Etoudi: These Rituals That Keep Paul Biya In Power

After the investigation published in the monthly letter The Letter of the Continent on the regular and repeated "working holiday" of Paul Biya in Switzerland in a presidential suite of the intercontinental hotel entitled "How Biya chairs Geneva, eleventh region of country »It becomes important to shed light and a correction on a play that seems too complacent about the madness of the greatness of an old negro, a person whose satisfaction of whims always comes naturally before the nation, and a tragedy which ordinary Cameroonians live in their flesh.

So let's focus on these empty rituals that are now associated with a state of Cameroon at the exclusive service of Paul Biya.

The good source of inspiration in this area is none other than Ferdinand Oyono's famous novel, Le Vieux Nègre and the Medal, which accurately and in depth depicts how the Cameroonian state has gone astray from the beginning and dramatically .

Etoudi: These RRituals That Keep Paul Biya In Power

This novel requires us to take a critical look and to have an uncompromising debate on the weight of the legacy of colonialism and the construction of a social environment that oppresses Cameroonians from the subsequent constitution of postcolonial regimes, intrinsically linked to the legacy of the experience of neo-colonial biopolitical plantation, and disguised as so-called modern or desired nation-states.

Indeed, a true perception of reality requires a dialectic between our own subjectivity and the social construction that surrounds us. The problem with Meka, the old negro, is that he interprets everything around him as "natural" (self-evident).
He does not understand the politics (the political system) behind the granting of a cheap medal by the colonial master. In this same process, he naturalizes the condescending attitude of the colonial master and considers as natural his own place of eternal subordinate in the colonial hierarchy. This is how colonization for Meka becomes "natural", just as the place it occupies in this arbitrary system.

Thus, he accepts as normal the creation around him of empty rituals.

As such, these empty rituals function as forms of ideological illusion that subject Meka to a kind of religion towards the state, through the talismanic power of the medal. In the same way, African leaders sold slaves in exchange for Pacotille and the cargo cult where African kings began to fetish cheap items from Europe and imbue them with talismanic power.

It is the Faustian market in which the African elite is committed to have access to modernity; access to modernity built mainly on the backs of African slaves and the ideology that everything that comes from Europe is supreme, devaluing automatically any form of local production.

The same thing can be said today where the African Elite who educates, cares for, and takes his holidays in Europe, never deign to do the same in Africa. Switzerland is also a good destination to hide money stolen from the continent, especially because of the strict rules protecting bank secrecy.

It is in this context that one can understand the empty rituals that Paul Biya (85 years and 35 years in power) created around his extended "working holidays" in a luxury hotel in Switzerland. These extended holidays are now part of the regal state of Cameroon, but are in fact empty rituals that cost a national fortune to Cameroonian taxpayers, while giving them or reminding the illusion of an overflowing activity and modernity for a fossilized and fundamentally unproductive political regime.