had children in mission colleges in Bamenda, although they themselves could not speak English. The driver agreed with my explanation and added that he personally knew a Francophone minister who had sent his son to study at Sasse College in Buea. By the time such children graduate, their English is as good as that of their Anglophone peers and in addition to that, the Francophones students still have the added bonus of their French still being intact, so to speak, which means that they end up by being very bilingual.

I know that Gabon under its current president, Ali Ondimba Bongo, has also embraced the English language, from a different view point, by adopting it as its second official Language, in addition to French which it inherited from its colonial master, France. The president of Gabon has argued that English is a major international language which would open up unprecedented opportunities for Gabonese people at home and abroad. The Gabonese president formally opened the doors to the English language in 2012. Unfortunately, one would have thought that Cameroonian’s unemployed graduates would be queuing up in large number to seek English teaching jobs in Gabon. But the reality is that such is not the case.

Similarly, in Nigeria in 1996, President SaniAbacha announced that Frenchwould be the country’s second official language. That is not surprising firstly because Nigeria is almost entirely surrounded by Francophone countries. Furthermore, there are many Francophonecountries in the Economic Community (ECOWAS) to which the country belongs and with which it does business on a daily basis.

 Writing in the Nigerian The Guardiannewspaper of today (December 2016), Dr. Stella Omonigho who is a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Benin in Nigeria said: “Officially, French has been the second official language in this country for the past 19 years. It has also been made ‘compulsory’ in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools across the country. French is also being taught at the tertiary level in the country.Nigerians should not over-flog the notion that there are no benefits in making French a second official language; events have overtaken that. What is most important for us to know at the moment is the importance of bilingualism or multilingualism; that is having good knowledge of at least two international languages. While other neighbouring countries have at least two international languages as their official languages, others have three to four. Nigeria must join her counterparts in the trend of bilingualism, which without doubt, has many benefits.”

The lecturer went on to say “we must understand that being bilingual has a positive effect on our intellectual growth and enhances our mental development. According to Nanduti (2009), ‘being bilingual opens the door to other cultures and helps an individual understand and appreciate people from other countries.’ I can assure you that our political leaders will interact better and exchange better knowledge with their Francophone counterparts without interpreters if they have knowledge of both French and English languages. Nanduti also affirms that being bilingual increases job opportunities in many careers where knowing another language is a real asset.Nigerians will widen their horizon in the labour world with an additional international language such as French, which is the third most spoken language in the world. A lot of internationally based companies, like Total, Exxon Mobil, Air France and KLM advertise for workers from time to time with qualifications including an ability to speak either French and English or English and German. The dearth of these competences poses a great challenge to Nigerian applicants who are limited by their knowledge of only the English language.”

Back here in our own country, Cameroon, we have not been very keen to seek jobs as French teachers in Nigeria, in the light of the golden opportunity which this new development offers us. Yet the few Anglophones from Cameroon who have found themselves there for other reasons, have found that occasionally, they are either being called to teach French here and there or to translate one document or another.

The current struggle for a recognition of rights by Cameroon’s Anglophone people should not exclude a look at the benefits  that lie in embracing French as wells as professions and activities that stem from it as a linguistic tool to greater achievement and self-fulfillment and not just a political cane used to lash relentless whips on hem. Far beyond the sphere of Cameroon, French is not just an international language but a major one.