Les déplacés internes de la crise anglophone dans la ville de douala : regard sur une crise d’intégration sociale.

Abstract

The present research on the theme “Internally Displaced Persons from the Anglophone crisis in the city of Douala: a look at a social integration crisis” outlines the humanitarian situation as experienced by IDPs in the city of Douala. The study stems from the observation that, following the crisis in the North-West and South-West regions, the Cameroonian government appeared to have put in place a humanitarian response plan to address the needs of IDPs. However, there was still one main concern: the social integration of the displaced. This led us to question the process of social integration and the strategies put in place to deal with the resulting difficulties. To this end, we posed the following main research question: How can we account for the social integration of IDPs from the Anglophone crisis in their new social environment? This question led us to the main research hypothesis that the integration of IDPs into their new social environment remained problematic. Our hypothesis was tested with the support of two theoretical approaches, namely symbolic interactionism and culturalism, and the use of both quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (documentary observation, direct observation, interviews, life stories) data collection tools and techniques. The sampling technique used was random sampling and allowed 150 respondents to be targeted. Data analysis was carried out using content analysis for qualitative data and Excel 2013 software to generate tables and graphs that allowed us to establish distributions between variables (gender, age, level of education, etc.) for quantitative data. According to the results of this work, IDPs living in the city of Douala encounter difficulties that seriously affect their daily lives, making the integration process difficult. From difficult access to housing, through discrimination, tribalism and stigmatisation, to problematic socio-professional integration, their life in Douala does not seem to be the ideal they aspired to. Indeed, fleeing the crisis, they hoped to find refuge in the Littoral, the region closest to the war zone. Faced with these daily difficulties, the population uses various strategies to survive and adapt, particularly jobs in the informal sector. However, women and young adolescents, who constitute the most vulnerable social groups, very easily engage in less praiseworthy acts such as prostitution, banditry and debauchery in order to obtain a livelihood. By showing how the Anglophone question, which has been the subject of several issues since colonisation, has greatly influenced the current Anglophone crisis, this study has also immersed us in the issue of multiculturalism and the representations that the different actors have of each of them.