In Bamenda today, the beating heart of Pan-African women’s activism was on full display. As the world marked Pan-African Women’s Day under the theme “Advancing Social and Economic Justice for African Women through Reparations,” the women of the North West Region stepped out, marching from Mile 1 Up Station to the Governor’s Office. Their message was loud, clear, and defiant: peace is not a gift to be granted from above – it is a right that must be claimed from the ground up.
This was symbolically more than a ceremonial walk. It was an act of resistance in a conflict zone. Bamenda’s streets have too often echoed with the sound of gunfire, fear and division in the years since the Anglophone crisis erupted. Today, they partly rang with chants, drums, and the harmonies of “Waka Waka for Peace.” In a city where peace can feel like a fragile rumour, these women made it visible, tangible, and urgent.
The call for reparations often misunderstood or dismissed is about more than compensation. It is about restoring dignity, repairing broken social fabrics, and acknowledging harm. Across Africa, women disproportionately carry the scars of conflict: they bury the dead like we saw pictures in Boyo Division, hold fractured families together, and rebuild economies from the ashes. In the crisis-hit regions, they have also been forced to flee, endure sexual violence, and navigate life as displaced persons. Reparations, in this sense, are an act of justice which is a promise that history’s wounds will not be ignored.
What happened in Bamenda today speaks to a broader Pan-African women’s agenda: that peace, justice, and equality are inseparable, and that women must lead in shaping them. From Liberia’s market women who forced an end to civil war, to South Africa’s mothers who marched against apartheid, to the women of Sudan demanding freedom in the streets of Khartoum, the story is consistent; African women’s peace-building is not a side event, it is the main strategy.
By linking their march to Pan-African Women’s Day, Bamenda’s women connected their local struggle to the continent-wide push for justice and reparations. They reminded us that conflict is not just a Cameroonian crisis, it is an African challenge and peace-building must be an African-led solution.
The uncomfortable truth is that women are still too often excluded from the formal spaces where peace agreements are negotiated. Yet their community-based work including calming tensions, mediating disputes, ensuring displaced families survive is what makes peace possible in the first place. The “Waka Waka for Peace” march was, in essence, a demand for a seat at the table.
As the Secretary-General at the Governor’s Office told the women today: “We will work hand in hand with women to ensure progress.” Those are welcome words. But unless they translate into real political will, policy change, and resources, they risk becoming the empty platitudes women have heard for decades.
In a year when Cameroon’s political future is being fiercely contested, today’s march was a quiet, dignified rebuke to the politics of exclusion, mistrust, and fear. It was a reminder that peace is not simply the absence of gunfire; it is the presence of justice, opportunity, and respect for human dignity.
The women of Bamenda did not walk for show. They walked for the right to live in a society where peace is built on truth, justice, and shared prosperity. They walked for the displaced mother in Nkambe who dreams of returning home, for the market trader in Buea struggling to feed her children, for the girl in Kumbo who wants an education free from violence.
If Cameroon, and indeed Africa, listens to them, we may yet find that the road to peace is not paved in military hardware, but in the footsteps of women who refuse to give up on their nations.
By Bakah Derick
Inclusive Development Advocate
Media Trade Unionist
Email: debakah2004@gmail.com
Tel: +237 67 54 60 75 0
