Outgunned Anglophone rebels turn to witchcraft in one-sided clashes with army
Like many young men in Cameroon, “Robert” dreamt of escaping poverty through a career in football.
Raised in the Anglophone town of Buea, he was a hopeful for local side Mount Cameroon FC, whose players helped to build the country’s reputation as one of Africa’s top footballing nations.
Last year, when the Francophone government crushed pro-Anglophone protests in Buea, he hung up his football boots and joined the Red Dragons, a separatist militia. They were, he admits, a team of raw amateurs taking on seasoned professionals.
“When I first signed up to fight, they didn’t have enough guns to go around, so some of us had to make do with machetes instead,” Robert, 28, told The National.
“But even the guns we had were home-made Dane guns [muskets introduced into West Africa by Danish colonial traders]. They only fire a single shot at a time and often they jam. Going into battle against the army was very scary.”
To even up the odds, Red Dragon commanders put their trust in witchcraft, issuing their men with charm pouches full of secret herbs.
They told them to abstain from sex before battle and to avoid wearing metal items such as zips or studs in their clothes or shoes.
Both practices were said to make the fighters bulletproof. Neither worked.
“The first time we went into battle I lost seven of my comrades,” said Robert, who fled Cameroon last month to a refugee camp in Nigeria.
The Red Dragons are among dozens of militias now operating in Anglophone regions.
They sprang up last autumn after a particularly bloody period in September when 40 demonstrators were killed by troops in only three weeks.
Although most are still armed with little more than homemade firearms and basic hunting rifles, some have acquired military-grade weapons taken from government soldiers.
As with most insurgent groups, attitudes towards them within their host community vary. Some Anglophones see them as saviours. Others say they are already being hijacked by criminal elements and are simply driving the conflict closer towards civil war.
Certainly, those who disagree with the groups’ separatist agenda do so at their peril. On the weekly strike days, entire towns down tools and schools stay empty. Teachers who have tried to keep their schools open have been threatened and sometimes kidnapped.
The militias also acquired their own reputation for brutality, with footage emerging last month of one group beheading a Cameroonian soldier.
Ayaba Cho Lucas, the commander of the Ambazonia Defence Force, the largest rebel group, told The National that the “killing and torture of captured soldiers was not allowed”.
But Robert claimed it was the only way the guerrillas could level the playing field.
“Sometimes we will cut off their fingers, sometimes more. Most of the times we end up killing them.
“This is war. Our cry is that Britain should help, as our former colonial power. But they haven’t.”