Godfrey Tangwa AKA "Rotcod Gobata": COLONIALISM AND LINGUISTIC DILEMMAS IN AFRICA: CAMEROON AS A PARADIGM

Tangwa at a glance

Jimbi Media Sites

AFRICAphonie
AFRICAphonie is a Pan African Association which operates on the premise that AFRICA can only be what AFRICANS and their friends want AFRICA to be.
Bakwerirama
Spotlight on Bakweri Society and Culture. The Bakweri are an indigenous African nation.
Bate Besong
Bate Besong, award-winning firebrand poet and playwright.
Bernard Fonlon
Dr Bernard Fonlon was an extraordinary figure who left a large footprint in Cameroonian intellectual, social and political life.
Fonlon-Nichols Award
Website of the Literary Award established to honor the memory of BERNARD FONLON, the great Cameroonian teacher, writer, poet, and philosopher, who passionately defended human rights in an often oppressive political atmosphere.
France Watcher
Purpose of this advocacy site: To aggregate all available information about French terror, exploitation and manipulation of Africa
George Ngwane: Public Intellectual
George Ngwane is a prominent author, activist and intellectual.
Jacob Nguni
Virtuoso guitarist, writer and humorist. Former lead guitarist of Rocafil, led by Prince Nico Mbarga.
Martin Jumbam
The refreshingly, unique, incisive and generally hilarous writings about the foibles of African society and politics by former Cameroon Life Magazine columnist Martin Jumbam.
Nowa Omoigui
Professor of Medicine and interventional cardiologist, Nowa Omoigui is also one of the foremost experts and scholars on the history of the Nigerian Military and the Nigerian Civil War. This site contains many of his writings and comments on military subjects and history.
PostNewsLine
PostNewsLine is an interactive feature of 'The Post', an important newspaper published out of Buea, Cameroons.
Postwatch Magazine
A UMI (United Media Incorporated) publication. Specializing in well researched investigative reports, it focuses on the Cameroonian scene, particular issues of interest to the former British Southern Cameroons.
Simon Mol
Cameroonian poet, writer, journalist and Human Rights activist living in Warsaw, Poland
Victor Mbarika ICT Weblog
Victor Wacham Agwe Mbarika is one of Africa's foremost experts on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Dr. Mbarika's research interests are in the areas of information infrastructure diffusion in developing countries and multimedia learning.
Tunduzi
A West African in Arusha at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the angst, contradictions and rewards of that process.
Dr Godfrey Tangwa (Gobata)
Francis Nyamnjoh
Prolific writer, social and political commentator, he was a professor at University of Buea and University of Botswana. Currently he is Head of Publications and Dissemination at CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal. His writings are socially relevant and engaging even to the non specialist.
Ilongo Sphere: Writer and Poet

By Godfrey Tangwa

QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy Volume XIII No. 1-2, 1999

Africa is the richest and most variegated continent on earth: geographically, climatically, historically, culturally, linguistically and resource-wise. That much is a palpable fact, requiring neither proof nor, for our purpose here, any further elaboration or analysis. Africa is also, paradoxically, the poorest continent on earth. Precisely because of its variegated riches, Africa is the most exploitable as well as exploited continent on earth. So it is on account of its exploitation and exploitability that Africa can be called a paradoxical continent: the richest as well as the poorest continent on earth.

The colonial intervention which, of course, lies on the same continuum with the slave trade, is, without doubt, the most important experience in the human history of Africa. And the most important single event in the colonial history of Africa is, arguably, the Berlin Conference of 1884 during which European imperial nations, like good hunters, stood over the map of Africa, like a game, and, with their imperial pens (penknives?) quartered her up amongst themselves, for its exploitable resources, with regard for neither the linguistic, cultural nor political state of affairs on the continent.

The imposition of European languages and systems of education on Africans followed the "partitioning of Africa" as necessary and inevitable corollaries, corrugates and support structures of colonial activities whose impetus, motive force and overriding aim remained economic domination and exploitation. It is possible but quite idle to speculate on what the history and situation of Africa might have been without the colonial experience. The experience itself is now simply an unalterable part and parcel of African history. It is a historical datum comparable to an individual s having been born or brought up at a particular place or time. Post factum, there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.