Social Cohesion, Diversity and National Integration
This domain checks whether you can distinguish diversity (a fact), multiculturalism (a policy of valuing it) and national integration (the process of building one nation from many communities), and whether you can apply the equality guarantees of the Constitution to discrimination scenarios.
The diversity tested
Cameroon has ten regions, two official languages and well over two hundred mother tongues, with Christian, Muslim and traditional religious communities, and minority groups such as the Bororo pastoralists and Baka hunter-gatherers.
Constitutional and institutional instruments
Article 1(3) of the Constitution provides that the State guarantees the promotion of bilingualism in French and English and protects national languages; Article 1 also guarantees equality of all citizens before the law. Integration is carried by the anthem and the motto Paix-Travail-Patrie, National Day on 20 May, Youth Day on 11 February, a national education system with common syllabuses and examinations, national sports teams, the army as a melting pot, and the National Commission for the Promotion of Bilingualism and Multiculturalism created in 2017.
Threats to cohesion
Tribalism and nepotism in appointments, regionalism, hate speech on social media and in some media, discrimination against minorities and against the English-speaking regions, religious extremism, farmer-herder land conflict, and the displacement caused by insecurity in the Far North and in the North West and South West Regions. The Cameroon Human Rights Commission (Law No. 2019/014) receives discrimination complaints.
Worked example
A head teacher punishes pupils for speaking a language other than an official language in the playground. Analysis: the Constitution protects national languages, so school rules may regulate but not stigmatise their use, and punishment based on a pupil's ethnicity is discriminatory. Remedies run from an internal administrative appeal and a complaint to the CNPBM to a petition to the Cameroon Human Rights Commission.
Traps
Reducing integration to assimilation: integration preserves diversity, assimilation erases it. Claiming Cameroon has only two languages. Confusing a region, which is an administrative unit, with an ethnic group. Explaining conflict by ethnicity alone while ignoring land pressure, inequality and weak governance.