Les années Biya : chronique du naufrage de la nation camerounaise
Éditions Schabel, Yaoundé, 2025
To drown one’s dog, rabies is generally the pretext invoked. This adage is borne out in Haman Mana’s accusatory text, self-published by Maison Schabel in Yaoundé. Six hundred eighty-five fervid pages painted with vitriol, ecstatic descriptions suffused with lyrical ardor, all to testify—as the title states—that Paul Biya, President of the Republic of Cameroon, has caused his nation to sink. The chronicle of this “calamitous reign,” written in a brisk style imbued with journalistic zeal for events, consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, and a dreamlike epilogue—each carrying the intention the author assigns to them. He does not shy away from stating it plainly: he wants to provoke strong feelings.
The opening pages introduce us to the indictment. The author leads his reader through a biographical stroll covering forty-three years exhumed from unpleasant dustbins, each of which, for him, indeed was such. Over time these years did not become a half-full glass of mixed results, but rather the empty one of there-being-nothing; a kind of black hole of an abyss of emptiness predestined, revealed with the advent of the event-like figure, in the symbolic burden of the unfathomable interrogation of what came before. This is how Haman Mana begins those years:
What was there before? Not much, however: just two beings chosen by a historical deus ex machina to preside over the destinies of a country they ended up ruining. One is Ahmadou Ahidjo; the other, Paul Biya.
The portrait of the first, sketched in terse strokes, is quickly dismissed: uninteresting—dubious origins, rudimentary education, despotic reign. The information is gathered from slanted readings that he did not bother to critique. His nearly quarter-century at the nation’s helm is swiftly surveyed. Only the immense and sumptuous palace he bequeaths to his successor Biya remains afloat in this account. Biya himself emerges as a superimposed shadow, appearing in a spectral saga, the watermark of a stench of Machiavellian intentions that inaugurate this affair…
Yet Haman Mana presents the king of the damned whom he drags out of the shadows under alluring auspices. His “before” moment, radiant, is the time when “the monster” was the hardworking senior official who climbed the ranks in impressive discretion. Having risen to the forefront, he occupied the stage—and distorted it. In fact, in the terrifying transformation of Dr. Jekyll into monstrous Hyde, he mystified it by a symbiotic mutation that began in a bloodbath in which he literally wrested power from the one who had “given” it to him not long before.
This explains, moreover, the image on the cover: an enigmatic man with eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his clothing stained with blood. It conceals the vengeful intention of denouncing a genealogical injustice. It is little known that Haman Mana is the natural son of an officer from the geographic “North,” from which most of those who conspired in those years against the institutions came. He experienced them intimately as his own. This identification speaks volumes, prompting him to take their side.
With hands stained by the blood that Mana wants to exonerate, President Biya begins his reign, starting in the third of the thirteen chapters. The first three years pass consolidating a tyrannical rule. The narrative, rich in descriptions, is keen on interpretation. The coup attempt (a crime of exceptional gravity everywhere) becomes here not sedition or an effort to overthrow institutions that everyone would see, but a persecution ringed with unjust judgments and summary executions. These are followed by measures intended to “sanitize” political life. Although, in passing, Mana admits the hope they aroused, he nonetheless depicts them as a “backlash”—a “new ideological makeshift” constitutive of an overarching reshuffle that plunges the nation under the prism of a security-focused existence.
Mana, however, starts from the facts. All countries—especially the younger ones—give direction to the growth of their nation. Cameroon experienced a troubled transition. It required readjustments, which he undertook tentatively. The casting of mechanisms and sidelining of certain actors were not always the happiest choices. Mercilessly, these fumblings are criminalized: they must surely hide bad intentions. When the economic crisis that had been affecting the world since the 1973 oil crisis looms on the horizon, a white-collar delinquency takes advantage. It is labeled “state banditry.” The narrative, having set aside exogenous causes of the crisis and magnified internal ones, naturally arrives at its own interpretation of the economic decay that sets in.
Haman Mana does not know—or refuses to know—that the Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain were collapsing under the blows struck by the Western bloc. Nor that, since 1973, the world had been under economic strain to which Cameroon, before yielding, had resisted considerably. The opposition long contained by the previous regime seized this febrile context to begin to assert itself. Mana elevates his quixotic heroism—but it is merely Africa’s natural reaction to an evolving international conjuncture, no more than the rush of new, unprepared, messy opponents.
But they are there. Haman Mana can give them meaning: erase their mistakes, magnify their ideas, denounce how they are repressed. He plunges headlong into the Manichean universe of his book where the villain is entirely on one side, and the good entirely on the other. Haman Mana is not only chronicler at this stage: he is also an actor, since he too was arrested and imprisoned for ideas. The trials and rejection he endured then have never left him. The partisan nature of his narrative returns, with a bias mixing all kinds of motivations of a passionate existence.
Chapter Four presents the interpretation of the economic crisis as a gigantic operation of banditry. Under his pen, the State becomes the empire of shady cronies predestined to be such: hooded waifs advancing at dusk, in a crepuscular languor; a perverted republic, hobbling in a chiaroscuro that has cast aside kindness and virtue. Within all its undertakings—political, social, economic—there is only evil. It will sink—as one must have feared—into terrible decay: economic recession, currency devaluation, social pauperization. It leaves the purgatory in which it wandered for hell.
This hell, entirely stirred by the whirlwind of the east wind, appears in Chapter Five. The sauce is spiced with scandalous affairs. Some are even palatable: like the “Italian summer” of the national football team’s haphazard performance at the World Cup. Its panem et circenses delighted the impoverished masses. Yet it remains an affair riddled with other affairs within—the punctilious management permeating the entire chapter. Scandals abound. They are ever-present: repressive measures against individuals who dare to contest, against the press, against universities, against the opposition, against the population. Starving masses rush to assault a power stricken by blindness, striking blindly: a cataclysmic depiction of a battle in which the tyrannical brood concedes on details but saves the essential: itself, power.
Then comes the turning point of the democratic ordeal: pluralistic elections. Haman Mana grudgingly concedes that the regime opened to plurality and challenged its opposition to defeat it at the polls. He fiercely resisted any other shortcut the opposition might seek—even though Mana refuses to admit that they sought any. The narrative becomes a textbook example of alternative truth, laden with suspect “analyses”—intellectual saltpetering to impose a wholly unreal universe. There cannot be a single villain in a zero-sum game that produced a winner and losers.
What can ballots be in conditions where everyone is learning as they go; where all suspicion weighs; where votes are cast amid all manner of mistrust? The Manichean universe of the work remains constant. The regime succeeded in ensnaring the opposition: bribing it, dividing it, turning it, sidelining the “people.” One is stunned to read that practically no one voted for it, yet it won—and gradually, opposition leaders were forgotten.
The stage of democratization as seen and described by Haman Mana in the previous chapter—the sixth and longest—leads to the seventh. The democratic era of Biya’s world, from Mana’s perspective, is the reign of the devil himself and his demons. He sums it up in a pithy phrase: the “journey to the land where corruption goes in and out everywhere.” The stroll aims to explain the country’s wealth and its inhabitants’ poverty. Mana becomes didactic: corruption was only admitted because exposed from outside. The regime had no merit in trying to combat it with operations like Épervier (“Sparrowhawk”). Moreover, these very operations were already tainted by corruption. We enter a Kafkaesque world of a country where everyone seems corrupt and only its leader is held responsible. Scandals are everywhere, curiously ones that Mana mentions because they are subject to denunciation and legal proceedings. He does not relent: he needs a culprit—and he has already convinced himself: the culprit is Biya.
Chapter Eight brings an additional scourge: war. It is rather surprising that, in a world in decay, populations governed by such a monster remained peaceful. The war is initially not actual but, on observation, first a bid by a powerful western neighbor, Nigeria, to annex part of the territory. Then, owing to Sahelian disorder—galvanized by Western interference in Libya and the opening of its arsenal to all winds—the war installs itself on the northern flank, disrupting the lives of populations and economic or tourism potential. As if that were not enough, it affects the Central African neighbor and literally transmits its damages into the country. Finally comes the last of the wars: the attempt at secession of the Anglophone regions.
On all these fronts, Haman Mana has but one culprit: Paul Biya. Either he could not anticipate, or he mismanaged. Even if he had handled it in the most exemplary manner on earth, as Biya did with Bakassi when it was returned to him, Haman Mana accuses him of nonchalance. The troops working to secure these fronts are poorly led, poorly paid, overexposed. The Anglophone conflict is worst of all: he caused it by a disastrous policy, maintained it by repressive behavior, and still refuses to resolve it. Paul Biya is guilty. It was clearly said: we are in hell. Paul Biya is the devil.
Chapter Nine describes a gulag, attempting to show the passage from a “pacified democracy”—of which the text’s description does not let us know whether it ever existed—to an “assumed dictatorship.” This chilling episode seeks to display the shackles that this dictatorship is made of: deaths in demonstrations, hunger, repression, the resurgence of “old demons,” incarcerations, torture, humiliation: the entire incendiary vocabulary of a totalitarianism that exists only in few places on Earth. Even there, they are rarely so expressive. The Cameroon that Haman Mana attributes to Paul Biya is a striking literary construct drawn either from a settling of scores or from projecting onto a figure he apparently dislikes for reasons we do not know.
Chapter Ten is devoted to the “state lie.” To a hellish architecture, one needs a devil who, as a good devil must be, is the father of lies. The journalist pursues every falsehood: from the “inaugural lie” to the “final lie,” leading us through the most sordid chain of duplicity human thought could invent. From whatever height, prism, perspective one contemplates the Biya regime, for Haman Mana it is nothing but lies: a twisted State (“Bend State” [sic]) that lies everywhere. About everything: costs, projects, strategies, structures, bodies, law, appearance, reality, who is who, who does what. Nothing is what it seems; it is a harlequin ball where one goes only masked as a rogue.
Chapter Eleven is the mirror effect that such a dismembered structure manages to produce: the disjointed prism of a de-structured society whose youth have learned to hate. Or at least not to love. This is perhaps, of all the chapters in his text, the only one in which Haman Mana makes some effort at honesty. In an attempt at self-introspection, he presents de-structured beings who, for the most part, are who he is: nationals who have chosen exile from their country that they have learned to detest. And since to hate one needs a reason, it is the father one chooses not to love. This father is called Paul Biya. He is the reason why all have gone into exile. He built vice and poverty.
Chapter Twelve is even more malevolent. Paul Biya, according to Haman Mana, had already done all the evil one can imagine in Cameroon. He added more. He scattered time bombs: lands that his protégés seized, walled up in the citadels of wicked laws that he promulgated in their favor; precarious petty trades he tolerated; foreign small traders flooding in and threatening demography and identity; so many other time bombs.
All this leads to the final chapter and a Potemkin republic: a papier-mâché scaffold intended to give the illusion over which he reigned and against which pretenders rush. Haman Mana finally envisions the evening of a disastrous reign that has lasted too long and which, by all his wishes, must absolutely fall. This death knell he desires stands as an epilogue and closes an aggressive literature and a morbid description. We have read it. One cannot help but make certain observations and raise some questions.
The first observation from this reading lies in the author’s engaged character, which interrogates the man and his journey. He has sketched someone else’s biography. What of his own? It must hinge on little: his acquaintances. They appear subliminally in the book, in a description where the “good” are also his and come from precise geographic areas. They are either from the North (the region of his father’s origin) or from the West (that of his mother’s). The work thus fits into a sort of genealogical fiction in which, subliminally, the geographic area of the devil Biya—and his demons—will constitute evil. The text thus appears as an element of a tribal construct that has not only poisoned political debate but has also, in Cameroon, corrupted all social debate.
The second observation concerns the surreal nature of the depiction, which offers a sharp contrast to all other portrayals of the same figure. The work is published in Yaoundé where this “assumed dictator” reigns. It is sold there in full freedom. Haman Mana made a career there. Although he claims to have been arrested, it was never for his ideas but for specific actions reproached to him. The judge-and-parties dimension of the text thus robs it of all credibility. Paul Biya, the accused of the novel (for it is one), ultimately has for his defense the very object of his accusation: his duration. He confirms sociologist Émile Durkheim’s assertion that: “It is… an essential postulate of sociology that no human institution could rest upon error and falsehood: otherwise it could not have lasted. If it were not founded in the nature of things, it would have met resistances in the things which it could not have overcome” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Paris, pocket edition 1991, p. 40).
Haman Mana’s portrayal is nothing but “the things” the Biya regime faced, confronted, and traversed. By such an unflattering description, Mana pushes readers to look around, both from outside and inside, at other opinions about the figure. Paul Biya, after all, is a public man whom many have known and who governs a country enjoying a certain reputation. It is neither the portrait they hold nor the idea they form. They may agree with Mana on the longevity, but they will hardly ascribe the same reasons to it. Hence the conclusion: Mana’s text is a model of unbalanced literature that calls for introspection. Why so much passion?
Ultimately, that is the main question this text raises. Who would take the trouble to produce such a lengthy, deep-honed hateful literature just to soil, criticize, denounce, fulminate, accuse, slander? Who possesses such piercing vision to notice what no one saw of the man across all those years and such a long reign? Who else but Haman Mana—and those like him who think as he does, having lived under or alongside this reign—would have had this interpretation? One almost comes to pity the subject of the pamphlet, for one cannot help but wonder: in this ocean of faults, does this man ultimately have no qualities? In this abyss of wrongdoing, is there not at least one thing of which this regime could be proud? Who is this being so bad, wicked, and perverse that not a trace of good remains? That is probably the gravest fault of the entire work: its exaggerated character. One can at least welcome the journey through Cameroonian history that emerges from the facts exposed, even if they are misinterpreted. That would at least be the silver lining one can find in this text…
Édouard Bokagné
Historian
