out oral interviews in the Mungo, the Bamileke, and, to a lesser extent, the Bamenda regions. The bulk of the interviews took place in Baham and surrounding chieftaincies in 2002 and 2003 and were carried out with the assistance of Joseph Kiegaing of Baham, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Yaoundé I. Mr. Kiegaing accompanied me on foot throughout chieftaincies of Baham, Bandenkop, Bamendjou, and Bafoussam and served as interpreter for the Ghomala’ language. I selected a number of interviewees with the assistance of Mr. Kiegaing and Mr. Pogo of Nkongsamba who were familiar with my topic of research. Present-day upécistes as well as state officials (most of whom requested anonymity) pointed me toward additional possible interviewees. I also found interviewees as a result of the information I had gleaned from archival records, whether the UN petitions, French sources, or the prefectoral archives of the Mungo Region. While in Cameroon from 2001 to 2003, I was able to make three back-and-forth journeys to France, which enabled me to read colonial sources against oral interviews and vice versa, thus facilitating corroboration and cross-referencing. As a result, the information I gathered from oral sources continually built on the archival material I collected, which in turn led me to new interviewees and to rephrase old questions as I progressed in my research.
The oral interviews largely shaped my understanding of the nationalist-era events in Baham and surrounding chieftaincies. Many of the people I spoke with included fragments of songs in their accounts of the nationalist period. Eventually I began to collect these songs and they proved to be an invaluable historical source. André Gabiapsi, an academically trained linguist from Baham, assisted me with their analysis and transcription, but I also interviewed people for contextual etymological information pertaining to political tradition and history contained in the songs. From 2001 to 2003 I did not stay in one place, with the exception of Nkongsamba, for longer than three weeks at a time. Instead, I came and went, thus returning to the same places and people again and again, which permitted further inquiry based on new levels of mutual familiarity.
I learned not to present my inquiries as political lest I alienate my informants (with the exception of those who had been the most active in UPC politics during the 1950s and, accordingly, are invested in the narration of the movement’s history). Interviewees’ reluctance to “talk politics” or describe their actions as political ultimately strengthened my approach since it encouraged me to leave behind the arena of formal politics and delve into the roots of Grassfields political culture and tradition in my quest to better understand the popularity of UPC nationalism in the Bamileke and Mungo Regions. I had to learn the ways in which survivors of the independence era could comfortably talk about the “troubles” of the independence era in ways that they did not find threatening. These conversations pushed me to reformulate my own understanding of nation and what constitutes the political, to whom, and why.79
Written archives can be as elusive and difficult to access as oral ones, and those serving as the foundation of this historical work are no exception. Archival research in both France and Cameroon proved difficult, although for different reasons. I knew of the archival collection in the Nkongsamba prefect through word of mouth, but was denied access to it for four months after my arrival in town (during which time I was told that there were no documents). Chantal Ndami, a friend who was pursuing a PhD in history in France, placed an international phone call to one of her former classmates who was a judge in the Court of Appeals of Nkongsamba. He introduced me to the prefect’s first assistant, who provided me with a key to the archival room. Thereafter, I came and went as I pleased, but the documents were stacked, unfiled, on the floor. Similar arrangements were made, via the prefect’s first assistant in the Mungo Region, to allow me access to the prefectoral archives housed at Dschang, where I found the documents piled in similar haphazard fashion in a small building with no cement floor or finished ceiling.
The National Archives, in Yaoundé, no longer contain much on the UPC, particularly as documents are rarely refiled after consultation. Even more problematic for researchers of Cameroon’s independence-era politics is the unavailability of the collection of UPC documents formerly in the possession of the late Professor Owona. Although these documents were to have been made accessible through the Department of History, University of Yaoundé I, they are, as yet, unavailable to the public. Researchers and students of UPC nationalism can only hope that they are in safekeeping and will one day be made accessible. The archives of the Nkongsamba Diocese, although well catalogued and classified, are kept under lock and key, available only to clergy of the diocese.
In France, a number of documents, particularly those pertaining to postindependence political processes, are kept under lock and key as well through the special dispensation (dérogation) system legalized in 1976. Although I was able to obtain permission, after waiting nearly a year for approval from Elysée after sending my official request, to see some papers from the collection of Jacques Foccart housed at the Centre historique des Archives nationales (CHAN) in Paris, I was denied access to documents relating to the assassination, by poisoning, of UPC president Félix Moumié in Geneva, in 1960, or those relating to the trial of Archbishop Ndongmo and ALNK commander in chief Ernest Ouandié, in 1970. According to current French law, the latter will be made available to researchers only after 2030. Documents pertaining to independence era politics in other archives in France were still under the dérogation system when I carried out the bulk of my research, including those in the Centre des Archives d’outre-mer (CAOM), in Aix-en-Provence, and the Centre d’histoire et d’études des troupes d’outre-mer (CHETOM), in Fréjus. I was eventually granted access to the documents in these centers, although the waiting period varied in length from one to three months. In contrast, records pertaining to Cameroon’s postcolonial period housed at the National Archives in the Royal Botanic Gardens, in Kew, United Kingdom, which I visited in 2005, proved easily accessible and a valuable source of information.
Official French and British sources—as well as those generated by the postcolonial Cameroonian state—are problematic for their overt bias against the UPC, which they depicted as a Communist Party satellite sponsored by Moscow or Beijing, and later as a terrorist organization that employed guerilla warfare to overtake large portions of the Sanaga-Maritime, Mungo, and Bamileke Regions. Reading along the archival grain for clues to the social epistemologies that informed the administrative production of records about the Cameroonian nationalist movement in the 1950s and 1960s permits the researcher to keep in mind that these sources do not so much describe the political nature of the UPC movement or narrate its activity as much as they provide records of governance against the backdrop of Africa’s decolonization and postcolonial state building in the context of the Cold War.80 Although geographical, biographical, and chronological information can be gleaned from official state records, they provide a clearer window onto state policies than they do the collective political imaginary of Cameroonian nationalism. As far as possible I have tried to mitigate the problematic nature of official state sources through corroboration and cross-referencing other source material and reading against the grain as well as along it. Upécistes were meticulous record keepers in their own right, an institutional characteristic visible in the petitions sent to the UN that unfailingly recorded names, dates, locations, and occupations of petitioners. Accordingly, the UPC, UDEFEC, and JDC’s primary documents, where available, contained information about party activity, membership, and chronology that was often more reliable and accurate than that contained in state sources.81 In many cases, particularly after official independence, state forces captured upécistes or ALNK fighters who were carrying UPC documents that ended up in the official archival record.
There are a number of avenues left to explore in the study of UPC nationalism. A close-up analysis of other Grassfields chieftaincies, particularly around the Bamileke Region towns of Mbouda, Dschang, and Bangangte, would continue to fill in the gaps in the historiography. A number of graduate students in Cameroon are producing monograph studies of this type, and a few local scholars have recently published regional chronologies of UPC and counterrevolutionary activity.82 Few, if any, studies exist of the UPC and its successor, One Kamerun, in the former British Cameroons. The town of Tombel, located in the Mungo River valley, just across the former Anglo-French boundary, undoubtedly has an enormously rich history dating to the nationalist period—but remains almost entirely unexplored.
