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Teachers removed from a school in Kumbo, in the western region of Cameroon, affected by an armed separatist uprising, says the teachers union.
Several teachers have been kidnapped from a school in a western region of Cameroon ravaged by years of armed uprising by Anglophone separatists, a local teachers’ union told AFP news agency.
Gunmen stormed the local Presbyterian primary and secondary school in Kumbo, taking 11 teachers, said the Reverend Samuel Fonki, director of the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon, and Stephen Afuh, director of a Presbyterian teachers union called PEATTU.
A local official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP that six teachers had been kidnapped.
There was no immediate response from the armed forces or the government regarding the latest incident.
The kidnapping came on the heels of the killing of eight schoolchildren in Kumba, in the neighboring Southwest Region, last month, which the government blamed on separatists.
In that attack, the Yaoundé government described the gunmen as separatists “who scare parents into not sending their children to school.”
So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the killings.
In October 2017, Anglophone fighters declared an independent state in the Northwest Region and the Southwest Region, home to most of the Anglophone minority in the majority French-speaking country.
The declaration, which has not been recognized internationally, sparked a brutal conflict with the country’s security forces.
More than 3,000 people have died and 700,000 have fled their homes. Human rights groups say both sides have committed crimes and abuses.
Schools and other institutions representing the Cameroonian state have been repeatedly targeted and kidnapped, often for ransom.
In November 2019, the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, estimated that 855,000 children were out of school in the two English-speaking regions.
About 90 percent of the country’s elementary schools and 77 percent of secondary schools were closed or not working at the time.
Anglophones represent around four million of the 23 million inhabitants of Cameroon. Its presence is explained by the decolonization process in West Africa some 60 years ago.
In 1961, southern Cameroon, a territory ruled by the British, voted to join the newly independent former French colony of Cameroon. The North Cameroons joined Nigeria.
There have been decades of resentment among Anglophones in Cameroon over perceived discrimination in education, the economy, and the law.
Demands for reform and greater autonomy from the moderates were rejected by the central government, leading to the declaration of independence from hard-line separatists.
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