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Through narrating the politics and everyday life in ex-British
Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia), Porcupine in a Python's Throat
makes an invaluable contribution to understanding the choices and
constraints facing both Southern Cameroons' (Ambazonia) people, and
the people of Republique du Cameroun. The volume illustrates how
the people of ex-British Southern Cameroons' (Ambazonia) seek
alternatives to the cycles of repression and state terrorism turned
into reprisal, retaliation and a genocidal war from 2016. This
volume challenges the authorities over delimited territories and
their inhabitants in states arbitrarily put together and held
together by external power and control. The editor and contributors
argue that the Westphalian sovereignty of authority as indivisible
in postcolonial and other settings is unworkable, and does not last
very long in plural societies put together and sustained with the
use of force.
Given the dramatic changes that have taken place in global politics
in recent years (especially following September 11, 2001), it is
time to examine a series of critical issues confronting the global
political economy. One of the most important of these issues is
terrorism and its relationship with weak states. This book examines
the weak state-terrorism nexus with particular emphasis on Africa.
Specifically, it provides an in-depth analysis of state weakness,
poverty, and the opportunities offered by the latter for the
breeding of terrorism and terrorists. It also looks at the part
played by radical Islam in transnational terrorism in Africa.
Emerging from this study is recognition of a need for the
international system to analyze a wide range of issues that
contribute to the weakening of African states.
Given the dramatic changes that have taken place in global politics
in recent years (especially following September 11, 2001), it is
time to examine a series of critical issues confronting the global
political economy. One of the most important of these issues is
terrorism and its relationship with weak states. This book examines
the weak state-terrorism nexus with particular emphasis on Africa.
Specifically, it provides an in-depth analysis of state weakness,
poverty, and the opportunities offered by the latter for the
breeding of terrorism and terrorists. It also looks at the part
played by radical Islam in transnational terrorism in Africa.
Emerging from this study is recognition of a need for the
international system to analyze a wide range of issues that
contribute to the weakening of African states.
Africa's dynamic security environment is characterized by great
diversity-from conventional challenges such as insurgencies,
resource and identity conflicts, and post-conflict stabilization to
growing threats from piracy, narcotics trafficking, violent
extremism, and organized crime taking root in urban slums, among
others. This precarious environment jeopardizes security at the
societal, community and individual levels. In a globalized and
interconnected world, millions of people worldwide are affected by
some form of human insecurity. Infectious and parasitic diseases
annually kill millions. Internally displaced persons number
millions, including 5 million in Sudan alone. In Zambia 1 million
people in a population of 11 million are reported to be
HIV-positive, a situation much worse in other countries. Potable
water crisis looms almost everywhere. In this book Tatah Mentan
points out the need to shift the focus away from a state-centric
and military-strategic emphasis on security to an interdisciplinary
and people-centric approach that embraces notions like global
citizenship, empowerment and participation. The primary elements of
economic, food, health, environment, personal, community and
political security all comprise the broader understanding of human
security in an intricately interconnected world.
Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more
important than any special result attained, so that special results
achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and
order the ongoing process. Africans must therefore be allowed to
apply their cultural and historical experiences and talents in
working out a pattern of 'government of the people, by the people,
and for the people' according to their own understanding and as
their own peculiar circumstances demand. Those who do not want the
vertical 'Western-Style Democracy' must be given a fair chance to
demonstrate an alternative African horizontal democracy. Perhaps
what they come up with might be of benefit to politics even in the
West, provided that their radical system of horizontal democracy
protects the life, liberty and property of citizens, and provided
that the people want it. The question of externally imposed or
market-driven multi-party or dual-party or non-party is a matter of
modality and should not occupy the center stage in Africa.
Since the end of World War II, global capitalism, spearheaded by US
financial interests and backed by the most lethal military force
that has ever been assembled, has consolidated its power over the
world economy. In the past decades, especially, transnational
corporations have tightened their control over national governments
and international institutions. The imposition of free trade
policies and the increasing privatization of social services have
facilitated the accumulation of fabulous wealth for the owners of
capital at the expense of working people and the environment
worldwide. Contemporary capitalism now dominates every major sector
of the world economy. The social and environmental costs of
contemporary capitalism are prohibitive. The global megatrends of
rising inequality and absolute poverty, political instability, and
global climate change-all compounded and accelerated by this
predatory mode of production-are adversely affecting the lives and
threatening the future of every inhabitant of nations and the
entire world. In view of these megatrends and the current global
economic crisis, the conclusion that contemporary capitalism does
not serve the interests of the vast majority of the people on the
planet and is both economically and environmentally unsustainable,
is self-evident. History offers harsh lessons. The political
violence of the 20th century, which resulted in an estimated 200
million deaths and untold economic and environmental destruction,
cautions us to work for socialism in the 21st century with every
means at our disposal except violence. Facing the awful power and
willingness of capitalism to coerce and corrupt, we must find ways
to make soft power prevail. Clearly, a revolution is in order-it is
time to place the socialist alternative on the national and world
agenda.
Globalization is a term that describes the contradictory economic,
political, and cultural processes of world capitalist integration.
Although capitalism has been of a global character since the 1400s,
the current phase of globalization is manifest by emergent
transnational institutions, changing relations between
multinational corporations and assaulted paradise of sovereign
nation-states and the development of a global monoculture of
consumption among feuding class divides. This book examines the
relationship between globalization and nation states, the dynamics,
contradictions, and crisis of global capitalism, and the developing
and maturing class struggles and the prospects for social change
and transformation of global capitalism. It examines these class
struggles within the context of the globalization of capital and
draws out the political implications of this process for the future
course of capitalist development on a world scale. In this book
Tatah Mentan drives home the point that contemporary neoliberal
globalization is in fact an advanced stage of capitalist hegemonism
and that the contradictions of 21st century globalization are thus
a projection of the contradictions of capitalism on a global scale,
with all its inherent exploitative characteristics and militarized
class conflicts that will lead to the revolutionary transformation
of vulture capitalist society. He argues that dominant global
processes are not an immutable feature of capitalism, but are
contested by social class actors across these three dimensions.
The New World Order Ideology expressed in the form of neoliberal
globalization has been used by numerous politicians, scholars and
media men through the ages. It refers to a worldwide conspiracy to
effect complete and total control over the planet through money
farming. This book examines the case of Africa put directly on the
chopping board as client states by this ideology - when less
hampered by idealistic slogans as human rights, raising living
standards and democratization - to better the achievement of the
agenda of the money farmers whose goal is to establish government
by loan operations. The money farmers' strategy, as in credit card
companies, is to lend as much as the subject target can borrow and
still pay fees, charges and interest payments. This means to
encourage them to borrow, loan after loan, consolidate all other
loans and keep lending - up until the crop of foreign exchange
seems in jeopardy. The ideal from the Lending Agency viewpoint is
to get an African country maxed out on loans to the point that it
actually operates all of its government and the nation on LOANS.
Once that goal is achieved, you basically have a never ending crop
of FOREIGN EXCHANGE from helpless and hopeless African governments
and people. Here is Tatah Mentan at his trenchant best
This book critically analyzes the complex relationship between the
African state and capitalist globalization. It describes in great
detail the significant effects of the various historical
trajectories of global capitalist expansion on the nature and
functions of the African state while focusing on the present
triumph of globalized neo-liberalism on the African continent. The
history of the state in Africa has been misread and misinterpreted
through the Eurocentric convictions of European African scholars
alike. The State in Africa has, since its colonial inception, has
served as the best possible political shell for capitalism,
enabling it to penetrate, again possession and establish itself
firmly and securely, regardless of institutional and leadership
instability at the helm. The glaring artificiality of the state in
Africa, coupled with the failure of the local ruling classes to
rise above the limitations of their provenance, is to blame for the
myriad crises of one-party authoritarianism, violent coups and
military dictatorship. It is also to blame for the progressive
alienation of the African people, and the prevailing crises of
identity and citizenship. Independence does not seem to have
changed much, as the state is still controlled by the most powerful
foreign, economically dominant class, which, has appropriated
political power as well to further compound the subjection and
exploitation of the oppressed Africans. Today the continent
continues to grapple with underdevelopment, civil wars, intra-state
conflicts, political instability, state failure and outright
collapse, thus calling into question the viability and
survivability of the Westphalian state model in Africa.
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.
The need for a revision of this well received and reviewed work was
obvious to all serious observers of sub Saharan Africa: The
emergence in the last decade of the enormouspolitical, economic and
social clout of China, the desire of Magrebi states and Egypt to
continue a "southward" policy that includes conversion to Islam,
Arab investment and especially control of oil and agricultural
lands. Professor Mentan has lucidly discussed the origins of neo
colonialism and in this new work not only challenges the "benign"
intent of China and Libya, he also introduces 3 new chapters on
NGO-land...the Haiti-like conversion of whole regions into
dependence on non governmental organizations based in the West(but
also, increasingly, in the East). Mentan also discusses African
higher education and its thralldom (in too many cases) to European
or American models that are unworkable in the HIPC nations of West
and Central Africa. This "academic capitalism " is shown as
extremely harmful to the poorest African societies especially
Fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. The author does not spare
national and local elites and homegrown political and social
players in what has happened but he argues that that the forces of
neocolonialism(although they would decry that label) still seek to
atomize, exploit an dominate via concentrated ownership and
development of Africa's immense natural resources and potential
consumer demand. Finally, this study also discusses the realities
of genocide, permanent war, disease and forced urbanization as they
effect the African people discussing Darfur, Southern Sudan,
Eastern Congo, Rwanda and Cote Ivoire.
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