Cameroon’s official bilingualism, enshrined in the constitutions of 1961 and 1996, formally promises parity between English and French and, by extension, between Anglophone and Francophone citizens. However, the lived reality of many Anglophone Cameroonians is marked by administrative marginalisation, linguistic discrimination and a persistent sense of non-belonging. Drawing on a corpus of 132,287 words comprising the complete texts of Nkemngong’s Across the Mongolo and Alobwed’Epie’s The Death Certificate, this study integrates Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model with van Dijk’s (2009) socio-cognitive approach to examine three categories of discursive phenomena: asymmetrical lexical labelling, derogatory naming practices and metaphors of belonging and exclusion. The findings indicate a clear asymmetry in identity representation. In Across the Mongolo, “Anglophone” occurs 39 times, while “Francophone” appears 10 times. In The Death Certificate, “Anglophone” is absent, replaced by a provincial binary in which the “First Province” encodes belonging as a form of tribal entitlement. Derogatory forms such as “Anglo”, “Anglobete” and “vieux babouin” construct Anglophone subjects as socially and cognitively diminished. At the same time, metaphors such as the River Mongolo, figured as “manacles and shackles around the necks of slaves” and the umbilical cord as a marker of biological rootedness, present Anglophone belonging as both affirmed and negated within the postcolonial state. The study concludes that these novels function as counter-discourses that expose an ideological construct. They further suggest that Anglophone identity is not only marginalised within state discourse but positioned as structurally expendable, raising broader questions about recognition and political existence in the postcolonial Cameroonian state.