In the Jungles of West Africa, a conflict spawned by colonial land grabs has spiraled into an all-out war. Cameroon, a mid sized oil rich country, gained independence from France in 1960 with the rest of French Equatorial Africa. A community of English speakers however seeks to break free from their union, using crypto-currency to partially fund their efforts. The bloody conflict known as the “Anglophone crisis” has raged for four years now and the rest of the world has paid it little attention but here at Springtime of nations we will put the war and its causes under a microscope.

The Modern story of what the rebels call Ambazonia begins with the German colonization of West Africa. In 1884, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reluctantly allowed the creation of “Kamurun”, a large but financially insolvent colony maintained by ruthless suppression of rebellious African groups. Never having more than 1000 Europeans at any one time, the French easily took over Kamurun during the First World War, throwing the British a small concession that became known as British Cameroons, the French keeping the lion’s share for themselves after the Treaty of Versailles dismantled the German Colonial Empire. French Cameroon was administered as a league of nations mandate, with French being imposed as the lingua franca, while the British treated their territory similarly. When the wave of Decolonization swept through French West Africa in the 60s, the British decided to let their Colony choose if they wanted to rejoin the pre-WW1 polity or their colony that would soon become the independent country of Nigeria. A plebiscite was held, and the South of the mandate preferred the former, the North the latter.

At first, the arrangement was extremely decentralized, with the country being split into two halves with one prime minister each. However, the Cameroonian president Ahmadou Ahidjo quickly usurped his constitutional powers, jailing his biggest critics in government by 1962, just a year after union. Ahidjo outlawed all opposition in 1966 and finally unilaterally scrapped the federalist constitution in 1972, creating a centralized state and breaking Southern Cameroons into two provinces. The promise of a state that respected minority rights was once again shown to be a lie. Suppressed by the police state of Ahidjo and his successor in 1982 Paul Biya (still the incumbent president), it was not until the 90s that concentrated and open protests against the coup surfaced in Southern Cameroons: English speaking Cameroonians demanded a return to the old federal system and their autonomy. These protests, organized by the Southern Cameroons National Council, were avowedly non-violent, but this didn’t stop the violent crackdowns by the Cameroonian state and the 2001 ban on the organization itself.

In 2016, another cycle of non-violent protests were met with yet another round of vicious state attacks. By September 2017, the provisionally established Ambazonia Defense Forces started meeting violence with violence. Amba is a local term for the river basin that makes up Southern Cameroons, and it gives the name to the ADF’s superior body, the Ambazonia Governing Council. The ADF has waged a very clever guerilla war, avoiding open firefights where they would be woefully outgunned by the Francophone government, sticking instead to the dense jungle of the region and daring the government to go in. Neighboring Nigeria which has its own problem with uppity separatists aids Cameroon while Nigeria based Biafran separatists aid the Ambazonians, fighting side by side in the Bakassi Peninsula which was ceded by Nigeria to Cameroon in spite of the protests against the exchange by the people that lived there.

The conflict has continued through the beginning of the COVID crisis and despite offers for a ceasefire by some separatists to first contain the pandemic. At this point about 1000 fighters have died from either side and as many as 4000 civilians have been killed as “collateral damage”. It bears repeating that the Ambazonia movement started as merely asking to return to a federal state, and only later, when all peaceful options for reconciliation were exhausted, to push for secession. All the men and women jailed for merely questioning the Cameroonian government, all those killed by savage police and soldiers, and all those civilians killed by the Cameroonian state in their quest to fully suppress any thoughts that deviate from the sclerotic decrees of the longest serving living president in the world, all this weighs on the conscience of the ADF fighters. The conduct of the ADF in fighting the Cameroon state has not been angelic, but their cause is just. The idea that a People can be lied into a social organization and then have no recourse to it is insane. It’s the kind of deranged thinking Springtime of Nations will always fight against, and we salute those who fight it in their countries. Long live Ambazonia and may a thousand flowers bloom!