Why a Nigerian village has welcomed thousands of refugees

Ndoh Cheng was asleep in his tent in the Adagom refugee settlement in Ogoja, Nigeria, when a soft knock on the doorframe suddenly roused him. When he came outside that morning in August 2019, he was greeted by a local teenage boy with a stack of yams balanced on his head.

The boy explained that his parents had sent him to give Mr. Cheng the tubers so he could participate in the town’s harvest festival.

For Mr. Cheng – who had fled a civil war in his home country of Cameroon the year before – the gesture remains etched in his memory. It was the moment he realized that Adagom was not just the place he had run to. It had become his home. 

“This community has given me far more than I ever imagined,” he says.

Mr. Cheng and his family are among the approximately 60,000 Cameroonians who have taken refuge in Nigeria since civil war broke out in their country in 2017. Spurred by demands for independence by Cameroon’s English-speaking minority, that conflict has claimed at least 6,000 lives and displaced over 600,000 people. 

Some 8,000 of them now live in Adagom, and the village has opened its arms to them. 

“The community saw them as their brothers in need,” says Victor Ogar, a supervisor with the Cross River State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), the local government agency tasked with integrating refugees. 

The reasons for that welcome are part altruism, part practicality, pointing to how embracing refugees can have benefits for locals and new arrivals alike. 

“C’est lui”

In August 2018, a year before the gift of the yams, Mr. Cheng was standing outside of his office in the Cameroonian city of Limbe. Suddenly, a truck of military police officers pulled up in front of him, and the men began leaping out of the car. 

“Est-ce que c’est lui?” one barked. (Is he the one?)

Another soldier’s curt reply confirmed the outcome: “Oui, c’est lui.” (Yes, it’s him.)

Before Mr. Cheng even grasped what was happening, the men shoved him into the back of the truck and drove him to a military facility, where he was charged with providing information to the Ambazonians – an anglophone militant group fighting for Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions to break away from the mostly-francophone country.

That conflict has deep roots, stretching back to the end of World War I, when the German colony of Kamerun was handed off to the British and the French, who split it in two. Following independence in the 1960s, the two pieces became a single country again.

But the national government was always heavily dominated by French speakers, who the anglophone minority felt treated them as second-class citizens. In 2016, lawyers and teachers in the two anglophone regions took to the streets in protest of the appointment of French-speaking officials to their courts and schools. In response, the national government cracked down violently, deploying tanks and soldiers. The heavy-handed response reignited a long-standing secessionist movement, and fighting began.

In the years since, government forces have been accused of indiscriminate arrests and other human rights violations. Meanwhile, the “Amba Boys,” as the separatists are often called, have claimed responsibility for deadly attacks on civilians, including bombings of schools and sporting events.

Mr. Cheng says soldiers tortured him in an attempt to get him to say that he aided the separatists – but he never did. After a month in detention, he was released without charge. But he knew it wasn’t safe for him to stay in Cameroon. 

So in September 2018, he boarded a ferry headed for Calabar, Nigeria, uncertainty gnawing at his heart. 

“Friends and teammates”

As it turned out, he had little to fear. 

When Mr. Cheng arrived in Nigeria, he immediately took a bus to the city of Ogoja, 40 miles from the border. He had a friend living in the refugee settlement there, which UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, had set up in a village on the city’s outskirts called Adagom. 

Earlier that year, the Nigerian federal government and UNHCR had approached Adagom’s community leaders with a request to use about 150 acres of their land for a refugee settlement. 

The leaders didn’t hesitate. After all, the people of Adagom are no strangers to needing help. The village lies just minutes from Gakem, the site where the first shot of Nigeria’s devastating civil war rang out in 1967. 

The community donated the land the government asked for, along with other parcels of unused farmland.

“We understand their plight,” says Edward Egbaji, head of the Adagom Clan. “We wanted them to feel as comfortable as possible.”

But leaders also knew opening their doors could have practical benefits. The settlement was not a refugee camp, but a kind of neighborhood on the edge of the village that people could move in and out of freely. 

That meant that the influx of refugees would likely boost the village economy, and bring an infusion of humanitarian aid to local institutions like schools and clinics. 

Cultural ties also played a role in the benevolence of the community, says Mr. Ogar, the government official working on refugee resettlement. He notes that many of the refugees belong to the Ejagham ethnic group – as do many people in Adagom and the surrounding areas. 

“We don’t see refugees and host communities here. There are only friends and teammates,” says Udam Loveday, a local resident. 

A sense of home 

On a recent morning, as Mr. Cheng rode through Adagom on his bike, his neighbors greeted him in a mix of Nigerian and Cameroonian pidgin English. 

Many conversations here – from customers haggling with vendors over fabric prices to men debating the latest English Premier League result – take place in a mix of the two languages. 

These days, the tract of donated land Mr. Cheng farms produces so many vegetables that he has more than his family needs. He often gives the surplus away to his neighbors – refugees and locals alike. 

He also runs a small charitable organization that works on social issues facing both refugees and locals. Sandra Ndok, a local who works for Mr. Cheng’s organization, says working with refugees has been the best experience of her life. 

“I am planning on spending a year in Cameroon after the war ends, traveling across the region, eating their food and dancing to their music,” she says. “I need to live the stories I have heard from them.”