> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Cameroon's Facebook Republic: Online Discourse Turns Scathing and Caustic. - URL: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/cameroons-facebook-republic-online-discourse-turns-scathing-and-caustic/ - Published: 2026-09-08T15:36:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-08T15:36:25.000Z - Description: How, can Cameroonians accuse their government of stifling dissent and squelching democratic space, while they themselves reduce online discourse to slander and abusive exchanges the moment they disagree? - Author: Ankiambom Nkesa Nkesa - Tags: Opinion Quietly observing the Cameroonian digital space over the last two weeks has left me reflecting on why the art of rhetoric in our country is so classless and so empty of restraint. I hold no brief for either camp trading blows on Cameroonian social media (Facebook) in the last two weeks, and I have no patience for murder in any of its forms, femicide included, however it gets framed or by whom. What I do have patience for, and what I think we have lost as a people, is the decorum with which we are supposed to argue. Read [Plato's Republic](https://share.google/p2CBCxZPatgrK0sHb?ref=bontehmagazine.com), or any of the dialogues in which Socrates takes on an opponent, and what strikes you is not merely the conclusion he arrives at but the manner of his arrival. His reasoning was never disparaging. It was intellectually humbling. **Socrates** dismantled his interlocutors with fact and with intellect, never once descending into a tirade. That discipline eventually cost him his life. [He was accused of subverting the traditional religion of Athens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial%5Fof%5FSocrates?ref=bontehmagazine.com), a charge that ranked among the gravest in the Greek world and amounted to treachery. Such accusations, history reminds us, were the favoured weapon of the uneducated and the unintellectual against men like Socrates, whose only offence was thinking too clearly for their comfort. Contrast that with what now passes for debate on our timelines. Jabs thrown, labels slapped, name calling, filth hurled in place of argument. Denigrating and deprecating language deployed not to persuade but to wound. Why, in a country so proud of its intellectual heritage, have invectives and expletives become the currency of online discourse? I would implore every Cameroonian who takes part in these 'debates' to peruse **Aristotle's** classic work titled [***The Art of Rhetoric***](https://share.google/FzSgQZSFFAQgSalKw?ref=bontehmagazine.com). It teaches something our public square apparently lacks, that you can defeat an opponent with class, that you can win an argument without ever throwing filth back at someone who has thrown it at you first. Which brings me to the question that prompted this piece. Why does a conversation meant to produce solutions keep collapsing into factions and cliques? Delly Singah has been under sustained attack for more than a week now, her offense being that she refused to treat the [recent killing of women in Cameroon](https://www.bontehmagazine.com/201-women-in-three-years-inside-cameroons-femicide-crisis/) as simple femicide, choosing instead to interrogate the ways in which women themselves may be contributing to the conditions that enable it. That position drew the internet warriors of the opposing camp out in force, and what began as a discussion of a genuine social ill degenerated into personal attacks and vendettas. Delly Singah is an erudite woman. Does she not understand that intellectual prowess demands decorum even under provocation, that logic alone should be the weapon with which she dispatches her opponents, the way Socrates once did? [She argues in her defense that she has endured bullying before while always maintaining her composure](https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1T1UFjJhNJ/) and has now simply decided to serve her critics their own medicine. That is a tenable justification as far as personal grievance goes. But what becomes of productive discourse when everyone reasons this way? A state that practices democracy practices dialogue. Dialogue is the space where ideas are refined into the policies and laws that shape a nation. How, then, can Cameroonians accuse their government of stifling dissent and squelching democratic space, while they themselves reduce public discourse to slander and abusive exchanges the moment they disagree? There is a great deal of work left for us to do on ourselves if we are to move this nation toward the state we claim to want for it. I am not dismissing the real hurt that comes with being bullied online, nor asking anyone to absorb cruelty in silence. I am only saying that anyone who joins the fray of public opinion must be prepared for its heat and prepared to answer it with something better than what was thrown at them. Otherwise, we may conclude that Cameroon, as a republic, does not extend the principles of public discourse to its online spaces and, by syllogistic reasoning, does not truly practice public discourse.