Cameroonian nurse recounts how he was brutalised by military on International Nurses Day

Each time Bernard Njodzeka thinks about the International Day of Nurses, he is gripped by saddness, fear and physiological pain inflicted on him last year by Cameroon’s military officers.

This year’s International Nurses Day, celebrated every May 12, made it exactly a year since he and two other nurses were brutalised and disgraced by military officers, who invaded his house in Mutengene, a town in the South-west Region.

Njodzeka says at the time his house was raided, he was planning to lead nurses of Mutengene Baptist Hospital, where he worked, in a peaceful, authorized march to mark the International Nurses Day.

Over a dozen soldiers stormed his house that morning, and without any explanations, searched the house before arresting him. Although they later released him after maltreating him and his colleagues, the trauma hasn’t left him.

Till date, no one has told him why his house was searched and why he and his two colleagues were arrested.

“As a nurse lead of the International Day of the Nurses’ activities at Baptist Hospital Mutengene, which I was chairing its activities, in the early morning of this day, the military raided the small house where I stayed. I got out of bed and was cleaning the house very early in the morning and when I opened the door, I met more than half a dozen of military. The military turned my house upside down, with no one explaining to me what was going on. The military forced me to give my phone and ID Card that they were taking me to the police station. I presented my professional batch, a letter from the DO, which I was to lead a nurses match but no one listened to me. I was forced to follow the police where two nursing colleagues working in the hospital with me were also arrested,” Bernard Njodzeka recalled.

He went further to picture the humiliation officers subjected him and his colleagues to.

“They forced us to sit on the floor in mud under the rain. It was indeed humiliating, as people passed by looking at us like criminals. The two of my colleagues were asked to go. After, I was carried to the station, I got released by a police I had treated. This was the worse Nurses’ Day I have ever celebrated, as all I felt was frustration and emptiness from the trauma and humiliation by the military men.”

Cameroonian Nurse

He said the brutal treatment he underwent reminded him of what thousands of other people are going through, especially in the English-speaking Regions of the country, which have been going through a brutal armed conflict since 2017.

“People with no voice keeps suffering and getting prison in English Cameroon for a fight they know nothing about,” he said.

Stories like that of Bernard Njodzeka are very rampant in the English-speaking Regions since the separatist war broke out.

Both military and separatist fighters have been accused of subjecting civilians to all sorts of cruel treatment, including torture and summary killings.