Revisiting Fonlon's Vision of a Bilingual Cameroon

“de jure, Cameroon has become a bilingual state; but, de facto, it is a highly diversified multilingual, multi-cultural country” (1969)

Described as "the chief philosopher and theoretician of Kamerun's official bilingualism" (Tangwa), Bernard Fonlon was one of the main architects of Cameroon's bilingualism policy. This policy's long term goal was to transform Cameroon into a country where bilingualism would be even more deeply engrained in every day life than in Canada, and where every citizen would flawlessly speak both French and English.

According to Fonlon:

Cameroon, thanks to its geographical position, has the singular character of being the one spot on the black continent where all the African peoples meet: here you have the Bantu who claim kinship with peoples as far South as the Cape, you have Sudanese peoples, you have the Fulani whose kinsfolk are found as farWest as Senegal and Mauritania, you have Hamito-Semitic peoples like the Shuwa Arabs, you have the pygmies of the equatorial jungle. Thus, it is in Cameroon that the African Confusion of Tongues is worse confounded; and it has become absolutely impossible to achieve, through an African language, that oneness of thought and feeling and will that is the heart’s core and the soul of a nation. We are left with no choice but to strive to achieve this unity through non-African languages; and, to make things more difficult, the Federal Republic of Cameroon, being composed of the former Southern Cameroons, British administered, and the former French Cameroons, has inherited two of them – French and English; and has therefore been obliged to become, constitutionally, a bilingual State.

In constructing a bilingual Cameroon, Fonlon favored individual bilingualism whereby every Cameroonian would have a mastery of both official languages, over State bilingualism (characterized by bilingual State institutions across the board) which he considered too costly. Thus in his article, The Language Problem in Cameroon, Fonlon argued that “the target to aim at, for us, should be, not merely State bilingualism, but individual bilingualism: that every child that passes through our education system shall be able to speak and write both English and French”

Was Fonlon's vision realistic or utopic, and can the origins of the Cameroon's intractable language problem really be traced to this philosophy which, some have argued, failed to take into account the socio-cultural and political realities of the bilingual Cameroon Republic?

We ask members of the public to send in their contributions on this sensitive issue that goes to the core of the national integration debated and of Anglophone marginalization in Cameroon

Bernard Fonlon. "The language problem in Cameroon". ABBIA, 22:5–40, 1969.