GREELEY — Like other Africans in Greeley, Vincent and Esau came to the United States to escape calamity in their homeland.
Only they are different. They are Cameroonians. Most Africans here are refugees from war-torn Somalia.
While war isn’t the current problem in Cameroon, a west African nation about the size of California, rampant oppression is. Vincent calls it a “secret war,” where opposition to a strongarm administration is silently eliminated.
Vincent and Esau are from southern Cameroon, the nation’s English-speaking territory where residents – according to these two members of the southern resistance movement – get discriminated against, harassed, jailed and sometimes killed by the French-speaking side.
“The French police rule the whole country,” Vincent says.
Because they are part of the resistance, Vincent, 67, and Esau, 60, declined to give their full names. They fear reprisals upon their eventual return.
“The country knows us very well,” Vincent says.
Vincent has been in the U.S. for two years, first settling in Denver, and has been able to seek work because he was granted asylum. A job at JBS Swift & Co. brought him to Greeley six months ago. He quit recently after suffering a hand injury, and he’s hoping to receive disability payments.
Esau arrived two months ago. He already knew Vincent from Menchum county in southwest Cameroon.
The two men, both fathers with family remaining in Africa, are roommates in a downtown Greeley apartment. They live modestly and get food from the Weld Food Bank.
Esau said police came for him last March because of his activism in the movement to secede. About 30 others were arrested in his village, he says, and were it not for his coincidental acquaintance with the sting’s police chief, Esau figures he’d now be behind bars, or worse.
The next time he wouldn’t be so lucky, so he came to America. He hasn’t been cleared to work yet – he’s trying to get asylum – and he doubts he’ll try the meatpacking plant because he saw what happened to Vincent.
“It’s my intent to stay (in the U.S.) until there would be such a time that there’s peace back home,” Esau says. “I will stay until I’m able to return.”
While the French-speaking administration has ruled since Cameroon established independence in 1960, there have been steady rumblings for secession in the south, where much of the nation’s natural resources, including oil, are located.
Paul Biya has been president for the past 27 years. With him in power, Vincent and Esau say, southern Cameroonians have been discriminated against when seeking jobs and denied decent schools and transportation. Political candidates from the south are harassed or imprisoned.
Cameroon is a democracy in name only, they say.
“Africa is suffering from all the dictatorships there,” Esau says. “The people in power – they stay there forever. … They keep all the people that will obey them in power.”
They blame France, which colonized much of Africa, for being a destabilizing factor for the continent. They hope the United Nations and newly elected President Barack Obama will take a more active role in working to cleanse Africa of corruption.
Plus, the man who aspires to lead southern Cameroon has no real chance of taking the helm without help from the United Nations, they say.
“We’d like (Obama) to implement democracy in Africa, because if there is no democracy in Africa, we will be forced to be running out,” Vincent says. “In the United States, you practice the real democracy.”
Esau says he’d rather not be living in the United States. He wishes that he and fellow Africans weren’t forced to flee and be, as he calls it, “a burden” upon other nations. He’d prefer to be in Cameroon, building a better future for his own country.
But at the present time, he feels he has no choice. For now he will make Greeley his city.
“There’s no way to live in Africa,” he says, his tired eyes telling it all.
