A homemade bomb thrown through the roof of a university of Buea lecture hall wounded 11 students on Wednesday in an English-speaking region of Cameroon in the grip of a bloody separatist conflict.
Buea is the capital of Cameroon’s Southwest region. Both the Southwest and Northwest regions are mainly English-speaking in the otherwise predominantly French-speaking central African country.
A decades-long campaign by militants to redress perceived discrimination at the hands of the francophone majority flared into a declaration of independence on October 1, 2017, sparking a crackdown by security forces.
The conflict has claimed more than 3,500 lives and forced 700,000 people to flee their homes, according to NGO estimates that have not been updated in more than a year despite an escalation in violence in recent months.
Wednesday’s bombing has not been claimed, but the anglophone separatists have regularly attacked schools and universities which they accuse of favouring French-language education.
