In the visitors’ area in the courtyard of Kondengui maximum security prison, French-dubbed Nollywood films play on a TV as inmates and their guests hug each other and laugh. The green, red and yellow flag of Cameroon flutters above.
The happy picture in this corner of Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, belies the prison’s dark status as ground zero of Paul Biya’s five-decade crackdown on dissent in the central African country. Thousands of people have been detained and tortured here as Biya, who turned 92 this year, seeks to keep Cameroon under his grip.
