In-group Unity in Anglophone Cameroon's Separatist Discourse. Strategies and Means of Realization

The present paper is the result of a scientific venture into the discursive construction of separatism in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, which separatists refer to as Southern Cameroons or Ambazonia. My study aims specifically at identifying the linguistic and rhetorical strategies separatist leaders use in order to create a sense of unity amongst all English-speaking Cameroonians and make them join the fight for independence. To achieve this aim, I have analysed speeches authored between 2010 and 2015 by two Anglophone Cameroonian separatist leaders. The analysis of the speeches, which followed the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak et al. 2009), reveals that Southern Cameroonian nationalists try to achieve unity by resorting to strategies such as nomination, predication, and argumentation through topoi. These strategies were realised by means of linguistic resources including lexicon, imperatives, deontic and epistemic modals.