When Harmonization Crosses the Red Line: Interrogating the Post-1972 Common Law Ethnocide in Anglophone Cameroon

By dint of their disparate colonial groomings, Anglophone Cameroon had common law as its legal system at the dawn of reunification in 1961 while Francophone Cameroon had civil law. Things would stay that way until 1972 when the government began sanctifying civil Law over common law through an asymmetric and assimilatory harmonization scheme. That was the beginning of the systematic erosion of common law in Anglophone Cameroon and the contemporaneous transposition of civil law to the territory. Anglophone common law practitioners manifested their revulsion to this harmonization travesty through multidimentional protests. One of such protests was their 2016 sit-in that morphed into an armed conflict. Using survey and participant observation as research instruments, Anglophone common law practitioners as the target population and stratified purposive sampling as the sampling technique, this study exemplifies common law ethnocide in Anglophone Cameroon. The key finding of the study is that the Cameroon harmonization scheme is skewed towards the attainment of civic nationalism and not law reform as it ought to be. Accordingly, the Cameroon harmonization scheme is flawed in its conception, defective in its methodology, imperialistic in its application and boundless in its scope. Above all, its assimilatory properties and propensities have occasioned an ethnocidal paradigm-shift in the legal system of Anglophone Cameroon from its pre-1972 common law status quo to its present-day civil law inclination. The major recommendation of this study is for government to give Anglophone Cameroon such autonomy as will allow it set up its own legislative assembly to legislate on private law matters. Without this, the erosion of common law in Anglophone Cameroon will continue.