George Esunge Fominyen is currently Coordinator of the Multi-Media Editorial Unit of the PANOS Institute West Africa (PIWA) in Dakar, Senegal.
PANOS Institute West Africa
6, Rue Calmette Dakar, Senegal
Email: esungeft@gmail.com
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
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.
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) Renaissance man, philosophy professor, actor and newspaper columnist, Godfrey Tangwa aka Rotcod Gobata touches a wide array of subjects. Always entertaining and eminently readable. Visit for frequent updates.
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 Novelist and poet Ilongo Fritz Ngalle, long concealed his artist's wings behind the firm exterior of a University administrator and guidance counsellor. No longer. Enjoy his unique poems and glimpses of upcoming novels and short stories.
Scribbles from the Den The award-winning blog of Dibussi Tande, Cameroon's leading blogger.
Enanga's POV Rosemary Ekosso, a Cameroonian novelist and blogger who lives and works in Cambodia.
GEF's Outlook Blog of George Esunge Fominyen, former CRTV journalist and currently Coordinator of the Multi-Media Editorial Unit of the PANOS Institute West Africa (PIWA) in Dakar, Senegal.
The Chia Report The incisive commentary of Chicago-based former CRTV journalist Chia Innocent
Voice Of The Oppressed Stephen Neba-Fuh is a political and social critic, human rights activist and poet who lives in Norway.
Bate Besong Bate Besong, award-winning firebrand poet and playwright.
Bakwerirama Spotlight on the Bakweri Society and Culture. The Bakweri are an indigenous African nation.
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.
Bernard Fonlon Dr Bernard Fonlon was an extraordinary figure who left a large footprint in Cameroonian intellectual, social and political life.
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.
Canute - Chronicles from the Heartland Professional translator, freelance writer and a regular contributor to THE POST newspaper. Lives in Douala, Cameroon
Is it easy to be an African woman? Always having other people deciding what you do, have, like or say; and how you should feel and act. Except if you are a woman like Joyce Ashutantang; a Cameroonian literary academic, actress, playwright, scriptwriter and poet.
In a series of poems posted on her blog –Batuo’s World – she masterfully brings out women's innermost feelings about love and life that some of society’s “protectors” in her country and continent of origin would want gagged and buried inside.
One of those issues is whether to allow women choose to keep or terminate pregnancy within given conditions. In “Sarah Palin: A Poem for Women” Ashutantang writes: “She can kill a moose, I can’t / She touts a gun, I hate guns / She derides abortions; I stand by them; my body is mine…”
In the first week of August 2009, the traditional rulers of Cameroon's Sawa ethnic and linguistic group organised a march through the streets of Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon, angered by a government decision allocating a piece of land - located at Besseke in the city's Plateau Joss area - as State property,local media reported. The Sawa want to build the headquarters of the Ngondo, their 300 year-old cult, on this site.
What caught my attention in this protest was the form it took. There was the march, a petition to the President of the Republic and (more interestingly) a church service at the Native Baptsist Church, which was followed by a ritual which included the burial of a goat (or sheep) on the site. It was the stark depiction of the African caught between living his/her old ways and being the reverent Christian in a modern world.
Is such open reliance on both the God of the missionaries and that of their ancestors a sign of Africans ready to openly live their multiple beliefs?
In December 2008, the American newspaper Star Tribune reported that a woman of Cameroon origin had filed a lawsuit in a US Federal Court accusing another woman for using voodoo to steal her man and ruin her life. By February the woman had withdrawn the case citing the power of prayer as the final sword in her battle to regain "her man". This affair drew a mix of contempt, ridicule and sympathy for her, as it seemed absurd that one would dare to file such a case in a court of law.
If this woman had been well advised she would have simply taken the case to the land of her forefathers. Article 251 of the Cameroon penal code provides that anyone found guilty of practising sorcery could be punished with imprisonment for up to 10 years and fined 100,000 FCFA ($200). All she needed to do would have been to prove her allegations. Well, that's where things become awkward. How do you prove the existence of what is essentially supernatural?
The Al Jazeera television programme People and Power recently broadcast an investigative report by Sorious Samura on the penal implications of witchcraft in the Central African Republic. I shared the version published on Youtube (below) with some friends. It sparked a debate over the presence of the occult in the minds and lives of Africans. Is this whole thing about witchcraft a figment of people's imagination? Are some African governments right to maintain witchcraft as a crime punishable by law? Where does one draw the line between a true para-normal occurence and idle and defamatory accusations?
The traditional wrestling season has re-started in Senegal. As the crowds roared at the Demba Diop Stadium as one wrestler fell and another stood the ground, I must admit there was a fleeting bit of envy that crossed my mind.
Why can't we have such a huge event in Cameroon?
I am pleased to say at least one traditional wrestling festival will hold in Buea, Cameroon.
Recently, an Eden newspaper report that "about 300 inhabitants of Esele in the Limbe III subdivision have been asked to quit their village and cede land for the construction of a military barrack" stirred virulent reactions among members of the Fako (South West, Cameroon) diaspora. They mostly worried about how vulnerable their kinsmen had become in terms of losing their ancestral lands. As I followed the heated debates on the issue, I reflected on my interpretation of "The Lost Heritage", a story by Cameroonian writer, Fritz Ilongo.
This is a short story. True. With a very catchy theme - if (like Fritz Ilongo) you hail from the land that spans the slopes of great Fako Mountain to the "Mwaanja" (ocean). It is a depiction of an intense reality that has political and social ramifications which may supersede comprehension.Bakweris have a problem about their ancestral land. Sold privately or at a state level (i.e CDC)...
Only last June, I posted an article on this blog (Man from Somewhere in-between) in which I suggested that the black South African on Black African violence that rocked South Africa in in April and May 2008, was merely hate generated by who we define ourselves to be and it had happened elsewhere and could happen anywhere.
Well, it happened on 15, 16, 17 and 18 July in my dear Cameroon. The “indigenous” inhabitants of Akonolinga (a small town situated 180 Km from the capital Yaounde), attacked the homes and businesses of “strangers” mainly ethnic Bamiléké living in “their town”, leading to the death of at least one person and the displacement of many “Bami” strangers. The spark that generated the outburst happens to be football, supposedly the rallying force of Cameroonians.
During the violent two weeks in May 2008 when Black South Africans attacked Black African migrants in South Africa, a friend of mine sent me a number of pictures depicting men being hacked or charred to death by other men. Under shock, she wrote to me saying, “Happiness is not always where you think you would find it.” She went on, “how could our brothers do this to us? How could blacks do this to blacks? How could South Africans do this other Africans?”
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