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About Our Leader
Ebenezer Derek Mbongo Akwanga, Jr., (born 18 November 1970) has been the Leader of the Southern Cameroons Youth League, the SCYL, since July 1995.
Personal Life History
Akwanga, Jr., was born in the sea-side resort town of Tiko in the Victoria Division (present-day Fako Division) of the Southern Region (present-day South-West Province) of the former British
Southern Cameroons. His father, the late John Nembu Zah Akwanga (fondly called by his friends a.k.a A to Z, Akwanga-White, Akwangha-Ndenke (Mundani) hails from Bechati village in Mundani, and
his mother, Yaya Hilda Enanga Mbongo (late) comes from the village of Boanda in the Bakweri clan of the former British Southern Cameroons. He is the last born of a family of five surviving children, two step-brothers and
a sister and brother. However, African tradition makes the young Akwanga a Mundani. After a very brilliant and movable Primary, Secondary, and High School Education which took him from Ndongo in Tiko
to Bachuo Akagbe in Mamfe, down to Muea, Molyko and Victoria, Akwanga, Jr., graduated in June 1991
with a General Certificate of Education Diploma in the Advanced Level with a pass in History (World Affairs) and English Literature. However, during this momentous period of his life, Akwanga, Jr., was by faith and personal courage catapulted into the
mainstream of the fight against injustice and the high-handed dictatorship of what he categorize as “The Civilian Junta” in the Cameroons. He then married Agnes Nenji Abungwi on the 16th of June
1991 with whom they currently have four children, Sabina Enanga Akwanga, Geneviva Abungwi Manyoh Akwanga, Corretta-Scot Gillian Enanga Akwanga and Leonard-Spencer Nembu-Meka Akwanga, Jr., Akwanga is a holder of an Associate
Degree in Criminal Justice from Axia College of the prestigious University of Phoenix and would be graduating in the months ahead with a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice Administration from the University of Phoenix. He is currently a member
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a campaigner for Amnesty International (AI), a member of the controversial left-wing organization, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a host of other international non-governmental organizations. He lives in the State of Maryland in the United States of America as a refugee and stateless person.
Trials and Tribulations
After completing high school, Akwanga, Jr., dreamt of a university education, however, this dream of his was compounded by the fact that his hopes and aspirations for a Free and Democratic Society couldn’t allow him to accept enrolling into the country’s only
existing university at the time in Yaoundé. During his stay at home, he went through all the tragedy and frustration of the day-to-day life of a crusader for freedom under a monstrous, carnivorous, brutal, barbaric, and devil-incarnated and annexationist tyrannical
regime of Mr. Paul Biya Bi Mvondo. His trials and tribulations effectively started in June 1991 when he organized, and led the first-ever pacific demonstration in the Cameroons on Friday, the 12th of June 1991in Victoria (presently
called Limbe by some). On that day, the twenty-one year Akwanga, Jr., questioned the Cameroonian regime of Paul Biya on its policy of constructing more underground political prisons at a time when the nation was barely able to feed itself. He called for the
liberation of all political prisoners, most especially students of the country’s only university in Yaoundé who have been abducted, some summarily executed, others brutally raped by the Cameroonian military and the gendarmerie, some tried and sentenced with no court
appearance after a series of bloody confrontation between the students (mostly Southern Cameroonians and those from the Bamileke clan) and the Cameroonian military following a student peaceful demonstration on the 3rd of April, 1991. He equally called for the creation
of a university for students of English expression and for the Biya regime to open up the country to real political pluralism. Akwanga, Jr., became blacklisted and declared a “potential enemy of the Cameroonian state” who “
must be extinguished at all cost before it is too late”.
Two years later, Akwanga, Jr., and other pro-democracy students compelled the Yaoundé civilian junta to open a university for English-Speaking Cameroonians in Buea, the Southern Cameroons which he later enrolled into. He was admitted as a student
of the Department of English, but he rejected the offer and asked to be transferred to the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts were he read history as a major and political science as a minor. By and large, Akwanga was tacitly banned from stepping foot in Victoria
after completing his high school education in Government High School, Victoria, and was threatened with death by the then Public Police Commissioner, Daniel Ewung Ngeme if he is ever found nearer the city. However, in April 1992, he narrowly
escaped from a joint paramilitary blockade meant to trap him after he attended a political rally of the opposition political party, the Social Democratic Front, the SDF, on the invitation of the late Dr. Samuel Tchwenko.
Akwanga became bitter and his personal trials, sufferings and persecutions became incessant. In typical Anglo-Saxon custom, authorities of the University of Buea organized elections into the students’ union government shortly after Akwanga, Jr., and
others became the first batch. He became very active in student politics, but his rise to prominence was not to be a roller-coaster as the Cameroonian regime had other diabolic plans for him. Candidates vying for the prestigious position of students’ union president spent
fabulous amount of money, trying to buy votes in the typical manner in which elections are won in the Cameroons. Some of the candidates were secretly sponsored by the university authorities in keeping with the Yaoundé regime’s proscription of free and fair elections; they
organized big parties where students had free food and drinks; they hired taxes to fray students too and from the university campus. But Akwanga exhibited an uneasy calmness and silence which even frightened the university authorities until they threatened to pull him out of
the race forty-eight hours before election. Akwanga’s reaction was simple: he organized and launched the “Anglo-Saxon Rebirth Campaign”, and took a rigorous round-the-clock campaign addressing the students of what was at stake in their lives. And
when he finally spoke to the students, it was more than clear that he had won the elections hours before votes were cast. And when the election came, the students gave him a landslide to the bewilderment of his opponents, the university authorities and the Yaoundé regime.
Akwanga’s charm, charisma, and incorruptible nature gained him both the admiration of millions and the hatred of thousands. He was called, “The Mahatma Gandhi of our generation”, “our own Nelson Mandela”, “The Leopard of Mundani”, “Symbol
of the Black Spirit”, “Admiral”. His tenacious and outspoken nature, coupled with his courage and his unyielding mannerism to liars and cheaters, Akwanga, Jr., entered into a major confrontation with the university authorities that would change the entire course of his life.
As pioneer students’ union president, he attended the first Council Meeting of the University of Buea on Friday, the 9th of August, 1993, during which the Biya regime decided to increase the newly instituted fees for all universities within the country. But Akwanga, Jr., opposed
the Council’s decision with very strong, piercing and emotional words. He told his fellow Councilors which included a representative of President Biya, his Prime Minister and others that:
“The decision to increase fees is not only untimely, it is also diabolical and another attempt for my generation to pay a heavy price for bureaucratic thievery in the name of an economic crisis. Your generation has taken everything from us and now you are
about to take away our possibility to be educated. I will never allow pillagerers and plunderers sanctioned by a very crafty and dangerous system of governance to destroy my generation’s hope for a brighter tomorrow. I cannot accept no matter the outcome that fees should be increased,
worst of all at this moment in time. That can only happen over my dead body”.
Akwanga stood his grounds and kept his words. The country’s only English-Speaking university in Buea was grounded by a students’ pacific strike never ever seen before in Cameroon’s academic cycle. And this forced both University of Buea authorities and the Minister
of Higher Education to called-off the whole idea of increasing fees. But he paid an insurmountable price. The university authorities and members of a highly-feared mystical group called the Mokunda Mafia denounced him to the police, the gendarmes and the
secret service. The Yaoundé regime then decided that Akwanga, Jr., must die. He was first dismissed from the University of Buea and barred from enrolling in any Cameroonian university or institution of higher learning.
Banished from the Cameroonian university system, Akwanga, Jr., was still contemplating his options when he took ill and was bed-ridden for eight months. It was alleged that he had been poison at the Secretariat of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buea when he went there to demand
a written explanation of why he has been banned from university education in the country. When he finally mysteriously recovered, the young revolutionary reckoned that the Almighty God had saved his life so that he could in turn serve Him. As the grand-son of one of the earliest Evangelist of the Basel Mission in the Cameroons, a child from a very devoted Christian family, and a lay-preacher himself, Akwanga, Jr., decided to join the pastoral ministry of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC). In the entrance
examination into the Theological Seminary in Kosala-Kumba of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon in 1994, Akwanga, Jr., performed so remarkably well that the jury placed him overall best candidate with a history-breaking performance in the English Language. But
other forces were at work. The Cameroonian regime, under the auspices of Anne Mojoko Musonge, the wife of the former Prime Minister intervenes to keep him out of the pulpit. So, before the final results of sixteen names were published, his name had been struck
off the list. He was accused of trying to use the pulpit as his new fighting ground against the Cameroonian regime. Akwanga knew that his only remaining option was to seek for solace abroad. He got admitted into the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South
Africa to read Divinity in 1994. His situation became an issue of concern to Dr. Martin Ngeka Luma (late) who became Chairman of the Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC). Dr. Luma supported the battered Akwanga, Jr.,
with financial assistance for him to obtain a Cameroonian passport. However, the Immigration Police took Akwanga’s money and pictures and told him that they were under “instructions from above” not to issue him a Cameroonian passport. When he insisted his life
was threatened, his Cameroonian identity card was seized rendering him void of the only item that still made him a Cameroonian – his statelessness was officially announced. Whatever reason the Cameroonian regime had for denying Akwanga, Jr., a passport, it was a decision that would haunt
the Biya regime for years to come.
Political Involvement/Right to Self-Determination
Trapped in a country that wants him dead, and denied the right to pursue university or higher education studies, Akwanga, Jr., turned his attention towards changing his beleaguered society for the better. In May 1995, there was general euphoria in the former British Southern
Cameroons when some SCNC officials including the former Prime Minister of the Southern Cameroons and pioneer Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Cameroon, John Ngu Foncha (late) and Solomon Tandeng Muna, former
Vice-President and Speaker of the National Assembly made a trip to the United Nations and London to argue the case for the restoration of the independence of the Southern Cameroons. Akwanga, Jr., was not unaffected. However, in a typical Cameroonian style, cracks emerged within the ranks
and file of the SCNC Executive Council. Its Chairman, Barrister Sam Ekontang Elad gave up the struggle after a secret arrangement with the Biya regime and was replaced by retired Diplomat Chief Henry Fossung, another puppet of the regime.
As the SCNC collapse and derailment of the peoples’ struggle reaches crescendo, Akwanga, Jr., personally warned the SCNC Leadership of its treacherous way and the consequences of their action on the entire Southern Cameroons Struggle. Realizing that the cancer of treachery has eaten deep into the
fibers of the SCNC, Lucas Cho Ayaba, Benedict Nwana Kuah, Christopher Fomunyoh Bah-Tangoh (late), Cornelius Asonganyi Bedefeh, George Ebai and other youths formed the Southern Cameroons Youth League (the SCYL) on the 25th of May 1995. The
mission purpose of the SCYL is to use all available civilized means including force to bring freedom to the suffering and persecuted people of the Southern Cameroons; to act as a forum were the voices of the stakeholders in the struggle for freedom and the vision of their country of tomorrow can
be properly represented. George Ebai was made the first Chairman and Akwanga, Jr., became the pioneer Spokesman for the Movement. However, barely three months in its inception, Ebai George was “caught” in activities that jeopardize the objective of the Movement and he was immediately replaced as
Chairman. Akwanga, Jr., took over the helm of the Movement in what many considered returning the stole to the rightful owner.
Across the territory of the former British Southern Cameroons, the SCYL made major inroads, recruiting thousands of youths and adults into their ranks in a manner that frightened both the sinking SCNC and the Yaoundé authorities. Akwanga held several meetings in various locations
attracting crowds of persecuted, bruised, battered and embittered people throughout his Homeland. In the process, he had series of skirmishes with the country’s authorities as they banned and tried to disrupt SCYL meetings. By 1997, it was certain that the regime was closing down its murderous plan on
him. A major clash was in the horizon, but no one knew when it would begin. In the evening of the 24th of March, 1997, while returning to Bamenda from one of his numerous meetings, Akwanga, Jr., and one of his close aides Julius Ngu Ndi (who
later died at the Yaoundé Maximum Security Prison of Kondengui) were arrested in the town of Jakiri. They were immediately thrown into a filthy Jakiri gendarmerie brigade cell. In an ensuing clash between the population and the gendarmes, many were wounded and some killed. Hundreds of Southern Cameroonians
were rounded up in what became a brutal crack-down on all activists for Southern Cameroons freedom. Akwanga briefly narrates the inhuman treatment given to him by the gendarmes on his first night in detention in a book he penned within the confines of prison and published on the 17th of April, 2007 in the
United States, titled “Smiling Through Hardship”. Akwanga wrote:
“Suddenly, kicks were rained at my body, and I felt slaps and knocks from batons everywhere. Buckets of stinking water probably prepared for occasions like this emerged from the adjacent room and were thrown on me. The beating accelerated, accompanied with insults, and by silently
bearing the pains, I angered them most. They continued until I pass out again. When I regained full consciousness, I found myself in a very narrow cell meant only for two persons with very poor ventilation. Surviving any cell like this is only through God’s will. I had never been treated this way though I
had been caught in their dragnets many times before. For the first time since my involvement in the political struggle to liberate my people, I personally preferred dying to living”.
Akwanga spent the next seven years in confinement under very horrible conditions. From Jakiri and Kumbo, he was detained at the National Gendarmerie Legion at Up-Station in Bamenda, and then transferred to
Yaoundé. In Yaoundé, he was detained in an underground cell at the Secretariat d’etat de la Defense (SED), before being relocated to the Yaoundé Maximum Security Prison on Monday, the 2nd of June, 1997. During his years in detention, Akwanga
was frequently in critical poor health linked to torture, raising worries amongst his thousands of militants, supporters and admirers that he would give up the ghost. At one moment during solitary confinement in 1998, he became partially paralyzed, unable to speak and vomited and excreted blood for almost a
month. How he survived remains a miracle today. On March 14, 1999, the regime began a kangaroo trial of the SCYL Leader and his political comrades. Human rights organizations, the United Nations Human Rights Committee and most Western governments described the trial at the Yaoundé Military
Tribunal as a parody of justice. The only Southern Cameroonian Military personnel who was a member of the four-man panel of military judges, Colonel Fomundam was quickly replaced hours after the charade began and he criticized the manner in which the tribunal’s selected
interpreter was doing his job. The prosecution equally kept changing the charges and by the time the showcase trial ended in the early morning hours of the 6th of October, 1999, no one, not even Akwanga’s lawyers knew the reason why he was on trial. However, unable to extinguish the flame of resistance in him
even during the showcase trial, the regime slammed a 20-year-jail-term on him on the 6th of October, 1999 after he had spent two years in solitary confinement in a special prison at Mfou, some twenty kilometers at the outskirt of Yaoundé. It appeared his
role in the Southern Cameroons struggle had been played out. But Akwanga would not go away. Writing for Jeune Afrique Economie (JAE –DU 1er AU 14 SEPTEMBRE 1997, p. 83 - 84) the Paris-based monthly magazine on the political and economic trends in Africa, the Magazine’s publisher and
Editor-in-Chief, Blaise-Pascale Talla described Chairman Akwanga in these words: “…the portrait of an idealistic young man…whose historical itinerary strongly symbolizes the frustrating and debilitating living condition of the Cameroonian youth of today
”. On the trial of Chairman Akwanga on the Southern Cameroons Struggle for Independence, Blaise-Pascale Talla wrote:
“If it is true that the gravity of the issue justifies a certain weakness on the part of the judiciary, then it is important that the Cameroonian authorities take stock of the profound root causes of this problem. The Anglophone Problem would no longer be pushed to the sideline as it has
been the case for a very long time…for, no amount of penal sanction would be too heavy enough to stop the growing spirit for freedom in the Cameroonian youth, who, like Ebenezer Akwanga and his comrades, would attempt another adventure”.
In a sudden reversal of fortunes, Akwanga, through his Movement made one of the most dramatic jail-breaks in modern African history. He made his way out of confinement on the 9th of July, 2003. He sought refuge in neighboring Federal Republic of Nigeria where he spent 33 months, most
of the time in frightening poor health attributed to the torture meted on him during his years in detention. Even there, his torturers trailed him and made four alleged assassination attempts on his life. He survived them all. However, the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria
became so frightened with seeing him being assassinate in their country, so they asked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to transfer him to a third country for safety purpose. Akwanga and his two daughters, Geneviva and Corretta-Scot Gillian left Nigeria on
Sunday, the 20th of February, 2006 from the Murtala Mohammed International Airport en route to the United States. He arrived at the Miami International Airport on Monday, the 21st of February, 2006 following a resettlement program organized by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in
collaboration with the United States Government. Despite what he has endured in life so far for his involvement in the struggle of his people, the fearless Akwanga plans to return home one day to fight for his peoples’ freedom: “I do not intend to stay here for the rest of my life because
the Southern Cameroons needs me and that is where I belong”.
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