Imagine a dimly lit room in Buea—a town where people have become used to going about their business with gunshots echoing far and wide like waves against a rocky shore. A young spoken-word artist takes the stage, topless with his face and body painted white with various African symbols, including cowrie shells, as if to hide his pain. With words as sharp as a double-edged sword, he weaves a tale of pain, hope, and resilience; his voice carries the weight of a people silenced for too long, a people yearning for peace and justice.

Taleabong Boris Alemnge, 23, the spoken-word artist on stage, was based in the Mile 16 neighborhood of Buea—the capital of Cameroon’s Anglophone Southwest Region—in 2016, when he had to temporarily drop out of high school as the Anglophone Crisis began. “I was forced to run from Buea to Mvomeka’a to meet my father, who was working in a rubber plantation there,” says Alemnge. Mvomeka’a is a village in the French-speaking part of Cameroon, famed for being the birthplace of Cameroon’s current president, Paul Biya, who has ruled for over four decades. Alemnge’s experience working with his father on this plantation, sometimes going for months without payment, and the pains of dropping out of school, albeit temporarily, influenced him to pick up his poetic arms and fight for the end of this crisis.

Alemnge mustered the courage to come back to Buea to complete high school, and subsequently enrolled in the University of Buea to study law amid the lingering sound and smell of gunfire. He buried his trauma in writing, an addiction that earned him the nickname PenBoy, which he now uses as his stage name. 

“I started writing a lot about the crisis,” he says. “After writing so much about it, I decided to start taking these poems on stage. I didn’t even know what I was doing by then.” 

The Anglophone Crisis started with a protest stemming from grievances over language and cultural rights—teachers and lawyers standing against the imposition of the French education and justice system on Anglophone regions of Cameroon by the Francophone-majority government. While the protests were largely peaceful, the government used lethal force to quell them; dissent quickly morphed into a secessionist armed conflict that has led to the deaths of more than 6,000 people. 

The crisis is rooted in Cameroon’s difficult colonial past, in political, economic, linguistic, and cultural tensions going back to the Scramble for Africa by Western European nations. At the end of the First World War, Cameroon was one of the many colonies Germany surrendered after signing the Treaty of Versailles. The Simon-Milner Declaration formalized the transaction—a callous act turning Cameroonians into spoils of combat—to Britain and France, with the latter taking the larger share (80 percent). 

French Cameroon and British Southern Cameroons (present-day Anglophone Cameroon) reunified again in 1961 through a UN-supervised plebiscite to form a federation of two “equal” states (British Northern Cameroons voted to join bordering Nigeria). A key provision to protect this goal was agreed to at the 1961 Foumban Conference: Article 47 of the Constitution, creating the federal state, which stated, “Any proposal for the revision of the present constitution which impairs the unity and integrity of the Federation shall be inadmissible.” In 1972, the agreement was summarily extinguished by a referendum, a blow to Anglophone Cameroon’s autonomy, abolishing the federal structures in favor of a highly centralized unitary state. That betrayal, widely viewed by Anglophone Cameroonians as an annexation of sorts, lit a slow-burning fuse among the Anglophone community; in 2016, the bomb finally exploded.

The crisis has taken many twists and turns since 2016, and a solution looks far from sight. While there are no signs of the civil conflict ending soon, spoken-word artists like PenBoy use their craft to help instill faith in a new future. Through their artistry and storytelling, they offer a glimmer of hope to a population in despair, and through their powerful performances, they inspire empathy, compassion, and a shared sense of humanity. 

These spoken-word “warriors” utilize their gift with prose as their ultimate weapon. Not only do they perform on stage, but they are using social media—a weapon that has already fanned the flames in the armed struggle with devastating consequences—as a site of intervention to maximize their reach and impact.

“As a spoken-word poet, the crisis inspired my writing in many ways,” says Ruddy Morfaw, who started making public performances about the Anglophone Crisis in 2018. She considers spoken-word poetry in the context of the armed conflict simply as a means of expressing herself for the “millions of others, the pain, loss, and disappointment generated by the conflict, and the overall desire of millions of Cameroonians who want to see an end to the conflict.” She captured this succinctly a year ago in her piece “In a River of Glass”: with a voice that echoes disappointment and regret, Morfaw shares her experience with the Anglophone Crisis and wonders “how much more we’ll have to lose each time we must disagree.” While hope flickers like a dying ember, the poet’s only prayer is for God to give those affected by the crisis, like her, a reason to hope—hope “for those fortunate enough to rise to another cock’s crow.” 

Through her spoken-word poetry, Emy-Pride believes she inspires empathy, understanding, and solidarity by fostering a sense of unity and shared humanity. Just like PenBoy, Pride dropped out of high school in 2016; two years later, she tragically lost one of her uncles in the crossfire between separatist militants and government forces. “Losing my uncle changed a lot of things about me,” she says, adding that her late uncle was her best friend. His death was the breaking point for the young spoken-word artist, who now uses her art to advocate not only for justice but for the end of the rather prolonged crisis.

In 2023, PenBoy made a tour of six administrative regions of Cameroon for his album Natives of the Universe, which he named the Peace Tour. The tour emerged from a realization that many people in the French-speaking regions of Cameroon needed to be informed about life of their Anglophone counterparts. “Through the tour,” PenBoy adds, “a lot of French-speaking Cameroonians have been motivated to join their voices, one way or the other, to call for the end of the Anglophone Crisis.”

While the album’s 13 tracks advocate for marginalized and vulnerable communities around the world, it focuses mainly on the Anglophone Crisis. “Arts and Arms,” one of the tracks in the album, gives a raw dissection of the Anglophone Crisis and also calls for its end. As the piece opens, blood drips out of the fingers of one of the characters, each drop a silent testament to unspeakable violence. PenBoy enters, voice raw: “Last night, I saw death flash its lights through the bullet hole on my wall.” Those “cruel metallic things,” he recounts, “almost found their way into my chest.” He continues after a stretch of sarcastic laughter as if to mock his pain: “Ask a child from Bamenda; he will tell you how we are invaded by armored cars, war planes flying above our heads like dragons in 18th-century movies ready to spit out fire. Innocent souls burning and perishing.” Bamenda, another capital of one of the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, has been the heart of resistance since the crisis started.

In October 2019, the Cameroon government organized what it referred to as the Major National Dialogue to end the armed conflict. The so-called dialogue, however, did not deliver concrete results: not only did the government fail to invite key separatist leaders, but the resolutions reached were a far cry from what an average Anglophone Cameroonian expected. The Anglophone regions were granted a Special Status following the dialogue, ostensibly offering a degree of autonomy. Unfortunately, this fell short of the widespread Anglophone desire for a federal system, leaving the underlying tensions largely unresolved.

Even before this dialogue was organized, Anglophone Cameroonians have remained divided on what solution is best for their polity. The past and present governments have helped in many ways to instrumentalize division and hate among Anglophones, starting with the reduction of what was an “equal state” in the union into two regions of the Northwest and Southwest competing against each other. A prominent Anglophone leader, the late Cardinal Christian Tumi, proposed a gathering of all Anglophones in Buea to develop a united stance for Anglophones prior to the dialogue but was blocked by the government. Anglophones therefore went to the dialogue as two separate regions and mostly represented by pro-government officials, as reported by the International Crisis Group. 

There has been continued infighting among Anglophone rebels, with several splinter groups emerging after the arrest in Nigeria and extradition to Cameroon of Anglophone separatist leaders who gave the much-needed leadership to the Anglophone cause. “They [Cameroon’s government and separatists] must come to a mutually agreeable compromise,” Morfaw says, “thinking less about their selfish interests and more about progress for the entire nation; allowing room for a free and fair expression of the peoples’ opinions about what they want.”

Nearly five years later, clashes between separatists and government forces persist in Anglophone Cameroon.

Cameroon will be holding its presidential elections in 2025, the result of which will have an overbearing effect on the direction the armed conflict in Anglophone Cameroon will take. The incumbent president is expected to win another seven-year mandate, and Anglophone separatist groups have called for a boycott of this election.

Regardless of failed attempts to end the armed conflict, spoken-word artists remain optimistic. PenBoy believes the youth have the trump card in the upcoming election, but he regrets that many are simply not interested in the political process of their country. Despite his misgivings, PenBoy says he is training a new breed of young spoken-word artists, not only to add to his army of spoken-word “warriors,” but to instill in the Cameroon society the culture of spoken-word activism as a means of addressing societal ills—driving this vision through Stage Life, a troupe he co-founded.

PenBoy’s recently released piece “Rebellion” satirizes Cameroon’s politicians and calls for the youths to rebel through the ballot box. “You call us leaders of tomorrow,” he stresses before raising his fist, “but we’re done waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.” As long as the spoken-word warriors continue to fight on their front lines, a united Cameroon rich in cultural diversity remains a future worth fighting for.