Africa’s forgotten war: As killings continue, the world closes its eyes on Cameroon

Mamfe Massacre

It was a peaceful night in Egbechaw village in Cameroon’s South West region. Martha* and her two children were fast asleep. Then, the deafening sound of a gunshot jolted them awake.

Gun blasts and explosions are familiar sounds in Cameroon’s English-speaking South West and North West regions, but the one on Monday November 6 was different. It was the sound of death knocking on their door.

“It was about 3am when we heard gunshots. We thought it was going to be normal gunshots that we hear often. But before I knew it, they had broken my door and were inside the house asking who is here, who is here,” Martha recalls.

Separatists wanting to break away and form a new nation have been fighting government troops in the two regions, but very often, unarmed civilians like Martha have found themselves in the throes of death.

“One of them told the one holding the gun to shoot and that if he does not want fire it he should pass the gun to him, but another one came from behind and held the gun and rather ordered that my children and I should leave immediately. That is how we escaped into the bush for safety,” Martha explained.

Matha’s husband wasn’t so lucky. He was shot on the head, the blood splashing on the floor.

When Martha and her kids came back from their hiding place, their home had been reduced to rubble.

“We saw lifeless bodies lying here and there, some with blood, some burnt…,” she said.

Besides the burden of raising the children as a single mom, Martha now has the additional responsibility of finding a new accommodation.

Government sources say at least 30 people were killed in what has become known as “the Egbechaw massacre.”

And there is no end in sight to the killings. Fourteen days after “the Egbekaw massacre”, separatists killed nine other people and wounded several others in a local market in Bamenyam, a town on the border between the North West and the French speaking West region. And so in just two reported attacks this month, nearly 40 people have been killed.

Five Cameroonian security forces, including the Eyummodjock Brigade Commander [in the South West] were killed in an attack by members of the Ambazonia Defense Forces (ADF) last week.

Security forces said separatists also raided a primary school in Ndu in the country’s North West region on Tuesday May 14, and abducted two teachers.

Separatists in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions have been fighting to secede from the rest of the country and create a new nation to be called Ambazonia.

It all started in 2016 when teachers and Lawyers in the two English-speaking regions took to the streets to protest against what they claimed was the ‘Francophonization’ of the Common Law and British-based education systems practiced in the two regions.

The government took a hardline, and what was initially a peaceful strike mutated into a political crisis. A separatist wing ensued and took up arms, demanding independence for Cameroon’s English speakers.

By 2022, the conflict had claimed the lives of at least 6,000 people and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes, according to the International Crisis Group. More than 70,000 others had sought refuge in Nigeria. The figures are definitely higher now.

But what happened in 2016 was the culmination of decades of what the country’s English speakers have always said were attempts by the French-speaking majority to marginalize and assimilate them.

Once a German colony, Cameroon was split between the victorious powers when Germany was defeated in the First World War. France got 80 percent of the territory and Britain got 20 percent. The two sides were thus administered separately until 1961 when the British Southern Cameroons voted in an UN-organized plebiscite to obtain independence by joining the French speaking part of the country that had already gotten its independence from France.

The two parties agreed on a federation of two co-equal states. But a controversial referendum in 1972 dismantled the federal structure, and English speakers have complained that the centralization of power was meant to foster an agenda of their assimilation.

The leader of the separatist movement, Sesseku Ayuk Tabe who is serving life in jail – along with nine other leaders – at the Kondengui Maximum Security Prison in Yaoundé told IDN that his incarceration won’t hold back the fight for independence.

“We are here because Cameroon wrongfully thinks that the unquenchable spirit of self-determination and self-realization of the people of Ambazonia can be silenced by violence,” he said.

The Cameroon government has dismissed the idea that Anglophones in Cameroon are being marginalized and far removed from the centers of power.

“The supposed feeling of marginalization by the people of the North-West and South-West Regions has often been advanced to justify this crisis. On this score, I wish to remind our compatriots in these regions, but also to those in the other eight regions of Cameroon, that marginalization, exclusion or stigmatization have never guided the work of the various governments I have formed since I became president of our country,” Biya said in an address to the nation on September 10, 2019.

The President insisted that “the corporate demands” by Anglophone lawyers and teachers have been exploited and distorted by “radical movements, mainly inspired from abroad.”

“They have thus hatched a secessionist plan to partition our country. In this regard, they have formed and financed armed groups that have caused untold harm to the population of the North-West and South-West Regions.”

The president has continued to call on separatists to drop their arms and join the National Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration centers, but has insisted that Cameroon will remain a “one and indivisible country.”

Even as the killings continue, the world has shut its eyes on the continuing massacres.