A Call for Clarity, Consistency, and Professional Publishing Standards
Jude Fokwang, PhD*
Introduction: A Recent Conundrum
One increasingly visible development in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon is the inconsistency with which personal names are written and presented. For many writers, scholars, and public figures, name order now appears almost arbitrary: some place the surname first, others begin with the given name, and still others alternate among several versions depending on the document or institution involved. An author may therefore appear in one publication as Fokwang Jude, in another as Jude Fokwang, and elsewhere as FOKWANG Jude.
This conundrum is comparatively recent. In the era of Southern Cameroons and later West Cameroon, public life reflected a relatively standardised practice: names were ordinarily presented in direct or natural order, with the given name preceding the surname. Prominent figures such as J. N. Foncha and P. M. Kale exemplified this pattern. Their initials represented their given names, while Foncha and Kale, their surnames, appeared at the end. The pattern was familiar, orderly, and broadly consistent with English-language administrative, literary, and publishing practice.
The dissolution of the federation, and with it the constitutional existence of West Cameroon, was followed by a growing francophonisation of public and cultural life in the territory now commonly called Anglophone Cameroon. Naming practices became one small but consequential site of this wider transformation. Francophone bureaucratic habits, including the routine foregrounding and capitalisation of the surname, increasingly shaped birth certificates, school records, national identity cards, passports, examination records, and other official documents.
What emerged was not a coherent replacement system but a disorderly mixture of practices. The surname might appear first on one document, last on another, or in the wrong field altogether. Because official records structure everyday life, this confusion gradually seeped into schools, workplaces, scholarship, publishing, conference programmes, websites, and social media. Many people began reproducing in public-facing contexts the same surname-first arrangement used by bureaucratic forms.
The focus of this article is narrower than the reform of Cameroon’s entire civil-registration system. It is addressed principally to authors and would-be authors, whose names are central to their public identity and intellectual legacy. It argues that Cameroonian authors should use direct order, given name followed by surname, on book covers, title pages, contributor notes, websites, and promotional materials. The surname should be inverted only where bibliographic organisation requires it.
Ultimately, this publishing question points towards a wider national conversation. Writers, publishers, librarians, educators, journalists, cultural institutions, and public authorities should work towards a clear naming convention that respects Cameroonian realities while remaining compatible with international publishing norms.
Naming Disorder and Its Human Consequences: A Personal Reflection
For me, this discussion is not merely academic. I have personally suffered from the confusion that inconsistent naming practices can create.
When I began my studies at Sacred Heart College, Mankon, Bamenda, my surname was removed from my school records. During my primary school years, my name had been recorded in the natural order found on my birth certificate, ending with my surname. Yet, upon entering secondary school, that surname disappeared from the official record without explanation. Consequently, I passed through an important stage of my education with an incomplete name. Only when I enrolled at the University of Buea did I fully regain my name.
The bureaucratic problem persisted when I applied for my first passport. My given names were entered in the surname field, while my surname was placed in the field reserved for given names. I endured this inversion and the resulting confusion for more than a decade, until the error was finally rectified in 2007.
This experience illustrates that naming disorder is not a harmless matter of presentation. Discrepancies among birth certificates, school records, university documents, identity cards, passports, and professional records can follow a person for years. They can complicate verification, travel, employment, authorship, citation, and the continuity of one’s public identity.
Authors have particular reason to take the matter seriously. A writer’s name is not merely an entry on an administrative form; it is the enduring identifier attached to books, ideas, reviews, citations, catalogues, contracts, royalties, and literary reputation. Confusion surrounding that identifier can fragment a body of work and weaken the continuity of an author’s legacy.
Natural Order Is How Authors Are Known
Most people are introduced, addressed, and remembered by their names in direct order. Readers recognise names such as Bernard N. Fonlon, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Bate Besong as the public identities of individual authors.
A book cover, title page, author biography, conference programme, or media interview is not a filing cabinet. Its purpose is not to alphabetise a person but to present the writer to readers. Direct order, therefore, serves the human and public function of the name. It allows the author’s identity to appear as it would ordinarily be spoken and used in prose.
The surname-first form has a legitimate but specialised role. It belongs primarily to contexts in which names must be alphabetised or sorted, such as bibliographies, indexes, catalogues, and databases. Treating this specialised form as the author’s public name allows a cataloguing convention to govern contexts for which it was never intended.
Bibliographic Systems Already Solve the Surname Problem
One of the strongest arguments for placing the surname first is the need to identify it correctly. Modern publishing practice already provides a simple solution: present the name naturally in reader-facing contexts and invert it in bibliographic contexts.
On a book cover, title page, or author biography, the name should appear as Bate Besong. In a bibliography, index, or library catalogue, it may appear as Besong, Bate or, where a citation style requires initials, Besong, B. The surname remains visible, searchable, and available for alphabetisation. No information is lost.
Authors, therefore, do not need to perform bibliographic inversion in their bylines. Editors, librarians, publishers, and citation systems can apply inversion when functionally necessary. This distinction offers both clarity and consistency: the direct form presents the person, while the inverted form organises the record.
The Chinese Example is Often Misunderstood
Chinese naming practice is sometimes invoked to defend surname-first presentation. In Chinese names such as Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, the family name traditionally precedes the given name. This is not a bibliographic inversion. It is the culturally established order of the name itself.
The Cameroonian situation is generally different. When a Cameroonian author writes Fuh Divine instead of Divine Fuh, the surname is often being moved forward to ensure administrative recognition, not because an indigenous naming system ordinarily requires the family name to precede the personal name.
That distinction is crucial. Chinese authors who retain the surname-first order are preserving a native naming convention. Cameroonian authors who adopt surname-first order may instead be reproducing a bureaucratic arrangement whose purpose was record-keeping. A cataloguing habit should not be mistaken for an ancient or universal cultural rule.
Is Surname-First More African? A Historical Perspective
A possible objection to this proposal is that the modern surname, and perhaps the direct order itself, are colonial inventions. This objection deserves serious consideration because African naming traditions should not be judged solely by European categories.
In many precolonial African societies, including communities in present-day Cameroon, people did not necessarily organise identity around a fixed hereditary surname in the modern bureaucratic sense. Many individuals bore a personal or given name and another name acquired through birth circumstances, kinship, initiation, or a naming ritual. In ordinary interaction, a person could be introduced by a personal name and then situated socially through a compound, lineage, clan, or extended family.
In my own case, I come from the Kungwe family in Bali, Cameroon. In a precolonial social context, I might have introduced myself simply as Ding-bob-ga (my middle name), a son of the Kungwe family. The important collective identifier would have been my lineage, commonly associated with the lineage head, rather than a fixed surname positioned mechanically before or after my given name.
This history complicates claims that surname-first presentation is inherently more African. The prominence of the surname as a mandatory and fixed administrative category owes much to colonial systems of registration, schooling, taxation, employment, and documentation. Such systems required people to fit into form fields labelled surname, first name, Christian name, or other names. Postcolonial bureaucracies inherited and extended these structures.
Recognising this history does not require us to reject surnames. Surnames now perform valuable functions in law, education, publishing, travel, and family continuity. The practical question is how they should be used. For authors, the best answer is to distinguish public presentation from alphabetical organisation. Direct order presents the author naturally; inversion enables bibliographic sorting.
International Publishing Standards Favour Direct Order
Publishing practice commonly distinguishes between the direct form and the inverted form of a personal name. The direct form is appropriate for book covers, title pages, contributor biographies, websites, publicity materials, conference programmes, interviews, and running prose. The inverted form is appropriate for bibliographies, reference lists, indexes, catalogues, and databases.
Thus, Dibussi Tande is the appropriate reader-facing form, while Tande, Dibussi is the corresponding bibliographic form. Primus Tazanu is the appropriate author presentation, while Tazanu, Primus is the form used when alphabetisation by surname is required.
The distinction is straightforward, functional, and internationally intelligible. It also removes the need for capitalisation devices such as ATANGA Lilian, which may identify the surname but produce an ungainly and bureaucratic appearance on a book cover or title page.
Direct Order Improves Global Visibility
Publishing is increasingly international. Authors and their works circulate through online booksellers, library catalogues, scholarly databases, websites, media reports, social networks, citation indexes, and digital archives. Consistency across these platforms strengthens discoverability and professional identity.
If the same author appears variously as Ngwane George, George Ngwane, and NGWANE George, readers and information systems may encounter unnecessary uncertainty about whether these forms identify one person. A stable direct-order form for public presentation, paired with a standard inverted form for bibliographic use, reduces that ambiguity.
For an author, consistency is a form of intellectual stewardship. The name on the cover should connect clearly to the name in the catalogue, the citation, the contract, the royalty statement, the author profile, and the broader record of publication.
A Recommendation for Cameroonian Authors
Cameroonian authors should adopt direct order in all reader-facing and public-facing contexts. This includes book covers, title pages, copyright pages where the author’s name appears in prose, contributor biographies, academic profiles, professional websites, publicity materials, interviews, and conference presentations.
Publishers, librarians, indexers, and citation systems should invert the name only where alphabetisation or metadata structure requires it. The author’s public identity remains Bate Besong; the bibliographic entry becomes Besong, Bate.
Authors should also select one stable professional form of their name and use it consistently across publications. Where initials, compound names, particles, or multiple family names are involved, authors should communicate clearly to publishers which element is the surname and how the name should be cited. This information belongs in publishing metadata, not necessarily in the visual arrangement of the byline.
Conclusion: From Naming Confusion to Cultural Clarity
By adopting direct order in publishing, Cameroonian authors would not be abandoning tradition or embracing a foreign practice at the expense of local identity. They would be restoring clarity where administrative confusion has taken root, distinguishing personal identity from bureaucratic classification, and reconnecting with a convention that once characterised much of public life in Southern Cameroons and West Cameroon.
The principle is simple: authors should be presented as people; bibliographies should organise names as data. Direct order serves the reader. Inverted order serves the catalogue. Both forms are useful, but each belongs in its proper context.
A national conversation about naming conventions is overdue. Publishing offers a practical starting point because authors rely on stable names to build recognisable bodies of work and lasting intellectual legacies. If writers, publishers, librarians, educators, and public institutions can establish a coherent convention, Cameroon will be better positioned to preserve personal identity while participating confidently in international literary and scholarly exchange.
Most importantly, future generations should encounter our names as they encounter us: as people first, and as catalogue entries only afterwards.
*Jude Fokwang is Executive Publisher at Spears Media Press
