Thursday, October 4, 2018, 9.30am – Feast of St Francis of Assisi. Red Day!
Yes, every death elicits pain and sorrow. But martyrdom evokes deeper emotions of sadness and anguish. On the above date, inside the Quasi Parish of St Theresa’s Catholic Church Bamessing in Ndop Division, Archdiocese of Bamenda, the Cameroon military shot severally at very close range and killed, on the spot, Seminarian AKIATA GERARD ANJIANGWE. He was a budding vocation to the Priesthood of Christ, primed to serve humanity.
However, what was very eerie and blood shilling, in this dreadfully fatal incidence, was that the dead could have been a Claretian Missionary caught up in a theater of war. In fact, it could have been a Nigerian Claretian Missionary.
The Claretian Missionaries (USA and Nigeria) have ministered in that region of the Archdiocese of Bamenda for many years. Indeed, St Theresa’s Bamessing used to be the major outstation of St Patrick’s Catholic Parish, Babanki-Tungo, Kedjom Ketinguh, Tubah in Menzam Division, North-West Cameroon. In reality, the Claretians from the Province of Nigeria constructed the presbytery of that station in the early 2000s.
Gerard wasn’t an activist nor agitator. Neither was he a terrorist. He didn’t belong to either the national armed forces or the so-called Anglophone Ambazonians – “rebel” fighters. No. He was a young seminarian living in the presbytery of the St.Therese Parish Bamessing hitherto ministered by the Nigerian Claretian Missionaries.
The feelers from Cameroon indicate that for close to three years Cameroonians of English expression (the North West and South West Regions) have known no peace but severest hardship in all aspects of life. Reports abound of indiscriminate and frequent extrajudicial killings. The populace live in perpetual fear amidst the continuous sounds of heavy gunshots. There are constant raids both from the army and from the locally trained ‘boys’, who demand money and property as ransom. Education is brought to a halt and businesses abandoned because the men live in the mountainous thickets while the women are left to bury those that ‘returned’ dead. This horrible scenario engulfed the young man Gerard and snuffed life out of his tender age. Shockingly, these atrocities do not find space in the international news media.
Let us continue to pray for an end to the militarization, invasion and mass slaughter of innocent citizens in that region. They are people under siege while the world looks on – UN and AU. But the Lord sees all and, we believe, will act soon.