Description
Written from the crucible of Bamenda, Ghost Town Chronicles by Bame Tomnyuy offers an urgent, poetic reckoning with the Crisis that has ravaged Anglophone Cameroon since October 2016. Choosing to remain at ground zero, Tomnyuy documents the slow unravelling of civic life and the profound trauma of a people caught in an endless proxy war.
Through striking imagery and oral cadences, these poems bear witness to the brutal realities of the conflict. Tomnyuy captures the suffocation of “Ghost Town Mondays,” where commerce and education halt under the threat of violence. He mourns the loss of innocence in classrooms turned into battlefields, the erasure of identity, and the anguish of displaced citizens forced across borders. Crucially, the collection explores the impossible choices forced upon civilians trapped between the heavily armed military and militant separatists, where simply speaking English can invite suspicion or death.
Refusing to romanticise the bloodshed, Ghost Town Chronicles gives voice to the unspoken suffering of Anglophone Cameroonians. It is both an elegy for the lives lost to the violence and a tribute to the quiet resistance of those who stay, survive, and remember.
Contents
Preface
Bamenda, 2016
Nightfall Abakwa
Hush, Soldiers Are Coming
Social Media Warriors
Diaspora to Ground Zero
Ghost Town Mondays
Why Are You Still Here?
Songs They Can’t Sing
The Day the Sun Blinked
Rain Wore Blood
Dead Bodies in the City
Dreams in a Coffin
The Earth Swallows Them Whole
Roadblocks and Bible Verses
Smile to Survive
My Fatherland is on Fire
Flags on Fire
Smoke Signals to Yaoundé
The Radio Went Quiet
Chalk and Guns
Schools Went Silent
Dust On The Blackboard
The Last Bell
The Missing Headmaster
The Villages
Smoke in the Villages
The Ashes of Ngarbuh
A Village Without Men
Widows of Fire and Ash
Voices in the Valley
Bullet Lullabies
The Border Eats People
Rice Without Salt
Tea Without Bread
Footprints
Borderless Grief
Teenage Soldier
Boys with Rifle Names
Whispers and Ransoms
He Left No Goodbye
English in Exile
Dreadlocks
Don’t Speak English Here
Mamma Spoke French
English and French Patients
Sunday Mass, No Sermon
She Speaks in Riddles
Red Earth, Redder Blood
Cameroon is an Old Riddle
One Nation, Two Guns
Faces We Know
My Brother, The Rebel
Between Firestorms
Applause to Old Promises
The Truth Refuses to Die
Waiting for Peace
Peace is a Broken Mirror
No One Heard His Cries
Justice is Still Missing
Empty Thrones
History’s Emissary
Cracks in the Cross
Red Ink
Broken Pencil
A Poet Still Sings
A Prayer in Five Stanzas
About the Author
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