The armed conflict in the North West and South West regions of Cameroon, often referred to as the Anglophone Crisis, began with professional demands from lawyers and teachers, degenerating into a full-blown separatist conflict. Though marginalisation and the progressive absorption of the Anglo-Saxon system by the predominantly Francophone system can be traced as the root cause of the agitations, the events of 2016 quickly set a new watershed moment in the history of the crisis.

While there have been Anglophone agitations for many decades, the current crisis began on 11 October 2016 in Bamenda when lawyers from the Northwest and the Southwest went on strike. Their demands, ignored until then by the justice ministry, centred around the justice system’s failure to use the Common Law in the two regions. The lawyers demanded the translation into English of the Code of the Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa (OHADA) and other legal texts. They criticised the “francophonisation” of Common Law jurisdictions, with the appointment of Francophone magistrates who did not understand English or the Common Law. There was also the appointment of notaries, to do work done by lawyers under the Common Law system. A lack of trust in the government and the brutality of the security forces aggravated the problem.