On National Unity Day, Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, held a military and civilian parade to commemorate the country’s 51 years of unification.
President Paul Biya has been in charge for all but 10 of those years. He is currently the oldest head of state in the world at 91 years old.
More than a million people have been forced from their homes since 2016, when a group of Anglophone Cameroonians started to rebel against Biya’s Francophone leadership, and the nation is today less cohesive than ever.
Some of those who watched the parade sounded optimistic about their country’s future and welcomed the day.
“It is to remind that we are one people, it’s to remind that it’s together that we can build and develop, it’s to remind that it’s together that we can be happy, it’s together that we can live in peace,” said Therese Temgoua, a Francophone Cameroonian who is a bank executive.
“I think it’s a happy day, and what I’ve seen today shows that Cameroon’s democracy is actually in the right direction,” Enobi Akepe, an anglophone Cameroonian who is a university lecturer, said.
But one francophone journalist described the unity of the country as a “facade.”
“Today, Cameroonians agree that we are living in a certain facade of unity. First, because in the North-West and South-West, you know that there are secessionists who do not let us breathe. On the other hand, we see the rise of hatred in the country,” said Pierre Youte, a journalist and the director of Soleil d’Afrique newspaper.
This rainy season Cameroon is also facing a cholera epidemic which has spread to all of its regions and is know to have infected around 20,000 people.
The figure is likely to be higher as only those infected people who manage to reach hospital are counted. On Friday, on the eve of National Unity Day, the authorities closed down some of Yaounde’s food markets to prevent the spread of the deadly bacterial disease.
