(CN) — Beheaded corpses. Entrails spilled onto dusty roads. Photos from the civil war raging in his home country Cameroon nauseate the professor. “Sometimes I wake up and on my WhatsApp feed there’s some pictures I cannot even take, I just have to delete, they’re gruesome,” he said.
It’s time for the world to wake up, he says, to the conflict in that has displaced more than 400,000 people and left at least 1,800 dead as government forces battle groups of separatist fighters and burn villages inhabited by suspected separatist sympathizers to the ground.
The separatists’ goal is to win independence for western regions of Cameroon, on the border with Nigeria, and create an independent country called Ambazonia for English-speaking residents who feel they’ve been relegated to second-class citizens by a president who has been in office for 37 years and foists the government’s preferred language on them.
There are 265 languages spoken in Cameroon, but the conflict involves just two: English and French.
The dispute is not solely a linguistic one. Its tangled roots stretch back to 1916, when Germany ceded control of the territory comprising modern day Cameroon to France and Britain.
“So Cameroon was split to the French, about 80% of present-day Cameroon, and to the British about 20%,” said Professor Nandi. Nandi, a pseudonym, is a medical doctor and naturalized U.S. citizen who teaches at a university in the American South.
He asked not to be identified because he periodically returns to Cameroon for health studies, and expatriate detractors of President Paul Biya have been arrested at Cameroon airports and jailed on questionable charges.
A Broken Deal
In 1961, Anglophones, then known as British Southern Cameroons, were given a choice by a British government eager to distance itself from its dark, empire-building past: Do you wish to achieve independence by joining the Federation of Nigeria, another former British colony, or do you wish to achieve independence by joining the France-backed independent Republic of Cameroun?
With outright independence off the table, the British Southern Cameroons voted to join the Republic of Cameroun in a deal that stated: “The peoples of both territories should have equal status and rights.”
Fast-forward to autumn 2016, when teachers and lawyers in Anglophone regions reached a breaking point and took to the streets in protest, weary of a government that had strayed far from the spirit of the 1961 deal.
Not only had state agencies under Biya frustrated English-speakers for years by issuing public notices in French, with no English translation, Biya’s regime had begun sending French-speaking teachers and judges to schools and courts in Anglophone regions.
By then, Tuskegee University communications professor and poet Bill Ndi had left Cameroon to teach in Paris, then to the United States. He won political asylum in the U.S. after the Cameroon embassy in Paris confiscated his passport due to his history of criticizing Biya.
Ndi, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2016, is still speaking his mind about Biya. “He cannot speak English. ... In a bilingual country he cannot carry a conversation. Even saying good morning to him is an uphill battle,” Ndi said in a telephone interview.
Ndi said employment in Anglophone regions is flipped compared to the Francophone areas, as 80 percent of French speakers have jobs, and 80 percent of English speakers are unemployed.
Though there are English-fluent teachers in Anglophone regions, Ndi said, many are unemployed because the government has assigned French-speaking teachers to the schools.
“You have people who cannot speak English barely at all. They are expected to teach these children geography, history, math, physics, chemistry,” Ndi said.
The courts are an even bigger mess, Ndi said, because in Anglophone regions they are based on common law, a system originated by the English monarchy in which case law, or precedent, is primarily used to resolve legal disputes.