European colonization and the transmission of the Ewondo language in Cameroon and Abroad: Historical and transnational perspectives

Abstract

European colonization has deeply marked the linguistic practices in different African territories until today. Cameroon, which was colonized by Germany from 1884 to 1916 and by France and Great Britain from 1916 to 1960, is formally a bilingual country with French and English being its two official languages. However, the linguistic reality of the country goes way beyond these two languages. Today, more than 250 African languages are spoken in Cameroon. This article focuses on the experiences of Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi, who was born in Yaoundé in 1950 and who is today Professor Emeritus of African languages at the École normale supérieure of Yaoundé. The article evokes Belibi’s family history, his schooling, university studies and his career as a high school teacher and as a university professor. It thereby examines the different school policies implemented in Cameroon toward African languages over time as well as the impact of university actors on ongoing political changes in the educational field. It also addresses demands from the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe and the world concerning the learning of Ewondo. The article is written in the form of a conversation between Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi and Elise Pape, a Franco-German sociologist specialized in the fields of migration studies and of postcolonial memories.

Introduction

European colonization has deeply marked the linguistic practices in different African territories until today. Cameroon, which was colonized by Germany from 1884 to 1916 and by France and Great Britain from 1916 to 1960, ¹ is formally a bilingual country with French and English being its two official languages. However, the linguistic reality of the country goes way beyond these two languages. Today, more than 250 African languages are spoken in Cameroon. Albeit there have been differences in the status of African languages in school teachings under German, French and British occupation, public schools have tended, even after the independence of Cameroon, to eradicate the use of African languages.

This article focuses on the experiences of Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi, who was born in Yaoundé in 1950 and who is today Professor Emeritus of African languages at the École normale supérieure (ENS) of Yaoundé. The ENS of Yaoundé is an elite institution in the field of higher education attached to the University of Yaoundé-I that trains teachers in the field of secondary education and researchers. ² The article evokes Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi’s family history, his schooling, upper studies and his career first as a high school teacher, then as a university professor. It thereby examines the different school policies implemented in Cameroon toward African languages over time and their current evolution as well as the impact of university actors on ongoing political changes in the educational field. It thereby focuses on Ewondo, Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi’s native language.

The article is written in the form of a conversation between Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi and Elise Pape. Elise Pape is a sociologist specialized in the fields of migration studies and of postcolonial memories. After her PhD on intergenerational transmission within families of Moroccan origin in France and Germany, she worked more specifically on entangled histories and memories in territories that have been formerly colonized by Germany and France. Between 2012 and 2015, she conducted empirical research in Cameroon on the impact of German and French colonization on family memories today. There, at university, she met Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi and his brother Charles Romain Mbele (see below). Since 2018, she has been taking Ewondo classes with Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi via WhatsApp. During these classes, Alexis and Elise have exchanged on the history of the Ewondo language and on its transmission over time, including in transnational contexts.

As Wilhelm Dilthey has put forward, the major characteristic of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) lies in the fact that researchers—contrary to researchers in natural sciences—are themselves part of the social processes they are seeking to understand (Dilthey, 2006 [1883]). Different works, notably in the field of anthropology, have reflected on ways to put the subjectivity of researchers at the forefront, in order to make visible how analyses and results gradually emerge and are constructed (e.g. Geertz, 1973; Jackson, 1990). Recent works in social science highlight the relevance of the use of conversations as a tool of research. While interviews, such as biographical interviews, focus on experiences of one person—the interviewed one—, conversations lead actors to share and analyze their experiences in a more collaborative manner (Payet, 2020). Conversations make visible how knowledge emerges in a situated way. They may transform actors’ viewpoints and lead to the development of new, jointly developed ideas (Deleuze and Parnet, 1977; Payet, 2020). This article goes one step further and does not only base on conversations in the phase of data collection and analysis, but also in the phase of presentation of the results. It thereby aims to contribute to a different type of scientific writing by highlighting the dynamic and relational character of research.The different sequences of the conversation address the history of the Ewondo people and specificities of the Ewondo language, school language policies and family experiences in Cameroon during German and French colonization and after independence, the struggle for the survival of Cameroonian languages, the concept of historical transnationalism, recent changes in language policies in Cameroon and on the African continent and finally teachings of the Ewondo language in Cameroon and abroad.

The history of the Ewondo people

Elise Pape (EP):

Alexis, you were born in Yaoundé in the neighborhood of Mvóg-Ébánda Ngul-Məkɔ̌ŋ. Your native language is Ewondo. Could you tell about the history of the Ewondos, and about the history of your village? ³

Alexis-Bienvenu Belibi (A-B B):

The word “Ewondo” is simultaneously the name of a town, of a clan and of a language. Ewondos are in fact few in number. Ewondos originally departed from Egypt and Sudan, but also from other African countries following Greek, Roman and later Arab conquests and migrated to the heart of the continent and further south. These migrations were accelerated by the slave trade after the seventh century: people fled and hid in the forests, where the horses of the slave hunters had difficult access. The Ewondo group crossed the Sanaga river (which crosses Cameroon from East to West) and settled on the left bank that we occupy today. At the time of the arrival of first German settlers, my ancestors already lived in Ewondo, which was the name of today’s Yaoundé, ⁴ the capital of Cameroon. Ewondos today are composed of five sub-clans. The Mvóg-Ébánda subclan to which I belong descends from Ébánda, the eldest of the Ewondos. “Mvóg” means: “descendants of, clan.” My ancestor Ébánda was the first to settle in Yaoundé, more precisely in the place that is today the city center, which now includes the central post office that you know, the former presidential palace that became the national museum, the ministerial district and the central hospital. The sub-clan of my ancestor, the Mvóg-Ébándas, occupied all this territory before German colonization. In the tradition of the Bantus, ⁵ the eldest is in a way the substitute for the father in case of absence of the latter. He has the responsibility to find a place of housing for his cadets. Ébánda’s father was not alive anymore and Ébánda had to abandon the city center to go to Kondəngi, and his younger siblings occupied the current city center. And from Kondəngi, the clan split into groups. One group occupied Ǹkǒl-Məsə́ŋ in Yaoundé 5th, another group occupied Ahála in Yaoundé 3rd, the bulk of the group remained in Kondəngi, the current site of the Yaoundé central prison, and another group went to Esə̌sǎl-Akɔ́g. During German colonization, the German colonists built roads. They introduced a law that forced numerous inhabitants to leave their place of living and settle along the road and work for its construction (Essomba, 2017). My great grandfather was ordered to send half of his children along the road. He chose to send my grandfather and his two brothers. The place along the road where they arrived was already taken. They fought to be able to stay there. The name Ngul-Məkɔ̌ŋ, where my family lives today, means “won by the force of spears:” we fought to push back those who were already there. That is how the sub-clan to which I belong settled down here, in Mvóg-Ébánda Ngul-Məkɔ̌ŋ, a suburb of Yaoundé, where I live until today.

The Ewondo language

EP:

Could you describe the Ewondo language, which is one of the 250 languages spoken in Cameroon?

A-B B:

Ewondo is one of Cameroon’s main vehicular languages, which means a shared language used by speakers of different languages. Ewondo belongs to the Bətí language. Actually, Ewondo is a dialect and not a language in its own right because of its perfect intercomprehension with all the other dialects that constitute the Bətí language. Bətí has dozens of dialects: Ewondo, Etón, Mangisa, Bamvə́lə, Bavɛ́g, Yezum, Bəne, Sɔ, Mvələ́, Yebəkɔ́lɔ, Ǹtúmu. . . (Guthrie, 1971). The Bətí language has three subgroups: Bətí, which is spoken in central, southern, and eastern Cameroon; Búlu, which is spoken in the south; and Faŋ, which is also spoken in the south. As a native speaker of Ewondo, I understand all the dialects of the Bətí area, as well as the Búlu and Faŋ dialects.

Ewondo is particularly important within the Bətí language, because it is the standard dialect, the reference dialect of Bətí. Yaoundé is the heart of the Bətí cultural area. As I was telling you, the Ewondo clan is originally small. Its historical boost came from the fact that Ewondo was chosen by the German colonial occupiers as the capital of “Kamerun” (the German name of the colony). Accordingly, the Ewondo language was chosen to evangelize the hinterland. This is how it became one of Cameroon’s main vehicular languages. In the early 2010s, Ewondo was a vehicular language for about five million speakers in the country (Essono, 2012) out of a total population of about 20 million inhabitants. ⁶ Today there are still about five millions Ewondo speakers in Cameroon for about 28 millions inhabitants.

There is something else important to say about Ewondo and Bətí. As you know, the borders that still today shape African states were drawn during the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885. They were defined according to the interests of Europe, and did not take into account the linguistic and family groups present on the African territory. Of course, as Renan (1997 [1882]) and many other authors have shown, a nation state does not necessarily fit one homogeneous language spoken. Switzerland for example, which I know quite well, since I collaborate with the University of Lucerne (Lucerne in French, Luzern in German), is divided into German-speaking, French-speaking and Italian-speaking cantons. The same goes for Belgium or Luxembourg. A specificity of the African continent is that the borders that were drawn separated family and language groups. Therefore many African languages are spoken in more than one African country. Bətí is spoken in other central African countries (mainly neighboring Cameroon) such as Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the People’s Republic of Congo and São Tomé and Príncipe. In addition to being one of the languages with the best vehicularity within Cameroon, Ewondo is also one of the languages with the best vehicularity on an African continental level.

One last important information about Ewondo. Ewondo, Bətí and most of the Cameroonian languages are tonal languages that means languages articulated around the tone. Any variation of the pitch induces grammatical and semantic variations. Ewondo and other tonal languages have five tones: the high tone, the low one, the middle tone, and two complex tones: the high-and-low tone, and the low-and-high one. For example, in Ewondo, the word “zam” (low tone) means “raffia,” the word “zám” (high tone) means “appetite,” and the word “zǎm” (complex tone low-and-high) means “leprosy.” This specificity needs to be taken into account in the didactics of Cameroonian languages.

Language policies in German colonial Cameroon and family experiences

EP:

You mentioned the impact of German colonial occupation on language practice and on displacements of the population. What has interested me in reading about the early German occupation of Cameroon is the difference between protestant and catholic missions who were the first to set up schools in Cameroon. The first English Baptist missionaries who settled on the Cameroonian coast before the arrival of the Germans taught the Gospel in the Duala language. Alfred Saker, a Baptist pastor, one of the most famous British missionaries, even translated the Bible into Duala. This approach had a major influence in missionary circles of the time (Stumpf, 1979). When the British Baptist Missionary Society left Cameroon in 1884, the German speaking Basel Protestant Mission agreed to take over the work of evangelization on one condition: that the German government would grant it the freedom to carry out its work as it saw fit. The Basel Mission was inspired by the approaches of Johann Gottfried Herder and Gustav Warneck and was in line with the romantic ideas of the time. It gave evangelization priority over the “civilizing” and political mission of the German Empire. It insisted on respect for the local culture, especially through the promotion of African languages and their teaching in schools and churches (Tabi-Manga, 2000). When the Pallotine Fathers of the Catholic Church arrived in Cameroon starting in 1890, tensions arose between both missions. The Pallotine Fathers taught more in German than the Protestant missionaries.

The German colonial administration in Cameroon is known for its lack of assertive language policy. Until early 1910, the decision to introduce German or Cameroonian languages in schools was left to the discretion of each educational partner, whether it was a mission or a public actor. In April 1910, the German governor of Cameroon, Theodor Seitz, introduced a decree stipulating that the German language should be used in schools to the exclusion of all other European and local languages. This decree aimed to reduce the use of the Duala language, which was widespread in the coastal area, ⁷ but also of English. Here, a competition between different European colonial occupants becomes visible. From then on, only schools that taught a curriculum developed by the German government, and whose students successfully passed an official exam in German, were subsidized (Tabi-Manga, 2000). This policy came up against strong resistance, not only by Cameroonians, but also by Protestant missionaries, who partly continued to teach in Cameroonian languages. The new governor Karl Ebermaier organized a conference in Berlin in April 1914 to decide on a language policy for Cameroon and to identify a local language that would serve as a lingua franca. However, no proposal was agreed on. Shortly afterward, World War I broke out and Germany lost its colonies starting in 1916. During my stays in Cameroon, I was struck by the numerous linguistic traces that remain from the period of German colonization: many Cameroonians have German first names, know German expressions that they have learned from their parents or grandparents. . . German is also taught in more public schools than in other West African countries. What links did your ancestors have to German colonists and did your family members learn German in colonial schools?

A-B B:

Actually my family members did speak German, but not primarily because of German schools. My paternal grandfather Belibi had a specificity among the Ewondos of Yaoundé: he had gone through the traditional initiation, the “Sô.” Before the arrival of Germans, an initiation existed that was compulsory for the majority of the young adolescent men of the region. It lasted between six months and one year and took place in the heart of the forest, cut off from the world. The adolescents of a given age group were entrusted to initiators who taught them to master cultural elements and the art of war. Generally, about 20–30% of a class died during this initiation. But those who died died, the initiators were not accountable to the parents. This was considered normal; those who perished were not seen as deserving to be men in the society they were going to integrate as adults. The initiates who had overcome this phase, who had come out of the initiation alive, were considered the elite of the elite. Grandfather had two brothers, an older and a younger one. Among them, he was the one chosen by his family to undergo the initiation ⁸ and he came out alive, so he was very very respected. However, the person who was appointed as the new Ewondo superior chief by the Germans, Charles Atangana himself had not gone through the initiation. ⁹ Atangana had a lot of respect for my grandfather, who was furthermore the descendant of the eldest of the Ewondos, the one who had first occupied the territory of Yaoundé. Therefore, Atangana decided to work with my grandfather. He transferred him part of the trade with the Germans: the supply of horses, the delivery of potatoes and of palm oil. Therethrough, the economic activity of the village became the breeding and training of horses that were then delivered to the German administration and the production and delivery of potatoes and palm oil. Grandfather had about one hundred children; my father was one of the last sons. All of my father’s elders, before they were caught up in the wars that followed, including World War I and World War II, were involved and very specialized in the businesses of horses, palm oil or potatoes. And all these elders were obliged to speak German, since they were in contact with the German administration. They often spoke German; I remember hearing them speak German.

Languages policies during French colonial occupation and in independent Cameroon

EP:

How did language policies evolve during French colonial occupation and after Cameroon gained its independence?

A-B B:

All the time that the French colonization lasted (the case of the English zone is different, but we won’t talk about it in this article, as we focus on the French part), the language policy in Cameroon was organized around the Jacobin policy, in reference to the Jacobins who initiated the French Revolution. For the Jacobins, regional languages were the enemy of French unity. In France, the construction of a nation-state was cemented by a single language to the exclusion of all others. This policy was applied to Cameroonian ethnic languages under French colonial occupation. When Cameroon became independent in 1960, this policy was taken over by the local elite who took over the power. ¹⁰ Professor Patrick Renaud, who taught us at university after the independences, ¹¹ goes even further. He shows that Cameroon could have made the choice to give African languages a chance while building a state. Well, it chose to build a state cemented by the official languages, French and English, to the exclusion of the local languages. The founders of the Cameroonian nation were convinced that the enemy of the nation was tribalism. And so, the same linguistic policy as in France was applied. The regime that succeeded colonization instituted a very harsh repression as soon as someone made the slightest agitation around languages. The first president of the independent state, Ahmadou Ahidjo, ¹² considered even the slightest noise, the slightest defense of local languages, as a crime, an attack on state security. This could end in disproportionate punishments, such as life imprisonment or even death. Professor Renaud wrote on this matter:

[T]he absence of political will in favor of [Cameroonian] languages suggests that many vernacular languages will eventually die a death that will be as discreet as it is certain. The Cameroonian state may be winning its bet on national unity, but at the high price of its languages and cultures (Renaud, 1987: 24). ¹³

The implementation of this linguistic policy resulted in what is known in Cameroon as “all in French, right away.” Pedagogically, children, for example, were required, once they entered preschool at the age of four, to abandon their first language of socialization they had previously learned within their family.

It has often been said about the local populations that they endured colonization, including the imposition of colonial languages as official languages, almost without any reaction. But this is not true. When the Germans arrived in Cameroon, they met with vivid opposition and the populations fought wars against the foreign occupier, which were of course asymmetrical in terms of technology. It was the same with the French, the populations fought to defend their culture. This resistance continued against the policies put in place after independence. The French language never fully replaced the African intercommunication system (Manessy, 1994).

Resistance at university for the survival of African languages

EP:

Could you talk about your university studies, and about the figures who influenced you?

A-B B:

Marcien Towa profoundly marked the first generation of university students in Cameroon, including myself. He was a renowned philosopher and a major figure of the African intelligentsia. Marcien Towa was born near Yaoundé in 1931 as the son of a very great traditional chief among the Bətís, more precisely among the Etón. All his youth, he was very imbued with the traditional culture. He was first trained at the [Catholic] seminary, which he left to study pedagogy and philosophy. During his studies, Towa was very much influenced by Egyptology on the one hand and by the Pan-Africanist movement on the other hand. His studies took him to Russia, Switzerland and all over the West. When he returned to Cameroon, he was recruited at the University of Cameroon in Yaoundé where he taught practically until his death. Within the field of Egyptology, he taught us the theses of Cheikh Anta Diop.

EP:

I am surprised about the gap of knowledge between African and European students and scholars on Cheikh Anta Diop. In Senegal, the University of Dakar is named after him, and many Cameroonian students I have met learned about his theses at university. In Europe he is widely unknown.

A-B B:

Cheikh Anta Diop was a chemist and nuclear physicist, but also a renowned historian and anthropologist. Through carbon dating on mummies, he attested that the civilization of ancient Egypt was black. He then started working in linguistics, and showed that the language spoken by the Pharaonic Egyptians, of which one of today’s resurgences is Copte, has more than 60% radicals in common with all the contemporary African languages. Linguistics attest that from the moment when two languages have more than 50% radicals in common, one can establish a filiation between the ancient language and the recent one. Whatever contemporary African language we take, we observe that it shares more than 50% radicals with Pharaonic Egyptian. Cheikh Anta Diop therefore concluded that, just as Western languages are daughters of Latin and Greek, African languages are daughters of Pharaonic Egyptian. He thus advocated that, just as young Westerners are first introduced to Greco-Latin humanities before studying their contemporary civilizations and languages, young Africans should be introduced to Pharaonic Egyptian before studying contemporary African languages and civilizations (Diop, 1977, 1988, 1997 [1978]). The fact that Cheikh Anta Diop described Pharaonic Egypt, often considered in the West as the cradle of humanity, as black, aroused much enmity among historians, and more particularly among Western Egyptologists. Today, his theses are widely recognized by the international scientific community (Mokhtar, 1981).

Pan-Africanist works also played a major role in our upper studies. Marcien Towa belonged to those who believed that the framework for Africa’s development was not the states, but a continental African union. We read practically all the Pan-Africanists of Africa, including Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, Cheikh Anta Diop from Senegal and the Congolese Théophile Obenga. We also read the Pan-Africanists from elsewhere: the Trinidadian lawyer Sylvestre Williams, the Caribbean Marcus Aurelius Garvey, and black American Pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois or Booker T. Washington. I defended my first DEA ¹⁴ (master’s thesis at the time) under the supervision of Marcien Towa on the topic “Ideological Foundations of Pan-Africanism in Kwame Nkrumah’s work.” The University of Cameroon in Yaoundé, before its fragmentation and the creation of regional universities (I will talk about this later), had an essentially Pan-African orientation. Kwame Nkrumah, Marcien Towa and many others professed that there is only a future for Africa faced to a world divided into powerful blocs if Africa presents to the world a united block (Nkrumah, 2007 [1963]; Towa, 1979). There is a link between the linguistic question and Pan-Africanism. Certainly, there is a great plurality of African languages: although several are dead, there are currently nearly 2000 on the continent. But this plurality, as I said, hides an intangible link, it is that these languages share more than 50% radicals with ancient Egyptian. This link is one of the basis of Pan-Africanism (Diop, 1982, 1997 [1978]).

The Cameroonian professors who were the first to teach us after the independences like Marcien Towa, Patrick Renaud and others stressed the today recognized fact that in order to learn a foreign language, one needs the categories of her/his native language. They also sensitized us to the importance of the language of first socialization in the balance of an individual. Because of their positions, they were regularly victims of all kinds of police abuse. Marcien Towa for example was in custody several times.

In 1977, the Chancellor of the University of Yaoundé prohibited the teaching of Cameroonian languages such as Duala, Bətí, Bamileke, Basa’a and Fulfulde at university (Renaud, 1987). In order to resist state policies that hindered the use of African languages, Marcien Towa, with other linguists at university, created “Language Committees.” Speakers of different Cameroonian languages gathered into committees and met once a month to develop actions to accompany the populations in the defense of African languages. Also, Marcien Towa, with the support of UNESCO, participated in putting in place an orthographic system for all Cameroonian languages, which we call GACL (General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages).

Historical transnationalism in (post)colonial Morocco and Cameroon

EP:

Can you tell about your professional career after your university studies?

A-B B:

After my university studies, I first worked as a secondary school teacher of French and French literature in different lycées ¹⁵ in Cameroon for twenty-seven years. My first position in 1973 was in a high school in Douala. ¹⁶ Douala lies in the Sawa coastal area. There, I became familiar with Basa’a and Duala, which are two further national vehicular languages. Later, I worked in other high schools in Yaoundé. Of course what was striking in high school education was the absence of Cameroonian languages and the weak part of Cameroonian culture and history in school curriculum compared to teachings on French history, literature, philosophy. . .

EP:

This very much struck me when I went to Cameroon for the first time in 2012. Strangely enough, the educational strategies families I interviewed described reminded me of practices of migrants in Europe. For example, in Douala, I met several parents who told me that they sent their children to their parents’ village every summer so that they would practice their native languages and not lose them completely. Many migrant parents who live in Europe do exactly the same. During the summer vacation, they send their children to their country of origin: Turkey, Spain, Italy, Morocco, etc. so that they practice their native language with their grandparents and not lose it completely.

A Cameroonian lady I met in France addressed this parallel between migration experiences and (post)colonial experiences in an explicit way. She arrived in France in the early 1970s. It is very important to her that African languages are transmitted in the family space, in Cameroon and in France. She is engaged at the local level and regularly participates in debates, particularly on immigration. One day, she attended a debate in which the transmission of the Arabic and Tamazight languages within families from North Africa was discussed. Indeed, for a long time, and still today, many actors of French public institutions (teachers, social workers), enjoined and enjoin immigrant parents to speak French to their children, arguing that this would/will help them in their school success. However, numerous studies show how harmful such a strategy can be: parents often cannot express themselves in-depth in a language that is not their first language of socialization, and are therefore limited in the emotional, cognitive and educational messages they transmit to their children. Secondly, they often make mistakes in this language and they can pass on these mistakes to their children. Moreover, when they don’t speak French as well as their children, they find themselves in a situation of inferiority, which can impede their parental authority. Finally, as you said earlier, numerous research studies show that we learn a second language more easily and better if we master our first language of socialization well, if the linguistic categories (grammar, syntax, semantics) of the latter are stable. The woman I interviewed grew up in a highly plurilingual context in Cameroon in the 1950s and continued to practice her native language in the family space after she entered a French-speaking school. ¹⁷ She recounted the following scene, which took place in France (Pape, 2020b):

I participated in debates where people said: “Well, the difficulties of integration of children in France comes from the fact that at home, for example, the children of- Arabs speak Arabic with their parents, therefore they do not integrate!” I have always said: “I contradict this statement! Because in these conditions all the children of our generations, then, in Africa, could never have studied! Because when we came home in the evening, we spoke our native language, and all the families around us spoke to us in our native language or in the language of other regions. And that didn’t stop us from studying!”

This observation also connects with main findings from my PhD on intergenerational transmission in migrant families of Moroccan origin in France and Germany. While interviewing the generation of grandparents in these families, who were born in the 1930s, I realized that many persons who had lived through the colonial and postcolonial period made experiences that resembled experiences of migration, but without ever having left their native country. Indeed, the introduction of European languages in Morocco (in this case the French and the Spanish languages), ¹⁸ of school systems, legal systems, etc. modeled along the French or the Spanish system, led to a certain acculturation of the Moroccan population. Decolonization also led to a change of the institutional system and of linguistic practices, for example through the policy of Arabization. This transition from one system to another, from one language to another, due to colonization and decolonization, was even more marked in French Algeria, which had become a full French department. I have suggested the concept of “historical transnationalism” to express this experience of moving from one country to another induced by colonial history alone, without any geographical displacement (Pape, 2020a).

These experiences of historical transnationalism, and the ongoing power of European languages and institutional models in Cameroon, lead to the situation in schools you just mentioned. Different secondary school teachers I interviewed during my research stays in Cameroon mentioned the same experience you described: the curriculum part on Cameroonian history and African languages is weak compared to the transmission of French history, literature, culture. . . Many students I met felt they knew more about French and European history than about Cameroonian and African history. Given the dominance of French and English in most fields of public life in Cameroon, what role does the family space play in your eyes, especially regarding the transmission of African languages?

A-B B:

The transmission of the Ewondo language within the family space has been at standstill for many decades. First of all, there is the pressure of school: even if the parents transmit their native language to

their little ones, as soon as those pass the door of preschool at the age of four, they are summoned to speak only French, to such an extent that the public schools totally cancel the parents’ efforts. Secondly, more and more parents today are convinced that, given that the job market is French-speaking, it may no longer be worth speaking Ewondo to their children that it is better for them to learn French already in the family space so that they are not handicapped compared to other children. The language dynamics in Cameroon are totally favorable to French and push to the total death of Cameroonian languages. Parents who no longer pass on Ewondo to their children and who choose to speak only French to them form the majority. In addition, the population increases, and there are more urban than rural people in Cameroon today. The metropolitan areas favor French, which is considered to be the vehicular language. So when children are born in urban areas, where parents are practically absent all day because of work, these children are generally more in contact with French than with Ewondo.

Ewondo epics: The Mvets

EP:

While you were a teacher at high school, how did you continue struggling for the survival of Cameroonian languages?

A-B B:

Over all my years of high school teaching, until the death of Marcien Towa in 2014, we met almost every month within the Bətí Language Committee at university to defend Ewondo, or more broadly the Bətí language. Marcien Towa was the president of this committee. Each member had well-defined responsibilities. My mission was to find everything that had been written in Ewondo, and everything that had been written about the Ewondos, in short, every writing that evokes our language and community. Marcien Towa especially encouraged me to gather all the works that exist around one of the most important musical genres of our socio-culture, the Mvet. Mvets are epics. Our socio-culture has developed nearly 10,000 complete epics. Right after Cameroon’s independence, in the early 1960s, Marcien Towa and other intellectuals criss-crossed the country to tape the Mvet-poets who were, in precolonial times, the elite. We set up a seminar in which the students transcribed the sound Mvets into written texts. We were able to establish one hundred integral epics, sometimes of 10 000 verses long. In 2004, Marcien Towa organized an exhibition of Bətí books at the town hall of Yaoundé, which based on the corpus I had accumulated over the years and on my brother’s, Charles Romain Mbele’s ¹⁹ private book collection. Since Towa’s death in 2014, most researchers and students who work on the Ewondo language come to me to borrow books or sound and written documents on Ewondo.

I must say that the university landscape went through many conflicts and crisis in the decades after 1960. At the beginning of the independences, only one university existed in the country: the Federal University of Cameroon, which was in Yaoundé. As I told you, Marcien Towa, but also numerous other professors who had strong ideological positions taught there. They were very popular and had many students. In the repressive political context Ahmadou Ahidjo put in place, and that in many ways was taken over by Paul Biya, ²⁰ this created a risk of social explosion. In 1992–1993, the Federal University of Cameroon was divided into different sub-universities that were spread throughout the country. Of course, more universities were needed in Cameroon. But fragmenting the Federal University reduced the risks of social uprisings. It is also of note to say that the university was fragmented exactly at the time when the structural adjustment was introduced in Cameroon through the International Monetary Fund.

Recent changes in language policies in Cameroon and Africa

EP:

Do you observe any recent changes or positive trends in language policies in Cameroon?

A-B B:

In 2000, I was appointed Professor at the École normale supérieure of Yaoundé to teach the Ewondo language. In 2008, a ministerial decree officially introduced the teaching of Cameroonian languages and cultures at university. A new department of linguistics and didactics of African languages was created at the École normale the same year and I was immediately retained for the teaching of linguistics and didactics of Ewondo. ²¹ From 2008 on, at the École normale, we trained future teachers to teach Cameroonian languages in secondary schools. The same applied to other institutions in higher education that train future teachers at other school levels such as preschool and primary school. Also, from then on, research on Cameroonian languages was officially (re)introduced at university level. Some of our students have meanwhile done PhD theses on Ewondo or other Cameroonian languages. Most of them do this in Cameroon, but some also obtain scholarships to do their doctoral work abroad, in countries such as France, and more recently China.

Soon after the introduction of the decree of 2008, experimental programs on the teaching of Cameroonian languages and cultures were introduced in different schools throughout the country. Sponsors, notably the Organization of La Francophonie, supported these pilot programs. Since 2016, the subject “Cameroonian languages and cultures” has become compulsory in all school types and at all levels in Cameroon. Educational authorities are taking steps, sometimes even at the risk of their careers, in favor of local languages. In June 2021, the Minister of Secondary Education issued a decree that obliges all candidates for the Cameroonian baccalaureate, ²² starting in the school year of 2021–2022, to pass a compulsory exam in the subject “Cameroonian languages and cultures.” For the Yaoundé metropolis, this is Ewondo, whether the students are Ewondophones or speakers of other Cameroonian languages. Paradoxically, the school, which is largely responsible for the decline in the transmission of Ewondo, is participating in the revival of the importance of Cameroonian languages by integrating the teaching of local languages into its curriculum.

EP:

Are there also changes in language policies concerning African languages on a more international level?

A-B B:

In 2010, the African Academy of Languages erected Bətí, alongside with Lingala (a main language spoken for example in the two Congos), as a priority language to teach and disseminate within two large areas: the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), which includes the Great Lakes (Democratic Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi), and the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), which unites Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic. To achieve this goal, the African Academy of Languages has appointed leading linguists and academicians to become regional coordinators who have the task to develop tools to make these languages international vehicular languages of the future. African languages are often described as not being able to carry out “modernity”: it is said for example that they are not adapted to teach disciplines such as medicine, mathematics. . . We linguists argue that languages adapt very quickly. Mainly, the vocabulary of African languages needs to evolve, for example in order to include words used in computer science, or in today’s technology. This can be done by two means, which the linguists appointed by the African Academy of Languages currently do: create new vocabulary ex nihilo or borrow words from other languages. The aim is to develop new vocabulary in the vehicular African languages chosen to cover all fields of human activity.

Teaching Ewondo in Cameroon and abroad

EP:

Are there any other actions you conduct outside of university in order to struggle for the survival of Cameroonian languages?

A-B B:

For the past 20 years, I have been teaching Ewondo every Monday from 7 to 8 a.m. on “Radio Cameroon.” I record the lessons with the technical team several months in advance. The show is very popular in the hinterland, where people speak Ewondo. I am a big star there. If I ran for office there, I would win hands down. The people in the hinterland are very appreciative of my sacrifices for the survival of the language. As mentioned earlier, the Ewondo language was chosen to evangelize the hinterland. It is still very present there.

EP:

I know that you also teach Ewondo to students living in Europe. I myself have been taking Ewondo classes with you since 2018 over WhatsApp. You told me you also teach students of Cameroonian origin who live in Europe over WhatsApp. Can you tell me more about your students and about their demand to learn Ewondo?

A-B B:

The demand abroad for Ewondo classes is very very high, and the offer is, from what I can see, very insufficient and of poor quality. The real tragedy of the migrants in Europe who are aware of the importance of transmitting their language and culture to their offspring is the difficulty they experience in implementing this transmission abroad. Family members or friends who live in France or elsewhere in Europe continually ask me for help in this matter. They ask me to create something for them, to intervene, to do something to help their children. This is, for us trainers of trainers, a field where we could be very useful to our compatriots in the diaspora.

EP:

You also sent me YouTube video links of a young Cameroonian woman who has migrated to Australia and who posts Ewondo classes online.

A-B B:

The initiative of this young Cameroonian living in Australia is a cry from the heart of people like her, who are aware of the risks for everybody that this language disappears. So there are young people, persons everywhere who take initiatives. However, they often have no pedagogical and didactic training in linguistics to teach this language. They handle information and communication technologies well, but often, for example, they use the missionary alphabet and writing system, which has all sorts of limitations. The missionary writing system does not note the nasal, ²³ it does not note the tone. How can you teach a tonal language without noting the tones, it is impossible. This should be one of the major concerns of our diplomatic representations abroad, of our embassies.

EP:

What are your next projects concerning the transmission of the Ewondo language?

A-B B:

In 2020, the Catholic Church in Cameroon created a large language center to teach French, English and Ewondo to missionaries, who mainly come from Asia and other African countries. The language center chose Ewondo since, as mentioned before, the Bətí language is spoken in three regions of Cameroon and in several bordering countries. I have been asked to be in charge of the Ewondo teachings within this structure. I count on these classes to reach a large number of learners. I also plan to create a Mooc (Massive open online course), a class free of charge that would be accessible to all migrants in the diaspora, regardless of the continent they live on, but also to locals who have access to technology.

Conclusion

EP:

Do you want to say some conclusive words?

A-B B:

Overall, the use of Cameroonian languages is going back to the profit of French. For many Cameroonians, French today is not only an official language, but their mother tongue. Different linguists announce the total extinction of Cameroonian languages by 2040, when the last generation who speaks these languages will have passed away. The decline of the use of Cameroonian languages is increasing in the very current political context, as there will be presidential elections in 2025. Political groups in Cameroon are structured around ethnic belongings. Speaking Cameroonian languages, especially in public spaces or in the cities, is currently perceived as a political act, in favor of one or the other political party. In rural areas, which are less politicized, Cameroonian languages are more widely spoken. At the same time, paradoxically, following the reforms in school curricula in 2021, the teaching of Cameroonian cultures and languages is progressing very quickly at school level.

At my small level, I have undertaken, in the frame of my employment at university, but also outside of my professional affiliation, to deconstruct the negative ideologies that weigh on Cameroonian languages. I try to show that it is not verified, in a universal and univocal way, that monolingualism is the sine qua none condition of social development—which I understand as the fulfillment of the greatest part of the population. European nations such as Switzerland, Belgium or Luxembourg, which are multilingual states, are among the most developed states in the world. We have no proof that monolingualism inevitably leads to development, and we have the duty to save our huge, huge, huge cultural and linguistic heritage unnecessarily put at risk.