To understand what happened in Ngarbuh requires understanding the conflict that brought armed soldiers to this remote corner of Cameroon. The Anglophone Crisis, which escalated from protests in 2016 into armed conflict by 2017, pits the predominantly Francophone central government against separatists in Cameroon's English-speaking Northwest and Southwest Regions - areas that were once part of British-administered Southern Cameroons. The separatists declared an independent state called Ambazonia. The government responded with military force. By 2020, the conflict had displaced hundreds of thousands of people and created a landscape where soldiers, separatist fighters, and armed ethnic militia all operated in the same rural areas, with civilians caught between them. Ngarbuh, nestled in the hills of the Northwest Region near Ndu, was one of those places where the lines between combatant and civilian had been erased by those with guns.

On that morning, six Cameroonian soldiers, accompanied by armed Mbororo militia and individuals described as Ambazonian detractors, entered Ngarbuh. What followed was not a battle. Human Rights Watch, which later interviewed 23 people including three eyewitnesses, confirmed that no separatist fighters were present during the attack. Independent journalist Jess Craig, reporting for The New Humanitarian, reached the area the day after the killings and spoke with dozens of eyewitnesses. She documented 21 dead: 13 children and 8 adults, including a pregnant woman. Other sources counted higher - at least 22 killed, with 14 children, 9 of them under the age of five. Independent investigators were able to verify 25 names of victims within 24 hours of the attack. These were families, not fighters. They were people who had been living their lives in a place the conflict had supposedly passed through.

The Cameroonian government's initial response was to minimize. Officials insisted that only five civilians had died, a claim that contradicted every independent account. When Human Rights Watch published its investigation establishing that soldiers and armed Fulani had carried out a massacre of unarmed civilians, the government accused the report's author of conspiring with separatists. But the evidence was overwhelming, and international pressure mounted. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for prosecution of the perpetrators. The United States echoed the demand. Opposition politician Maurice Kamto called for a national day of mourning. By early March, nine soldiers had been arrested and questioned, including two colonels. The government eventually conceded a version of events: three soldiers and a local vigilante group had, it claimed, accidentally killed 13 civilians during a firefight with separatists, then set buildings on fire to destroy evidence. Three soldiers were arrested. The Ambazonia Governing Council dismissed the account as false justification for the systematic killing of civilians.

An alleged eyewitness to the massacre was murdered on February 29, just fifteen days later. The killing underscored how dangerous it was to speak about what had happened in Ngarbuh, and how fragile accountability remained in a conflict zone where multiple armed groups operated with impunity. The violence in Ntumbaw did not end with the massacre. On May 12, 2020, approximately 30 armed Mbororo killed two more civilians, accusing separatists of killing seven of their own. In October, Mbororo militia killed a separatist fighter and were subsequently targeted in retaliation. The cycle continued. Ngarbuh became a name that human rights organizations invoked as evidence of what the Anglophone Crisis was doing to ordinary people - people whose children were among the dead, whose village had become a battleground, and whose grief was first denied by the state that was supposed to protect them.