Away from home: The story of an informal refugee

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Six years and going to the 7th that Anna has been unable to see her village, to weed out the grass from her mother's grave, to sweep the dust from her family home. 6 years in which she has been uprooted from her community, 6 years in which her children have not stepped foot  in their motherland. Making them another generation of rootless kids. No links with home, no notion of the traditions, the cultures, the norms of their ancestral land. A generation that will certainly grow without knowing their mother tongue, if Anna does not insist on teaching them.

The thought of this scares the daylight out of Anna, she herself a motherless kid, who had no mother to guide her into womanhood and had relied on the little family left, the older women in the family from whom she could learn from. But which now would be impossible. Most of them have been forced to flee, or move to other parts of the country considered safer.

A broken infant generation, a broken adult generation, all thanks to the ongoing crisis raging in the English parts of the country once called Africa in miniature for its biodiversity and cultural rich mix, but which is now called Africa in miniature also for having adopted all the bad habits in African continent: corruption, nepotism, and recently bloodshed and insecurity.

Anna's story is just one among thousands of stories of broken families and broken generations of Cameroonians who have been forced to become aliens in their own country or elsewhere. A generation that has lots of questions to its elders and its contemporaries but the most urgent one is why?
Why the greed , why the disregard for human lives. So many lives lost, broken in a senseless crisis that could have been resolved with a few words of goodwill, with an attempt to make amends. Like many Cameroonians, Anna asks, who is benefitting from this senseless crisis, that has turned her homeland into a no man's land, where armed men be they the military or those claiming to be on the side of the people, kidnap, kill, maim and terrorize the same people they all claim to want to defend. They same people whose interest they all claim to be fighting for.
" Do they even know what I feel" wailed Anna tearfully. "They claim to be fighting for me, for my children yet because of them my children and I are worse off. We were poor before. We were often treated with distain and even called  Anglo fou (meaning foolish anglophones) just because we speak English. Yet we struggled, we managed to grow, to build something. But most of all we could sleep and wake up in peace in our homes. But now all of that is gone".

Since the beginning of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, the sound of the gun has become a daily one, to the point where children as young as four years old, know which sound is an AK47 and which is a hunting gun and which is a machine gun.
Another thing which has become common site is the sight of decaying bodies on the roads, something all new but whose frequency has made it become a common sight.
The new vogue in the region is the scarcity of young men aged 17- 35. Many have fled as a result of the military's easy pick on this age group at the slightest occasion, on accusations of them being the armed separatists. An accusation that is often done with little or no proof and with a rapid judgement, death by the gun or an immediate imprisonment in one of Cameroon's prisons, where they never come out or even get access to fair trial.

Anna says this has made young men scarce in her village. Many have fled, among them her cousins. Able bodied men who had thriving transportation businesses, taking businessmen and women to neighboring Nigeria and back. All of them are now refugees, begging for scrapes God knows where, struggling to take care of their children. Anna is even more bitter with t he current situation in Cameroon following news of the kidnapping of the last cousin who was brave enough to stay back. "They say he was selling beer from the French speaking  Cameroon. That is the name given for beer sold by the Cameroonian brewery company Brasseries, which before the crisis all beer drinkers in Cameroon drank and even still do. So what is his crime? They want him to sell which drink then? To import drinks from abroad? My cousin is a small trader with a little shop trying to make ends meet and take care of his family. If they kidnap him for trying to put food on his table, how does that help the common Anglophone? Those are 4 more children left without a father, another wife left without support. If I was a secessionist, I would aim to seek solutions to make my people still thrive and take care of themselves instead of punishing them for trying to live" retorted Anna furiously. " This is all so senseless, " she muttered, walking away to hide more tears, more anger.

The crisis in Cameroon is yet to get any attention from the international community. Several human rights organizations have termed it one of the most forgotten conflicts in Africa. This means that for Anna, the pain risks continuing for many years, until the day enough pressure is put on the government of the 80+ year old President Biya, to have a real dialogue with the other citizens of the country whom his government has termed terrorists, arrested, killed and threatens with imprisonment if they return to the country (in some cases).

I stare and see this woman walking away, two beautiful children running around her. One of them is so intelligent. Who knows, she may just be the next generation of female surgeons in Cameroon, but that will be if the raging civil war ends and permits their mother to be at peace enough to even dare take her children back to her homeland , to her village, to the place where her inheritance is.

I remember that the young lady had said " I want to go back but there is fear of the army, then fear of the fighters.  Fear of the senseless kidnappings. It has now become a case where someone is jealous of you and s/he tells the fighters that you work with the government or you are from abroad or a spy for the army, and before you know it, you are taken away or even killed. I already lost my mother because of a senseless power struggle, I do not want to lose my children. In the end I wonder where they want us to go. The army which had to be there for citizens is against citizens, yet we have been paying taxes that pay them, feed them, our parents did and their parents before. The combatants also scare us, asking for exorbitant amounts from people in the diaspora, and elsewhere as if they do not know how life is hard everywhere.  Who then is for us? God is my only hope now", she had said. Anna had asked where are those who created all this problem, who took over territories and split and created nations with problems? Where is the international community? "Are they waiting for us to all die and then they come and build a genocide memorial and do fine speeches? To come and condemn the action years later when they should be acting now?", she had joking asked through her tears.
I do not have the answers, I do not know what to say. I am also asking the same questions. I look at her walking away, and I notice I am crying. I look at her and I see me. Yes, it is my story.

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