Annabelle Werner’s article is additionally featured in The Generation’s Spring 2022 Digital Print Edition: Women. Coming June 2022.
While the Anglophone Crisis rarely surfaces in the international news cycle, millions of Cameroonian civilians are caught in a deadly stalemate between the armed separatist groups and national security forces. 765,000 people have been displaced since the conflict began nearly five years ago.1 Terrible atrocities are being committed by both sides, including the burning of villages, school shootings, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), sexual violence, and extrajudicial killings.2 Schools were shut down for nearly three years for fear of attacks and are only now hesitantly reopening.
To aggravate this quagmire, water scarcity due to climate change in the Far North region has invigorated intercommunal tensions. Herders and farmers as well as various ethnic groups are vying for dwindling resources. This past December, the UNHCR declared a level 2 (out of 3) emergency in the region when 112 villages were burned to the ground, 15,000 people became internally displaced, and 85,000 people fled to Chad;3 a state that already hosts nearly a million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs).4 This violence compounds the Far North’s existing suffering from a war against Boko Haram that has killed over 3,000 people and displaced nearly 250,000.5
Scholars such as Henry Ngenyam Bang and Roland Azibo Balgah have predicted that the state will devolve into a “Complex Disaster Emergency”(CDE), or a type of disaster scenario that is of a “multi-causal nature…[and holds] the propensity to interrelate political, economic, social, and environmental factors including internal armed conflict”.6
It can be difficult to find hope when the region faces a litany of such complex and devasting violence. However, a shred of optimism may be found in one marginalized group that is organizing for peace and rebuilding community relations at the grassroots level: women may be the peacebuilders Cameroon so desperately requires.
But to further understand the recent violence Cameroon faces and how women may be able to facilitate desperately needed local reconciliation, specifically in regard to the Anglophone Crisis, let’s return to the beginning of the active conflict. In 2016, dissonance over language and political autonomy stirred peaceful protests headed by lawyers and teachers. The unrest was rooted in the repression of the Anglophone minority and an unsolved question of autonomy that began under colonization. The British had carved out 20% of Cameroonian land while the French occupied the other 80%. The smaller Anglophone regions were demarcated from the other eight Cameroonian provinces as the British and the French established differing legal and education infrastructures consistent with these separate metropoles. The clearest difference was language.
In the decolonization process of 1961, the two Anglophone regions were quasi-autonomous but were eventually joined under the same state, the “Republic of Cameroon”. There were decades of “Negative Peace”7 rife with tensions between the Anglophone regions and the French majority, with the Northwest and Southwest regions arguing that Yaoundé was employing repressive tactics and erasure of their culture, such as requiring there to be solely French-speaking teachers at schools where no one spoke French. In 2016, the state security forces met peaceful protestors with violence in an attempt to quash dissent against the government. About a year later, a militant secessionist group called the Ambazonia Defense Force was formed. Civilians are now caught in the crossfire between militant groups who burn villages and enforce “ghost town” protests in order to gain power through terror, and the government that has used state security forces to commit crimes against civilians. The state also continues to ignore and minimize the conflict with the secessionists, thus perpetuating the crisis.
Across Cameroon and humanitarian crises elsewhere, it holds true that women and girls are affected differently by armed conflict than men. They are always at risk of gender-based violence in times of peace, but sexual violence can be turned into a weapon in times of war. Women and children also make up the displaced at high rates, making the gender distribution among adults at refugee and IDP camps almost all women. For example, during intercommunal violence in Cameroon last December, 98% of the adults in IDP camps were women.
This gender distribution reflects the terrible realities of conflict and survival. As men leave their families to fight, women take on the responsibility for both economic stability and childcare. They must make difficult decisions to flee, or even to stay in dangerous conflict zones to assume the burden of caring for vulnerable persons in the community who can’t relocate such as the elderly, disabled, and sick. Further, if a woman’s village is destroyed and she flees to the bushes, she would be subject not only to the dangerous natural elements and hunger but also to sexual violence by warring parties. If she flees to the city, her vulnerable position may make sex work the only viable option for survival. Thus, women suffer from conflict differently and typically assume the responsibility for the survival of the family and community during war.
But these burdens do not equate to a decrease in agency or their ability to affect political outcomes. Because while the Cameroonian cultural context has entrenched patriarchy, and women have typically been conceptualized solely as nurturing mother figures (like many cultures), these views of women as motherly and peaceful have allowed them to “organise undisturbed”.8 For example, in 2019, “more than 700 women from different cultural groups gathered in the Yaoundé Conference Centre to urge the government to put an end to the killings in the Anglophone regions”.9 Scholar Ivoline Kefen Budji describes how women utilized “sounds of mourning” to create stress and move peace talks forward.10 As they “wept, screamed, ululated, and sang dirges”, one woman explained to the media:
“These are the women of the North-West region who have been in pain for the past three years, and because we heard that the prime minister is coming here today we decided that we should come out and cry aloud because the flow of blood has been too much. There is pain! We don’t sleep! There are incessant killings every day. We think that as women we have to do our own part of the job by coming out to cry, to tell the powers that be that they should try to put an end to this.’”11
Women have also organized diplomatic groups comprised of representatives from across the entire country. These reconciliation strategies include the formation of the Southwest and Northwest Women’s Task Force (SNWOT) which is a women-led group in Cameroon that fights against all forms of violence and the Cameroon Women’s Peace Movement (COWPEM) which is an assembly of women from all ten regions of Cameroon and various diasporas aimed at advocating for women’s right to participate in decision-making at all levels.
Women have taken up such roles as organizers and peacebuilders across the country, but they also face barriers to further leadership roles that could further thwart Cameroon’s chances for stability. One scholar, Zoneziwoh Mbondgulo-Wondieh, began her research to discover if/how gender operated during the Anglophone crisis, and if the substantial amount of women’s participation in the protest movement brought gender inequality into the agenda.12 Ultimately, Mbondgulo-Wondieh concluded that while human rights issues were discussed during this period of social reflection, gender equality was not an issue that was highlighted.13 If Cameroon pushes gender equality into the agenda, it could serve as a life raft for ensuring the survival of entire communities.
Thus, while women experience marginalization and are caught in a terrible crossfire between separatists, national forces, and intercommunal conflicts, they have continued to organize and demonstrate their agency in facilitating community and regional reconciliation. They have communicated and negotiated between large, militarized actors, and could be the best diplomats to reduce intercommunal tensions at the grassroots level. The problems Cameroon faces are sobering, but women could play an important role in putting out “small fires” as well as shaping long-term solutions.
Endnotes:
1. International Crisis Group. “Cameroon”. (n.d.). Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon
2. Jess Craig. “Violence in Cameroon’s anglophone crisis takes high civilian toll”. Al Jazeera. April 1st, 2021. Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/1/violence-in-cameroon-anglophone-crisis-takes-high-civilian-toll
3. United Nations. “Cameroon: Intercommunal clashes continue to displace thousands”. UN news. December 17, 2021. Accessed May 6, 2022. https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1108242
4. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Clashes in Cameroon’s far north displace more than 100,000 people”. December 17, 2021. Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing/2021/12/61bc54734/clashes-cameroons-far-north-displace-100000-people.html
5.International Crisis Group. “Cameroon”. (n.d.). Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon
6. Henry Ngenyam Bang & Roland Azibo Balgah. “The ramification of Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis: conceptual analysis of a looming ‘Complex Disaster Emergency’”. Int J Humanitarian Action 7. January 24th, 2022. Accessed May 6, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-022-00114-1
7. Gladys M Ashu. “The Impact of the Anglophone Conflict on Women and Children and Their Advocacy For Peace in Cameroon”. Gender & Behaviour Vol. 18 Issue 1. January 1st, 2020. Accessed May 6, 2022. p 14830. https://eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=4d24cd5b-d71f-4df4-8492-d193a6f07555%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=144348065&db=a9h
8. Comfort Ero & Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. “Women are suffering in Cameroon’s war, but they also hold the key to peace”. International Crisis Group. March 9, 2022. Accessed May 6, 2022.https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon/women-are-suffering-cameroons-war-they-also-hold-key-peace
9. Gladys M Ashu. “The Impact of the Anglophone Conflict on Women and Children and Their Advocacy For Peace in Cameroon”. Gender & Behaviour Vol. 18 Issue 1. January 1st, 2020. Accessed May 6, 2022. 14842. https://eds.p.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=4d24cd5b-d71f-4df4-8492-d193a6f07555%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=144348065&db=a9h
10. Ivoline Kefen Budji. “Utilizing Sounds of Mourning as Protest and Activism: The 2019 Northwestern Women’s Lamentation March within the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon”. Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, 1(4). December 1, 2020. Accessed May 6, 2022. 443. https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.4.443
11. ibid.
12. Zoneziwoh Mbondgulo-Wondieh. “Women and the Anglophone Struggle in Cameroon. In Gender, Protests and Political Change in Africa”. July 4th, 2020. Accessed May 6, 2022. 144. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46343-4_7
13. ibid.
1 comment
This is wonderful