By Dr. Peter N. Mbile
There comes a moment in every society when words must do more than inform or argue. They must pierce the spirit, awaken conscience, and provoke transformation. Cameroon has reached that moment. After nine long years of the so-called Anglophone Crisis, what confronts us today is not simply politics, nor history, nor grievances. It is a crisis of psychology, of minds trapped in cycles of anger, fear, and revenge. And unless we break these chains, we risk sliding into a deeper fratricide where brothers turn fully against brothers, and the future of our children is consumed by bitterness.
The brutality of lockdowns
Recently, Dr. Aristide Mono, a respected television personality, released a deeply moving audio message in which he lamented the latest lockdown declared by separatists in the Northwest and Southwest. Like a father issuing arbitrary commands, they announced that life itself must be suspended until after October 12 elections. Businesses closed, schools shuttered, livelihoods destroyed, without debate, without compassion. His voice carried not only sadness but outrage at the casual cruelty of such decrees. It exposed the truth: that the greatest victims of separatist violence are not the state, nor distant elites, but ordinary Anglophone families who wake each day under the weight of fear.
What logic, what justification, sustains such brutality? The separatists claim righteous anger over marginalization. Yet indignation over injustice cannot excuse the collective punishment of entire communities.
The anger of a few cannot outweigh the rights of millions to live, learn, work, and dream.
Shared grievance, twisted logic
Let us be honest. The history of decolonization in Cameroon was flawed, hurried, and riddled with betrayals. Marginalization, perceived and real, touches many of us. But this truth belongs to all Cameroonians, not just the armed few who now terrorize villages. No Anglophone, no Francophone, no citizen of this land can deny that governance has failed us. Yet to transform that failure into the justification for killing, burning, kidnapping, and silencing is to twist grievance into madness. It is to claim a monopoly over pain while inflicting pain on one’s own kin.
In truth, separatists have no path to victory. Militarily, they cannot prevail. Politically, they are discredited, reduced to clinging to ambiguities of history.
At community level, they are a violent minority, many operating from abroad, while criminal opportunists kidnap and extort in their name. Even in the diaspora, self-proclaimed presidents and commanders preside over virtual “governments” while raining terror on the very people they claim to defend.
The result is a grotesque irony: Anglophones brutalizing Anglophones, under the illusion of liberation.
The danger of intra-anglophone conflict
What I fear most today is not only the state’s confrontation with separatists but the rising anger of Anglophones themselves. In community discussions, in private groups, I sense a deep and growing indignation, not against Francophones, nor against the government, but against separatists who have robbed children of education, traders of income, farmers of peace. Intellectuals once sympathetic now recoil in disgust. Communities whisper of defending themselves. If this anger hardens, we face the nightmare of intra-Anglophone civil conflict, brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour.
This, above all, must be prevented.
A transformation of mind and spirit
The way forward cannot be found in military operations alone, nor in endless administrative decrees, nor in another round of empty conferences. What is required is a transformation of psychology, an awakening of the human spirit to the futility of violence and the necessity of reconciliation.
To those still carrying arms, hear this: every bullet fired at a neighbour is a bullet against your own humanity. Every child kept from school is a wound inflicted on your own future. Every business burned is a spark of hatred that will one day consume you too.
Forgiveness is not weakness. Reconciliation is not surrender.
To lay down arms is not to abandon the struggle for dignity; it is to reclaim it.
For dignity cannot be born from ashes and graves. It can only be built from dialogue, from patience, from the shared work of reforming what is broken in our nation.
The responsibility of all
But let us also admit: the burden is not only on the separatists. It is on all of us, on the state, which must govern with empathy and justice; on communities, which must resist the temptation of vengeance; on diaspora voices, which must stop feeding the flames of violence from the safety of distance; and on international partners, who cannot continue to look away while their own citizens orchestrate terror abroad.
To forgive is not to forget, but to refuse to perpetuate the cycle of destruction.
To reconcile is not to excuse, but to create the possibility of rebuilding together.
A final appeal
Cameroon stands at the edge of an abyss. We can continue to hurl ourselves into fratricide, feeding anger with anger, until nothing remains but ruins.
Or we can choose the harder, nobler path: to step back, to forgive, to reconcile, and to build.
The choice belongs to each of us. And I say this with conviction: the separatists cannot imprison the spirit of our people unless we allow it.
The true liberation of Anglophones, and indeed of all Cameroonians, lies not in secession nor in repression, but in the rediscovery of our shared humanity.
Let us end the violence. Let us separate grievance from crime, politics from terror, justice from vengeance. Let us be remembered not for how we destroyed one another, but for how, at the darkest hour, we chose to forgive.