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Cameroon Frees US Professor Held for Criticizing Government

by Associated Press

   YAOUNDE, CAMEROON --

   A New York literature professor held in the Central African nation of
   Cameroon since early this month after writing an article that
   criticized the government was released Wednesday, his lawyer said.
   Stony Brook University Professor Patrice Nganang was expelled from
   Cameroon and has been told not to return to the country where he was
   born, lawyer Emmanuel Simh said.
   Nganang, 37, who has dual citizenship in Cameroon and the United
   States, had faced a January 19 hearing after being detained December 7.
   The court in Yaounde early Wednesday announced he would be let go and
   that all charges against him were dropped.

   The charges included issuing a death threat; insulting constitutional
   bodies, specifically the military; and inciting violence in a Facebook
   post, according to the New York City-based Committee to Protect
   Journalists and other supporters.
   Nganang, an essayist and novelist, wrote an article for weekly news
   magazine Jeune Afrique that was critical of how Cameroon's government
   has handled a sometimes violent secessionist movement in some
   English-speaking areas of the country.
   The English-speaking minority in Cameroon has complained about
   discrimination by French speakers. Dozens have been arrested and killed
   in protests supporting independence for some Anglophone regions.
   Tensions have mounted since November 2016, when lawyers and teachers
   called for a strike to stop what they believe is the overuse of the
   French language. Violence erupted when separatists joined in and
   started asking for complete independence.
   Human rights groups, which have accused Cameroon authorities of trying
   to silence opposition voices, had urged Nganang's release.
   "We can only be very happy, when we have an unlawfully and arbitrarily
   detained client, to see him released," Simh said.
   Nganang's wife, Nyasha Bakare, told The Associated Press by email
   Wednesday that her husband had begun his trip back to the United States
   and would arrive in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
   "We are so very happy that this 21-day ordeal is over," Bakare wrote
   from Zimbabwe's capital of Harare, where she was with the couple's
   8-year-old daughter.
   Bakare has said Nganang was on his way to join them in Zimbabwe for the
   holidays when he was detained at the airport in Cameroon's capital,
   Yaounde. The family will reunite in New Jersey on Friday, she said.

   "As I write this from Zimbabwe, where I recently witnessed firsthand
   the fall of a dictator, Robert Mugabe, who was only two years longer in
   office than Cameroon's Paul Biya has been, I have to continue to hope
   that tyrannies in Africa will soon come to an end," Bakare wrote.
   Robert Harvey, a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University who
   helped lead a campaign to get Nganang released, said his colleague's
   supporters were overjoyed by the news.
   "It's just wonderful, we're all ecstatic," Harvey said. He described
   Nganang as a professor "who believes profoundly in the power of
   literature to improve us as human beings."
   Nganang has been teaching in the United States since 2000 and at Stony
   Brook University on eastern Long Island since 2007, according to
   Harvey. He is scheduled to work as a visiting professor at Princeton
   University in the spring. He has published scholarly essays, novels and
   books of poetry.
   Last week, a military appeals court in Cameroon acquitted and freed
   Ahmed Abba, a correspondent for Radio France International's Hausa
   service, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for not
   denouncing acts of terrorism and laundering proceeds of terrorist acts.
   Cameroon had also faced international pressure over his conviction.