Anicet Ekane: The Patriot Cameroon Betrayed

DOULA-CAMEROON: They have taken Anicet Ekane and look how calmly the country inhales as if nothing sacred has been desecrated. They, the curators of our national rot, the men who turned a living country into a mausoleum with a flag. They, the custodians of decay who built their longevity on the corpses of the very people they pretend to govern.

Do you know what is most obscene? Not the brutality itself, we have tragically grown used to that but the silence that follows. The kind of silence that makes you wonder whether we have become a people carved from wax.

Ekane is gone. Just like Fru Ndi is gone. Just like Yondo Black is gone. And Biya, this immovable shadow, has watched every one of them fall. Not by accident. Not by time. But by the slow, calculated erosion that this regime has mastered: suffocate their voice, starve their hope, crush their resolve, and then pretend nature took its course. Forty-plus years he has outlasted them all. Not because he is strong. But because we have allowed ourselves to be weak.

Ekane’s murder is not a tragedy. Tragedies are accidents. This was policy. It was a message delivered with a body bag instead of a press conference. It was the regime announcing, again, that your dreams, your sweat, your patriotism, your very existence mean absolutely nothing unless you are useful to their survival. And here is the part that should make your blood boil: they expect your silence. They have taken Ekane, just as they took so many before him, calculating correctly, so far that Cameroon will shrug, post a few outraged paragraphs, share a quote or two, then return to sleep as if democracy is a luxury bed waiting to be remade.

So now let me ask you the only question that matters:

What is the price of your belief?

Not your outrage. Your belief.

Because belief costs something. It demands something. It tears something out of you. And if the only price you pay is a Facebook rant and a WhatsApp status, then be honest: you are not fighting for Cameroon; you are performing grief so you can feel righteous without doing a single uncomfortable thing.

Ekane sacrificed. Fru Ndi sacrificed. Yondo Black sacrificed. Many nameless ones sacrificed. And you? What have yousacrificed?

Let me say it plainly, and yes, rudely:

If you cannot take the first step, stop asking for help from the diaspora.

If you cannot risk anything, stop demanding that someone abroad risks everything.

Help is not the foundation; it is the final reinforcement.

You are the foundation.

And right now, the foundation is cracking under the weight of excuses.

The diaspora cannot save people who refuse to save themselves. They can support, amplify, strengthen but they cannot substitute your courage. They cannot outsource your responsibility. They cannot bleed on your behalf while you hide behind resignation.

This country is not dying because Biya is powerful. It is dying because too many of its citizens have chosen the luxury of complaint over the burden of action.

And action does not always mean grand gestures. Sometimes it is the stubborn, disciplined refusal to participate in your own humiliation. Sometimes it is joining others to break the spell of fear that has turned millions into spectators of their own oppression. Sometimes it is simply saying, “No more,” and backing it with something other than emotion.

Ekane’s blood is speaking. Loudly. Angrily. Accusingly.

And if it does not pierce you, then perhaps we have lost more than a patriot, perhaps we have lost our very capacity for shame.

Listen to the truth you refuse to hear:

Biya will not leave by himself.

He will not wake up one morning and remember he is mortal.

He will not grow a conscience he never had.

He must be compelled by pressure, by unity, by collective refusal to release the country he has suffocated for decades.

Not through chaos. Not through violence. But through the kind of mass, disciplined, coordinated resistance that no palace guard, no propaganda machine, no aging autocrat can withstand.

But it begins with you.

Your courage.

Your sacrifice.

Your decision to stop waiting for somebody else to write the story of your deliverance.

Anicet Ekane gave his life for a country that has not yet proven worthy of him.

Are you willing to make your life worthy of his?

Or will you, once again, let another hero’s blood dry into nothing?

The question is no longer before Biya. He has answered long ago.

The question is before you.

The time is now not tomorrow, not someday, not when the diaspora intervenes. Now.

Let Ekane’s blood be the last Cameroonian blood shed for silence.

Let his memory be the oath we finally keep:

Never again.

Not one more.

We rise.