On Mondays, Bamenda becomes a ‘ghost town.’ Schools shut. Markets close. Workers stay home.
Mondays have been this way for years in Bamenda, the largest city in Cameroon’s majority English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions. The silence is often violently enforced: part of Operation Ghost Town Resistance, a campaign of mass general strikes instated by Anglophone activists in 2017 in protest of discrimination faced by English speakers in the majority-Francophone country. Years on, the BBC described the once-bustling Bamenda as a city where ‘only the coffin trade is booming’.
A war with its roots in linguistic discrimination has torn Bamenda apart. The city is not alone – around the world, language has often been at the core of economic, political, and cultural discrimination, repeatedly developing into humanitarian crises. Yet as Bamenda falls silent, so too does the United Nations. As the UN continues to fail to address the connections between language discrimination and intrastate war, the dangers of language conflict remain on display in Cameroon.
A Country Divided
Cameroon lies at the junction of West and Central Africa and is home to approximately 28 million inhabitants. The country was colonised by Germany in 1884 and, following a division of German colonies in the aftermath of World War I, was split again between England and France. Its population is now classed as 80% Francophone and 20% Anglophone, with the Anglophone population largely residing in the previously British-controlled Northwest and Southwest regions.
The country has been at war for the last seven years. In its Northwest and Southwest regions, Anglophone separatists wage a fight to establish an independent, breakaway state: Ambazonia. Over seven years, a violent government crackdown on Anglophone activism, intense fighting in civilian centres, and rampant human rights abuses on both sides of the conflict have left 6,000 Cameroonians dead and more than 700,000 displaced.
Cameroon’s war is commonly known as its ‘Anglophone Crisis’, one that has been building since the official end of colonisation in 1961, when territory controlled by Britain was merged with that colonised by France to form the modern Cameroonian state. On paper, Cameroon is a bilingual nation, whose resources and opportunities are equally accessible to its Francophone and Anglophone populations. In practice, however, the Anglophone regions of Cameroon and its English-speaking citizens have faced widespread marginalisation, discrimination, and violent oppression in public and political life.
Opportunities for higher education in English are minimal. Though the University of Yaoundé is officially bilingual, a 2020 study found that 80% of lectures are conducted in French. Textbooks in English are usually poorly translated. Key laws, including systems of corporate regulations, often lack English translations. Civil servants are overwhelmingly Francophone and conduct their services in French. In 2017, out of 36 political ministers with a portfolio, only one was Anglophone. Francophone lawyers, judges, and teachers are frequently given positions in the Anglophone regions. Poverty levels in the Anglophone regions are among the highest in the country. Political discrimination is rampant. Since the 1990s, the government has issued restrictions on Anglophone advocacy groups ranging from restricting gatherings in public buildings to banning books and media examining the crisis.
Such social, political, and economic imbalance between Anglophone and Francophone Cameroonians has been the basis of Anglophone political advocacy and activism for decades, stretching back to the 1961 creation of the boundaries of the modern Cameroonian state, one which authors and artists have equated to a ‘loveless marriage’, arranged by the United Nations itself. Over the years, there have been numerous inflexion points, notably former President Ahidjo’s 1972 move to centralise the state and dissolve the initial post-independence federalized system. Further was President Biya’s 1983 educational reforms aimed at modifying the Anglophone General Certificate of Education (GCE) to be similar to the Francophone Baccalauréat, a move that prompted protests, strikes, and boycotts by Anglophone students that have carried on for decades.
Escalating Conflict
It was, in fact, students, academics, and lawyers that catapulted the country into a new phase of the Anglophone crisis in 2016, one that has left many Anglophone activists seeing no solution but secession. In the autumn of 2016, demonstrations for bilingual reforms to Cameroon’s legal and education systems were met by violent government crackdowns. Troops were deployed onto college campuses, where students were raped, brutalized, and jailed. Anglophone political parties and organisations were banned, and their leaders arrested en masse. As Operation Ghost Town Resistance began, President Biya shut down the internet in the Anglophone regions. The country’s Bataillons d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), known for their use of excessive force and documented human rights abuses, were deployed to the region and joined by army and gendarmerie forces. Separatist militias emerged, and by October 2017 declared the creation of a new Anglophone state.
In the following years, the U.S. Department of State has documented numerous human rights violations on both sides of the conflict, including arbitrary and unlawful killings — both politically motivated and against citizens — restrictions on the freedom of the press and violence against journalists, as well as cases of torture and life-threatening prison conditions in government detention. There is no end in sight. There have been no formal peace processes or bilateral ceasefires since the conflict began seven years ago. The government has repeatedly baulked at outside attempts to facilitate peace talks. In January 2023, Cameroonian officials denied the Canadian government’s announcement that it had agreed to proceed with mediation with separatist forces.
Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis is a crisis of colonial legacy, of distribution of economic and political power, and of civilian access to the state and its resources. It is also, in all these aspects, a crisis of language. It exists as one of the most salient, entrenched, representations of language conflict – defined most broadly as a conflict between groups of speakers of different languages within a state. While these conflicts may also have dimensions of ethnic difference, addressing them through a lens of language conflict allows scholars to, as the Language Conflict Encyclopedia project explains, understand the specific ways language is instrumentalized ‘to exact an economic, social, and political toll upon minority groups within a state.’
The Power and Potential of Language
Understanding language conflict necessitates understanding language as one of the most powerful facilitators of human society, governing our interactions with our neighbours and governments from birth to death. It facilitates the constitution of both nation and state, identity and resource, thus capable of fuelling both inclusion and exclusion. In our modern world, Amy H. Liu argues, language functions as a key political tool due to three related attributes: its ability to serve as 1) a marker of ethnic identity, 2) a source of national cohesion, and 3) an instrument used to build political communities. In holding these fundamental roles within states, language is therefore imbued with deep power and potential when it comes to civil conflict, serving as the root or activator of grievances which have time and time again erupted into violent conflict.
Across the globe, civil wars on an axis of language difference have ravaged countries. For three decades, Sri Lankan Tamils fought for an independent state, spurred on by repressive language policies in the majority Sinhalese-speaking country. The conflict left 100,000 killed and 300,000 displaced. In Catalan, Belgium, Basque, and Corsica, protests and subsequent government responses have often turned violent. In the 1960s, Quebec was rocked by terror. From Ireland to the Balkans, language remains a reflection of tensions, a source of the exacerbation of social divisions, and an ongoing political question.
The United Nations’ Linguistic Uncertainty
It appears, then, that linguistic discrimination and grievances have repeatedly been at the core of devastating, lasting conflict, thereby weakening states and prompting humanitarian crises. On paper, the United Nations seems to have acknowledged the importance of language rights. Beginning as early as 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN has laid out general principles regarding linguistic rights and what constitutes violations of them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, did not itself specify linguistic rights, but rather took the initial step of establishing that humans were entitled to rights including life, liberty, security, and non-discrimination regardless of their spoken languages.
In the following decades, the UN further specified principles of linguistic rights, notably within the 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National, Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities. Such principles have included rights to education, justice, and political participation with the absence of discrimination and with the preservation of equal access regardless of spoken language. These are rights the UN has notably afforded not just to individuals, but to groups as well, thus establishing the validity of linguistic minorities and their accompanying associations to exist in public and political life. In the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN General Assembly declared that linguistic minority groups ‘shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.’
In practice, however, the UN has remained reluctant to enforce the ideals of linguistic rights it has established. There remains no legal guarantee as to the rights of linguistic minorities. A 2014 study of human rights enforcement institutions by Moria Paz found that key legal and enforcement bodies remain unprepared to enforce the commitments to linguistic diversity they have normatively established, and “continuously allow the state actively to incentivize assimilation into the dominant culture and language of the minority.”
In its enforcement of linguistic rights, the United Nations remains at the mercy of a fundamental yet unanswered question: whether its loyalties lie with states or peoples. As Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott’s seminal works detailed, modern state bureaucracies and nationalisms were birthed and fuelled by the codification of vernaculars and creation of ‘imagined communities’ facilitated by the spread of a shared written word. Across mid-nineteenth century Europe, nation and state building was a practice of linguistic homogenization, serving as a resource for consolidation and community-building, and imperial projects across the globe. Language has been viewed as a tool under the state’s purview – its own controlled marker of who can exist within and access the state’s resources. At its core, then, the question of language protections and rights for linguistic minorities pits the UN against its historic governing logic of sovereignty, nation-building, and territorial integrity.
Yet in an era of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the United Nations should conceivably fall on the human rights side of its linguistic logical puzzle. The 2005 adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine at the UN World Summit positioned the UN as an intervener when states fail to protect their populations. While the crimes it details are unspecific to linguistic oppression, it marked a step forward in the UN’s normative understanding of sovereignty as one which centres upon a state’s responsibility to protect its citizenry. When it comes to ensuring state stability and preventing civil war, the lessons of history are clear: linguistic discrimination leads to language conflict.
On Cameroon’s Language Crisis, Silence at the UN
Cameroon’s conflict, however, has barely reached the central apparatuses of the United Nations. In a review of the UN Secretary-General’s (UNSG) official public statements on Cameroon’s conflict from 2016-2022, the only references to any “grievances” were made early on in the conflict, in 2017. These referenced ‘grievances’ were general and unspecific. At no point since the outbreak of the conflict have the UNSG’s public statements referenced any linguistic rights violations. After 2017, the UNSG’s public statements no longer used the word “Anglophone” – solely referring to a crisis in the Northwest and Southwest regions. Furthermore, the United Nations General Assembly has passed no resolutions concerning the conflict. In 2021, 62 civil society organisations, including Amnesty International, called upon the UN Human Rights Council to take action to address human rights abuses in Cameroon, citing Cameroon’s crisis as one the Human Rights Council had ‘failed to adequately address’, and citing inaction from the UN Security Council. The call has remained unanswered.
There is precedent for stronger action on Cameroon’s crisis. In 2019, the United States announced it would end some military assistance to the country over human rights abuses by security forces, noting in particular the Northwest and Southwest regions. In 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken further announced the implementation of visa restrictions on those ‘undermining the peaceful resolution of the crisis in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.’ Comparatively, the UN’s most recent move on the conflict has been the launch of a humanitarian response plan – although it still lacks a public critique of the underlying causes of the conflict that necessitate such a response.
Towards Linguistic Peace
When a state violates a principle that the UN holds as normative and valuable, the UN can respond in several ways: by issuing sanctions, promoting negotiations, and authorising the use of force. Even before such actions, the UN has another tool in its arsenal: its word, and the messages it transmits to the global community. Yet the UN’s silence on language shows an unwillingness to address the role of language divisions and linguistic discrimination in conflict worldwide. In the case of Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, the UN’s silence on language issues is deafening.
When one looks beyond Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, one sees a country that is a true example of the possibilities of multilingualism. Cameroon is one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth – its citizens speak over 260 languages. On a given day, Cameroonians use an average of three different languages. Language need not have become a contested issue in Cameroon, but was constructed as such due to decades of oppressive colonial language imposition, modern two-dimensional official language policy, language discrimination, and, eventually, political exclusion and violent government response. In Cameroon, it is clear: the risks of excluding a linguistic population from a state and resources are enormous. Linguistic protection is conflict prevention. It’s time the UN started treating it as such.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 13: Language.
Elena Frogameni is a DPhil student in Politics at The Queen’s College, Oxford and previously graduated with an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from St. Antony’s College, Oxford.