Home of Peace
Peace Our Concern: Advocacy to Solve Issues of Cultural Identity in Cameroon is based on community participatory methods dubbed Home of Peace, 20 children of the anglophone region of Bamenda and 10 children of the francophone children stay together in one house with the objective to create an enabling environment to know each other’s differences, appreciate them see what binds us. The project presents an integrated and in-depth treatment of three themes.
- Why is peace-building an issue? (the ideology and philosophy of peace) What drives passion in peace-building?
- The multi-cultural aspects of peace-building and cognitive-communication disorders. Identifying and substantiating peaceful symbols in our indigenous cultures.
- Societal barriers to peace-building. Promoting an enabling environment for peace-building.
The project is the result of five years of experience working with youth. The project deals with issues of cultural identity crisis – multicultural identity crisis. It is like thinking in images about co-existence in a multicultural community. It, therefore, sees community theatre as a very important weapon for the peaceful conflict resolution, of the on-going socio-political struggle in Cameroon, especially in the struggle for communal and individual self-definition in a multicultural context. The project is obviously influenced by the ideas of the youth. For instance, the solution of some problems to do with the current Anglophone Crisis was found through discussions within the teenagers. A lot of approaches which we used were in fact borrowed from or were gotten from what the teenage actors suggested.
It is, therefore, our concept to bring together youth from the two regions, to learn from each other, to improve our understanding of each other and promote the idea of uniting in diversity. We plan to stream our encounters online to
Through created Home of Peace handles to engaged more youth in around the nation.