The choice facing Ambazonia is therefore not simply between colonial rule and political independence. It is between an economy organized for the prosperity of others and a Republic designed to retain the value created by its own people. Anything less would not complete liberation. It would merely localize extraction.
By Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News
The Defender of Freedom Who Defended Empire
Winston Churchill occupies an almost sacred place in British national memory. He is remembered as the wartime leader whose defiance helped prevent Britain from surrendering to Nazi Germany. His speeches strengthened a frightened population, his political determination sustained the Allied cause, and his leadership became inseparable from the defense of freedom in Europe.
That achievement should not be denied. But neither should it conceal the contradiction at the heart of Churchill’s political philosophy.
The freedom Churchill defended for Britain was not a freedom he consistently accepted as the immediate right of colonized peoples. He believed deeply in the British Empire and regarded it as an instrument of British greatness, strategic power, and civilizational authority. He resisted the rapid transfer of power to India and opposed interpretations of self-government that threatened Britain’s imperial possessions.
Churchill did not personally create every colonial policy imposed across India and Africa. He did not design every plantation, tax, labor regulation, railway, or mining concession. Much of the imperial economic structure existed before he entered senior government and continued after his departure. His importance lies elsewhere.
Churchill became one of the most powerful defenders of the political order that made extraction possible. He represented a governing philosophy in which the interests of Britain could legitimately take priority over the aspirations, resources, and welfare of territories governed from London. That philosophy matters to Ambazonia today because extraction does not always announce itself as robbery. It often arrives through law, administration, commerce, infrastructure, development promises, and institutions described as serving the public good.
Extraction Was a System, Not an Isolated Abuse
The British Empire did not survive merely because British officials planted flags in distant territories. It survived because empire was supported by an economic architecture.
Colonized territories supplied land, labor, soldiers, taxes, minerals, and agricultural commodities. The imperial center controlled much of the finance, insurance, shipping, technology, industrial processing, branding, and access to consumer markets through which those resources acquired greater value.
The colony produced cocoa. The industrial center manufactured and marketed chocolate.
The colony produced rubber. The industrial center manufactured tires, medical products, and engineered components.
The colony produced palm oil. The industrial center refined it into foods, soaps, cosmetics, lubricants, and chemical products.
The colony exported timber. The industrial center produced furniture, construction systems, and branded consumer goods.
The colonial economy did not merely remove physical resources. It concentrated the most profitable stages of production elsewhere.
That was the doctrine of extraction.
Its defining principle was simple: the territory of production should not necessarily become the territory of ownership, industrialization, or wealth accumulation. Colonial infrastructure frequently reflected the same logic. Roads and railways connected mines and plantations to ports. Administrative centers were linked to export zones. Harbors were expanded to move commodities abroad. Yet neighboring communities often remained poorly connected to one another, and domestic manufacturing systems remained shallow.
A railway could therefore be impressive and still be extractive. A port could be modern and still serve underdevelopment. A plantation could employ thousands and still leave the surrounding population without ownership of the value chain.
The relevant question was never simply whether Britain constructed infrastructure or established institutions. The deeper question was what those institutions were designed to accomplish and whose long-term prosperity they principally served.
India: Political Subordination and Economic Dependence
India provides the clearest example of the scale at which the doctrine of extraction could operate. British authority integrated the subcontinent into an imperial system of taxation, military supply, trade, finance, and strategic production.
India contributed soldiers, agricultural commodities, revenue, and industrial output to Britain’s global power. Yet Indian citizens did not control the ultimate decisions affecting trade, currency, wartime priorities, or the allocation of national resources.
Churchill’s hostility toward rapid Indian self-government reflected more than personal prejudice. It reflected a belief that imperial authority was necessary and that Britain possessed a superior claim to decide when India was prepared to govern itself. The Bengal famine of 1943 exposed the danger of such political dependence. The catastrophe resulted from several interacting factors, including wartime disruption, inflation, market failure, crop difficulties, transportation problems, the loss of rice imports from Burma, and inadequate relief.
Historians continue to debate the precise degree of Churchill’s personal responsibility. It would be inaccurate to claim that one man alone created the famine. It would be equally inaccurate to remove British wartime policy from the conditions that intensified it. Colonial decisions, imperial priorities, and delayed relief contributed to a disaster in which millions died.
The larger lesson extends beyond Churchill’s intentions.
A territory may produce food and still experience mass hunger. It may possess resources and still lack authority over their use. It may contribute heavily to the survival of an empire while the survival of its own population remains secondary. This has direct significance for Ambazonia. Agricultural policy cannot be designed primarily around export earnings. Cocoa, coffee, bananas, palm products, rubber, and timber may generate foreign exchange, but national policy must first protect food security, local livelihoods, and the resilience of producing communities.
A country that exports agricultural wealth while importing most of its food has not achieved economic sovereignty. A country that allows foreign markets to determine what its farmers grow without maintaining national reserves, processing capacity, and diversified production remains dangerously exposed. The lesson from India is not that international trade should be rejected. It is that no people should surrender control over the institutions that determine whether their own citizens eat.
South Africa: Extracting Minerals by Controlling People
In South Africa, imperial and settler expansion became intertwined with diamonds, gold, land, and the organization of labor. The extraction of mineral wealth required more than mines. It required an entire social system capable of supplying inexpensive and disciplined workers.
Land alienation, taxation, and restrictions on African economic independence helped drive Black men into wage labor. Migrant-labor systems separated workers from their families and communities. Mining compounds regulated movement and discipline. Railways connected the mineral economy to ports, financial centers, and global markets.
Churchill did not invent this system. Mining companies, settler governments, financiers, and imperial administrators were more directly involved in building it. But his political world accepted the broader proposition that imperial control and racial hierarchy could be defended in the name of order, progress, and British interest.
South Africa therefore reveals that extraction is not limited to the removal of minerals.
Labor can be extracted. Land can be extracted. Mobility can be controlled. Wages can be suppressed. Communities can bear the environmental and social costs of production while ownership and profit remain elsewhere.
This warning is especially important for a future Ambazonian mining and energy policy. Foreign investment may provide capital and technology, but no contract should create an enclave in which an external company controls the land, machinery, information, and export revenue while surrounding communities receive only temporary jobs.
Employment is necessary, but employment alone is not development. Producing communities must gain roads, schools, healthcare, technical training, supplier opportunities, environmental restoration, and a direct share in the wealth generated from their land. A citizen should not spend a lifetime extracting a resource without acquiring any ownership in the economy built around it.
British East Africa: The Geography of Removal
British East Africa demonstrates how infrastructure can be designed around extraction. Colonial governments built railways, roads, and administrative networks that connected productive interiors to coastal ports. These investments created towns, expanded commerce, and introduced systems that later independent governments could use. Their benefits should not be denied. But their original purpose must also be understood.
Much of the infrastructure was intended to move exports, support settler agriculture, facilitate military movement, and strengthen administrative control. Colonial taxation and coercive labor policies also pushed Africans into wage employment and public works, including railway and road construction. The economic geography was revealing. The plantation was connected to the railway. The railway was connected to the port. The port was connected to the imperial market. But the farmer was not necessarily connected to a domestic processor.
The producing region was not necessarily connected to national research, finance, or manufacturing.
This distinction should shape Ambazonia’s infrastructure policy. Victoria Port must not become simply a more efficient doorway through which timber, minerals, bananas, rubber, cocoa, and palm products leave the country. Tiko must not be developed only as a logistics platform serving plantations and foreign exporters. National highways must not merely connect resource zones to the coast. Infrastructure must first integrate the Republic. Roads should connect farmers to processors, universities to industrial districts, communities to healthcare, and counties to one another.
Port development should create shipping services, marine engineering, cold storage, insurance, trade finance, customs technology, and locally owned logistics companies.
A port that exports resources but imports nearly every high-value service surrounding those exports is not yet an instrument of sovereignty.
Infrastructure must carry national capability inward as efficiently as it carries commodities outward.
British West Africa: Production Without Industrial Power
Across British West Africa, colonial economies became heavily associated with cash crops and extractive industries. Cocoa, palm oil, palm kernels, groundnuts, cotton, timber, and minerals connected African producers to international commerce. African farmers were not passive actors. In territories such as the Gold Coast and Nigeria, smallholders expanded production, built commercial networks, and sometimes accumulated considerable wealth. Cash-crop regions also experienced improvements in roads, urbanization, and household income, demonstrating that export agriculture could generate real benefits.
The problem was structural rather than absolute.
The colonial territory might produce large volumes of commodities, but the highest-value economic activities remained concentrated elsewhere. Industrial processing, shipping, insurance, machinery, finance, and international marketing were often controlled outside the producing economy. The territory produced. The imperial center processed. The territory supplied labor. External companies controlled the commercial route to the consumer.
This created a dangerous illusion: that rising exports automatically represented economic transformation. Production is not the same as ownership. Export earnings are not the same as industrialization. Employment is not the same as sovereignty. A country may become one of the world’s leading cocoa producers while importing chocolate. It may grow oil palms while importing soaps and cosmetics. It may export logs while importing furniture and construction materials.
The volume leaving the port may increase while the country’s industrial knowledge remains shallow.
Ambazonia must never evaluate national development primarily by the tonnage of commodities exported. The relevant measure is the amount of knowledge, processing, technology, ownership, and wealth retained before the commodity leaves.
Southern Cameroons Was Not Outside the Imperial Economy
Southern Cameroons was administered first under the League of Nations mandate system and later as a United Nations Trust Territory under British administration. Trusteeship formally required the administering authority to promote political, economic, social, and educational advancement and to prepare the inhabitants for self-government.
British administration left important institutions. Southern Cameroons inherited aspects of the common-law tradition, parliamentary government, public administration, education, and commercial organization. These should not be erased simply because the wider colonial structure was unequal. But institutional inheritance must not be confused with full preparation for economic sovereignty.
Southern Cameroons was administered largely through its association with Nigeria and did not emerge with control over a complete national system of international finance, shipping, industrial manufacturing, and strategic economic planning. The economy remained heavily dependent upon plantations, agriculture, and the export of primary products. Even during the trusteeship period, Southern Cameroonian petitioners complained about insufficient industrial development and called for local industries capable of processing rubber, timber, bananas, and other resources.
Their concern was not that the territory lacked natural wealth. It was that the territory’s wealth was not being converted into an independent productive system. That unfinished transformation remains central to the Ambazonian question.
The CDC: Achievement within an extractive structure
The Cameroons Development Corporation is the most significant institutional example.
The CDC was established during the British administration to manage former German plantation estates and was expected to operate for the welfare of workers and the inhabitants of Southern Cameroons. The corporation became far more than a plantation company. It created large-scale employment. It established housing, clinics, schools, roads, and plantation settlements. It trained workers in agriculture, administration, engineering, accounting, and technical trades. It brought together Southern Cameroonians from many communities who might otherwise have remained separated by distance and local identity.
The CDC became a social institution and a practical school of modern corporate organization. It allowed workers to experience systems of management, labor relations, public service, and commercial discipline. Families formed new communities around its estates, and Southern Cameroonians from different counties came to understand one another through shared work. This nation-building role should be preserved in historical memory. But the CDC also demonstrates the limitations of a plantation-centered economy. Its principal activities revolved around bananas, rubber, and oil palm.
These are valuable products, but they represent only the beginning of much larger industrial value chains. Rubber can become tires, footwear, seals, hoses, medical equipment, and construction products. Palm oil can become refined foods, cosmetics, soaps, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, and chemical inputs. Bananas can be transformed into flour, starch, beverages, packaged foods, animal feed, and biomaterials. The plantation cultivated and harvested the commodity. The most sophisticated manufacturing, branding, shipping, finance, and retail functions were often controlled elsewhere.
The CDC was therefore both an achievement and an unfinished project. It proved that Southern Cameroons could operate a large public corporation and connect economic activity to social development. It did not complete the transformation from plantation production to industrial ownership. The answer is not to condemn the CDC as though it contributed nothing. Nor is it to romanticize the corporation and leave its structure unchanged. The answer is transformation.
A future Ambazonian CDC should become an integrated agro-industrial, scientific, and citizen-ownership institution. It should support small farmers, develop domestic processing, create national consumer brands, finance agricultural research, and establish manufacturing companies around rubber, palm products, and food technology. Its success should not be measured only by hectares cultivated or tons exported. It should be measured by how much knowledge, processing, ownership, and intergenerational wealth remain inside Ambazonia.
PAMOL: When the Plantation Survives but the Region Remains Poor
PAMOL presents a similar contradiction.
Its plantation roots extend into the earlier German estate economy and subsequent British commercial administration. Its principal estates became associated with Lobe in Ekondo-Titi, Ndian near Mundemba, and Bai in Mbonge, with operations involving oil-palm cultivation, processing, and supporting services. PAMOL created employment and provided services in areas that received limited investment from the state. Roads, settlements, clinics, and technical knowledge developed around its plantations. Its research activities demonstrated that a plantation enterprise could become a center of agricultural science. Yet PAMOL also illustrates the danger of enclave development.
A plantation can operate for generations while the surrounding county remains underdeveloped.
Workers may harvest palm fruit while their communities import soap, cosmetics, refined cooking oil, and industrial products manufactured from palm oil. A mill may produce basic oil without creating a diversified bio-industrial economy. The company may survive while the region fails to transform. The question is therefore not merely whether PAMOL continues operating. The deeper question is whether Ndian becomes an owner of the palm economy built upon its land and labor.
A transformed PAMOL should support smallholder cooperatives and locally owned suppliers. Communities should receive equity participation and enforceable development benefits. Agricultural research should be expanded and connected to universities and technical institutes. Palm oil should feed domestic industries producing refined foods, detergents, cosmetics, animal feed, biomass energy, and specialized chemicals. The people of Ndian should not merely work in the value chain.
They should own part of it. Otherwise, the plantation will remain active while the doctrine of extraction survives.
Tiko and the Route From Plantation to Consumer
The banana economy around Tiko offers another example of incomplete commercial sovereignty.
Southern Cameroons produced bananas for international markets. But external commercial networks controlled much of the refrigerated shipping, insurance, overseas distribution, ripening, wholesaling, and retail access through which the fruit reached consumers. The territory carried the agricultural risk. The international trading system controlled the route to the market.
This arrangement created employment and connected Southern Cameroons to global commerce. Tiko developed as an important plantation, transportation, and commercial center. But producing a perishable commodity without controlling transportation, storage, branding, and final distribution leaves the producer vulnerable.
A future Tiko must therefore become more than a plantation outlet. It should develop cold storage, food processing, packaging, quality-control laboratories, logistics technology, agricultural-equipment fabrication, and locally owned export companies. Its transport infrastructure should serve manufacturers, farmers, and innovators throughout the national economy. The old system moved bananas outward. The new system must move technology, capital, and knowledge inward.
The Marketing Board and the Hidden Power Over Farmers
The Southern Cameroons Marketing Board represented an effort to exercise greater institutional control over cocoa, coffee, palm produce, and other agricultural exports.
Marketing boards can serve valuable purposes. They can protect farmers from extreme price fluctuations, build reserves, and use commodity earnings to finance research, storage, roads, and regional development.
They can also become instruments of extraction.
A government may purchase crops from farmers at artificially low prices, sell them at higher international prices, and conceal the surplus. Reserves accumulated in producing regions may be diverted to political projects elsewhere. Farmers may own the crop but remain excluded from the institutions that determine grading, pricing, export contracts, and the use of revenues.
The lesson is that national ownership of an institution does not automatically make it just.
The foreign merchant can be replaced by a domestic bureaucracy that extracts from the farmer in the name of the state. A future Ambazonian commodity system must therefore be transparent. Farmers and cooperatives should participate in governance. Price formulas should be public. Reserves should be independently audited. Commodity earnings should support infrastructure, research, and industrial processing in the regions that produce them. No government should treat farmers as a source of invisible taxation.
Colonialism Can Continue Under a New Flag
The most dangerous misunderstanding of colonialism is the belief that extraction ends automatically when foreign administrators leave.
It does not. A postcolonial government can inherit the same economic architecture and operate it for the benefit of a domestic elite.
Foreign governors may be replaced by national ministers while raw materials continue to leave unprocessed. Colonial concession agreements may be replaced by secret contracts signed by politically connected officials. External trading companies may be replaced by domestic intermediaries who collect commissions while technology, finance, and ownership remain abroad. The flag may change. The purpose of the economy may remain the same.
This is why Ambazonia must study the CDC and PAMOL as carefully as it studies Churchill. The threat does not come only from foreign powers. It also comes from Ambazonian leaders who may become local agents of extraction.
A corrupt government can sell land, timber, minerals, fisheries, data, and infrastructure while describing every transaction as development.
A politician may speak the language of sovereignty while signing away the economic foundations of sovereignty. Nationalism without transparency can become camouflage for elite capture. Ambazonia must therefore guard against both external extraction and internal betrayal.
From Extraction to National Value Retention
The answer is not isolation. Ambazonia will need international investment, markets, technology, and commercial partnerships. The answer is to negotiate from a national doctrine. That doctrine should be called the Doctrine of National Value Retention. Every major project involving land, agriculture, minerals, timber, energy, infrastructure, or data should leave Ambazonia more capable than it was before the investment arrived.
The country should retain value through domestic processing, taxation, skilled employment, citizen ownership, technology transfer, local procurement, and reinvestment.
Communities whose land sustains an enterprise should receive more than promises and temporary jobs. They should receive infrastructure, environmental protection, supplier opportunities, and a direct economic stake.
Strategic contracts must be published and subject to parliamentary, judicial, and independent financial scrutiny.
Long-term concessions should not be signed in secrecy by a small group of officials. The Republic should measure a project by what remains after investors have taken their legitimate return. What knowledge remains?
What industrial capacity remains? What infrastructure remains? What ownership remains? What environmental condition remains?What opportunity remains for the next generation? An investment that removes resources while leaving debt, pollution, and dependency is not development.
It is extraction with modern paperwork.
Britain Without Nostalgia or Hostility
Ambazonia should neither approach Britain with permanent hostility nor with sentimental dependence. Britain can become a valuable partner in education, law, finance, engineering, technology, and diplomacy. The common-law inheritance and the English language provide meaningful connections. But shared history does not guarantee shared strategic interests.
Churchill understood international politics through the interests of Britain. He defended empire because he believed it strengthened British power.
Ambazonia must learn the same strategic seriousness—not to build an empire, but to protect its own people. Historical familiarity should not be mistaken for obligation. A former administering power is not automatically a future protector. Moral language does not always determine foreign policy. Partnership must therefore be based on reciprocity, transparency, and measurable benefit. Britain should be engaged as a modern state pursuing its interests. Ambazonia must engage it as a people prepared to pursue theirs.
The Ambazonian Warning
The history of Churchill’s empire matters because it reveals that freedom can be defended selectively. A government may condemn domination in Europe while maintaining domination abroad. An empire may speak of progress while organizing extraction. A colonial authority may build roads while directing them toward the removal of resources. A company may provide jobs and clinics while preventing workers from becoming owners. A trust administration may promise political advancement without constructing complete economic sovereignty.
Ambazonia must understand these contradictions before designing its future.
It must not confuse foreign investment with development. It must not confuse exports with prosperity. It must not confuse employment with ownership. It must not confuse public ownership with competent management. And it must never confuse political independence with economic liberation. The deepest lesson of the CDC and PAMOL is that a people can work their own land, operate major institutions, and produce valuable commodities while the highest rewards continue to accumulate elsewhere.
The deepest lesson of Churchill is that powerful states pursue their own interests with discipline.
Ambazonia must learn to do the same. The future CDC must create industries, not simply crops. The future PAMOL must create owners, not merely workers. Tiko must become a center of processing, fabrication, and logistics, not merely a route through which commodities leave. Victoria must become a gateway through which investment, technology, and national capability enter as efficiently as resources depart. Ambazonia’s land must produce more than agricultural commodities. It must produce knowledge, enterprise, capital, and lasting national power. A people who fail to recognize the architecture of extraction may reproduce it beneath their own flag. A people who understand that architecture can dismantle it.
The choice facing Ambazonia is therefore not simply between colonial rule and political independence. It is between an economy organized for the prosperity of others and a Republic designed to retain the value created by its own people. Anything less would not complete liberation. It would merely localize extraction.
Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News
