Last night we received news that a good Cameroonian friend, a pillar of the church, a supporter of local music in the church, was hauled out of his church’s Sunday morning service yesterday and shot to death. Chief Esoh Itoh hosted my wife and me in his house both of our first two visits to Cameroon. The first time he called his volunteer choir to sing so we could record them, and the second time he organized a day of performance by all of the performance choirs in his village (half a dozen or so in a village of about 5000 people), again so we could record the music. He was a good friend who served God and his fellow man as best he knew how.
I turned this morning to Psalm 83, my go-to psalm to pray against evildoers, but I realized almost instantly that this psalm did not fit the occasion: his murderers were not persecutors of the church, at least not per se. They were “separatists,” people who want the English-speaking regions of Cameroon to be their own nation, out from under the boot of the French-speaking majority. “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled,” as the saying goes, and from what I can see, this is a war of secession in which there are no good elephants, and Chief Esoh was simply grass that got trampled.
Or was he?
He had been doing his best to not take sides, having stayed in his house for months to show his neutrality. But in a sense he could never truly be neutral. He was a chief, a government official, and as I point out here, chiefs are an integral part of a system that is indiscriminately exploitative at best. In this case, though—at least from what I’ve been told—the French-speaking majority, which lives in a comparatively resource-poor area, depends on revenues from the comparatively resource-rich English-speaking area to pay for their government “services.” For decades the English speakers have been what might be called first-class taxpayers but have received second-class services. After decades of the government turning a deaf ear to their protests, some English speakers organized a peaceful—again, according to my sources—protest in November of 2016, to which the government responded by shooting a couple hundred of them to death.
Since then, the separatists have been entering villages, killing government workers, burning the houses of their families, killing random Francophones they find on buses, and God knows what else. My guess is that if they succeed in forming their own nation, it will be a worse hellhole than it was in October 2016. And, of course, after the separatists leave, the government comes in and burns the houses of anyone they think offered help to the separatists. Thousands of people have fled their homes and are living in the forest.
John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” and despite my disagreements with him in most places, I have a hard time disagreeing with him there. And, of course, violent revolutions always turn out badly, as our own is clear evidence.
Chief Esoh was aware of at least part of the exploitative nature of the system. The last time we were with him, the discussion turned to how difficult it is for private people to make a good living, and he said rather wistfully, “It’s too bad that we can’t give everyone a government job.” Until yesterday I was thinking that it was good manners that kept me from saying, “Everyone in North Korea has a government job. Is that what you want?” Now I think it was cowardice. My words probably would not have changed his mind, but at least I would be at peace knowing I had done what I could to influence his thinking.
“Blessed are the peacemakers.” An integral part of peacemaking is not only pointing out the evils of exploitative systems but providing alternatives. The Cameroon Baptist Convention provides an alternative to the government schools and health care system. (It may be that they take government funding, in which case I’ll leave it to you to prove to me that this makes them more, rather than less, effective at weaning the man on the street from dependence on government largess.) If the churches had also been loudly protesting the exploitation of the Anglophones by the Francophones all along—that is, peacemaking—perhaps the current situation of all-out war would not have happened.
If we accept the idea that those in government are serving God by doing good, we can only conclude that there is abundant evidence that he doesn’t protect his servants very well. We have the book of Habakkuk, which teaches not only that those whom God calls to execute judgment on his behalf are evil but that he will eventually punish them for their evil. But another example that came home to me in my devotional reading the other day I find chillingly relevant to Chief Esoh’s death.
In Acts 12, we see sixteen soldiers who were just doing their jobs. They didn’t set the policy that put Peter in prison; it was only their job to see that it was carried out. Though they did nothing wrong, carrying out their duties as they had been assigned, God worked a miracle and brought Peter out of the prison. God’s miracle ended up costing those sixteen men their lives (Acts 12:19).
The less influence people like King Herod, His Excellency Paul Biya (President of Cameroon), and Donald Trump have on our lives the better. We need to show that relationships based on voluntary service, not political processes, are the foundation of a just, peaceful, and prosperous society. And submission to Jesus, while most importantly the ultimate good in and of itself, is the way to true voluntary service. I am indeed an obnoxious—I’d say son of a bitch, but I don’t want people to think ill of my mother—but this blog is the best I know to do to do just that.
Meantime, we need to be careful whom we work for. Daniel and his three friends worked for an evil government and survived the experience only because God worked miracles on their behalf. Chief Esoh—may he rest in peace—was not so fortunate.
