“Invisible widows”: Cameroon’s conflict is making ‘widows’ out of women whose husbands are still alive
- In a conflict that has driven men to leave and disappear for years, women with living husbands are left to build lives alone, raising children with no support and no certainty that anyone is coming back.
Image Description: A woman sitting alone on a small stool in a dim, bare room, softly lit by a small window. She is wearing a blue dress and an orange headscarf. Beside her is a fading smoky silhouette of a man who appears to be seated on another stool, though no one is physically there.
Yaounde, Cameroon (Minority Africa) — The air inside this abandoned feed mill in Cameroon’s capital city is sticky and hot. The heat comes from the zinc roof, overcrowding, and children playing and screaming around despite it. In one of the makeshift homes at the corner, Glory Menye sits on an upturned plastic bucket, trimming leeks into neat bundles for the market. Her children weave around her, preparing their trays to set out and sell leeks for the day.
This is home for them—eight people in a small cubicle inside an abandoned feed mill shared with 17 other families displaced by the conflict in the North West and South West regions. It is a life patched together from loss.
Menye’s mother is gone, their family home in Bamenda burned to the ground by separatist fighters. Her husband is alive but defined by absence. He hides in the “bushes” near their hometown in the North West, pursued over a land dispute inflamed by Cameroon’s ongoing conflict.
“He used to come and visit in our former house late at night and disappear by morning, I no longer felt safe; all sorts of persons used to come and look for him, the last time he came and I told him about moving, I have not seen him since then,” Menye says, her hands never still as her eyes drift upward, trying to remember the last time she saw her husband.
Her only escape is starting anew, somewhere none of those searching for him could find them. She paid 300,000 francs (about $540 USD) for the space—money she gave to someone she believed had authority. Now she wrestles with eviction and a court case that could leave her and her children homeless next year. The owner of the poultry facility has returned after a long production break and wants to relaunch his business, but 18 displaced families have turned the feed mill into a hostel. The sale was fraudulent.
“If I am reimbursed the money, I can find somewhere else to stay,” she says, though she admits that, according to the owner, the payment never reached him, making her request unlikely.
For now, she lives with the uncertainty—and with the weight of being both mother and father to her eight children—while her husband hides in the hills. Her livelihood comes from a basket of leeks bought wholesale and sold at the market for 100 francs (17 cents) each. Now that schools are on holiday, the whole family helps. It covers food. It covers hope “but only enough to pay school fees for four of my eight children next academic year. We are just managing like that,” Menye says, exhausted.
Back at the mill, evening falls, and Menye counts the day’s leek sales under the glow of a single bulb. Somewhere in Bamenda, her husband remains in hiding. She does not know when, or if, he will return. For now, she folds the notes into her wrapper pocket and turns back to her children, taking each day of her as seeming widowhood one day at a time.
Just a few kilometres away, the air smells different—this time of rotting garbage piled high beside a roadside shop. Behind the counter, Victorine Fonyuy sells tomatoes, bars of soap, eggs, and other small items households might need. Every few minutes she pauses to serve a customer, apologising for the stench. Her home, an abandoned chicken house, stands a short walk away. Fonyuy’s husband disappeared more than five years ago after quarrels about his lifestyle, his desire to join the separatist fighters, and his growing irresponsibility after the conflict cost him his livelihood.
“He wanted to live a life I did not agree with, so he just left, and I do not even know where he is today—[whether] he finally joined them—and I have never seen a franc from him to support the children,” she tells Minority Africa.
She is raising three children and caring for a relative displaced by the crisis. Her eldest daughter, 24, spends the holidays learning hairdressing to help support the family. The youngest, just 11, is still in school. They live in a single room and parlour in the abandoned chicken house, making do with what little she earns from her shop. Like Menye, Fonyuy describes herself as a widow—not in the legal sense, but in the way her life has been defined by abandonment and uncertainty. Yet she expresses gratitude for occasional good Samaritans who stop by to help her, and for family members who support her as she navigates her plight.
“I am not a closed person. Whenever I share my story with people, they feel pity, and I am sometimes called up for small grants or strangers squeeze bank notes in my hands,” Fonyuy says, smiling for the first time that evening.
Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis, the backdrop to these women’s stories, began in 2016 as a political and social conflict rooted in the marginalisation of the country’s English-speaking regions by the French-speaking majority government. Over time, peaceful protests escalated into violent clashes between separatist groups and the state.
The crisis has created a massive displacement emergency, with the United Nations estimating nearly 700,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), many fleeing violence to major cities like Yaoundé, where Menye and Fonyuy now live.
The Divisional Officer of the area where both women live, Joseph Alain Etoundi, acknowledges that Menye and Fonyuy’s stories are part of a much bigger crisis.
“The security crisis in the North West and South West has led to an influx of internally displaced persons into my area of jurisdiction, Yaoundé VI,” he says. “We have made efforts to register all these IDPs, in partnership with civil society actors. For now, the state has no plans to evict them, but is in a tight spot to handle accommodation and individual support for all the families.”
This reality is far from rare, says Esther Omam, the Executive Director of Reach Out Cameroon, a non-governmental organisation championing the rehabilitation of widows and families. “In every community we have worked in, one in three women is heading a home because the man is absent—not dead, but displaced or in hiding.”
She calls them “invisible widows”—women who cannot remarry because their husbands have not been declared dead, who are denied access to inheritance, and who do not qualify for targeted aid because they don’t fit official categories of vulnerability.
“Culturally, their loyalty is questioned. Economically, they struggle. Psychologically, this is too much for their mental health,” she says.
Reach Out Cameroon broadened its scope to include these women in its aid campaigns, with initiatives such as Peace House, which provides food, sanitary kits, psychosocial support, and small economic grants. Some women have gone on to train other women and girls. But sustaining the work has been hard. Leaders of such initiatives acknowledge that funding has dropped year after year, and priority is often given to those still in active conflict zones, leaving programmes for these families limited. The organization lost a five-year USAID grant after funding cuts at the start of the Trump presidency, and bureaucratic issues—such as the mass suspension of several NGOs by Cameroon’s Ministry of Territorial Administration—have further strained resources.
“We will not even be able to assist them this year with back-to-school supplies, as usual, due to all of these issues,” Omam says.
She adds, “Widows can mourn openly and receive social acknowledgement. These women live in constant fear, never knowing if their husbands are safe, alive, or ever coming back.”
Edited/Reviewed by PK Cross, Caleb Okereke, Samuel Banjoko, Awom Kenneth and Uzoma Ihejirika.
This story was commissioned under the Minority Africa Pitch Clinic by Juliet Nkemdy and Shameer Ramdin.
Illustrated by Rex Opara.
