In Cameroon's Anglophone crisis, a stitched-together nation pushes at the seams

When Elie Smith was growing up in Cameroon’s English-speaking west, he was taught in school that he came from a proudly bilingual country – a British colony and a French colony stitched together in the 1960s to form a new and united nation.

So it came as a shock when he arrived in Douala, the country’s largest city, to take his national high school entrance exam, and found that all the test questions were in French – with no translation. He spoke French, but for his many classmates who didn’t, the exam was a humiliation.

“You just had to guess at what was being said and try your