Paper short abstract:

Faced with the Anglophone crisis, members of the Fulani communities entrapped by the war hysteria, developed flexible containment mechanisms. Irrespective of the options, the war presaged impressive displacements among the Fulani contributing to issues of adjustments in their new environments.

Paper long abstract:

The Fulani of the North West Region of Cameroon are mainly cattle nomads with inaudible lifestyles. They mostly live on grassy hilltops overlooking pasture-laden valleys for herding. Recently they are gently gaining sedentary habitations and are often visibly indifferent to political issues that do not directly impinge on their immediate socio-economic setting. The historic routine of living, especially, in their natural eco-structure was greatly affected by the general anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty engendered by the belligerency accompanying the Anglophone crisis that radicalized roughly around 2017. It is in this context that following a qualitative (historical) method-approach supported by primary and secondary evidences, the study argues that the extension of the armed phase of the Anglophone crisis to the Fulani social and geographical reserves exposed them to conditions of the war scenario. Faced with the entanglement and hysteria, members of the Fulani communities developed alternating containment mechanisms that saw them collaborating with or resisting the guerilla set up of the separatists-led ambazonian-fighters. The study interrogates the extent to which the Fulani in the war circumstance contended with the decision to synchronize positions of either appropriating the propaganda of the separatists’ forces or aligning with the ideology of the state to neutralize the ambazonian-fighters. It argues that as a survival strategy within the war situation, some Fulani populations were constrained to flee from their natural abodes to new locations where they submitted to the impulses of local and international support agencies to adjust to their host communities.