Africa.
CAMEROON: AN EXCEPTIONAL COLONIAL HISTORY?
Cameroonian nationalism lends itself especially well to an extrametropolitan historical analysis. In Cameroon, as elsewhere along Africa’s western coast, European powers came and went throughout the era of the transatlantic trade, and pidgin English spread and took root as a lingua franca among the populations involved in translocal commerce.34 But even after the Berlin Conference allotted Kamerun to Germany in 1885, the revolving door admitting European powers seemed to continue spinning, making the territory’s affiliation with any particular metropolitan power relatively tenuous. Not until 1910 did Germans “pacify” areas in the hinterland, such as the densely populated Grassfields region, which comprised over a hundred hierarchically organized and mostly autonomous chieftaincies. Just a few years later, Britain and France took over the German colony in a joint military operation during the First World War, and divided the spoils at Versailles in 1919 with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary.35
The new international frontier separated several communities, societies, and polities from north to south, including the western portion of the Grassfields around Bamenda, which now fell under British control, from the eastern Bamileke Region, under French administration. In both territories, the British and French were merely administering authorities under the supervision of the League of Nations and then, after the Second World War, the UN.36 In the Grassfields region, as in the northern, Islamized regions, the British and French, who had hastily cobbled together stopgap administrations after the war, relied on African rulers to govern. From the point of view of local populations in regions such as the Grassfields, where rulers had wielded significant power and authority before European occupation, traditional chiefs represented the most consistent form of governance throughout the colonial period, as European administrations seemed to come and go, and political borders shifted.
Despite the territories’ particular status as UN Trust Territories after the Second World War and the relatively brief period of European rule in regions such as the Grassfields, decolonization progressed in much the same way in the Cameroon territories as in other British and French colonies. After the war, the French administration organized elections at the same time as they were held in the rest of France’s territories, while the British permitted the formation of political parties in the Cameroons. In 1956, France held loi-cadre elections to establish parliamentary assemblies to govern internal affairs in French Cameroon, as it did in its other overseas territories. For many of France’s African colonies, loi-cadre meant increased political representation and greater political autonomy, and it was widely viewed as a necessary transitional stage en route to decolonization.37 In French Cameroon, as elsewhere in French Africa, administrators groomed African politicians to eventually take their places in political bodies and institutions that resembled France’s own. The political parties that benefited from French support, including the Évolution sociale camerounaise (ESOCAM) and the Bloc démocratique camerounais (BDC), failed, however, to attract mass followings or to build up a popular base.38
If administrators and pro-French politicians missed noting the significant differences in the legal status and colonial histories of the Cameroon territories, Cameroonian anticolonial nationalists certainly did not. From the party’s inception, in 1948, UPC leaders consciously dismissed the territorial, political, and historical markers that guided French and British decolonization processes in the Cameroon territories and instead built a nationalist movement on a blend of anti-imperial global trends and local political practices. When, after the UPC’s ban, in 1955, the French administration organized the first territorial elections in which universal suffrage was applied, upécistes sent some forty-five thousand petitions to the UN in lieu of votes, claiming their right, as inhabitants of a UN trust territory, to participate in political processes even if French administrators denied their access to elections.39 As French administrators worked with Cameroonian collaborators to make French Cameroon part of a “greater France” through an interterritorial application of loi-cadre, UPC nationalists invoked the UN Charter to argue that implementation of loi-cadre was illegal in a UN trust territory and that Article 76 had in 1946 already granted the right of self-government to territories under European rule. As French administrators sought to do away with traditional chiefs, UPC nationalists protested their deposition throughout the Bamileke Region.40 And as French administrators pushed Cameroon toward interterritorial federation with other French colonial territories in 1958, upécistes in exile signed on to Kwame Nkrumah’s plan for a United States of Africa.
Most tellingly, as French administrators sought to standardize political discourse throughout French Africa on the eve of independence, upécistes were primarily concerned with how to translate nationalist terms into indigenous languages. The translation needed to be cultural as well as linguistic, as made clear in the petition that Marthe Penda sent to the UN Trusteeship Council in December 1954, discussing the primary-school curriculum: “The children learn nothing but passages from plays written centuries ago by Molière and no teaching is given on indigenous history, or customary and traditional dancing; the children only learn the history of distant countries so that a child who can recite details of the map of France does not know the name of a river flowing through his own village.”41
Upécistes’ quest for independence from foreign rule amounted to a struggle to define, on their own terms, what constituted legitimate political practice for a soon-to-be-independent African nation. The UPC definition included a rejection of a metropolitan political modality—based on allegiance to a greater France, electoral politics and évolué elitism—and its replacement with something else. The something else, a blend of contemporary global and neotraditional42 local political culture, formed the stuff of Cameroonian nationalism. Although at first glance the blend of international and local elements in UPC nationalism seems exceptional, it is more likely that the articulation between local political culture and global political trends in African nationalisms could be argued to constitute the norm, not the exception. Historians such as Joey Power and Elizabeth Schmidt have shown the ways in which grassroots political activists referenced and reframed transregional political discussions in colonial territories.43 The works of Steven Feierman, Carol Anderson, and others have demonstrated the importance for activists in UN trust territories of petitioning the UN and engaging in human rights talk.44 Additional close-up histories of grassroots nationalisms and transnational connections are needed, to shed light on the immediate and residual importance of the independence-era marriage of local and international political processes during Africa’s decolonization.
SETTING THE STAGES: THE FOCAL POINTS
Three geographical focal points anchor this three-tiered history of Cameroonian nationalism: Baham, a strong chieftaincy situated in the densely populated, mostly rural Bamileke Region; Nkongsamba, the capital of the Mungo Region, French Cameroon’s fertile plantation zone; and Accra, Ghana, where the Kwame Nkrumah government that came into power at independence, in 1957, founded the Bureau of African Affairs to support and assist anti-colonial liberation movements in territories still under European rule.45 Nationalist activity radiated outward from these three points, creating regional epicenters with overlapping peripheries. Although the present analysis ranges beyond these three centers, each one is symbolic of the local, territorial, and transregional layers of Cameroonian nationalism. The book is structured in three parts of two chapters each, and progresses chronologically against the backdrop of these interconnected locations.
Grassfields Political Tradition and the Creation of a Bamileke Identity
Part One historicizes the political practice of Grassfielders before European rule, and evaluates the formation of a “Bamileke identity” in the Mungo Region under French administration during the interwar period. The Bamileke Region, as the French called the portion of the Grassfields that fell under their administration with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary in 1919, was the most densely populated region in French Cameroon. Some three hundred fifty thousand to half a million people lived in the region itself, which remained mostly rural and agricultural,
