Since 2016, Cameroon has been in the midst of what has become known as “the Anglophone crisis.” Building on posts published last week by Father Lado, (available here), and CIHA Blog Co-Editor and literary scholar Dr. Cilas Kemedjio (available here), this week Dr. Kemedjio further examines different aspects of the Cameroon “crisis”. Stay tuned for the final section of Dr. Kemedjio’s piece later this week and as always, feel free to share your comments below.
Undeclared War Comes to Bafoussam, At the Place Called Marché B.
By: Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester
In the city of Bafoussam, capital of the western region, there are two main markets. One is called Marché A, the other Marché B. I have never researched the names, but I know in other Cameroonian cities, this distinction arises again and again; the A Market is more “modern” and the B Market is dedicated more to local products. I was in a car with a friend in the city of Bafoussam, capital of the Western region of Cameroon. As we were making our way through the unending traffic jams that have come to be part of the identity of this city, I saw four or five military trucks full of soldiers, mostly young men. I thought that they were being transported to the military barracks located in the western suburbs of the city. My friend then uttered: “Candidats à la mort/bound to death.” I asked her to explain. She told me that they were being sent to the war zone to reinforce the security forces who are fighting the putative Republic of Ambazonia whose independence was declared on October 17, 2017. I don’t know why, but the sight of these military trucks frightened and traumatized me deeply. I knew that some of these soldiers were indeed candidates for death. I knew that some of these soldiers would also inflict death on combatants or innocent folks. I knew that death would be abundant, in a country that has so much work to do just to secure the basic levels of human dignity.
The day before, in the city of Dschang, I was told that the militia fighters invaded the village of Fongo-Tongo, located near the Anglophone region and near the city of Dschang, where I went to secondary school. One of my best friends is from Fongo-Tongo. We met in 7th grade in the government high school in Dschang. We have remained in touch throughout our lives. When I heard that war had spilled into his village, I was quite concerned. But when I met with him in his office in Yaoundé, I did not dare to ask him about the incursion of the militiamen. I was too scared to hear the bad news. Too scared to ask–that may be an old import from the past. A past that saw many anticolonial fighters butchered. Heads cut off. Their heads displayed publicly to intimidate and terrorize populations into submission. The current crisis borrows its language from that past. Media reports indicate that on September 11, 2018, an armed band believed to be part of the secessionist forces attacked the locality of Fongo-Ndeng, burning a school and warning residents that to leave the area. On June 26, 2018, a group claiming to represent the Ambozonia Republic (secessionist forces) mounted a raid against a police station in Babadjou. These developments are quite alarming because these attacks are taking place outside of the Anglophone region. Is this part of a well-thought strategic or are these random acts of thievery perpetrated by opportunists who are benefiting from the terror economy?
That past is the bloody repression of anticolonial fighters that culminated in the public execution of Ernest Ouandié and his comrades in Bafoussam in the 1971. Writer Werewere Liking has documented the horrible history of this oppression in the Bassa region of Cameroon. In her autobiographical novel (The Amputated Memory 2005), Liking writes about the “huge massacre [that took] the lives of a more than half hundred thousand Bassa and Bamileke men, women, and children. Entire villages were burned and pillaged, women were raped, entire populations deported and confined to what they called “relocation camps.” A former Chief of Staff of the Cameroon army went on national television to describe how his forces took part in beheading and displaying the heads of anti-colonial fighters. More than half a century after that fact, he lacked basic human compassion that one would expect when discussing traumatic and tragic events that inflicted pain on two of the major ethnic groups that make up Cameroon. In the 1990s, during popular claims against the one-party system, the Yaoundé government militarized the entire country through what was dubbed “commandants opérationnels/operational commands.” Army generals were put in charge of security forces in all the country. Extra-judicial executions became the norm. I was shocked when I met two well-to-do Cameroonians at a friend’s house in Paris. They were in full agreement with the extra-judicial killings because, they claimed, at least crime has gone down. In the Bepanda neighborhood of Douala, a woman accused nine young men or teenagers of having stolen a butane gas container. The military forces took them in custody. They were disappeared, and up to today, no one knows what happened to them. That was in 2001. We are in 2018. The government banned the only film (Une Affaire de nègres by Osvalde Lewat 2007) documenting their disappearance. The undeclared war happened to anti-colonialist fighters because the French colonizers and later their local protégés never declared war. It was either pacification or a security operation. The undeclared war happened to these young men. The war is happening now, and it is still undeclared. The security forces are protecting life and property, even at the expense of black lives.
Black Lives Do Not Matter: The Anglophone Question
In the stretch of the road where I saw the military trucks, we took about 45 minutes to travel less than half a mile. The road is the gateway to many destinations, including Douala, Bamenda, Dschang and more. Yet the road is in such a sorry state that it is not hard to get a sense of the frustration of the residents. This is the only road for people traveling from Yaoundé, Foumban to the West of the country. Yet this road–the only road in this city– has been left to this dreadful state. Even these candidates for death, on their way to death or redemption, endured these dreadful traffic jams. The worst part of the Bafoussam-Bamenda road may actually be the sorry state of the road. With the current crisis, unending police checkpoints and the random attacks by secessionist forces have made the road even more dangerous for the common traveller.
It was on this road that I understood the misery that Cameroonians go through every day. In Yaoundé, it is impossible to travel around the city. Roads are scarce and in bad shape. On top of this scarcity, residents have to deal with another hardship: visiting dignitaries. Whenever someone is visiting Yaoundé, the only good road that goes from the Nsimalen airport to downtown or the presidency is made unavailable. I was in Yaoundé when some grand master of a charitable organization—or some masonic lodge according to some–was visiting. It took us two hours to drive less than half a mile. I realized the high cost of humanitarianism that night. In Yaoundé, electricity is random. Some neighborhoods can go for weeks if not months without running water. The Minister of Health announced that there was a cholera outbreak in Yaoundé. He asked city dwellers to wash their hands. Running water is random at best. Trash is removed whenever the municipality deems it necessary. Cholera is a disease from another century, yet in Cameroon, it continues to strike, for example, in Maroua, the Northern part of the country inflicted by Boko Haram. The anthropological mutilation is the very fact of being a resident of Cameroon.
A video, circulating since July and apparently fake, shows a presumed militiaman eating human flesh. The Cameroon Interior Minister used it to denounce secessionists as cannibals. It turned out the viral video was from the shooting of a Nollywood movie. The fact that people were willing to believe such an atrocity, however, indicates the alarming anthropological mutilation that is tearing Cameroonian society apart. Another video showing apparent Cameroonian soldiers executing women and children also testifies to this indifference to basic human rights. After several denials, the spokesperson of the Cameroonian government finally issued a press release implicitly acknowledging that these cold-blooded murders were perpetrated by Cameroonian soldiers, who were eventually arrested. The treatment of presumed “secessionists” and “Boko Haram fanatics” derives from this inability of the Cameroonian security forces to conceive of the humanity of Africans.
The cover story of a July 6th edition of a local paper, The Guardian Post, reads: “African rights court petitioned over torture of Anglophone detainees. Urge to arm-twist Yaoundé to end mistreatment of those arrested in connection with Anglophone crisis.” In the same issue, the paper runs another story that reads: “The United Nations Children’s Fund has revealed that at least 425 people including 142 civilians have been killed in the North West and South West.” The crisis runs deeper: 58 schools have damaged (mostly burned down by presumed secessionists), causing 32,000 students to be out of school in the Anglophone regions. And there is more: 600 people have been arrested including unknown number of children, more than 20,000 people are seeking asylum in Nigeria and there are 160,000 internally displaced Cameroonians. Black Lives, I’m sorry to say, do not matter that much in Cameroon.
The government has responded to this socio-political crisis with an “Emergency Humanitarian Assistance Plan.” Realizing the growing divide between the Francophones and the Anglophones, this humanitarian plan may be construed as a gift made by the so-called francophone regions to their Anglophone counterparts. This plan is partly funded by donations from all the regions. I also presume that what the official media refers to as “development partners, friendly countries and international organizations,” will also contribute to the humanitarian undertaking. The plan targets “displaced people who are scattered all over, displaced people living with host families and refugees.” The plan intends to provide these victims of the conflict with “food aid, material of basic necessity such as blankets and mattresses, hygiene materials that include soap, towels, toilet tissue, tooth brushes and tooth paste.” The Military Engineering Corp will build houses. Distressed populations would receive help with the help in restarting their farms. Displaced school children will receive the necessary materials to go back to school.
This humanitarian assistance may signal a legitimate concern for the welfare of these distressed populations in need. However, we at the CIHA Blog are charged with critically investigating humanitarian interventions. This one launched by the Cameroonian government seems rather suspect. It seems restricted to buttressing the ruling party in power. At least, delegates who are raising funds are all from the ruling party. I do not know if members of opposition parties have been associated with the effort. The second suspicion arises from the fact that this humanitarian plan arrives in tandem with the coming presidential election. Its political undertones cannot be masked. Finally, I wonder why a government would have to become a humanitarian actor to be credible. Why not simply mobilize government funds in the name of national solidarity? Why not, in other words, govern responsibly? Garga Haman, a former cabinet minister and presidential candidate, denounced this humanitarian emergency plan as inadequate and insulting. He called for the State to face its responsibilities in assisting all Cameroonians by activating the existing networks of national solidarity afforded by the national budget. Haman, who was tasked with a listening tour early in the crisis by the Presidency of the Republic of Cameroon, also backed the initiative led by Cardinal Christian Tumi and other faith leaders (including imams and Presbyterians), to organize a conference to address the current crisis. Cameroonians have lost faith in their government. The moral authority of the interfaith leaders may present the best hope for bridging the gaps that divide the country.
Cameroonians Have Lost Faith
A friend who spent about two months investigating the crisis in the North and South West regions reminded me that the militiamen (maybe there are women, but I have no way to back this speculative feminism) are actually desperados. They graduated from public universities. They expected to get jobs that never came. They became “débrouillards” (hustlers). The crisis presented an opportunity for this generation that literally has nothing to lose. According to the government, these desperados are carrying out attacks against the Cameroonian army and police. They are burning down schools, kidnapping government officials and ordinary citizens, seeking ransoms. No one knows if these kidnapping are simply egregious crimes or if they are part of a well-planned strategy. A priest was killed recently. A former leader of the Anglophone Lawyers Association, a group that jumpstarted protests in October 2016, denounced the violence. His family’s house was subsequently burned down. The desperados seem to have provided the government with just the excuse they were looking for to militarize the Anglophone regions.
Instead of caring for the lives of the living people of Cameroon, the government has resorted to slogans to keep the country together. A commission on Bilingualism and Multiculturalism has been set up. Apparently, this commission is charged, among other mandates, with finding new ways to make “Anglophones” feel at home in the Republic of Cameroon. Patriotism, or at least its propaganda version, has found a new lifeline in Cameroon. On Cameroonian television, slogans calling on citizens to be more patriotic are a clear sign of the government’s attempt to fight against the secessionists. A few more cabinet ministers of “Anglophone” background have been appointed. This routinized political bricolage testifies, more than anything else, to the lack of imagination that has been the hallmark of the Cameroonian government for more than twenty years. The gerontocracy that rules Cameroon is out of touch with the youthful population, the huge majority of the country. Besides the youth, parents and grandparents are desperate given the apparent signs of the decline affecting the country. But I believe that the unifying thread that holds the country together is a resounding lack of faith in the government. Cameroonians have lost faith in themselves as political actors or actresses. Cameroonians have lost faith in their government. Cameroonians have lost faith in their country. Cameroonians do not believe that tomorrow may bring good news. And that’s the scariest part that may spell disaster, even more than the current convulsions coming from the Anglophone regions, Boko Haram in the North, the spillover of the chronic instability in the Central African Republic, the armed bandits wreaking havoc in the Bakassi region. A desperate citizenry that has lost faith and hope is the very definition of existential insecurity.