Public Lecture: The Nomadic Mbororo-Fulani Conundrum in Cameroon’s North West Region: From Fry Pan to Fire; Speaker: Nicodemus Fru Awasom

MIASA Conference Room, 13th February 2024

Abstract:

This paper examines the intractable perennial problem of the nomadic Mbororo-Fulani in Cameroon’s Northwest region. The problem that has not been sufficiently historicized and comprehensively studied by scholars to shed light on its changing scenarios, and to connect it to its African parallels in order to better articulate and illuminate the problem. The advent of the pastoral Mbororo starting from 1903 injected pastoralism as a new economic activity in a region which was hitherto agricultural. Serious problems soon started arising when both cattle and human population started expanding and this created an unprecedented problem of intermittent herders and farmers clashes over land use and a Mbororo identity crises. Multiple efforts at resolving this problem were compounded by the outbreak of the Anglophone war of independence in 2017 which is the greatest existential threat to the nomadic Mbororo herders since their arrival in the North West region.

Professor Nicodemus Fru Awasom is a holder of a Doctorat and a PhD degree in History from the University of Yaoundé and Ibadan respectively and is therefore a scholar of French and English-speaking academic traditions. He is an academic of international standing with decades of teaching experience in several universities in Africa and Europe, and with a track record of publications in peer review journals in Africa, Europe, Canada, and the USA. His last teaching assignment was at the University of Swaziland (now Eswatini) where he taught African history for 10 years with particular emphasis on methodology and the decolonisation of African history. He edited a book on Youth and Identity in Africa (forthcoming CODESRIA: Dakar) and another book on the Making and Unmaking of Africa’s Independence Constitution, currently under review by Spinger’s publishers.

His Doctoral thesis was on the Hausa and Fulani in the Bamenda Grasslands 1903-1960 and this constituted a fertile ground for him to embark on research on the Mbororo in the light of declassified British Public Records on the Mbororo. The title of his book project here at MIASA is: The Unending Crises of Mbororo Pastoralism in Cameroon.

Since he left the University of Swaziland, he has been a temporary visiting scholar at the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, University of Bamenda and the University of Buea in Cameroon and is engaged in supervising a couple of PhD theses.

Professor Awasom is also a political activist and a virulent critique of the President Biya’s 42 years old regime in Cameroon, and French neo-colonialism (FranceAfrique). He is also leading expert in the Anglophone problem in Cameroon and had made concrete proposals for the resolution of the crisis.