Borders Drawn in Chalk
Cameroon's Colonial Fault-Line Erupt into a Twenty First Century Battleground
This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.
Cameroon’s bloodiest fault line is a colonial artefact. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, the League of Nations split “Kamerun” into a French‑ruled core and a thin British crescent. Independence brought an uneasy 1961 federation, later scrapped, leaving Anglophones in the Northwest and Southwest under a centralised French‑speaking state. By 2016 protests over French‑only courts and curricula ignited an armed push for an independent “Ambazonia”.
Today that chalk border dictates who lives or bleeds. Villages burn, plantation labourers lose limbs, and schools are torched as rebels and soldiers force civilians to prove loyalty through the language they speak. Hospitals are war‑zone checkpoints; paperwork—once a colonial control tool—is destroyed to erase futures. The crisis is not merely “separatist” but the still‑open ledger of British–French partition. Without genuine federal autonomy that honours the 1961 pact, Cameroon’s Anglophone regions will remain a 21st‑century battleground drawn by strangers a century ago.
This gallery is a brief selection from a much larger body of work. The remaining images and full narrative are reserved for my forthcoming book. For commissioning or licensing enquiries, please contact me directly.
Cameroon’s bloodiest fault line is a colonial artefact. After Germany’s defeat in 1918, the League of Nations split “Kamerun” into a French‑ruled core and a thin British crescent. Independence brought an uneasy 1961 federation, later scrapped, leaving Anglophones in the Northwest and Southwest under a centralised French‑speaking state. By 2016 protests over French‑only courts and curricula ignited an armed push for an independent “Ambazonia”.
Today that chalk border dictates who lives or bleeds. Villages burn, plantation labourers lose limbs, and schools are torched as rebels and soldiers force civilians to prove loyalty through the language they speak. Hospitals are war‑zone checkpoints; paperwork—once a colonial control tool—is destroyed to erase futures. The crisis is not merely “separatist” but the still‑open ledger of British–French partition. Without genuine federal autonomy that honours the 1961 pact, Cameroon’s Anglophone regions will remain a 21st‑century battleground drawn by strangers a century ago.
© Liz Loh-Taylor
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