Yaoundé, Cameroon – Five-year-old Josephine first met her father Louis Ambe when the coffin bearing his lifeless body was being lowered into the ground between the graves of his parents at the family residence in Bafia-Muyuka in southwest Cameroon.
It was April 19, 2022
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When she was born in November 2017, Ambe was in the sixth month of detention in the capital Yaoundé, awaiting trial. He had been arrested along with 16 others in Bafia-Muyuka, ostensibly in connection with the armed conflict in North West and South West, the country’s two English-speaking regions.
He died in prison earlier this year.
Josephine and her seven-year-old brother will remain with Martha Ambe, Louis’s stepmother who raised him from when he was eight, and who’s taken care of his children since he was arrested.
“I had hoped to see Louis released one day and meet his children whom he had barely known,” she said. “Each time I think about his death, I imagine how to take care of the children he left behind.”
Death in custody
There have been reports of other inmates dying in custody, including detainee Thomas Nganyu Tangem who fell ill in custody and later died chained to his hospital bed in Yaoundé in August 2020. His death and images of him shackled to a hospital bed prompted widespread outrage.
Ambe, his lawyer Amungwa Tanyi Nico said, was one of a group of 17 cocoa farmers arrested over a price dispute as the conflict was picking up.
Seeking leverage to force the farmers to lower their prices, the village chiefs in Muyenge – Ambe’s village – branded them separatists, Nico said.
Their case at the Yaoundé Military Tribunal suffered “unjustified delays”, he told Al Jazeera, with Ambe’s case in particular adjourned more than 40 times until he fell ill and died in detention.
