VIBANFLAGBOOKSCANADA: 2016-02-14

United Kingdom Trust Territory of the Cameroons: Nomenclature from Postal Stamp, World Wars, Britain, France, Morocco, Germany, Japan, USA, Independence and other issues at stake.

I stumbled upon the appended postal stamp while rummaging my late uncle's possessions when he passed away ten years ago. The stamp and my uncle's lives are inextricably intertwined and are of vital importance to me, fellow citizens of British Cameroons and their sympathizers. This will be expanded below irrespective of exigencies of space. We are contesting now over the nomenclature of an occupied once vibrant country by Cameroun Republic (former French Cameroon), its marginalized and dismayed citizens. The contest as to which is the right appellation, the United Kingdom Trust Territory of Cameroons (UKTTC) and other regionyms as it is known are well documented: British Cameroons, UNO Trust Territory of Cameroons Under British Administration, the League of Nations Mandated Territory of Cameroons Under His Majesty's Government , UNO Cameroons and assorted coined place names by various political groups and activists in that territory and those who are languishing in exile. Wrangling over place names takes me back to Gulliver's Travel where the Yahoos, Houyhnhnms, Lumdachitch, Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Blefuscudians and others are going into war to battle it out as to which side of the egg is bigger, the top or the bottom.

Whatever nomenclature you opt for, the landmass has not changed even as well defined in the African Boundaries A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopedia by by Ian Brownlie published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1979 is, there as our testimony. The author is a man of integrity and his sources before the Bakassi debacle are outstanding and tangible. Another document British Cameroonians need to refer to before distracting their citizens from the vital debates of when they would be running their political affairs without interference as it had been for 55 years, is this one too published by His Majesty's Stationery Office in 1930: Declaration Made by the Governor of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria and The Governor of the French Cameroons defining the boundary between British and French Cameroons. These have provided for the (State of) British Cameroons whose appellation sprung out in the Cameroon debate lately. The above documents and accompanying analogue topographic maps must be handy and considered sacrosanct if the boundaries are not to be contested now that Cameroun Republic and Nigerian citizens are crossing its boundaries and occupying its prime lands without the approval of British Cameroons authorities.

It must be underlined that although most Africans are not used to land titles, deeds, it will sooner or later become part and parcel of their economic livelihood. Land is wealth and could stand as collateral security for legitimate owners to get loans for further investments and development. If Africans are to consider this seriously, it would be found out that Africans are sitting on tons of gold bullion that could be converted into cash and make them richer than they are now. That is how a good number of Westerners survive in capitalist economies.

Note that instead of printing separate stamps for the Cameroons UKTT, that is UNITED KINGDOM TRUST TERRITORY, the '"CAMEROONS UKTT" was simply superimposed on a Nigerian stamp. By the Nigerian stamp being used, signify that it was for administrative purposes and not that the UKTTC was part of Nigeria. It was still a UNITED NATION TRUSTEESHIP and not Nigerian or Cameroon Republic that was a French Trust.

Most of us saw the tension that rose to boiling point owing to Nigerians who were allowed to settle or surreptitiously settled in Bakassi during the days of the Germans in Cameroons, the British rule of Nigeria and British Cameroons and the harm that could have caused had it not been handled by the World Court at The Hague with utmost delicacy and in an international legal manner to the satisfaction of all and sundry concerned.

Whatever the designation we want to anchor to or store in our archives for posterity or use in our debates, the principal issue is that there is and was a country called British Cameroons, immortalized in sundry documents some of which are philatelic, maps with procés verbaux, written documents, pictures and many more. The present British Government may not want to come to your assistance for various reasons but the fact remains that they carved out that country that stood by them in thick and thin as we will see below. Should it not be ideal that they support the British Cameroons now in dire moments of yearning to have their political independence back?

The Anglo-German Western Boundary surveyors of the then German Kamerun in 1912 that stands now for the Eastern Nigerian and Western British Cameroons Boundary. After Herman Dessner in Im Lande des Dju-Dju, 1923. Note the German and British Flags in the back ground

After all, no matter the circumstances that led to the British departure from British Cameroons in 1961, no matter our agreements and disagreements, we were friends and will ever be friends and citizens of the same world joint together by one culture, English. The English left the USA in a way least expected but there are no countries with closer ties in the modern time than the Americans and the British. They could have been in the past like Tom and Jerry but they are now bosom friends and expected to be so in the foreseeable future. Some evidence below-discussed that includes the British Cameroons from the First and Second World Wars stand as testimonies.

We take intercourse by electronic means for granted but not long ago, we had to use analogue means which some of us are still anchored to. We sat down at our desks, use special light weight papers to pen and put in envelops called manila, affixed on postal stamps and posted them to our destinations for an infinitesimal cost than it could have cost us if we had to carry the messages or pay some travelers or ourselves to take them to our destinations. In 1680 the postage stamps were used in England then without the glue that was discovered eventually. The price of the stamps depended upon the letters' destinations, how urgent the senders wanted them to reach their addressees, their contents, and weights. These activities are still carried out today particularly for parcels being shipped around for us and those die-hearts who are glued to the old ways of doing things.

Others are for diplomatic reasons with top secrets that still use the old typewriters instead of everyday computers. They do not even trust special highly secured computers or programs to transmit their messages. They have reasons. Most electronic messages are diaphanous and can be intercepted by those with the right gadgets or program. For example, the author was scare when a friend told him that each letter that is send to private individuals via the internet is read by at least by one million people. He could not doubt his allegation as he was not a cryptanalyst and had nothing to hide but to tell nothing else but the naked truth as in this treatise. Lest did he expect it to find a Nigerian stating that he had arranged the collection of his digital photos and drawings thousands of miles away and an Indian literally taking over his computer thousands of miles away. So I do not blame some branches of government that do not want to broadcast all they handle fro security and other reasons. Malware follow us all over even in our handheld electronic devices. Indeed, the Internet and its paraphernalia were good inventions and they accelerated communication at a reduced cost thus shrinking the world as our global village but should they take over our lives and control us?

British Cameroons or the UKTTC location in Africa and Western Sahara in red. We urge the world's governing bodies to liberate the two remaining countries in Africa to join the club of gentle ladies and gentlemen in the UN General Assembly.

When you ask some students to pen a good letter they ask us what the heck we mean. With the imposed system of education some class seven school livers are unable to spell their names and others cannot recite the 12 times table. It is because they had not been schooled or used to letter writing and the blame in the case of British Cameroons is squarely on those who want to assimilate British Cameroons without considering the psychological strains they go through. So when you are fusing two strong cultures together take a lot into consideration. From the example of the state in question, UKTTC, it does not work and has not worked for the last 55 years. In other parts of the world children are growing up in an electronic world where you just sat before an IBM or Dell or TOSHIBA computer, tablets or some word processors and write or dictate your messages in a memo format and transmit. In a matter of second and the recipients had them where-ever they were in the world. Some have even come up with encrypted ways that their friends are able to decrypt and that is still strange and good innovations of communication often capitalized upon by some men of darkness to spread mayhem.

Thanks to the USA that came with the Internet. That would have been used for their defense in case some mad persons dropped a nuclear bomb and destroyed all we had as fixed lines of communication and posting of letter. The US believed that they would still communicate to one another wherever they were in their bunkers or submarines or in the atmosphere or on some solar planet if the physical infrastructure for communication were destroyed. The satellites that rotate around our globe every second would still transmit our information to recipients wherever we were or are in the world. Let no one pray for this ever happen, nonetheless we have to be prepared.

So, sometimes when some people are bashing the Americans for being responsible for causing wars in the Middle East and Africa, we have to appreciate their technologies that have come to help us in some of our mundane tasks. The list of their inventions could fill volumes and there are yet many to come in the pipeline. In fact, the Americans are leaders in all wordily inventions and innovations before the British, Russians, French, Chinese, Africans and others come along. Talking of Africans, they do invent things but leave them in inchoate states that are not purified, modernized or articulated. In the electronic or computer dominated world, our analogue inventions are looked at as curiosities. So the inventors need to be upgraded, be modernized or be left tottering behind the bandwagon.

We are not going to forget living creatures as they invented a good number of things we use without paying them copyright fees. For example humankind got the art of paper making from wasps but we destroy them each time we see their nests by our buildings. If we "follow" some animals and plants in particular, we may never be ill as they have all panaceas to our sicknesses. What is awry with us is that we are not yet in terms with them and do not experiment or we do it the wrong way.

One of the reasons for Americans being avant-garde is their support for researches both in the private and the fiscal sectors. In some countries, do not stand up to state that you have invented or stumbled upon some gadget that could help the nation and the government. You could be sent to the galore and that is bizarre. The government wants to take credit for everything and suppress individual endeavors as if it were some socialist commune. And this sounds like monstrous socialism that will soon die anyway. These are strange and debilitating.

Let me abridge the story of my mustachioed paternal uncle and the stamp found in his possessions deliberately brought here to draw the attention of doubting readers of the appellation UKTTC we earlier saw. Uncle was what a local Southern British Cameroonian who passed through the Cameroons College of Art Science and Technology (CCAST), their own Eton would call a 'character,' a special chain-smoker. In those days (1970s) smoking was in vogue and I learned from him that it was normal to smoke. This man became a career soldier in the West African Frontier Force under the British in 1939. The army canteen would supply tins of cigarettes to all soldiers to take away their boredom while waiting for the enemies in their bunkers or trenches and killing time. The dread of cigarette smoking as a cause for certain cancers was interpreted by most unexposed Africans as witchcraft. This was the general knowledge among members of the West African Frontier Troops in which he belonged that the white man had no witchcraft in his cigarettes. So it was dismissed as mumbo-jumbo. We can only guess the harm this smoking did to many in Africa in the past.

My uncle and fellow soldiers dug trenches in the jungles of Burma to fight suicidal Japs as they were called then, by the British and Americans. They also fought in North Africa and the Middle East. The Japs launched expeditionary forces to build a big empire may be as the British and others in S.E. Asia. They were real human-soldier-ants that were prepared to die at any time to save even the last person in their infantry. My Uncle also fought in the Middle East. The British were still ruling the Palestine they took over from the Ottoman but the Arabs were constantly at loggerhead with the Jews coming in to settle or those who were already there. The Arabs objected to the immigration of the Jews and the British recruited both moderate Arabs and Jews as policemen to handle security palavers. It went on well initially. It was not long before they were fighting one another. The British had to separate the warring factions before the suggestions that the Jews could be settled in Palestine, their old Biblical home after they were not accepted in Madagascar that was French and South Africa. Others even suggested Northern Rhodesia where the English were being encouraged to settle since the founding of that country by Sir Cecil Rhodes then based in South Africa (1890). We also heard of the Pearl of Africa, Uganda but the British would not allow the Jews to settle there. There was also a problem with emigration to the USA. It was not all that facile as you have the issue of the Syrian Arabs today being told by the US Presidential Front-runner Mr. Donald Trump stating that it had to be suspended as terrorists were likely to mingle in their midst an enter the USA. The Jews were feared but it was not overt as analysed below.

With hindsight if the British could have opened all those possessions, perhaps the Jews could have gone there as better havens and be saved from their rounding up to be deported and massacred by the Nazi-Fascist and others, begun in earnest on the outbreak of the Second World War. It was all intrigue among the Europeans even though the Jewry started blaming the Christians of all nominations for being taciturn when the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeitepartei (NSDAP) Nazi were persecuting them as they were alleged to be following the old tradition that the Jews were responsible for crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the cross. The fact remains that the Jews in most of Europe were not fully integrated and were looked at, as 'them', so were the Gypsies and other minorities when scientific reasoning started waning out. Could their integration have helped saved them from concentration camps?

They, the Jews generally married among themselves no matter wherever they were and for how long they have been in the midst of other races. That was similar to the roving Gypsies with their caravans who found themselves all over Europe. So they were sometimes not loved by those they settled in their midst fro being different. (they had their banks, synagogues, schools, private clubs and even language and that was disturbing as is still in some settlements in Europe and North America). They lived as a separate country within their host countries and the aboriginals frowned at them, even the French and Germans and Fascist Italy with whom they had been together for thousands of years.

In the case of British Cameroons, some settled in Victoria, the first capital of British Cameroons and eventually vanished into thin air. Unconfirmed sources told us that they immigrated to South Africa, Sao Tome and Principe. It is common even in modern set up that when a people are aloft and do not integrate as the Ibos in Nigeria, and the Tutsis in Rwanda, other races often find them not friendly, snobbish and when they are having national problems their host tended to blame them. In the same vein Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and his entourage were to persecute the Jews for some of these reasons. The question is should a people be forced to integrate against their philosophies or traditions? If it means a survival strategy, it might be necessary for that would have been better than to read of their holocaust in various concentration camps in Europe and the Gulag in the then Soviet Union. It happened during the Great War (WWII) and could still happen as we saw the case of the Tutsis minorities among the Hutus in 1994. The Hutus were ever ignored by successive colonial masters and favored the tall elegant Tutsis in Africa and the manifestation of hate that had surfaced occasionally in the past let to some have a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus being massacred by the Hutus. (Interested readers may have to read Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire's account of Shake Hands with the Devil, the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003).

Furthermore, this avuncular guy narrated fascinating stories of their troops in the Holy Land. His narration of their visit to the cave where Jesus was supposed to have been born was listened to open-mouthed as if they had gone to heaven and returned. He went on that he and his fighting mates visited Golgotha where they found the wet blood of Jesus Christ where He was crucified on the cross. Some of them dipped their index fingers in His sacred blood to make signs of cross on their foreheads and miraculously they remained their permanently. I thought that he meant the crosses on Ash Wednesday then that would have been tar black. At that juncture, we looked at his forehead to see if we could see the red blood of Our Lord on his forehead. There was nothing on his wrinkled yellowish-brown forehead. He went on that it was some daring West Africans and East Indians who did such things.

On baby Jesus, we nearly asked him to tell us how baby Jesus Christ looked like. If He had brown, blue or hazel eyes as some bambinos. We were puerile and did not think properly before commenting. Uncle being a man of few words and if he had to utter a word it was well weighted and measured in length and breadth. With hindsight, I could have asked him if he was not fluent because of the urge to smoke constantly. If one knew that he was around it was the smell of smoke that forbore his presence. However his coming was announced by his army steel-stocked boots. He would carefully polish those boots and air them every day before wearing them to work. He never forgot tying on his puttees that made him a curiosity in the town. Civil servants and school masters who had never known the army wore thick stockings. He was not being chatty as other men who have been overseas. I was not sure why he was so taciturn as if he was some lawyer and did not want to be cornered by a defendant in the high court of law.

Why did he find himself in the Middle East where there was that gallant German Field Commander Erwin Rommel that was terrorizing the British, Australian and New Zealand troops? Fuhrer Adolf Hitler had ordered Rommel that he had to die or win in the infamous decisive Battle of Alamein in 1942 in the Egyptian desert. To the Germans, stoicism, and gallantry were the rules of wars just as the Japanese kamikazes that attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on February 7, 1941. If my uncle and fellow British Cameroonians were there, I believed then that he and his colleagues had orders from the British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery's subordinates. Monty, as he was called was a no-nonsense tactician who defeated the Germans decisively in that battle and changed the direction of the Second World War. That victory emboldened the Allies who were suffering in the hands of the Germans in Europe. The question was why my uncle was among the British troops?

He had been recruited with other British Cameroonians to fight with the British to defeat Adolf Hitler, Leader of the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeitepartei (NSDAP) or Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi) of Germany formed in 1920 who was poised to conquer the world. They were defending the British Crown as they sang. The Germans had skirmishes with France over Alsace Lorraine and it could not be sorted out amicably, that is, to their advantage. They also believed that they were humiliated and cheated at the Conference of Versailles in 1919 after the First World War (1915-1918) in which the vanquished were punished and their territories seized and their loots divided among the victors. Those who sided with them paid heavily. The Germans under the National Socialism party had come to the conclusion that their defeat was owing to having in their midst another country of very inferior peoples called the Jews, the Gypsies, lesbians, homosexuals, other physically impaired who did nothing to put the Aryans on top of other races above and were anti-patriotic. It was not totally true as during the First World War there were Jews who fought alongside the German troops. It turned out that they were jealous of the successes of the Jews as in other countries in Europe and North America. In the then Germany, the Jews formed the bulk of intelligentsia, medical doctors, writers, artists, bankers and you name it. They owned landed properties, banks, factories and shops.

The Nazi government instead of attacking only the French they could not agree with, attacked surrounding states that were neutral in their disagreement with the French. They invaded and defeated the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and the British were appalled and had to enter the war to rescue the French. The British in the distant past were not very friendly with the French but they fought for the French during the Second World War. Most of us will recall that the British had gone to wars with the French and given opportunity in the 1800s Napoleon Bonaparte would have crossed over to defeat the British but for the natural protective barrier, the British Channel and their mastery of the naval skills. The British sea power helped in their colonialism abroad where they were also trained in wars of subjugation, operation of men of war. You will also recall that the overawe Duke of Wellington (Sir Arthur) had had field experience fighting and quelling upraising of the Indians in the East Indies (vide: Wellington A Reassessment by Charles Petrie, 1956). So when he came to face Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, it was a rehearsal for him. He defeated the man who had been claimed as unconquerable, Napoleon Bonaparte. Interning him in St. Helen Island, one of the Africa's Islands in the Atlantic, Britain and Europe could have a spell of peace. Napoleon was fighting for the sake of fighting and because he had the weight and loyalty of his soldiers behind him. In a way it was a quixotic adventurism as that of the ISIS in the Middle East of today, when he had the sky as his limit.

In the past too, the French defeated the UK and the language of court was French. Does it surprise British Cameroons lawyers when those who had been assimilated by the French suggested that French be the language of court in their occupied British Cameroons? That is why your modern English is enriched or prostituted by French words and expressions. Any English style that skips King James' style is marred by aliens’ clichés. (Beg your pardon if I am guilty of this too).

Hitler had such well-disciplined army and his words were his bonds. Many believed that they rather died than to let their Fuhrer down. They fought and were winning but made costly mistakes as Napoleon Bonaparte once made when he launched his Russian Campaign in bone chilly winter and attack of neutral countries around Germany with the hope of expanding its territory. Seeing that they could not soldier on alone they formed a tripartite with other sympathetic countries.

The other members of the tripartite were Japan and Italy. Japan that was getting to be a formidable power in the Pacific Ocean and megalomaniac, that is in SE Asia was a force to be reckoned with. Japan had defeated Russia in 1905; they had defeated and occupied China subsequently and were already in Formosa, later Taiwan, and were ready to take up Burma (Myanmar), Borneo, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Dutch East Indies among many others as their colonies. It was scary as that could mean that the world power like the UK under Sir Winston Churchill was to loss its lofty global position. The USA was the only country that was on the way of the Japanese expansionism even though the USA was a sleeping giant that was not megalomaniac. It had been toned down by its wars of independence with Great Britain and their civil war to unite the south with the north and stamp out slavery that was eating thin the fabric of the USA. However, it had possessions as Hawaii, Guam and other Islands in the Pacific. The US had to guard and protect for economic, defense and strategic reasons. The Japanese where eyeing them as the feeling of their Emperor and Yamamoto their foreign minister and others in the 1940s was that they should have been in those areas where Westerners were already there or showing interest.

Italy under the ruthless Benito Mussolini with his Fascism cooperated to help one another. Mussolini was bitter too as Italians possessions in Africa were taken from Italy at that infamous Treaty of Versailles in 1919 after the First World War in which Italy backed the wrong horse, Germany. The Italians were chased out of Abyssinia, Eritrea and Libya where they committed heinous war atrocities on Africans. They also felt that they were cheated as the Japanese felt that America and Britain could have allowed them to stay put in China where they occupied . The Japanese became more agitated when embargoed by the US in 1941 that supplied 80% of their oil. Their economy was crippled. For that reason they were eyeing the Dutch East Indies in the Pacific where they could get free oil as Cameroon Republic is getting free oil from British Cameroons today. It was a dangerous stranglehold. With an impasse in their deliberation in Washington in 1941, the Japanese started preparing for war in secret that culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 Hollywood glamorized by making assorted films about.

In addition, the British had helped the French in the bloody Crimean War of 1851 and sacrificed a great deal. It looked as if life was valueless then but they did defeat the Russians. It was not the last help. The British had to help the French to get hold of Morocco since the Germans were claiming it in 1912. That was the year China was declared a republic on January 1st 1912 and it was also the year the German Sacred Heart Fathers (S.C.J.) entered Kamerun and had the assistance of the Pallotines Fathers who were already in Duala since the 1890. Back to Morocco, the British could not let it go to German for several reasons: One was that if the Germans had taken over Morocco, they would have been controlling the sea routes to the south and north Atlantic and two, the Mediterranean shipping routes. That would diminish the British control of the seas and hamper their sea trade activities to the Middle and Far East. That was unthinkable. Those are some of the reasons the UK had to support the French in the Fez Conference of 1912 in which the Germans were bought out of Morocco. How was this done?

The French grudgingly gave out a sizable portion of the French Equatorial Africa leading to the creation of what the Germans called the Neu Kamerun, New Cameroons. The Germans were not completely happy but remained pacified. Well, the reasoning was that if they could defeat France they would have abrogated the treaty of Versailles (1919) after the First World War in which they were humiliated and their other possessions, Togoland, Kamrun, German East Africa, German S. W. Africa and those in the Pacific Ocean taken away from them.

Those were some of the remote caused of the Great Wars. What sparked the Second World War in 1939 was when a Jewish fellow called Ernst Vom Rath shot one of the German plenipotentiaries, actually a Third Secretary in Paris on November 9, 1938. The Germans had an opportunity to launched the Hitlerian policy of expansionism to make Germany grow so to say. They blew this escapade out of all proportion claiming that it was a Jewish conspiracy to keep the Germans in their place. They set on the Jews they had been looking for a reason to flush them out of Germany for being an inferior race whose miscegenation was to debase the Aryan race, their lack of patriotism and others we earlier analysed. Hitler elaborated these in his book written while in prison in 1920, called My Life, Mein Kampf (1925), a very arrogant work, described by some reviewers as shoddy, where he abused people as political bandits, accused the Jews for having brought the Negroes into the Rhineland and many more. Sadly, this was used as a catechism by his followers, Nazists throughout his reign up to 1945 when the Allied Powers defeated Germany. It was republished officially in Germany for the first time in 2016 since it was banned and sometime had to be elapsed. Did the above evernts sound like the case of full-blooded Africans in the then White South Africa and elsewhere in North America before the abolition of slavery? (This analysis is for documentation and not to exhume bitter feelings among any group of people today in any part of the world.)

To reiterate, some of the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeitepartei (NSDAP) Nazi Party's belief was that the Germans did not win the First World War because of lack of cooperation of the Jews, lacking patriotism. That feeling was silently shared too in France and in other European states that the Jews were not cooperating and often sidelined themselves for selfish gains. We are to accept this analysis, though with a pinch of salt, when the other states cooperated with the Germans in shipping the Jews to various concentration camps instead of protecting or hiding them. We are to sympathize with the Jews when it took so long for other states, names withheld, who did not want to blow the whistle when it was heard that there was killing in Poland in 1939 and the rounding up of Jews even in Vichy France before the noses of the French who had purported to be friends of the Jews and before the faces of other foreign embassies all over Europe. We saw that the outcome of the Paris assassination of the plenipotentiary, a one man incident, triggered the killing of the Jews particularly when Poland was overrun and had Auschwitz there for the setting of concentration camps.

The British who had embassies and consulates in Germany, Austria, and Poland but could not confront Germany or sound alarum. They needed too the cooperation of the Americans but the Americans under President Theodore Roosevelt were dillydallying. The bureaucratic deliberations of both houses of Congress meant urgent decisions of life and death took long to be realized. A close look at President Obama's Government in 2016 tells you that his progress and that of the USA is hampered by all those bottleneck, gerrymandering that are absent in other Western countries. For example, Winston Churchill and his advisers had to meet with Roosevelt at the village of Argentia, east coast of USA on August 9, 1941 to discuss the events in the Pacific and Far East. Winston suggested to the Americans to assist by sending troops to the Mediterranean as a matter of urgency. Roosevelt took it lightly and this was not carried out. Although being commander in chief President Roosevelt had to hold lengthy meetings with his entourage before decisions were executed and those were frustrating as they are still today be it the Republicans or the Democrats ruling.

In the absence of the Americans cooperating peremptorily, the British had no other options if they wanted to liberate the French other than to recruit troops from their colonies in East and West Indies, S.E. Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Africa including the Trust territories entrusted in their care as the British Cameroons by the League of Nations. It is for this reason that my uncle Alfone who could read and write and other nationals of British Cameroons were recruited in 1939. It was not made clear to some of them why they were fighting but the known fact was that Germany was to return to Africa to discriminate against Africans as they were doing to the Jews and the French too. In fact, some of those recruited had been with the German Colonial Troops, Schutztruppen and they were again recruited to fight their former masters.

Whatever when Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected President of Congo Leopoldville, now Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that had never known peace since its independence from the Belgians, was killed in Katanga district (17 Jan., 1961) during a Belgian-US backed coup d'etat. Mr. Moise Shombe one of the leaders wanted to cut off Katanga from the rest of Congo and still be with Belgium when the rest of DRC was to be independent. My uncle was upset and told us that most whites did not see blacks as humans equal to them above all those who differed with them as Lumumba bringing in the Russians with their communism, the Americans did not entertain. Uncle would sigh and puff smoke from his lit cigarette. We would look at the smoke spiraling upwards to the sky as he shook his head from side to side. Whatever was in his head then, was left to conjecture.

My uncle returned from the wars but was pensioned. When there were Empire Days’ celebrations, the pensioners or retirees would don their old British army uniform and marched passed. The sporting events of students were usually opened by singing the British Empire National Anthem, God Save Our Gracious Queen. Some of my uncles’ army colleagues did not return from the wars. Some returned and were on crotches. I got to know that it was the work of anti-personnel landmines that sadly littered all of Africa that fought wars of independence as in Angola, DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea Bissau and still being laid by religious bandits in Somalia. (They help in impoverishing and keeping Africa backward economically and industrially in the the name of religion/sharia when the rest of the world is heading ahead). Those who could not return were killed by the Japanese in the Burmese jungles. Others were buried there or entombed in the sandy desert of Egypt in unknown graves in North Africa. Burma is known today as Myanmar and you can never forget her leader still hanging outside called Aung San Suu Kyi. She is one woman whose life will one day be compared to that of our illustrious African leader, Nelson Mandela.

Many British Cameroonians died during their first Baptism of fire during the Second World War. They died to defend democracy of the French and denounce the pogrom of Jewry and other minorities for no other reason other than racism and selfishness. Yet today, their sons and daughters are shedding tears, sweats and blood to be freed and the British are saying that they have got so much in their plate and no room to look at the Question of British Cameroons Independence. If the British Cameroons were the Falkland invaded by the Argentinians as on April 2, 1982 the British and Americans would have liberated it from the Argentinians, called Cameroon Republic (Ex French Cameroun). The French too have forgotten the role my uncle and others played in defeating the Japanese, the Germans and Italians who were out to dominate the world with Nazism-fascism, make the French and others second class citizens in their homeland, bombastic imperialism and instilled fear. Their combined action of the Allied including askaris, my uncle and other British Cameroonians in that war saved and built modern France. We also stood by the French when ISIS butchered late last year their 130 young men and women we buried in the morning of their lives. Why do 'they' believe that the British Cameroons have got men without blood and feelings? Their lives matter. They have forgotten British Cameroonians because of their oil they take gratis. Can you equate oil with liberty and life? Will the French forget the Senegalese and others too from the former French West Africa (AFO) and those of the French Equatorial Africa who fought with them gallantly during the Great Wars? Do you know why they were called the World Wars?

Finally we will return my stamp buttressing our story that to me is comparable to the rare one penny red stamp that once sold for a million US dollar in 1980. It is more valued to me than the first British one issued for the colony of Lagos in 1870. I went agog to see such a rare stamp of Nigeria but with the UKTTC printed in red within it (see fig.). As earlier said, it meant that it was the printed initially for Nigeria but since it was economical to use excess Nigerian stamps by the British ruling British Cameroons, our country's name was simply inserted by the British Colonial Office for their convenience thus: Cameroons, UKTT. This is the origin of our contention. That stamp meant so much to me that I frame it and if I had visitors in our shack, I took them by hand to the wall mat at the rare of our smoky hut where our family pictures were posted. I hoarded it for I knew that with the invasion of French and glamorization of all that was French in the Southern British Cameroons by some naive fellows or Southern UKTTC, valuable things of historical importance would soon disappear. Many had been destroyed or hidden from the young generation. Those are some of the ways a vibrant country can be killed. As I looked at it, I would be mesmerized for to me it was an emblem of a country drowning and only caught by a floating stamp.

Today some persons do stand up and even say that there was no British Cameroons and swords are even crossed. Those who demonstrate to see the state reestablished are killed. That is barbarism and not democracy young British Cameroonian fought to revive and restore in France and elsewhere. It is not far from it, as some forumites doubted if there was another appellation for the British Cameroons called United Kingdom Trust Territory of Cameroons. There is as it was.

The Royal West African Frontier Force in Maynmar, now then knows as Burma
The author's uncle was here and other British Cameroonians to fight with the Japanese imperial troops to liberate France, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, European Russia, Sweden, Norway and others. It is the turn of British Cameroons.

Sorry, the pictures on a wall-mat at the rare wall of our hut, though cherished were mutilated. How? If a member of the family died from natural causes or whatever, a red ballpoint was used to draw a mighty cross on his or her forehead. Whoever drew those crosses was so careless that the eyes were often crossed out from the group picture. If one wanted to know the death rate of an extended family, one simply went to the family album and counted crossed faces. Then most families could not afford to be photographed but others did when having wedding ceremonies or first Holy Communion for those who were Christians. It made us to fear death and not to welcome it if we were not strong Christians. Even if we were not, Chairman Mao Zedong did not see anything in death or dying that should make people fear in 1915 when he was still a pupil. He went on that people feared death because it was only once and the last experience one did not return to talk about, as after one had been on an excursion or holidays to some strange holiday resort. Whatever, we were young and wanted to live and to talk of death was scary. If I looked at someone's picture and I did not see his or her pupils the impression I had was that nothing had been seen of that person. The action of family members on pictures and of people in my area was encyclopedic. It recorded people and their view of death. They were of the opinion that if someone died, his pictures also died with him. They did not know that they were to die and others would be standing above their pictures and mutilating them with red crosses and the cycle would go on and on indefinitely. Similarly, my mother did not want to see my father's picture after his death some years ago. My sister also lost her husband and equally tore and put into the latrine all his priceless black and white pictures. He was thinking like the rest of them. The death was not supposed to be conjured to life by pictures as was with Islam followers who dreaded anyone depicting Mohammed, the founder of their philosophy/government. That was a bizarre belief and they needed indoctrination to learn to learn civilization.

Whatever the inclination of people, they should never put a cross on the stamp or map of British Cameroons. Apparently its enemies and those who want to exploit its people want to put crosses on its head. The people may die but their ideas never die and their land will ever be there to remind invaders of their transgression.

The United Nations' Trust Territory of the Cameroons Under British Administration, The UNO's Political Map, 1959.

We earlier saw that some of the members of the West African Frontier Forces did not know what they were fighting for. Since the British Cameroons was under the British, they came to recruit our young men including uncle Alfonse. In a way, my uncle and our parents were British, under King George VI, according to them and so we had to defend the British and their allies the French and Belgians. It was a right thing to do and if it were to happen today, many will still line behind the British to defend France. It was human civilization being defended. At that dire moment we were considered as one and indivisible members of one civilized world.

You will see that at the end of that war, the British opened their doors to let in West Indians as in their heart of hearts, they believed that they were British and had shared their blood for France and Britain too. They were fighting to liberate the French whose territory had been occupied by the Germans under Hitler's National Socialism, your call Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeitepartei (NSDAP) Nazi. You uncles or fathers too where fighting to liberate the French from Nazi imperialism. Whom have the French liberated? They came to French Cameroons and hunted the UPCists like animals and it was the British Cameroons that opened its doors to hide East Cameroonians else many would have been killed. That is why today you have many of them in Kumba, British Cameroons where the stamp in the figure was posted in 1961. Now both they, Cameroon Republic and France have joined hands to deny you, British Cameroons political Independence, that liberty you fought hard to give them, the French. Does man easily forget his history? Will they even read this memo and think of British Cameroons, that is asking them to liberate them too? Or have we crossed the bridge and dynamited it so as to deny those after us from crossing too?