René Ngek Monteh, (Ph.D.),
Department of History | Higher Teachers Training College-University of Yaoundé 1 | montehrene@gmail.com
The North West Region of Cameroon, unlike many other parts in Africa, has the
reputation of being the world’s leading theatre for ethnic strife. The continent is experiencing an increase in the scope and intensity of conflicts underlined by internecine ethnic rivalries. Many such conflicts, which involve land and boundary problems, have antecedents in historical legacy. This study thus addresses the prolonged land skirmishes amongst the people of Oku and Mbesa and peace attempts from 1982 to 2017. In this paper, content analysis has been adopted in the collection and processing of data. Our materials embody both primary and secondary data collected from private archives, books, journals, articles, academic works, and internet materials. The results arrived at in this paper has been at the bases of a consortium of primary, secondary and electronic sources embodied with the historical methods of analyses. The narratives and submissions arrived at here provide cogent clues that besides colonial demarcation, population expansion and the rocky and undulating topography with limited fertile lands in the Oku and Mbesa Fondoms, constituted the major causes of their differences. However, conflicts erupt and escalate between these friendly communities due to group struggles and are underpinned by complicated alliances in which ethnic identity and affiliations are key variables. These differences grew with time then generated to open war episodes in 1982, 1988, 2007 and 2008. These wars did not at all encourage any friendly relations noted in the political, social and economic spheres of life. The early mechanisms put in place for peace-building had never bored any lasting solution for the people considering it as brutal peace. But as time went by, it became necessary for both traditional leaders engineered by external elites to look for a permanent solution and live as was the case before. However, the year 2017 remains impacted on both communities as a result of the series of peace-building propagated by traditional authorities and institutions of the two Fondoms.
Keywords: Conflict resolution, Land skirmishes Oku-Mbesa, Peace building
