Cameroon Professors Publish: A Reply To Nwanatifunwaco’S ‘Cameroon: Professors Without Publications’

This paper is a rebuttal to NwanatifuNwaco’s blog post captioned “Cameroon: Professors without Publications’’ (at https://chiefnwaco.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/professors-without-publications/, retrieved on 29 November 2014). Nwaco purports that Cameroon academics—university intellectuals (researchers, scholars or professors and research students)—largely do not produce and/or publish scholarly works such as research papers, book chapters, and monographs. His claims are principally based on the unavailability of titles and abstracts by Cameroon professors in his Google searches. He also alludes—rightly and/or wrongly—to the partisan politics that compels many an intellectual in Cameroon to focus on political assignments at the expense of research and to strive at publishing regime-tilted works. In spite of the fact that his assertions acknowledge some unnamed exceptions, we find them largely faulty and unfounded. Consequently, this paper embarks on a mission of refuting his allegations and proving that Cameroonian university intellectuals—both learned professors and their mentees (like the case of this present author)—do publish scholarly works in national and international channels. With evidence from the CVs of some Cameroon professors randomly culled from Internet sources, with reference to some national journals and annals managed in Cameroon, with reference to some randomly selected papers by Cameroonian intellectuals obtained via Google Scholar, Academia.edu, Researchgate and Selectedworks, and with citations from diverse academic publications, the present paper attempts to somewhat neutralise Nwaco’s assertions. In order to balance our arguments, the paper also identifies weaknesses in academic publishing in Cameroon and proposes strategies to remedy the situation. Key words: Academic Publishing, Cameroon, Scholarly Publishing Challenges in Cameroon, Cameroonian Academics Publish, Scholarship in Cameroon/Africa Policy