Dear Editor,
I write to your paper in response to DR. NICK NGWANYAM on his reaction, to the commentary you published which I authored.
CLARIFICATION: Naming the Goat Does Not Make It Yours
By Dr. Martin Mungwa – New York, USA | Ambazonian
Dear Dr. Nick Ngwanyam,
Thank you for your response. But respectfully, your letter does not clarify—it compounds. What is clear from your reply is a continued entanglement in semantics over substance, and a painful refusal to confront the historical and legal facts of the Southern Cameroons question. This is not a matter of fever or “hearing voices.” It is about calling things by their rightful names and defending the truth without compromise or fear of tribal backlash.
You say you’ve spoken about the “Anglophone Problem” since 2012. I do not deny your public engagement. But that term itself is part of the problem, not the solution. It was coined by the very regime whose grip you claim to critique, yet whose constitutional framework and vocabulary you continue to echo. What began in the 1990s as “the Anglophone problem” was always a deliberate downgrading of what the United Nations, history, and international law have long recognized as the Southern Cameroons question.
Let’s be clear:
The Southern Cameroons was a UN Trust Territory, not a region of Cameroon.
Its people were to attain self-government or independence, not integration.
What happened in 1961 was an incomplete decolonization, not unification.
And what we live with today is the consequence of illegal occupation, not a linguistic or administrative crisis.
By insisting on calling it the “Anglophone problem,” you are doing the equivalent of renaming a stolen goat and asking the rightful owner to accept a new tag instead of demanding its return. That is not nuance—that is whitewashing.
Your federation proposals, West-East capital fantasies, and Progressive CPDM reform talks, while intellectually stimulating, are built on a foundation that has already collapsed. You are proposing to fix a house that was never legally built to begin with. The so-called “United Republic of Cameroon” has no binding legal instrument connecting it to the Southern Cameroons. We are not reforming a broken family—we are liberating a colonized people.
To say that “no Anglophone is more Anglophone than the other” is to ignore the core issue: this is not about language or tribe. It is about sovereignty and betrayal. Those of us who recognize the legal name Ambazonia are not simply using another word for “Anglophone.” We are affirming the distinct political identity, legal history, and violated right to self-determination of our people.
Dr. Nick, you are a man of intelligence. But intelligence must serve truth, not convenience. You ask whether I’ve caught wind of your federation models or your songs about Ebebda and Numba. I have. But dreams built on a stolen foundation do not bring justice—they bring delay.
Ambazonians are no longer asleep. We have awakened not just to our identity, but to the futility of half-measures, especially those marketed by men of influence who fear being called separatists more than they fear being remembered as traitors.
This is not personal. It is historical. The names we choose reflect the side we stand on.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Martin Mungwa
New York, USA | Ambazonian
For the restoration of a stolen nation, not the reform of a broken colony.
