Renowned for her role in the fight for the rights of women in land ownership, Nkwah Elizabeth explains how the Crisis has affected her activities in this fight. and her role in trying to salvage a humanitarian situation that has befallen her people.

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(TRANSCRIPT)

My name is Nkwa Elizabeth. I have been in many other places as a woman and as an activist. So my activism came from the aspect that we're having problems to own land as women, inherit anyway, inherit land as women. Then I thought, I said, but it is not a man's world. So I started bringing women together to see how we can go into our men, especially in Bali, to tell them that the girl child has the right to land. Because land is like the main resource there for women and for every other person. Because it's a royal area.

So in 1991, 1999, me and some five women, we formed a group called Bahofak. That is Bali Women's Union of Farming Groups. So we united farming groups, mostly made of women. And started asking for men to let us inherit land. And in the course of that, we discovered that the women were not educated on their rights, on some of their rights. So it were women who were fighting against themselves. Because the moment your husband dies, your sister-in-laws stand by. The boys to say, you are not, you don't have right to that land. Or your sisters will even stand against you, that you don't have right. You leave the land for the boys. So we started building their capacity by educating them.

Then came an issue where we decided that if we can also buy our own land. And then make our female children inherit. Then this problem will gradually be solved. But then it still boils down to the fact that we have not solved the problem for everybody. Because not everybody will be able to buy land. We still went back into it. And some women started doing their farming in groups. In the way that before the brother comes. Or the husband's brother comes. They have worked a big place. And then in any case, if you destroy anything, they now take it to the agricultural offices that were there. And so men started relaxing. They just relax. They say, okay, you'll work a farm here. But you'll never build a house. But in that, we are still going in it.

Then came 2010. It was almost 11 years after. There was a group in Austria that decided to phone us. Because they came for terrorism. And they found some women and their reports. So they decided to phone us to educate the women. Just to make them know how to read and write. We started a school for adult literacy. And there the women too now knew some of the things that they did not know. Because in course of that, we're telling them how to make their own wealth. Because if you have your own everything, you will not be fighting for inheritance. Within that time, we're always busy. Most of them made poultry. They started rearing goats to have their manure. Because our group too had to preach on organic food. So we trained them on how to manage these animals to give them manure for the farm.

As things were moving well, we even had the people visiting us from Austria. And even making the farm with us. But 2016 came. We found that the women, when 2016, the teachers strike and lawyers, when the school children came back to the houses, we were all in support of it. But, in our group, we're telling women that, but these children coming back to the house, is it possible for them to remain? It may be possible for them to remain in the house. But since we're not quite educated on our political landscape, on what was to happen, we all believed that it was going to take a year or two. So we withdrew children. They were saying, no, if we, this was to keep children at home, and make UNESCO come in to eat. So all of us, including me, were keeping the children.

We said, no, if UNESCO has to come in, then we have had a ground for an improved education. But two years passed. AM came in. We found that the boys who had left school, had been introduced to this taking AMs. And even in that taking AMs, we said, I started asking my group members, I said, are we sure that this AMs is good for the children? Everybody was supporting it. I mean everybody. Every woman. They were giving food to the boys to stay in the bush and fight for this so-called freedom.

Later on, it became like some, people started settling squabbles through them. When you have a problem, that our land issue came back. So that each time you had a problem between you and your brother, they would take you to the AMBA boys. They would warn you, they would beat you. Most women were facing it quietly because majority were supporting them. So they would say, but why did you do that? Why did you? Why did you? Then a time came I said, but we are going into a situation where we will not control.

We started discovering that women were now, when this, the conflict became so, so intense that the government had to send the B, the gendarmes and so on. It became a village. It started sending away people from the villages. And those who could not afford to leave the village went into the bushes. So on visiting one of our woman who had a problem with pregnancy, I discovered that in that bush, she could not come out to the farm. They come out of the farm. She was, they were all afraid. They would not come out to the hospitals. I said, so what are we to do now? They said, no, they were to, they are taking those children. They are helping their women who had been doing local midwifery.

But with local midwifery, how, after that, what, how are you going to treat that newly born child? We said, no. I said, no, this is taking a different dimension. I started calling other women. That we should see into it too. I had now gone to meet the Stand Up For Cameroon group. When they started, they called us for a meeting in Yaoundé. We, in the meeting, in the first meeting, as we're in the meeting, we heard that in Batibu, the duo has been killed.

We're meeting. in February it was supposed to be 11 February so they discovered in the meeting that the Francophone women did not know that 11 February for us we used to take it as the plebiscite but they were taking it as you day and they did not if most people do not know what the plebiscite was so that is when they invited us to talk about the Anglophone crisis the most of the youths were like it's a you day and on I was saying that plebiscite was a day the two Cameroons decided the Anglophones decided to join their brothers east of the way mongo so just when we're having lunch from that meeting we had them a deal has been made between the two of them and they decided to take it as 11 February for us killed on that 11 February in Battebones I said okay you see what is I started happening we were we went the call us for heat of you in the radio stations and they were talking about it.