“Suffer Don Finish”, Counting the Cost of Multitparty Upheavals in Bamenda, Cameroon in the 1990s

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue VI, June 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

“Suffer Don Finish”, Counting the Cost of Multitparty Upheavals in Bamenda, Cameroon in the 1990s

Godwin Gham Nyinchiah
Department of History, University of Buea, Cameroon

Abstract: – The history and character of multiparty politics at the local level in Cameroon coincided with the evolution of things in the rest of Africa as affected by the Cold War politics. It took the debilitating effects of the World economic slump of the 1980s and the early 1990s to once more unleash a kind of venomous wave of radical change that blew across Africa with a very high velocity destroying existing conservative forces along its way. Therefore, 1990 marked a watershed in Cameroons’ political history as multiparty politics was re-introduced with the launching of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) or (suffer Don Finish) in Bamenda. Its launching saw the death of six Cameroonians, the militarization and the imposition of a dawn-to-dusk curfew in the town. This paper raises many questions, and sought potential answers as well. How did the people of Bamenda survive the dawn to dusk curfew imposed in the town? How did they feed themselves regularly? How did they go about their businesses in the presence of gun trotting-military men? How did they communicate? How, when and why were the troops eventually withdrawn? What are the long term consequences of these upheavals? Sources will be mostly gotten from ordinary people who were involved and implicated in the processes, newspapers and archives. On the whole, the paper is written from the perspective of the voiceless people.

Keywords: Suffer Don Finish, Multiparty, Counting, Cost, Upheavals and Bamenda.

I. INTRODUCTION

The re-introduction of multiparty politics in the 1990s following the ‘wind of change’ from Eastern Europe unleashed a venomous spate of conflicts which took on serious ethnic, regional and socio-economic and political dimensions in some African countries(Kah,2018). In many African Countries South of the Sahara, the leaders were reluctant to embrace multi-party politics when it was re-introduced in the 1990s. According to Bayart (2009:20), in Cameroon for instance, President Paul Biya reluctantly embraced multi-party politics only after much pressure at home and from the international community. The town of Bamenda played a momentous role in the struggle for political liberalisation in the 1990s, because it was the birth place of the first opposition party the Social Democratic Front (SDF) . As a result of this, Bamenda was regularly subjected to political violence and insecurity especially during periods of electoral consultations (Nyinchiah, 2016:42) largely because it was the fief of the main Opposition Party, Suffer Don Finish-the SDF.

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