end, the late 1960s, seemed to have unraveled into random, unpredictable violence, looting, and revenge. In 1964 the British embassy in Cameroon2 reported that between 61,300 and 76,300 civilians had lost their lives as a result of independence-era violence, from December 1956 to June 1964, and that nearly 80 percent of these casualties had occurred in the Bamileke region.3 Inhabitants of the region had plenty of reason during those years to think about the meanings of nation and independence. Since the French and British Cameroons were UN trust territories rather than colonies, Cameroonians who lived through “the time of troubles” also became familiar with the UN and its legal role in the politics of decolonization. In 2003 the grandmother’s words carried a memory of a time when Cameroonian nationalists from the Bamileke region used gung, the indigenous word for chieftaincy, which French administrators had translated and codified as “village,” to define the nation they envisioned. Her words also carried the faint echo of a time when many Cameroonians overestimated the ability of the UN to serve as a forum for international consensus and as an arbitrator and protector in world affairs.
This book recounts the history of the practice and discourse of Cameroonian nationalism, spearheaded by the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC), as it unfolded in intersecting local, territorial, and global political arenas in the 1950s and 1960s. I have found this multidimensional perspective most effective for explaining why the UPC attracted the largest number of members and sympathizers of any political party in French Cameroon, becoming the most popular nationalist movement in the territory. Only by examining the ways in which UPC nationalists engaged shifting local, territorial, and international political currents can we approach a full understanding of why, despite the movement’s grassroots popularity, its support throughout Africa and beyond, and its decade-long armed struggle, upécistes (as UPC members called themselves) failed to achieve political power in the postcolonial state government when official independence was declared on January 1, 1960.
The UPC nationalist party and its affiliated women’s, youth, and trade unionist wings, initially launched to reunify the territories of the French and British Cameroons (administered together as Kamerun during the German colonial period, which lasted from 1884 to 1916) and to gain their independence, soon evolved into an “extrametropolitan” movement that deliberately bypassed inclusion in or collaboration with metropolitan political institutions.4 To escape the constraints of European rule, Cameroonian nationalists grounded their political ideology in particular locales within the territory, recycling and, in many cases, rediscovering elements of local political culture that they tailored to their contemporary objectives—independence from European rule, the reunification of the French and British Cameroons, and the establishment of a sovereign nation-state. They also traveled—imaginatively and literally—beyond territorial boundaries, attributing symbolic and political importance to the United Nations, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Asian solidarity, other anticolonial struggles, antinuclear pacifism,5 and the burgeoning notion of universal human rights.6 In so doing, Cameroonian nationalists sought to supersede the metropole-colony paradigm that seemingly underwrote political processes in late-colonial Africa.
Charting the particularly local and expansively global trajectories of UPC nationalists requires a revision of existing historical accounts of Cameroonian nationalism7 and leads us to question the extent to which independence-era politics were guided by affiliations with (or resistance to) metropolitan governments. Historian Frederick Cooper has stressed the need for a greater appreciation of the “political alternatives” imagined by African political actors on the eve of independence, in order better to understand how and why political possibilities expanded and narrowed in colonial territories.8 But to truly comprehend the political alternatives envisioned by nationalists, we must look beyond the metropole-colony boundaries that have so often guided our research, scholarship, and assumptions. This means retrieving the local spiritual, political, and cultural content of nationalist movements like the UPC, and then following the connections that nationalists created with political actors beyond their territorial borders, even (or especially) when these routes do not lead to Paris, London, or Brussels.
In following the paths of Cameroonian nationalists where they actually lead, rather than limiting their range to French territory, this study does a number of things that no previously published histories of Cameroon’s decolonization have done. Rather than focus exclusively on French, UN, and Cameroonian documents,9 it draws on a breadth of sources from the UN, France, Great Britain, Ghana, and both provincial and national archives in Cameroon, as well as oral material collected throughout Cameroon and in Ghana. This history includes previously unknown actors—traditional chiefs, local politicians, ordinary farmers and workers, and women—in the story of Cameroonian nationalism. The inclusion of subaltern actors is crucial since, by 1957, most of the nationalist party leaders had been deported, and in 1958, the movement’s fountainhead, Secretary-General Ruben Um Nyobé (1913–58), was gunned down by a French military patrol in the forest of the Sanaga-Maritime.10 And yet, in the absence of central coordination and leadership, the movement only spread, intensified, and increasingly drew on sources of local inspiration.11
Finally, this work is the first published scholarly study of Cameroonian nationalism to examine the nationalist vision that persisted, albeit fragmented and factionalized, for nearly a decade after Cameroon’s official achievement of independence. The primary task of President Ahmadou Ahidjo’s regime during the first postcolonial decade was to eradicate and suppress the ongoing UPC rebellion. The elements of Cameroon’s state building in the early years after independence, many of which were inherited from the French administration in the late trusteeship period, consisted mostly of heavy-handed violence, interrogations, imprisonment, “disappearings,” resettlement and concentration camps, public beatings, intrusive intelligence gathering, and propaganda campaigns designed to instill fear of the state and its agents.12 While the history of the UPC is a story that ends with the party’s failure to gain access to the seat of power with the dawn of independence, it is also a story of the state’s failure to become a nation.
BLENDING LOCAL AND GLOBAL POLITICS
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UPC nationalism synchretized local, regional, and international political processes. Some of these, including the legitimacy of traditional chiefs, inheritance laws, spiritual technologies, and the translation of nationalist ideas into indigenous languages, derived from remembered political, cultural, and spiritual traditions that predated European rule. Others, such as labor unions, planters’ cooperatives, political parties, and elections, emerged under foreign rule. Nationalists’ awareness of current international politics stemmed from the status of the French and British Cameroons as UN trust territories. From the UPC’s inception, in 1948, leaders quoted from both the UN Charter, which promised autonomy to trust territories, and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The party’s global perspective was reinforced through the alliances that upécistes forged with Nkrumah-style Pan-Africanists beginning in 1957.13 UPC nationalist leaders mediated the links between global and local more adeptly than other territorial politicians, and in this mediation lay the source of the movement’s strength and tenacity, and of ordinary Cameroonians’ awareness of the UN, human rights, and anticolonial struggles beyond the territory’s borders.
While the “glocal”14 political articulation first formed in the minds of a handful of nationalist leaders in the late 1940s, it became stronger as the movement spread from cities and towns to the countryside until, by 1955, a global-local connection guided nationalists’ practice, discourse, and mobility throughout French Cameroon and beyond. Beginning with Um Nyobé and Abel Kingue’s first trip to the United States, in 1952, nationalist leaders traveled internationally with great regularity: to New York to speak before the UN General Assembly, and to Vienna, Stockholm, Budapest, Bucharest, Moscow, and Prague to attend congresses organized by NGOs such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and the World Federation of Democratic Youth. By the late 1950s, Cameroonian nationalists had arrived in Khartoum, Rabat, Accra, Conakry, and Cairo, where they consistently took part in All-African Peoples’ and Afro-Asian Solidarity conferences.15
