By Nalova Akua
A woman cried out upon seeing what looked like a corpse, a sheet-covered form lying on a stretcher. As volunteers wheeled it onto the stage, Boris Taleabong Alemnge recited a poem whose title spoke the unspoken: “Death.”
“The day you die, people will cry,” the 24-year-old told hundreds of audience members in an embattled part of southwest Cameroon. “But this won’t stop the clock from ticking or the flowers from blooming.”
Alemnge is among a group of artists using spoken-word poetry to denounce ongoing bloodshed in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, where separatists are fighting government forces. The supposed corpse was a stage prop, but the tears and wails that greeted it were real.
The civil war has killed an estimated 6,500 people, a majority of them civilians, and displaced nearly 1 million since 2016.
Spoken word has gained new prominence in Cameroon as poets like Alemnge, who performs under
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