Jenny* interrupted her story, twisting in pain, her right hand resting on her stomach, the other buried in a pillow. Diving into her memories was torture. Like dozens of women from one of Cameroon's two English-speaking areas, this farmer was raped. By soldiers, she said, who had been deployed in the vicinity of her hometown since a civil war between separatists and the army broke out in 2017.
That was in September 2021, in a village on the outskirts of Bamenda, the capital of the NorthWest region. Jenny, a 46-year-old mother of six, was working on her bean, yam, and maize plantation with one of her daughters. Concentrating on their task, the two women ignored the approaching soldiers. "Usually, when we hear them coming or the noise of their cars, we run away. We run, and we hide in the bush. We were surprised," Jenny said, crying.
"If you go in Bamenda now, people will tell you it is a common thing," she said. Since then, she has taken refuge in Douala, the country's economic capital, where she shares a room with her boys. Her daughter, who was also raped, stays with an uncle in Yaoundé, Cameroon's administrative capital. Her mother is in Ebolowa, in the south of the country. She is separated from her daughter "for lack of money, but also because we don’t want to talk about it again, and we are trying to forget," Jenny said.
Between 2019 and 2023, Le Monde met 30 victims who, like her, confessed to having been sexually abused. Some by the military, others by separatists. Since the outbreak of the conflict, which has already claimed more than 6,000 lives and driven more than 700,000 people from their homes, according to the non-governmental organization International Crisis Group, cases of gender-based violence are soaring, said Akem Kelvin Nkwain, human rights officer at the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA), an organization that documents the conflict in the west of the country.
"Rape is constantly used as a weapon of war, leaving many women and girls mentally and psychologically tortured. Some have ended up in the grave while others have attempted suicide," said Rosaline Obah, a national coordinator at the Cameroon Community Media Network (CCMN).
Military officials interviewed by Le Monde reject all accusations. "The Cameroonian army has only one duty: To protect the territory and the people to the point of dying. And that's what the soldiers do, and some of them lose their lives for the whole nation," said a colonel stationed in the English-speaking part of the country. "No soldier will rape the person he is supposed to protect. Our men are trained."
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