Colbert Gwain | The Muteff Factor
Ever since I began creating content for The Muteff Factor (formerly The Colbert Factor), I have rarely felt as deeply affirmed or quietly exhilarated as I did when I received an online message that left me both surprised and humbled. One of Cameroon’s most renowned biomedical researchers, Wilfred Mbacham — a man I had never written about and did not personally know — had expressed a desire to get in touch. His purpose, he said, was simply to convey his profound appreciation for the body of work I had been producing.
When we later exchanged messages, he spoke with a generosity that was both disarming and encouraging. He told me how proud he had always felt reading my reflections and suggested that we should meet in person whenever possible to explore how The Muteff Factor might become even more deliberately solution-oriented. He went further still: perhaps, he proposed, the accumulated essays could one day be gathered into a book. Coming from a scholar of his stature, the suggestion felt less like praise than a quiet commissioning.
When we met some months later, I was not just overtaken by his humility and simplicity, but our conversation, once begun, moved easily across many terrains: possibilities of civic writing and the curious journey by which reflections rooted in a small village like Muteff could find resonance far beyond its hills. As a respectable traditional authority from Funam village in Mbengwi Central in Momo Division, he spoke with attentive seriousness about local knowledge and cultural memory. What I experienced in that encounter was not merely endorsement but recognition — the rare moment when one’s work is seen from afar and returned with enlarged meaning.
This brief yet defining moment inevitably brought to mind the quietly luminous memoir Breakfast with Leonard, in which an initially chance encounter between the celebrated artist, Leonard Cohen, and the younger writer Maynard Collins opened, years later, into sustained conversations that would yield a remarkable book. When a thinker of Professor Mbacham’s distinction pauses to recognize reflections born of a small-village imagination, he does more than praise a writer — he enlarges the moral geography within which that writing understands itself. And sometimes, as Breakfast with Leonard quietly reminds us, such enlargements are where the truest works begin.
In like manner, when veteran jurist and indefatigable peace crusader, Sir Dr. Ntumfor Barrister Nico Halle, recently placed a phone call to the upscale community mediator Eringo Esther Omam, what began as an expression of appreciation soon evolved into a deeper engagement that has reopened stalled conversations on peaceful co-existence and grassroots conflict resolution in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions.
The initial call, sources indicate, was prompted by Nico Halle’s desire to commend Omam for her sustained community peace initiatives and for the traditional recognition recently bestowed upon her as Moeneni by chiefs of the South West. In acknowledging her leadership, Halle affirmed not only an individual but the wider constituency of community-based peacebuilders who have labored — often quietly — to keep dialogue alive amid violence and fragmentation.
Yet the exchange did not remain at the level of courtesy. The two leaders subsequently met in person, using the opportunity to exchange reflections on peacebuilding, public service, and the moral burden of leadership in fractured societies. Their conversation ranged beyond programmatic concerns into deeper philosophical territory: responsibility, moral example, and the delicate, often unseen work of holding societies together when trust has thinned.
Both were reportedly unanimous that justice, peace, and reconciliation are inseparable — not sequential stages but mutually sustaining elements. Esther Omam likened them to ingredients in a shared meal: remove one, and the whole loses meaning and nourishment. In a situation like the raging Anglophone conflict, where demands for justice have sometimes been framed against calls for peace, this insistence on their unity carries significant normative weight.
More striking still was their shared emphasis on the primacy of dialogue beginning with leaders themselves. Before peace can meaningfully take root in families and communities, they argued, it must be modeled among those who claim public responsibility. Honest dialogue, they agreed, requires courage, sincerity, and the willingness to set aside labels and preconceived positions — a discipline particularly urgent in polarized environments where identities have hardened into antagonisms.
The symbolism of their encounter extends beyond personal rapport. It recalls that Barrister Nico Halle was crowned Ntumfor — spokesperson — by the Fons of the North West, while Moeneni & Eringo Esther Njomo received her own traditional investiture from chiefs of the South West. This parallel recognition is not a ceremonial footnote. The Anglophone conflict, though rooted in the shared marginalization of the two English-speaking regions, has over time exposed and deepened fractures between the two regions, fueling episodes of intra-Anglophone mistrust and escalating hate speech.
Against this backdrop, the coming together of Ntumfor Halle and Moeneni Omam acquires added resonance. It gestures toward an intra-Anglophone reconciliation long overshadowed by the larger national crisis. Their meeting implicitly acknowledges that peaceful co-existence must be restored not only between Anglophone and Francophone Cameroonians but also among communities within the Anglophone space itself — communities bound by a common colonial history yet strained by recent narratives of difference.
Both figures embody complementary forms of legitimacy within this space: Nico Halle, long regarded as a moral elder of the bar and civic conscience, represents institutional memory, and Esther Omam, grassroots mediation and community resilience. Their convergence suggests continuity across generation and geography, reminding observers that the moral infrastructure of peace in the Anglophone regions, though battered, remains intact enough to be reactivated.
In protracted conflicts, societies often wait for credible figures to signal that it is safe to speak again. Nico Halle’s outreach and Esther Omam’s reciprocal openness perform precisely this function: they reauthorize peace discourse in a space where fear had rendered silence prudent. The Halle–Omam encounter represents less of a diplomatic event than a moral one: the quiet reweaving of trust between strands of a society pulled apart.
Equally important is the gendered dimension of the exchange. Throughout the Anglophone crisis, women’s networks have sustained some of the most consistent local peace initiatives, frequently at personal risk. By affirming Omam’s leadership, Halle implicitly validates the central role of women mediators in any durable settlement architecture. Peace, the call suggests, will not be restored solely through elite negotiation but through community-rooted reconciliation processes in which women’s experience and authority are indispensable
And speaking of phone calls, what if unlikely allies in Cameroon placed a phone call to each other as a sign of metanoia during this Lenten season? Paul Biya calling Issa Tchiroma, Chris Anu, or Dr. Sako; the factional leaders in the Anglophone conflict calling each other… How is it that we’re the most connected generation, yet the most divided: divided by language, tribe, religion, culture, politics, and, more importantly, by those who don’t want us to be united. A phone call does something politics often cannot. It humanizes. It interrupts caricature. It introduces tone, hesitation, and breath. It allows the possibility—however fragile—of recognizing the other not as a symbol or enemy, but as a person.
Silence has become a weapon in Cameroon’s conflicts. Each side speaks to its own echo chamber, its own wounded constituency, its own history of grievance. Leaders address followers; rarely do they address one another. Yet history, sacred and secular, repeatedly shows that conflicts often begin to thaw not in conference halls but in unexpected personal gestures: a visit, a handshake, a letter, or a call.
