Nine years after the “Anglophone Crisis” in October 2016, violence has engulfed the northwestern and southwestern regions of Cameroon. The current crisis stage began with demonstrations by lawyers and teachers protesting against the marginalisation of the Anglophone education systems and the judiciary. It has since progressed into several stages, with several factional leaders devastating the regions.
The movement initially evolved into a conflict between Francophones and Anglophones, aimed at addressing the grievances of English-speaking communities against their French counterparts. Over time, it transformed into a deadly struggle among Anglophones — a case of brothers fighting brothers.
“We were first made to think these people in their comfort zones abroad were our leaders who would clear our path to equality and better days in a Cameroon in which we were being marginalised,” says Forminyen, a local who asked that his name be altered over fear of retribution. “Then the gospel changed into that of secession, and we were told to hate and kill Francophones among us. They told us they were our liberators, but the reality today is that they are our jailers. They have been visiting terror on our people, and the people they told us were our enemies are now the ones harbouring and feeding us.”
Nearly a decade into the Anglophone crisis, its effect on the community life and the local economy in the two English-speaking regions remains devastating, even as normalcy has returned. At its peak in 2018 and 2019, more than one million people fled from their homes to seek refuge in the French-speaking areas or Nigeria. About 90 per cent of those fleeing their homes paradoxically sought refuge among the people the Anglophone leaders made their peers believe were their enemies.
The educational sector is the most severely affected segment of the Anglophone community. In 2025, due to the ongoing Anglophone crisis, an estimated 488,000 children in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon were out of school. This figure represents around 25 per cent of children aged 3-17 in these regions who cannot attend school. The crisis has also led to the closure of many schools, with about 2000 schools, or 41 per cent of schools in the two regions, currently non-operational.
While these schools remain closed or non-operational, more and more new schools are being built in French-speaking Cameroon to accommodate the English-speaking pupils and students deprived of attending schools within their local milieu.
Educational psychologists in Cameroon criticised the actions of Anglophone leaders, noting that a movement initiated by teachers and lawyers to improve the academic and legal systems for English-speaking Cameroonians has transformed into a profit-making scheme for adversaries of this community. While violence against teachers and students in English-speaking regions continues, French-speaking areas are benefiting by welcoming displaced school children and teachers.
Most of the displaced Anglophones and their children, now taking refuge in French-speaking Cameroon, are reluctant to recount the ordeals that forced them to flee from their ancestral homes and schools. Those who spoke to us did it with tears flowing down their cheeks, narrating how the Amba boys, a group of militant separatists in Cameroon, ravaged their homes.
“They arrived in our village early one morning, around 5 a.m.. They were heavily armed. They eventually announced that everybody should gather in the town hall. At the meeting in the town hall, they said they knew most of the young men in the town were hunters, so they told them to go back to their houses and bring along their guns,” a man from a village in the Manyu division of the South West region, who now seeks refuge with his family in Douala, narrated to HumAngle.
“After collecting the guns, they warned that they did not want to see any children in school from that day. And in school meant both in the primary and the village secondary school. That same day, they started their exactions, taking anything that pleased them from the villagers,” he added.
Shortly after arriving in the village, a group accused someone of spying on them. They held a meeting where they identified a local boy as the spy, executed him publicly, and displayed his head on a stake. They warned the villagers that anyone providing information about them or sending children to school would face the same consequences. This incident prompted many families to leave the village.
“If one were not very religious, one would think God no longer exists. But the fact that we are still alive today after the horrors we have gone through makes one keep their belief in God. Our living conditions here are very precarious. The fact that we have been uprooted from our ancestral home is a very disquieting situation,” said Pah Awah, who was displaced from a village in the North West region and now lives in a rural area in the southern region of French-speaking Cameroon.
However, the children struggle to adapt to a new and unfamiliar environment, feeling like they are starting over. They must relearn basic skills and learn the local language and French, which are foreign to them and their families.
“Besides all these, we do not work; we have to do menial jobs on farms for the natives to have something to eat with our children. We have been depending on assistance from benevolent families to send our children to school. Having even a single meal a day to eat is not easy. Two meals a day is a miracle,” Awah adds.
‘Income is good’ when children are displaced
Government teachers who fled from the violence in Anglophone Cameroon have teamed up in some areas of French-speaking Cameroon to open their makeshift private schools, into which they have absorbed pupils and students they took along from their former schools. Some teachers claimed they feel comfortable in their new locations, stressing that the environment is welcoming and business is good. They have found a business idea that thrives for the children and puts food on their table.
“The enrolment is good, and I would lie to you if I said the school is not doing well. Income is good, and compared to my take-home pay in the government secondary school where I used to teach in Meme division of the South West region, the difference is like day and night. My monthly income here is more than triple what I used to earn while in Meme,” one of the teachers reveals. When asked if he plans to return to the South West for the next academic year, given that the security situation in Anglophone Cameroon is stabilising, the geography teacher expressed doubts.
Given the financial gains from running their private schools now in French-speaking Cameroon, most of the government teachers who abandoned their schools in the North West and South West regions, through dubious arrangements with the delegates of education in their various divisions in the Anglophone areas continue to receive their government salaries even as they are not teaching in the said schools which remain closed.
“Though most of the government schools in the rural areas of North West and South West regions remain closed, divisional delegates of education continue to create the impression that school has resumed in the said rural areas and through back-door arrangements between the inspectors and the teachers, the inspectors continue to officially certify that the absentee teachers regularly attend school thus enabling them continue to receive their monthly salaries which they share with the teachers,” a source in Cameroon’s education sector says.
A government teacher running his private school in Bafoussam, the West regional capital, revealed that when he first abandoned his government school in a village in the North West region, he continued to receive his salary under an arrangement he made with his divisional inspector, to whom he gave 20 per cent of his monthly salary.
“As my absence continued to extend, the inspector continued increasing his share of my salary. I have had to deal with three different inspectors following the transfers of others, and today, after about eight years of absence from the government school where I used to teach, the inspector’s cut from my salary has increased to almost 50 per cent. He insists that without his false certification of my presence at school, my salary would be suspended, and I would earn nothing at all, so I either pay up or earn nothing. Faced with the reality, I could do nothing but accept the terms of the inspector,” the teacher said.
When contacted for their side of the story, most education inspectors roundly condemned the accusation as “disinformation”, with some describing it as “fake.” HumAngle probed why absentee teachers from non-functional schools still receive their pay, especially after the Ministries of Basic and Secondary Education instructed inspectors to report all absent teachers for salary suspension.
One inspector claimed that teachers in his area had their salaries withheld. However, when we pointed out that his son, who had been living with him and not attending school in the inspector’s jurisdiction for over four years, still received his salary, the inspector became aggressive.
‘Home is home’
Before Cameroon gained independence and was reunified in 1961, schools in regions like Manyu, Meme, Ndian, Kupe-Mwanenguba, and Fako taught the local Douala language during the initial two years of primary education, switching to English in the third year, sources in the country’s education sector told HumAngle. The primary textbook for Douala was titled “Edubwan a Jombe,” which translates to “the key of the door.” Many people from this age group, especially those older, have a basic understanding of the Douala language, enabling them to adapt to the local environment comfortably. Residents from these divisions consider themselves Sawa, like those from the Littoral region.
About one million English-speaking displaced persons currently settled in French-speaking Cameroon may present a semblance of comfort within the local Francophone communities that have welcomed them for the past nine years. However, the notion that “home is home” remains within these displaced communities.
“There is nothing equal to home. Brutally uprooting oneself and the children from their ancestral home to a strange community, no matter how welcoming it can be, is the most unwelcome thing that can happen to a family, especially to small children. The psychological impact and the obligation of having to begin school almost from scratch is devastating, mostly to the children but also to the parents like myself,” Mformi Gerald, a local from the North West region, laments. He now lives with his family in Makenene, a town in the Mbam-et-Inoubou division of the Centre region.
Since arriving in Makenene more than eight years ago, Mformi has invested all the little money he had in buying farmland from which he has been earning a living to feed and send his children to school.
“I want to go back to my village in the North West. I want to go back to school there. Though I go to school here, the learning process is not interesting. I am yet to understand French well enough to follow my lessons conveniently, and the teachers who come to teach us in English are Francophones whose knowledge of the English language is rather rudimentary, so one hardly fully understands what they teach,” Mformi’s son interjects during the interview.
Enter the IPOB fighters
Who are the remnants of the Amba boys who still terrorise the local populations in the North West and South West regions today? And what are the possibilities of laying down their arms and surrendering to the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reinsertion (DDR) centres set up in the regions?
At the beginning of the uprising in the two Anglophone regions, irate youths broke into several prisons and freed inmates, including hardened criminals. Most of these criminals constituted the backbone of the insurgency, with many of them styling themselves “generals” within the separatist fighting ranks. With schools forced to close down, most of the young children staying at home, aged between 12 and 17 years, easily fell prey to the harangues of separatist leaders in the diaspora and locally. They make up the bulk of those “Amba Boys” who have not yet been killed by the security forces.
The diaspora sponsors of the continued banditry and kidnappings in English-speaking Cameroon have come under severe scrutiny from international human rights organisations for their brutality against civilians and their continued insistence that schools remain closed.
Many of these diaspora sponsors have been heard in their private WhatsApp groups infiltrated by security forces and other individuals insisting that schools remain closed because they say if schools resume in full throughout English-speaking Cameroon, the few Amba Boys who stay in the bushes would be forced to return to school, and there would be no secessionist fighters left.
Besides these local criminals, operatives from criminal gangs and the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) in Nigeria have also found fertile grounds to ply their trade and make money from kidnappings, armed robbery, and rural terrorism.
After the late Cardinal Christian Tumi, a Cameroonian prelate, was kidnapped on Nov. 5, 2020 and eventually released on Nov. 6, 2020, he gave testimony to the presence of Nigerian bandits within the ranks of the Amba fighters. Cardinal Tumi revealed that of the more than twenty individuals present at the hideout where he was held captive, only one was a Cameroonian, and the rest were Nigerians.
Among the “Amba generals” who have so far been killed by the Cameroon army are “General” Insobu, an alleged Nigerian criminal mastermind who operated in the Ndian and Meme divisions of the southwestern region and “General” Ikoku, who operated in parts of the northwestern region.
Through the ransom they collected from abducted individuals in Cameroon, Insobu and Ikoku are reported to have constructed mansions for themselves in their native Nigeria. However, HumAngle was unable to confirm the various claims independently. The Cameroonian army has since killed both men, according to local security sources.
Sponsors of the separatist war in Cameroon operating from the diaspora have, within the past months, been propagating information to the effect that they have signed a cooperation pact between the Ambazonia separatists and the IPOB operatives in Nigeria.
During the peak of the Anglophone crisis between 2018 and 2020, some naive supporters of the Ambazonia movement could be seen in the streets of Cameroon’s North West and South West regions, waving Biafran flags while riding their motorbikes. Many of the local security forces, along with the Ambazonia supporters, were unaware of the consequences of their actions. This situation persisted until the security personnel received education on the legality of displaying the flag of a foreign separatist group in Cameroon.
What’s the way forward?
The Cameroonian government has been actively seeking to resolve the crisis, leaning heavily on a military approach. While this military strategy appears to have curbed the escalation of conflict, the repercussions on education and the families of impacted children do not seem to be improving.
The government has pursued one strategy after another with little success. For example, a redistribution centre with special security measures was set up in the administrative unit of Ngoketunjia near the northwestern regional capital of Bamenda. The idea was to move non-functioning schools and their students and teachers from outlying areas where the security situation had deteriorated to the centre, which was heavily guarded by armed troops. However, with limited accommodation facilities at the centre, the students had to return home after classes, exposing them to even greater danger.
In a 2023 report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council assessing the human rights conditions in Cameroon, President Paul Biya’s administration was urged to “implement effective measures to ensure the safety of students and educational personnel across the country.”
The government accepted the recommendation but has essentially paid lip service to it, claiming that the situation is under control. The Cameroonian government maintains that it will not negotiate with the separatists, whom it describes as “terrorists”, and is relying on the military option, which has not succeeded in completely ending the crisis. However, it has been curbing the violence inflicted on the communities by the separatists.
Experts and observers of the Anglophone crisis noted that if the government decides to negotiate with the separatists, it would be difficult to decide who to negotiate with because there are over seven separatist factions, each with an axe to grind with the others.
Recently, host countries of the separatist diaspora appear to be playing a greater role in curbing violence in Cameroon by arresting separatist leaders residing within their borders. This has been the case with the United States of America, where more than ten secessionist leaders have so far been arrested, and more than five of them are already serving prison terms. The most recent arrest in April this year was that of Eric Tataw, notoriously known as “Garri Master”, who instigated a wave of murderous atrocities in English-speaking Cameroon by calling for the mutilation (garriing) of children who go to school. He also called for the cutting of fingers and hands of workers of Cameroon’s highest private employer, the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), who dared to disobey his no-work injunctions.
Before the arrest of Tataw in the United States, Norway had also in September 2024 arrested Ayaba Cho, leader of the Ambazonian Defence Forces (ADF), easily the most deadly separatist group that was notorious for the beheading of civilians and kidnappings for ransom.
Since these waves of arrests, there has been a lull both in the violence in English-speaking Cameroon and the social media propaganda of the separatists that helped them raise funds for the purchase of war weapons.