Barrister Henry N. A. Enonchong, PhD

Founder (1934 to 2008)

Henry Ndifor Abinjong Enonchong founded these chambers in 1970, after a decade in academic law and public service. He wrote the first treatise on Cameroonian constitutional law and was among the founders of the Cameroon Bar Association.

Early years

He was born at Besongabang, in Manyu Division, on 22 March 1934. He attended the Basel Mission School at Besongabang and entered Bali College in 1949. Financial hardship forced him to leave school in Form Three, the equivalent of ninth grade. He prepared for the Senior Cambridge School Certificate examination on his own and passed it in 1954.

He worked first as a clerk with the Cameroon Development Corporation and taught in an elementary school at Bota, in what is now Limbe. He then trained at the College of Hygiene and Sanitation at Aba, in Nigeria, qualified as a sanitary officer, and served at Port Harcourt, Victoria, Buea and Tiko. During those postings he began studying law by correspondence with the University of London.

Legal education

He sailed for England in 1960 and earned his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of London in 1962. He was called to the English Bar at Gray's Inn. He returned to Cameroon in 1963, joined the Legal Department at Buea, and served as Director of Cabinet (chief of staff) to the Deputy Minister of Justice.

He left again for the United States, where he earned a Master of Laws (LLM) at Howard University in Washington in 1965 and a Doctor of Comparative Jurisprudence degree at Georgetown University in 1967.

The academy and the Bar

He returned to Cameroon in 1967, joined the law faculty of the Federal University of Yaounde as Assistant Professor of Law, and was admitted to the West Cameroon private bar. He was Solicitor and Advocate of the West Cameroon Supreme Court and of the Federal Court of Justice. He was among the founders of the Federal Cameroon Bar Association and of its successor, the Cameroon Bar Association.

In 1970 he resigned his university post and established Enonchong Chambers. The firm handled the full range of litigation and advisory work, and it trained attorneys who went on to build practices of their own.

Published work

His writing set out the constitutional framework of a country governing itself under two inherited legal traditions at once, a subject on which almost nothing had been published when he took it up.

• Cameroon Constitutional Law: Federalism in a Mixed Common-Law and Civil-Law System. Yaounde: Centre d'Edition et de Production de Manuels et d'Auxiliaires de l'Enseignement, 1967. 313 pp. Held by the Library of Congress and cited in the New York University GlobaLex guide to researching Cameroonian law.
• “Yaounde”, chapter 14 in Donald C. Rowat (ed.), The Government of Federal Capitals. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973, pp. 271 to 283.
• “The Position of Cameroon State in Litigation”, Abbia No. 11, 1965.

Education and community

In 1974 he founded Enonchong Memorial College at Besongabang, a commercial secondary school for the children of poor families, and set up a scholarship program that supported students for many years. He was also an agro-industrial entrepreneur, and the father of fourteen children.

He died on 26 June 2008.