The school year in Cameroon started Monday with hundreds of schools in the troubled western regions reopening their doors for the first time in three to five years.
Anglophone separatists previously used threats to keep the schools closed, but some rebels, for the first time, are saying they should be spared from the conflict.
Cameroon’s government said several hundred schools reopened in its restive English speaking North West and South West regions.
Most schools in the regions have been shut down for three to five years, since the start of a separatist conflict to carve out an English-speaking state from Cameroon and its French-speaking majority.
The most senior government official in Nkambe, a western district, Ngida Lawrence Che, said at least half a dozen schools that were sealed by separatists in the 17 villages that make up Nkambe have reopened.
The government reports that separatists attacked or set fire to more than 200 schools between 2017 and 2019, and nearly all schools in the Northwest and Southwest regions were shut down while teachers and school children escaped to safer localities.
The Ambazonia Defense Forces, ADF, said to be the largest separatist group in Cameroon also, for the first time in 5 years gave instructions for schools to reopen.
The ADF however warned government troops not to set foot on any school campus in the restive regions adding that fighters have been instructed to make sure the national anthem of Cameroon is not sung in English-speaking schools.
Secretary of state to Cameroon’s minister of education, Asheri Kilo, said children in areas where fighters still prohibit education should be admitted in schools in safer areas.
She says the government will continue to deploy troops to make sure that all Cameroonian children in conflict zones have access to education.
There was no immediate word on how many students in the North West and South West regions had returned to school. For some, it will be the first time in class since 2016.
