Abstract: This research examines the unease expressed by the Anglophone minority people of Cameroon, as a result of alleged marginalization by the Francophone majority. Discontent had been gathering momentum for decades in different forms. However, things came to a head following a strike staged by Anglophone lawyers and teachers in 2016, to which the government responded with repression. Since then, the situation has escalated and led to an armed conflict with separatist fighters taking over the struggle and claiming to fight for a separate republic for the Anglophones known interchangeably as “Ambazonia” and “The Southern Cameroons”. The paper uses a combination of historical and archival secondary sources, and the technique of observation, backed by qualitative analysis, to examine the dynamics of the conflict, both overtly and covertly. The findings reveal that there is indeed an identity crisis among Cameroon`s Anglophone peoples vis-a-vis their Francophone counterparts. The study concludes that the root cause of the problem lies in the colonial past of the two peoples and offers recommendations that can lead to peaceful coexistence.
Keywords: Political Communication; Cameroon; paradigm shift; Anglophone; post-colonialism; armed conflict; Identity Crisis; Secession; Liberation; Ambazonia; The Southern Cameroons.
Title: Political Communication: The Shifting Paradigm of Cameroon Anglophone Self-Expression (1961-2018)
Author: TIKUM MBAH AZONGA
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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