President Paul Biya has decreed a State burial for the fallen hero of Cameroon’s unification.
Great men die but their actions live after them, says an adage. That could be the case with the fallen national figure, Winston Ndeh Ntumazah who died in London on January 21, 2010, at the age of 84, just when Cameroon is half a century old in her strides for nationhood. To honour, the memories of late Ntumazah, President Paul Biya, signed a decree on Monday March 1, 2010 instituting a State burial for him on March 27, 2010 in Bamenda.
To many contemporary Cameroonians, little is known about the activities of Mr Ntumazah that earned him such prominence. However, he is one of the few political actors in Cameroon who worked hard to restore the country’s history as he knew it from the Germans. Besides his political party “One Kamerun”, he played a key role in the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) that fought for the country’s independence from colonial rule. The “One Kamerun” party was created as he went on exile following the French colonial hostility to his activities within the UPC. He therefore wanted “One Kamerun” to be the West Cameroon version of the UPC.
Be it in “France’s satrapy in Kamerun is safe”,(1985) “Mercenaries rule Kamerun” (1972) or “Ndeh Ntumazah” (2001) all written by the nationalist fighter, Ntumazah sought to highlight his vision of Cameroon and determination to straighten records which he felt that his fellow politicians were attempting to distort. When the country gained independence, Ntumazah refused to take sides with those who felt that the evolution of the country must be to their taste. Thus, with the liberalisation of the political landscape in Cameroon in the 1990s, he returned home to continue with his political agenda within the UPC. The multiple cases of division within the party by its sympathisers did not change his desire to see in the UPC the great national party that its founders dreamt of.
Although he clandestinely left the country in 1962 on exile, his stay in Ghana, Guinea, Algeria and the United Kingdom did not take away his desire to see Cameroon assert her national identity as one and evolve as a strong nation.
From Ntumazah’s narratives in one of his autobiographies, his party comrades Ruben Um Nyobe and Felix Moumie had much admiration for him even before independence as he had the courage, at the time, to confront colonial administrators in Ambam and got a jail term in Douala for the act.
Symbolically, Ndeh Ntumazah has died at a time Cameroon is half a century gone into her quest for a nation out of the ashes of colonialism. Given his commitment to the arduous task of building a closely knit country, Cameroon, the Head of State found it logical for him to have a State burial. That is definitely a merited nati
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