Eveline Angonwi

“My engagement started in 2010, when I lost my sight,” she says. “I see it as an obligation to make my rights count.” She does not describe that as a turning point so much as a starting date. Asked how she came to lead, her own account is four words: “I have always been a leader.”

She is a sociologist by training, with a master’s in population and development from the University of Yaoundé 1, and an organiser by habit. She chaired CONAFAC, the national committee of blind women, from 2015 to 2018, and chairs the women’s committee of the African Union of the Blind, whose conference she ran in Nairobi in July 2022. In June 2024 she was elected President of Cameroon’s national Elections Working Group.

She founded CAMAB Women in 2019, around a case its own documents state flatly: blind women in Cameroon face a double discrimination, one based on disability and one based on sex. CAMAB is built to answer that structurally rather than rhetorically. Its constitution requires the national president to be a woman with visual impairment, and at least 80 percent of the board to be women, at all times. She holds an office CAMAB’s own rules would not let a sighted person or a man hold.

She teaches as well as advocates. At a training for disabled people’s organisations at Magba she took the sessions on self-esteem, assertiveness and the national disability card, and opened by talking about her own childhood rather than the curriculum. She works on a computer with JAWS and a phone with VoiceOver, which is also why she expects the organisations she deals with to be reachable that way.

Her account of why blind women should be in the room has not softened. “As a woman with disability, you have to prove yourself beyond doubt that you are capable. You have to work extra hard.” And, earlier and more directly: “Our eyes are closed and yet we do things, and we do things well. So we are the experts.”