Victor Julius Ngoh: The Historian Who Betrayed History

Prof. VICTOR Julius Ngoh

By Mankah Rosa Parks, Senior Investigative Correspondent

There are few things more disheartening in the life of a nation than the betrayal of its truth-tellers. And yet, in the case of Professor Victor Julius Ngoh, what should have been a legacy of scholarly integrity has become a cautionary tale of moral compromise and intellectual dishonesty.

For decades, Ngoh postured as a leading academic voice on the history of Cameroon. But over time, his work has revealed a disturbing pattern: the deliberate distortion of Southern Cameroons history to fit the political contours of the Biya regime. His utterances in televised debates and official publications show not only a lack of academic neutrality, but an active participation in the whitewashing of war crimes and systemic marginalization inflicted upon the people of Ambazonia.

Ngoh is no neutral historian. He is the court chronicler of a genocidal state.

His convenient omissions and revisionist narrative portray Southern Cameroons’ historic quest for self-determination as a post-colonial aberration, rather than the legal and political fact it is. He downplays the 1961 plebiscite, ignores the two-state federal structure betrayed by Yaoundé, and vilifies Ambazonian voices as misguided dissidents, rather than victims of a brutal occupation. His work reads less like academic scholarship and more like propaganda drafted for the Presidential palace.

What is particularly tragic is that Ngoh is himself a beneficiary of the very Anglo-Saxon education system he now ridicules. Like many francophone refugees who found opportunity in the British-administered Southern Cameroons, he rose through the ranks of free, merit-based schools—systems that never discriminated based on ethnicity or region. Today, he bites the very hand that fed him, dishonoring both the truth and the traditions of tolerance that built him.

But history is a patient judge. One day, when the archives are opened and justice finally speaks, Victor Ngoh will not be the one writing the script. He will be the subject of it—a tragic figure who traded truth for proximity to power.

And no number of honorary degrees or televised defenses will shield him from the verdict of a free people determined to reclaim their stolen narrative.

Mankah Rosa Parks