'I love my country but nobody is safe' ... Cameroon's trapped exiles

Amid the sound of children excitedly practising a drama for a forthcoming performance, a yam seller calls to passers by with discounts for their wares.

- Eromo Egbejule

Outside a closed graphic design shop overlooking them from a small hill, Solange Ndonga Tibesa tells the story of being uprooted from her homeland in north-west Cameroon.

In June 2019 she and other travellers were abducted with her three-month-old baby by secessionists, who accused them of supporting the military. Their captors repeatedly hit them with butts of their guns, keeping them in a forest without food or water.

"We stayed in a forest there for two days. My baby cried [so much]... and we just became used to the mosquitoes," said the 30-year-old. "One of the boys was asking me to take off my clothes but I begged: 'It's better if you just kill me than rape me, before the other boys intervened."

In October, Cameroon goes to the polls, with 92-year-old Paul Biya, its president since 1982, running for an eighth term. An estimated 6.9 million people are registered to vote, but Tibesa, who fled into Cross River state in neighbouring Nigeria after her release, is one of thousands who cannot vote even if they wanted to.

The vast majority of Nigeria's eastern flank is with Cameroon. The entire corridor is swallowed by two overlapping axes of migration due to conflict: in the upper half are mostly Nigerians fleeing jihadists such as Boko Haram and the Islamic West Africa Province; in the bottom half are Cameroonians fleeing a civil war in the English-speaking minority areas since 2017.

About 107,000 refugees have come into Nigeria from Cameroon alone, according to figures from the UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency.