The discursive formation of nationalism: A study of the Anglophone secessionist movements in Cameroon

This dissertation investigated the discursive construction of national identity amongst the Anglophone minority of Cameroon. More specifically, this work studied the linguistic strategies used by the leaders of the different political parties advocating the independence of the former British Southern Cameroons to construct Anglophone nationalism and advocate self-determination. To achieve this purpose, a total of fifteen (15) texts from three different genres, namely, letters, speeches and opinion articles were collected from the Internet and analyzed using the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak et al, 1999). Besides, this approach was combined with Corpus linguistic analysis so as to give a quantitative facet to the study. The analysis of the different texts under study revealed that the leaders of Southern Cameroonian nationalist parties articulate their identity construction discourse in two parts or topics, namely, the presentation of the Southern Cameroonian distinctiveness and the presentation of the independence fight as legitimate and legal. The presentation of distinctiveness of Southern Cameroons is achieved mainly by nomination and predication strategies, whereas the presentation of the independence fight as legitimate and legal is accomplished through sub-strategies such as quoting authorities, intertextuality, storytelling and topoi. These strategies were found to have been successful in bringing the Anglophone fight to the spotlight and in consolidating a sense of common heritage amongst Southern Cameroon