Yearning for (Dis)Connections

Book excerpt: In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom uses the works of Nyamnjoh, Ndi, Besong and Takwi to explore how Cameroonian worlds are on the move of and for identity negotiations. He also explores how the uneven development of those Cameroonian worlds has been creating growing gaps within and among regions while at the same time Francophonising Anglophones and Anglophonising Francophones through four-fold processes of complementarities, continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. The book demonstrates that persistent Francophone hegemony and resurgent Anglophone nationalism often fail to realise that all Cameroonians have been shuffled like a pack of cards; that cultures are formed through complex dialogues and interactions with other cultures; that the boundaries of cultures are fluid, porous and contested; that identities are multiple and layered in complex, pluralist democratic societies; and that there is need for public recognition of cultural and identity specificities in ways that do not deny their fluidity, nimbleness and incompleteness.