Paul Biya, great sponsor of Ethno-regional xenophobia in Cameroon

The targets were the Anglophone/Bamileke axis. John Epee Mandengue saw the rot of the system and wanted to exploit it to his advantage, hence he launched his tabloid called Elimbi. And Elimbi newspaper was the first openly hate propagating instrument, treacherously presented as a newspaper. It was built along the moulds of the outrageous Radio des Mille Collin of Rwanda. Radio des mille Collin, was the Radio station that encouraged the massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. I have met John Epee Mandengue a number of times and I can write here on that, he never shared the views that his paper circulated. But he was a cynical opportunist, who will not hesitate to kill even his own mother in a bid to obtain what he wanted. In Cameroon, he was very convinced that, since the Biya government was ready to massacre ethnic Bamilekes and also Anglophones, in order to preserve his political power, he wanted to use the opportunity to reach his own political goal.


His paper called Elimbi, had the best paid journalists in the very difficult financial situation of the independent private Press in Cameroon. In the beginning, Elimbi was only a monolingual (French) newspaper. But since the xenophobic views of the government was also appealing to some pro-government elites of the coastal parts of Anglophone Cameroon, known as the South west province, Elimbi newspaper went bilingual (English and French). The mid 90s was a period when, the government tried to revive the ancestral links of the linguistic and culturally divided people of the coastal regions of the French and English-speaking regions of Cameroon. This cynical stratagem was not meant forge national unity. It was meant to elevate a defensive barrier that will protect the regime in both regions. For in both regions, the regime of Paul Biya was vulnerable to the popularity of the opposition, in particular the popularity of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) led by John Fru Ndi. The government succeeded in the French-speaking coastal region and beyond to create and revive ancestral hatred. But in Anglophone Cameroon, the government succeeded to sow the seeds of discords, but with some difficulties. The example of the glaring success of the diabolic scheme of the regime in the English-speaking region was that, for the first time, and that was in the 90s, conflicts between natives and none natives became rampant. And focus of attack were people from both English and French-speaking grass-field regions of Cameroons.