Anglophone Crisis: How the colonial past divides Cameroon today
Puzzled together under colonial rule and divide, Cameroon has an institutional divide a century in the making...
Part I: The Quiet Calls
In late 2016, the streets of Bamenda began to fill up not with soldiers, but with lawyers.
They wore British-style black robes and powdered wigs, relics of an old legal inheritance that had survived an era of political transformation. They marched in protest of a procedural technicality. They protested the appointment of Francophone judges trained in civil law to courts in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, where common law had long prevailed.
To outsiders, it felt brutally bureaucratic. To many Anglophones, it felt existential.
Since Cameroon’s establishment, its linguistic divide has undermined strong national unity. Located in Central Africa, the subtle national divide comes from its bilingual past. After the German defeat in World War I, its colony of Kamerun was partitioned between France, about 80% of the land and the capital of Yaounde, and the British, who mandated the 20% of the former German colony. Accordingly, two administrations emerged. One in the West practised a decentralised British common law, while centralised French civil law was practised in the East.
In 1961, the British Southern Cameroons voted in a UN-organised referendum to join independent Cameroon rather than Nigeria, which was led from Lagos. A federal structure was created to preserve the Anglophone region’s legal and education systems.
Federalism did not last.
In 1972, President Ahmadou Ahidjo dissolved the federation in favour of a centralised state. Paul Biya’s succession only meant deeper central authority, where Anglophones began voicing concerns about governmental underrepresentation, marginalisation in public administration, and the gradual erosion of English-language institutions.
For decades, the system appeared stable.
However, stability in a fragile system could be disregarded unless there is more structure.
Winter, after all, is a period of apparent calm; instead, it was not the end, but a dormancy before change.
Anglophone Cameroons, or Ambazonians, protest against unequal treatment seen between Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons
(“This Country Is Being Torn by a Civil War That Few Have Heard Of” 2021)
Part II: An Awakening A Decade Ago
Teachers’ strikes followed the lawyers’ marches. Anglophone educators protested the deployment of French-speaking teachers to English-language schools, receiving instructors unfamiliar with the curriculum and obstructing progress. University students, likewise, joined demonstrations, and community leaders condemned the government from Yaounde and called for institutional reform.
The government responded forcefully. Protestors dispersed, activists were arrested, and struggles were ignored. In early 2017, authorities imposed an internet shutdown within the Anglophone regions, a blackout that lasted months, ravaged businesses, education, and most importantly, communication. What began as a professional protest evolved into something broader. Some civil society groups called for a return to federalism. Others preached full independence under the state of “Ambazonia”.
By late 2017, armed separatist groups emerged, government security forces deployed heavily to the northwest, and violence escalated. According to reporting by the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, the conflict over subsequent years resulted in thousands of deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands. Schools closed, systems stopped, and communities found themselves fighting a war based on which colonial language they used, which colonial system they preserved.
The giant awoke, and as a result, the story unfolded – not in anger, but it was a generational response.
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Part III: The generation that played the Harp
The 2016 protests were not initially orchestrated by armed groups or political elites. Instead, they were led by commoners, including lawyers, teachers, and students, who were ordinary civilians in their twenties and thirties. The weight of state oppression, political distrust, and economic stagnation clashed with government forces and armed separatist groups, and both sides were accused of abuses. According to Human Rights Watch, village burnings, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings were all too common. Similarly, the humanitarian consequences mounted, with more than 6,000 people killed by 2023, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that over 700,000 individuals were internally displaced, with up to tens of thousands fleeing to nearby Nigeria.
The youth population, however, were central at every stage of this transformation. They had formed the backbone of the original protests, amplifying grievances through social media and civic organising. Cameroon’s demographic structure intensified this conflict. In a young nation, where the median age is 20, and the majority of the population is aged under 25, the crisis felt and became generational.
The sleeping giant not only represented colonial grievance, but it also shadowed a youth population long navigating marginalisation, now forced to choose between reform, subjugation or survival. Yet as one giant awoke, many remained in its slumber. Not all Anglophones cried for partition, and not all Francophones dismissed reform. The awakening aimed to expose fragmentation, not to redo a system and produce clarity within communities, families, and the first generation that took the issues into their own hands.
Part IV: The Architect is Youth Power
When armed clashes dominated outlet headlines for a few short days, youth activism paralleled with less visibility but similar persistence. During the government’s 93-day internet shutdown in 2017, young Cameroonians adapted. Virtual private networks were widely adopted, diaspora networks became shrines for information, and digital platforms transformed into spaces to raise political discourse.
The digital resilience reshaped the crisis. Hashtags related to the Anglophone regions circulated internationally, drawing international attention from foreign governments and NGOs. Debates within youth communities matured, shifting from protest to revamping structural faults. Decentralisation thus emerged as a contested but recurring theme. In 2019, the Cameroonian government convened a “Major National Dialogue” to address Anglophone grievances. Although it did not garner the intended popularity from Ambazonian leaders, many youth activists and civil society representatives participated, signalling that the political landscape had not been reduced to mere gunfire.
Afrobarometer findings reveal distrust and dissatisfaction with the central government, yet outright independence remains a question many prefer not to answer. Instead, many respondents who were on the frontlines of the issue, particularly the younger generation, favour increased decentralisation within a reformed, unified state. The Cameroonian giant was never jolted awake, but instead woken up slowly. One impulse pulled towards separation and rejection of facing the problem, whilst another tackled the problem straight on. Under the surface, a third pulled towards pragmatic coexistence.
Urban youth culture illustrates that this story is not black and white but a conflict that has stirred and needs time. In cities such as Douala and Yaoundé, Anglophone and Francophone students share educational institutions and creative spaces. Music scenes, entrepreneurial networks, and digital communities often transcend a binary linguistic identity. For a generation raised in formal bilingualism, identity is assimilated rather than divided. In this sense, the crisis has not only hardened boundaries; it has also forced young Cameroonians to rethink what being Cameroonian means and what Cameroon is after colonisation.
Protestors protest in front of soldiers deployed by the government
(Cappellacci and Li 2017)
Part V: Winter’s Edge: 2016-2026 and the questions that will arise
Now, a decade after the first lawyers marched in Bamenda, the Anglophone crisis remains under stalemate. Armed incidents sporadically arise, families fear returning to their homelands in neighbouring states, and political trust between Anglophone communities and the government remains delicate.
Even though Cameroon still struggles through a figurative winter, to solely describe the past decade as one in the doldrums undermines the subtle Cameroonian rebound. With more than 60 per cent of the population under the age of 25, Generation Z, which experienced the crisis in its most chaotic years, will define its future trajectory. This generation is more digitally connected, more linguistically fluid, and more globally aware than its predecessors. Opting to change the status quo, local youth centres connect online to discuss with regions distant from each other, settling disputes, engaging in discourse, and understanding each other’s culture.
The sleeping giant, then, may not simply be separatist nationalism or state authority. Alternatively, it is this generation, frustrated by colonial and bureaucratic backup, that they plan to clean out for future generations. Granted, some still call for independence, but others now press for greater autonomy, whilst preserving the government.
Winter can harden landscapes, but it preserves seeds for the coming spring. It leaves food scarce, but also offers a cosy slumber for hibernating animals. The grievances that surfaced in 2016 have not disappeared, nor have the structural inequalities that fuelled them. But neither has the hope and continuous negotiations to change inequalities slipped the imaginations of the protestors in Bamenda a decade ago.
Ultimately, the season has not yet changed, the struggles continue, and the giant is still waking up from slumber.
But beneath the surface, movement continues, and when the giant wakes up, it will rock the earth.