This is no longer our cause

Photo: Stijn Swinnen

The incessant power outage in my neighbourhood in Buea was a serious cause for concern. Sometimes we spent entire nights in darkness, the sounds of crickets ringing in our ears. These were certainly not the best times to stay in darkness with no electricity. The heat was unbearable and we no longer had the luxury of the ceiling fans that rocked noisily from side to side as their blades swirled.

The heat was not our only concern in the neighbourhood. It wasn’t even our main worry. Our utmost concern was security. The Anglophone crises instilled fear in everyone. Fear of fighting. Fear of arrests. Fear of stray bullets. The darkness heightened our fears.

Power was restored on a Friday evening just in time for the evening news. It was as though they knew that we needed the news—to get updates on recent happenings. The television blinked lazily as though angry at being woken from its long slumber. I waited patiently for the familiar dull intro. News was the same. Arson attacks on homes and public schools in remote communities, kidnapping, rapes and deaths of innocent citizens, exchange of gunfire between government forces and Ambazonian fighters. Both camps blamed the other for all the atrocities and mayhem.

I shook my head in resignation. “This is no longer our cause,” I muttered underneath my breath.

Only a few days ago I met a friend in Limbe who had just returned from his village—one of the local communities in Eyumodjock sub-division of Southwest Region. He narrated his ordeal of having to flee the village after a hastily conducted funeral:

My village had come under siege--ransacked by government forces on the heels of Ambazonian fighters that ambushed a military patrol team and also kidnapped some village heads, or ‘notables’ as they are called. I trekked through bushes to Ekok, Cameroon’s border with eastern Nigeria where I stayed temporarily in one of the internally displaced person’s camp before sending an SOS to my family in Limbe. Prior to this time, government forces had embarked on peaceful patrols in the village and surrounding communities. They interacted well with the local people such that Ambazonian fighters became suspicious of the notables ‘selling out’. Innocent leaders were intimidated and whisked away to unknown places. Government forces soon swung into action, fighting fire with fire. Spurred by the government rhetoric to flush out ‘rag-tag’ fighters, the military descended on the people with brute overzealous force. As military force took hold, local civilians scampered for safety. Many died in ensuing stampedes, others hit by stray bullets. Some crossed the border into Nigeria. Others sought refuge in Ekok and in the forest, and days later, crossed into Nigeria as well. Thus began their lives as refugees.

I was deeply moved by his story. I feared for the safety and whereabouts of my aunty, Eyonmagha, who lived in one of the affected communities where she had moved after retirement from public service. Thankfully she established contact a few days later narrating how, with her granddaughter, she had to flee to Mamfe town after weeks in the forest and was now looking to come to Buea. Weeks later, she managed to make it to Buea along with her granddaughter and two other relatives. They were the lucky ones. Many others were still trapped in the village. Some relatives remained incommunicado and we could only hope that they had found their way to the refugee camps in Nigeria.

Aunty Eyonmagha’s stay in Buea increased my financial burden. Taking care of four adults who had no means of livelihood was slightly too much for my meagre teaching wage. My one-bedroom apartment was barely enough to accommodate all of us. No one had any privacy. Most nights, I slept on the couch leaving the bed for two of the ladies. At other times, mostly weekends, I spent the night with my friend, Ndive, who lived in Buea town. Ndive and I used to be course mates in Higher Teachers Training College and taught in the same school in our first posting. He had a small family bungalow with one spare room that he was happy for me to use from time to time.

The next few weeks seemed to pass in relative calm until my neighbourhood in Buea became a flashpoint for sporadic gunshots, especially at nights. Aunty Eyonmagha could not contain the terror and anxiety. Her blood pressure condition worsened with each day and we had to put her on medication—a luxury in our world of horror.              

***

The sporadic nighttime gunshots continued. We were starting to get used to it although we never let our guard down. I had already started regretting moving to Buea, my second transfer move within two years. I had barely spent a year teaching when I had been asked to transfer from Edea and become Senior Discipline Master in Buea. It was a promotion of some sorts that I couldn’t just turn down as it had the potential to open career paths. The same had happened to Ndive who, after only a brief time as Senior Discipline Master, had been rapidly promoted to Vice-Principal.

Ndive and I had moved from Kumba for our first posting. While I found myself in the remote part of Edea, he moved to Limbe and by sheer stroke of fate, we had both transferred to Buea. Our initial transfer from Kumba was, at the time, a bid by the government to muzzle and dislodge some key members of the Teacher’s Trade Union in 2016. As chapter executives, Ndive and I participated in negotiations with the government to address concerns of gross marginalisation raised by the teachers one of which was the imposition of teachers of French extraction, some with very limited knowledge of English, on English public schools.

The English lawyers who faced similar marginalisation in the legal profession soon joined our quest. We wanted fair representation, justice, and fairness. However, the government bluntly refused to heed our call and our cause gradually snowballed into a civil resistance starting with a general strike. In no time, we were juxtaposing our professional demands with demands for better welfare of the Anglophones. The people soon keyed in on our cause and gave us their full support.

But as our coalition grew, so did the dissenting voices. I was wary of a newly assembled ‘common front’ tagged the Consortium which coordinated our negotiations with the government. At a point, the few voices in the Consortium took charge leaving others, including pioneer members like us, dormant. But we cooperated, even when we thought the consortium had derailed by pushing for the Form of State agenda. They wanted a return to the pre-1972 system where the country was governed as a two-state federation—East and West Cameroon—with each federating unit having semi-political autonomy. The consortium argued that the Anglophones fared better under the old arrangement pointing to the creation of institutions like Cameroon Bank, Marketing Board, and Limbe seaports that were the catalyst for economic boom and prosperity in those days. This prosperity seemed to have vanished with the amalgamation of Cameroon.

Enticing as it sounded, I was not particularly convinced about this plan. Some of us warned against the Form of State Agenda but others argued that it would guarantee smooth functioning and co-existence of the bi-cultural systems in the country. We yielded to their arguments.

“I remember the good old days when we could boast of the undiluted support of our people in the cities and villages,” Ndive once said to me.

“That was because they saw themselves as part of our cause,” I replied. “Can’t say that is still the case”.

“It seems the consortium was our albatross,” he said.

I agreed with him. I never supported the Form of State Agenda. It was ill-timed and poorly planned.

*****

The Form of State Agenda did not make it through the negotiations. The government would simply not sanction it. There was nothing they could do, they said. And they had a good point. Any constitutional change would require debates and votes in parliament. It was not something the government could simply declare. But the consortium would have none of it. Led by some big wigs in the diaspora, the consortium started pushing for regime change, blaming the current sit-tight regime for most of the country’s problems. The locals soon bought this narrative and began to resist the government. They thronged the streets in violent protests and riots, defying police and military crackdown. Other non-violent tactics were soon adopted. One of them was the ghost town or contri-Sunday which involved all the locals staying at home in order to paralyse social and economic activities.

In no time, the narrative changed to one of secession. This new separatist agenda was driven by fierce propaganda and social media campaigns with the consortium even forming an interim government. The new goal was simple and non-negotiable: to create an independent state of Ambazonia. Our initial goals—fairness, welfare, inclusion—were now long forgotten. With these agitations came arrests, riots, and clashes with the police. Before we knew it, there was a full-blown crisis.

Ndive was of the opinion that compatriots in the diaspora had exploited the vacuum created by the government’s initial incarceration of consortium leaders to push the Form of State agenda. He also believed the arrests were a dumb move by the government. “Imagine imprisoning the same people you had been negotiating with,” he said. I agreed.

“If not for some form of divine providence we too would have been staring at the walls of the Yaoundé maximum prison,” I once teased.

“We earned our stripes too,” Ndive replied with a smile.

He was right. Our sudden transfers out of Kumba was to destabilise leaders of the movement. Even before the transfers, Ndive had been lucky to narrowly escape a police raid at his Kumba residence. Men of the GMI, a special unit of the police force, had been raiding homes of suspected leaders of the consortium. Ndive had gotten wind of the planned raid and fled town.

The consortium did not manage to get the change it wanted. Instead, the incumbent president won a re-election that guaranteed him another seven years at the helm. There was no newly independent state either, only loss of lives and property. The clashes continued and the crisis deepened.

***

The gunshots grew louder and louder. Aunty Eyonmagha’s health was getting worse. The two relatives that came with her decided to join internally displaced settlements in Bonaberi, Douala, as news filtered of material support from government and some local organisations. Other relatives that were trapped in the village had also found their way to Douala. I moved Aunty Eyonmagha and her granddaughter to Limbe so that she could continue her medication in a safer area. A relative of mine offered them accommodation in one of his small vacant apartments.

Limbe was relatively calm and safe except for intermittent but distant gunshots every now and again. I decided to rest awhile there whilst still keeping tabs with the situation in Buea. Ndiye had said he would be leaving for Yaoundé soon. He needed somewhere to cool his head until the situation improved. The irony forced my lips into a wry smile. Back in the day, Ndiye would never venture into Yaoundé. Like other Francophone cities, it was enemy territory. However, things were different now. Our towns were war zones. Most Anglophone elites, even the Diasporans, moved their relatives—those that were still in Cameroon of course—to Francophone cities. Those who could not afford to move themselves or their children got stuck in the crises, vulnerable and hopeless.

"How can you desire freedom and further intertwine yourself with your so-called enemy?" I asked, the sarcasm not lost in my voice.

"It’s a matter of perception," Ndive said.

"We fought the wrong cause,” I said. “The problem was with the system, not our Francophone brothers and sisters".

Ndiye did not say anything but I could see the defeat in his eyes. We had lost everything.

He tried to reassure me with a Bible verse: Weeping may endure through the night but joy comes in the morning.

I don’t know how close the morning is. What I do know is that, before it derailed, our cause was a worthy call for social justice. It was never supposed to turn into a bloodbath. It was never supposed to usher in a night of weeping.

About the author

Godwin Luba writes under the pen name ‘godycreative’. He lives in Limbe, Southwest Region of Cameroon. He is an entrepreneur, Bible teacher, writer, freelance journalist, and newspaper columnist. He started his literary journey years ago as a playwright, with some successfully staged plays. In 2017, he participated in the Cameroon/Nigeria literary exchange program by the Goethe Institut (Lagos-Yaoundé) in collaboration with Saraba and Bakwa magazines. His nonfiction pieces have been published in Limbe – Lagos anthology, and in Kalahari review.