BY SANDRA LUM
Reports from Bamenda, chief town of the North West Region of Cameroon say an Anglophone lecturer, Teke Johnson Takwa, noted for his criticising the Yaounde regime for the poor mistreatment of Anglophones in Cameroon especially Anglophone teachers and lecturers, has been arrested security and defense forces.
Teke Johnson Takwa is currently in custody at the military detention facility in Bamenda Up Station.
The arrest of Teke Johnson Takwa has complicated the lives and future of his wife and children, especially Teke Grateful Anwi a former vice publicity secretary of the University of Buea Students Union, UBSU, who is abroad for further studies.
Teke Johnson Takwa was arrested on Saturday August 2, 2025 at a mixed control checkpoint around Commercial Avenue in Bamenda. THE SUN gathered that the officers went through his phone and discovered messages confirming that his daughter, Teke Grateful Anwi, now abroad onetime worker in a bank at the a Mobile Money department received money from abroad and sent to his father for onward transmission to separatist fighters and other groups to reinforce their objectives in clamouring for the restoration of the independence of Former British Southern Cameroons or the creation of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.
It should be recalled that Teke Johnson Takwa had, at the dawn of the Anglophone crisis, been warned about his activism by joining other lecturers and teachers to protest against the transfer of French-speaking teachers to Anglophone colleges and Universities to teach Anglophone students.
His daughter played a frontline role in frequently organising student unrests as the vice publicity secretary of the University of Buea Student Union, UBSU, to manifest their grievances following government’s failure to keep to its promises since 2016. This caused her being arrested and later released by security officers sometimes in May 2021.
Sources say it is against this backdrop that the military initiated criminal proceedings against Teke Johnson Takwa before the Bamenda military court, and endorsed an arrest warrant against Teke Grateful Anwi, declaring her wanted.
As we went to press reports said while Teke Johnson Takwa is still in custody awaiting prosecution before the Bamenda Military Court, his wife, Timbu Caroline Acha, a teacher by profession, had gone underground, while Teke Grateful Anwi’s three siblings now live in trauma and fear and facing possible arrest by the military.
According to the Cameroon Penal code if arrested, they will face charged for acts of insurrection, hostilities against the state, and failure to report.
The Anglophone crisis began in 2016 with strikes by teachers and lawyers, which later attracted the people of the two English-speaking regions of the country, as they expressed their accumulated grievances emanated from marginalisation by the majority French-speaking part of Cameroon, inequality in employment, adulterations of the Common Law judicial system and English subsystem of education.
The crisis has left thousands, both civilians and security and defense forces, dead, others internally displaced with some living in bushes, while over 30,000 have fled to neighbouring Nigeria where they are living as refugees.
Houses as well as villages have been razed to the ground with extrajudicial killings being regular occurrences.