Buea, Cameroon - A woman cried when she saw something that looked like a corpse, lying on a stretcher covered in shape. When volunteers brought it to the stage, Boris Taleabong Alemnge recited a poem with its title self-evident: "Death."
"The day you die, people will cry," the 24-year-old told hundreds of viewers in a beleaguered part of southwestern Cameroon. “But that won’t stop the clock from ticking or blooming flowers.”
Alemnge is one of a group of artists using spoken poetry, condemning the ongoing bloodshed in the English-speaking region of Cameroon, where separatists are fighting government forces. The so-called corpse is a stage prop, but the tears and wails that greet it are real.
The Civil War has estimated to kill about 6,500 people, most of whom are civilians, and nearly one million people have been displaced since 2016.
Spoken language, performed under the stage name "Penboy" in Alemnge, gained new popularity in Cameroon, and he believes their art forms involve daily dangers of war zones that many people avoid talking about.
"Death is inevitable, but many people don't even want to think about it," he said, releasing his latest album "Red" after a performance organized in March.
Artists find the eager audience say they are moved by the rhythm of spoken language.
“I watched the crowd remain silent and then rise like waves because his words have the power to heal,” said Prosper Langmi Ngunu, who watched Penboy’s performance.
Almost everyone in the English-speaking area has lost one person close to them. Mental health problems are common. As a result, members of the warring parties also raped the gang, which led to an increase in teenage pregnancy.
"Red" returns the theme of Penboy's first album, "The Cosmic Natives", which advocates that people share humanity and struggle for vanity reasons that do not justify human costs.
Despite the deepening of linguistics due to the conflict, Penboy visited six of Cameroon’s eight French-speaking regions to attract attention from the atrocities committed in the English-speaking regions. He said his poems found sympathetic audiences there and even made some listeners supporters of peace.
International and local organizations have recorded records of robbery, killing and torture, as well as mass rape and burning of villages. The belligerent parties usually attribute the blame to this abuse.
Scars of inconsistent shapes of colonial rule in modern Cameroon along the language fault line. After World War I, Cameroon was once a German colony, split between Britain and France into two independent entities until the early 1960s, when Cameroon became independent and became a single federal, bilingual country.
The arrangement is short-lived. Over the next decade, Cameroon amended its constitution through a referendum and dissolved the parts that guaranteed the rights of English-speaking minorities.
The English-speaking population accounts for about 20% of the country's approximately 30 million people. They were swept by the French majority and were marginalized. Tensions encountered tensions in 2016, when the government tried to impose France in schools and courts in English-speaking areas, a point where security forces were heavily suppressed protests.
The conflict prompted some English-speaking separatists to take weapons against the government. Both sides have been accused of violence against civilians.
Another spoken language artist who accompanied Camila said that speaking events such as the Penboy March 9 party are growing in popularity reflect how people are not afraid to express their anger.
"Since we can't pick guns to fight, we use the power of spoken language to convey our message. Some people find peace in it, some people find recovery while getting an education," she said.
Her performance drew inspiration from an October 2021 attack where a soldier killed 5-year-old student Caro Louise Ndialle after shooting a car that fled the checkpoint.
"How can we forget to carry a lifeless body of a baby girl, just like the trophy won in the championship, her open-air skull is mastered?" Camilla asked the audience.
Her poetry blends into memories of corpses on city streets, as well as schools and hospitals after government soldiers and separatist fighters burned them to the ground.
Other works are mean people who the poet considers to be hypocrisy and warring.
In The Cry of War, spoken poet and writer Sandra Nyangha tells the story of people getting tired of conflict and eager to return to peace.
"If you can give orders like war, you can also order it to end," she said.
For Penboy, speaking gatherings are part of an effort to bring art into the crisis-affected communities. He also developed initiatives in the plans in the “Actist Project” launched last year to help young people build confidence by developing writing and acting.
He said the war snatched a lot of education.
“My goal is not only to refine their skills. To get them to use art forms to bring solutions to the community,” Penboy said. “It is a responsibility for artists to use their skills to advocate for change.”
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Corrected the story to point out that the sixth paragraph was performed in March, not last month.