UBa: STUDENTS GAIN KNOWLEGDE ON COMBATING HATE SPEECH

A two day work shop organized by DefyHateNow in collaboration with the Student and Youths Empowerment Forum(SYEF) was geared towards training students on "Combating Hate Speech Offline and Online for a Peaceful Society". It had as aim to school youths on how to change the society and promote peace, how young people can participate in peace building activities ,how to identify the causes of hate speech, how to combat it and mitigate conflict among socio-cultural divides.

         Organizer, Bahiru Adamu

Bahiru Adamu  a student of Higher Teachers Training College(HTTC) in the University and the organizer of the workshop says he is one of the young Cameroonians trained in Yaounde in February 2021 by DefyHate. He also noticed that there is a lot of hate speech in the university. “ after the training in February where we were given the resources in other to come and train other young people in the fight against hate speech,  we brought together these participants from different schools and faculties of the University because we discovered that the university like the society has a lot of hate. Reason why we brought these youths together to drill them on hate speech and how to combat it.”

Talking on the challenges he faced while trying to bring these young people together he intimated that bringing young people together is not easy as they don’t believe in the system. " for you to get them to leave their other commitments and attend such a work shop is not easy but the attendance was more than expected.”


Abdul Aziz is one of the facilitators. He talked on Identity and context and thinks this aspect is often relegated when it comes to conflict resolution and peace building. “I think this is an issue that has been neglected as peace building is concerned because there are social, cultural and religious divides that exits and all of this have to do with our identity that is inbuilt within our own capacities as human beings. So we begin to under mind our own capacities and begin to look at peace building as an attempt to incorporate cultures. It is not a quest to be the same but a quest to be together. Identity and context is trying to link these identities and acknowledging that they belong to some communities and seeing how complementary their differences are.:”

A participant says as a Fulani he is defined as a minority and comes from a community where economic divides such as farmer grazer problems exist so he intends to implement the best strategies reason why this two day work shop is very important to him.” I have learnt so much on how to combat hate speech and how to interact with people. I have gained knowledge on how to deal with other villages I will encounter in my locality that is so diverse.”

These participants are expected to be peace ambassadors and combatants of hate.

Photo credit: Amabo Chris

Tantan Patience

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