The Bamenda Awakening: A Congregation’s Roar and the Church’s Deafening Silence
In the cathedral pews of Bamenda, the people of Cameroon have done what their shepherds refused to do: they thundered a prophetic “No” to tyranny and its ecclesiastical enablers. What follows is not polite commentary; it is a cry of outrage from a nation whose churches have been bought, whose votes have been stolen, and whose children have been murdered in the streets while the successors of the apostles looked away. Read it, weep, and then—God help us all—choose whose side you are on.
OPINION
Theodore Nkwenti
11/23/20254 min read
The recent, glorious pushback in Bamenda was a moment of divine intervention. When the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop José Avelino Bettencourt, invoked the title “President of Cameroon” with the shamelessness that only a diplomat detached from human suffering could muster during the rededication of St. Joseph's Cathedral in Bamenda on November 15, 2025, the people rose. What met his utterance was not reverent hush, but a thunderous chorus of boos from the congregation—a visceral rejection that echoed like the crack of judgment day itself.
This was no mere murmur of discontent; it was the pushback heard around the world, a raw outcry against a regime that has metastasized into a parody of governance, and against a Church that has slumbered in complicit silence amid the carnage. It was the people, not their appointed leaders, who spoke truth to power. It was a stark reminder that while the shepherds may be sleeping comfortably in bed with the regime, the flock is being devoured by wolves. The people refused to allow the house of God to be used as a stage for sanitizing a monster.
Under the grotesque masquerade of an October 12, 2025 election—a shameless fraud that eliminated Maurice Kamto before a single ballot was cast—the Biya regime, a decrepit leviathan, that has never encountered a principle it wouldn't betray for the sake of perpetuating its plunder, staggered into its forty-fourth year of tyrannical torpor.
Post-election, as the people rose in righteous protest, Biya's forces unleashed a brutal campaign of mass killings, gunning down at least 48 unarmed demonstrators in a spree of state-sanctioned slaughter, alongside waves of arbitrary arrests and intimidation that stifle the very breath of dissent. These are only some of the grotesque spectacle that made Bamenda’s rebellion inevitable. This was not mere dissent; it was a moral verdict, delivered from the pews against a backdrop of spiritual betrayal. And it throws into terrifying relief the noxious silence that has become the official policy of the Church hierarchy in Cameroon.
Yet, where is the Church in this maelstrom of malevolence? That ancient bastion of moral guidance, advocacy for the oppressed, community succor, education, and spiritual solace—once the prophetic voice thundering against injustice—now cowers in silence, a retreat from its sacred duty amid the regime's post-election atrocities.
Though some bishops, like those of Douala, once dared to call for Biya's abdication, the broader ecclesiastical hierarchy has shrugged off the regime's pariah status, accepting lavish gifts that bear the regime's thumbprint like a brand of betrayal.
Spearheaded by Minister Paul Nji Atanga, that soulless sycophant who has peddled his integrity so thoroughly he could not feign possession of one, gifting opulent church buildings and presiding over presidential largesse to religious institutions—bribes cloaked in benevolence, ensuring the Church's lips remain sealed. When you accept such tainted offerings, you do not merely receive a building; you inherit its foundation of lies.
What, pray tell, is the usefulness of such a Church if it cannot summon the courage to address the suffering and oppression wrought by this all-too-powerful regime? People are starting to wonder if it is truly committed to its values. When Maurice Kamto was transparently sidelined, not a single priest, pastor, Imam, bishop, etc., raised a clarion condemnation; when over 48 souls were extinguished for the crime of protesting, the pulpits echoed with emptiness.
As representatives of Christ, the Church should constantly ask itself: What would Jesus do? Surely not this—Jesus who overturned tables in the temple and decried the hypocrites would not lie comfortably abed with tyrants. Recall the historical precedence: the Church in Europe, with unflinching resolve, helped dismantle the iron yokes of fascism and Nazism, standing as a bulwark against evil. Yet in Cameroon, the hierarchy shrugs, its neutrality in injustice a de facto alliance with the oppressor. As Desmond Tutu warned: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
Some apologists argue that the people themselves have faltered, contenting themselves with idle libations in bars while expecting the Church to lead the charge. But such action is only conceivable with the wind of ecclesiastical moral authority at one's back—speaking truth to power, not consorting with it. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," intoned Edmund Burke, a universal maxim that indicts the silent shepherds of Cameroon's flock.
Having bought and acquired the silence of the Church in Cameroon, that kind of oxygen that allows its evil to breathe, the Biya regime is actively courting the Vatican, its next prey, with sponsored pilgrimages and whispers of a papal visit to Africa—perhaps positioning Cameroon as the first stop to schmooze and hobnob with holiness and launder its legitimacy.
The Church is being played like a cheap violin, its strings plucked by despots seeking an imprimatur of divine approval. Pope Leo be reminded of this adage: "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." The Church, by bedding down with Biya's flea-ridden regime, risks not just infestation but irrelevance—a once-mighty institution reduced to a hollow echo in the face of unbridled evil.
So let the Church know this: Their attempts to appease the tyrant are fueling a deeper spiritual crisis than any political upheaval. When the people, who still cling to the faith, see their shepherds consorting with the butchers, they do not lose faith in God; they lose faith in the men who claim to speak in His name.
The pushback in Bamenda is but the first tremor. Cameroonians, rise; let the Church rediscover its prophetic fire, lest it be consigned to the dustbin of moral obsolescence. For in the silence of the holy, evil does not merely triumph—it dances unchallenged, and the blood of the slain cries out from the ground—while the shepherds count their thirty pieces of silver in silence
