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Tucked into a precipice bordered by dense forest, Agbokim Falls are one of Nigeria's most beautiful beauty spots, a majestic stream that attracts few tourists.
For the latest visitors to come here, however, its foggy splendor is a sight to be savored for different reasons. The 60 – meter waterfalls mark the border with neighboring Cameroon, from which thousands of refugees now flee the civil war: when they finally hear the roar of the water, they know that ". they are safe.
The latest fighting in West Africa has not been about the usual lines of religion or grazing rights, but about a war of words. The refugees belong to the English-speaking minority of Cameroon, born 60 years ago when the south of Cameroon, led by the British, merged with its French-speaking neighbor.
For men like John Samuel, speaking English of the Queen was a mark of pride, despite the loss of jobs and opportunities in a country dominated by Francophones. More recently, however, it almost cost him his life, as the Anglophone campaign for equal treatment was brutally repressed by Paul Biya, the French-speaking president of Cameroon.
"Government soldiers have arrived in our city, burned houses and fired firearms," said Samuel, a native of Buea, the capital of the English-speaking region of southwestern Cameroon. "They shot my cousin and then I ran away with my two young boys and we went through the forest for three days to go to Nigeria."
Mr. Samuel, 64, is one of the 25,000 Anglophones who fled to Nigeria, while another 140,000 were internally displaced in Cameroon. The fighting claimed the lives of 600 people, including more than 100 members of the security forces killed by English-speaking "self-defense" groups.
Although the conflict has attracted little attention from the outside world, it has already descended to "barbaric" depths, according to diplomats. Government troops have been accused of rape and looting in English-speaking villages, sometimes burning houses with their occupants. Self-defense groups, often armed only with homemade machetes and rifles, resorted to vicious guerrilla tactics, kidnappings and even beheading soldiers.
Fighting intensified in the run-up to Sunday's presidential elections, where Biya, who has led the country since 1982, will run for a seventh term.
Despite a widespread boycott of polls in English-speaking regions, diplomats believe that Biya will always win, if at all by vote fraud. Yet the same stubbornness that has seen him hang on to power for so long has also fueled the flames of the English revolt.
Disturbances erupted among the five million Anglophones who broke out two years ago, when English-speaking lawyers staged street protests against the plan to increase the number of French-speaking judges in their style courts. British. Rather than respond to their requests, Mr. Biya responded with tear gas.
It was not the first time that Anglophone demands were repressed: a wave of student protests in the 1990s was crushed in the same way. However, in the era of social media, images of legal acts confronting riot police have become viral, triggering larger protests for civil rights that have been repressed to death.
Today, much of the English-speaking regions of the northwest and southwest are in revolt. Well-observed general strikes – known as days of the ghost town – paralyzed the economy. Many schools have been closed for more than a year. In Bamenda, the capital of the northwestern Anglophone region, bodies of mortuary were filled with unidentified corpses.
Mr. Biya has made late reforms, incorporating more Anglophones into his cabinet and setting up a committee to investigate grievances. But many fear that it is already too little, too late.
"The cultural and linguistic discrimination here goes back almost to the time of independence, but the way the government reacted to the recent protests led to increased radicalization on the ground," said a Western official. The National.
Paul Melly of the Chatham House think-tank pointed out that tensions were not at the "common level" between ordinary Anglophones and Francophones. "It's more about the government's inability to respond to a civil rights campaign," he said. "This then completely degenerated, with brutal security reactions and young men entering into violent armed groups".
Britain, France and the United States are now putting pressure on Biya to give him more ground, knowing that Cameroon is also a partner in the war against Boko Haram further north.
For many anglophones, no concession will be able to compensate. Many now want to have their own separate republic of "Ambazonia", a claim that they had formulated for the first time at the end of the colonial era. It takes its name from the English-speaking town of Ambas Bay, a palm-fringed spot on the Atlantic coast, where most of Cameroon's lucrative gas fields are also located.
Given that independence would deprive French Cameroon of a large part of its resources, no one realistically expects Biya to comply with the demands of the separatists. But after what he saw in his village last year, refugees like James Ngomba insist that the next time they go to fall Agbokim, this will not be the case in a country called Cameroon .
"Government soldiers shot dead four men in my village and then two teenage girls," Ngomba said. "I'm tired of being enslaved by Cameroon, I am now ambazoned."
The names in this article have been changed
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