Under The Broken Scale of Justice. The Law and My Times

Under The Broken Scale of Justice. The Law and My Times
Author: Nyo' Wakai
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9956717398

This book explores the latent and sometimes overt undercurrents that have shaped the judicial history of Cameroon since the United Nations Trusteeship period. It is an insightful account by a critical observer privileged to serve as Director of Public Prosecutions and a judge in a post-independence context characterized by dual and often conflictual legal systems inspired by French and English colonialism. Justice Nyo'Wakai demonstrates how the conflict of judicial concepts, procedures and usages have led to the Francophone judicial system trying to impose itself on the Anglophone judicial system in Cameroon. Often reduced to toothless bulldogs by new constitutional dispensations informed largely by the French colonial legacy and Francophone realities, Anglophones have bemoaned the independence of the Judiciary identified with their Anglo-Saxon heritage. In the face of such domination and the highhandedness of the Executive, only mature cool headedness and the ability to bend over backwards on the part of Anglophone legal practitioners have contained the explosive situation and allowed for a gradual evolution of the Judicial System in Cameroon.

Prisoner without a Crime. Disciplining Dissent in Ahidjo's Cameroon

Prisoner without a Crime. Disciplining Dissent in Ahidjo's Cameroon
Author: Albert Mukong
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2009-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9956716162

Doughty human rights crusader, Albert Mukong was incarcerated for six years in some of Cameroon's worst detention centres under the despotic regime of late President Amadou Ahidjo. This book details his personal account of the discipline and punishment that the Cameroonian state has systematically dished out to dissidents who have dared to stand their ground. Until his death in 2004, Albert Mukong was without doubt, Anglophone Cameroon's most conspicuous political prisoner, spokesperson and champion human rights advocate. The particular detention he recounts in this book is evidence of how nationalists such as Ruben Um Nyobe, Ernest Ouandie, Bishop Ndongmo and others, have in their struggles sacrificed enormously so that freedom and democracy might see the light of day in their reluctant Cameroon.

Gender, Discourse and Power in the Cameroonian Parliament

Gender, Discourse and Power in the Cameroonian Parliament
Author: Lilian Lem Atanga
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2010
Genre: Cameroon
ISBN: 9956615463

This book investigates gender and power relations in the Cameroonian parliament using a critical discourse analytical approach, which focuses on social issues and seeks to expose unequal relations within institutions. The study identifies different gendered discourses within the speeches of Members of Parliament and government ministers. Consciously or unconsciously, these participants within parliamentary debates draw on topics that construct women and men in specific ways, sometimes sustaining gender stereotypes or challenging existing conditions. The way men and women are constructed using language also is indicative of gender and power relations within this particular community. The study also looks at the way men and women are constructed using traditional discourses of gender differentiation and how some of these discourses get challenged, appropriated or subverted using progressive gendered discourses that advocate equal opportunities, gender equality and gender partnership in development.

Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today

Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today
Author: Tatah Mentan
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2009-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9956715638

The celebrations that heralded democratic change in the 1990s in Africa have gradually faded into muffled cries of anger and attendant violence of despair. Almost everywhere on the continent so-called democratic leaders are openly subverting the people's will and disregarding national constitutions. Ordinary people find themselves removed from the centres of power, marginalized and reduced to helpless and hopeless onlookers as political leaders, their friends and families noisily enjoy the spoils of impunity. From Nigeria to Zimbabwe, Kenya to the Ivory Coast and Uganda to Cameroon, the writing is on the wall. The experiment with democracy has blatantly taken a dangerous nosedive. There is a crisis of honest, committed and democratic leadership, in spite of the advancements in education and intellectualism of the populace, and despite the influences of globalization and new understandings of governance. In this brief volume, Tatah Mentan makes an incisive diagnosis of how the "security forces" brutally crush protests against bids to stay in power through corrupt electoral practices as well as how opposition voices have been hunted down and crushed or intimidated into graveyard silence. This is a clarion call for Africans to embrace the values of People Power in synch with the dictates of the current global imperatives. There is no place for visionless leadership. Africans need to raise their voices to recapture their freedom.

Ecology and Natural Resource Development in the Western Highlands of Cameroon. Issues in Natural Resource Management

Ecology and Natural Resource Development in the Western Highlands of Cameroon. Issues in Natural Resource Management
Author: Cornelius Mbifung Lambi
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 995661548X

The densely populated Bamenda Highlands of Cameroon remains one of the regions with the greatest land degradation problems in the country. Factors responsible for this include climate change, the hilly nature or topographic layout of the land, and human interference through overgrazing, destructive agricultural practices and the impact of deforestation. This detailed study of resource management and its ecological challenges in the Bamenda Highlands, stresses an important link between falling food output and soil deterioration. While most areas in this predominantly agricultural region enjoy food abundance, the inhabitants of high-density infertile, rugged mountainous areas are forced to resort to double cropping and intensified land exploitation that leave little room for soil regeneration. The population problem in relation to land degradation is infinitely more complicated than the region's sheer ability to produce enough food supply. The authors make a strong case for a delicate balance between human agency and environmental protection in this highly populated and physically challenging region where land is a precious resource and land conflicts are common.

Straddling the Mungo: A Book of Poems in English and French

Straddling the Mungo: A Book of Poems in English and French
Author: Wuteh Vakunta
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2009-03-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9956716081

This collection makes a forceful case that official bilingualism is not a pipe-dream, but rather a powerful modus operandi with the potential to ease a myriad of socio-political bottlenecks.

Dispossession and Access to Land in South Africa. An African Perspective

Dispossession and Access to Land in South Africa. An African Perspective
Author: Akomaye Yanou
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2009-03-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9956715875

This book deals with the conceptualization of access to land by the dispossessed in South Africa as a human right. Yanou examines the country's property model in the context of the post apartheid constitutional mandate to redress the skewed land distribution of the past. The book reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the land restitution process as well as the question of the payment of just and equitable compensation for land expropriated for restitution. It also reviews the phenomenon of land invasion and quality of access to land enjoyed by the South African black woman under the present dispensation. Yanou argues that the courts have, on occasions, construed just and equitable compensation generously. This approach has failed to reflect the fact that what is being paid for is land dispossessed from the forebears of indigenous inhabitants. In a South Africa that lost most of its ancestral land during colonialism and apartheid, access to land for the dispossessed should not be equated with the protection of property acquired under apartheid. Getting it right would entail truth and reconciliation with the collective dispossession suffered by South African blacks.

Whether Losing, Whether Winning. Essays in Political Realism

Whether Losing, Whether Winning. Essays in Political Realism
Author: D. Nyamndi
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2009-01-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9956717282

The fate of minorities, the quality and ultimate purpose of elections, the place of truth in human relations: these are some of the core concerns of this unique narrative. Although handled against the background of recent political events in Cameroon, the

Mediating Legitimacy: Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African Chiefdoms

Mediating Legitimacy: Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African Chiefdoms
Author: Jude Thaddeus Dingbobga Fokwang
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2009
Genre: Cameroon
ISBN: 9956558648

This study analyses the effects of democratic transition in two African countries - Cameroon and South Africa - on chiefs and the institution of chieftainship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the monograph explores the cultural and socio-political conditions that enabled chiefs to reinvent themselves in the new era of democratic politics despite their status as 'old political actors'. It explores the kinds of legitimacies claimed by chiefs in the new era and the responses of their subjects to such claims, particularly with respect to chiefs' involvement in national politics. The monograph makes a case for the importance of comparative research on chiefs in the era of democracy and the predicaments they face therein. It contends that contrary to exhortations about the incompatibility of chiefs and democracy, the reality is that political transition in both South Africa and Cameroon produced contradictions, creating space and a role for chiefs in a fascinating and negotiated interplay of legitimacies and history.

Scribbles from the Den

Scribbles from the Den
Author: Dibussi Tande
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9956558915

"49 insightful essays ... which originally appeared on his award-winning blog 'Scribbles from the den'"--Page 4 of cover