support the UPC and more likely to support the administration’s efforts to eradicate UPC influence in Bamileke communities. In the December elections, five such Bamileke chiefs were elected to French Cameroon’s territorial assembly to serve as deputies in the new loi-cadre administration. After the depositions and the elections, chieftaincy became an idiom through which Bamileke populations, whether residing in their home chieftaincies or in emigrant communities beyond, discussed the politics of decolonization.
In many ways, by outlawing the UPC and its affiliated parties and by selectively deposing traditional chiefs in the Bamileke Region, French administrators shaped electoral processes on the ground in 1956, forcing people to choose one side or the other. The result was a political landscape flattened into two opposing and confrontational sides, and this enabled UPC leaders to simplify their message accordingly, effectively painting anyone who supported the territory’s integration into the French Union rather than the UPC’s envisioned rupture with France as a “traitor” (fingung) while portraying pro-UPC chiefs, notables, and civil servants as mpouogung—patriots or (lit., children of the nation).61 Bamileke chiefs who chose to ally with the Franco-Cameroonian administration in power as of late 1956 had been in power longer and relied on the French administration as the main source of their legitimacy within the chieftaincy. On the other hand, most of the chiefs who joined the nationalist movement had more recently inherited the stool of power.62 They were young and schooled, and sought to establish their legitimacy both through new political developments and through “traditional” culture as they understood it. They enjoyed the support of significant portions of their emigrant populations in Cameroon’s cities—Nkongsamba, Douala, and Yaoundé.
Differences over the role of Bamileke chiefs in territorial politics can be read as the continuation of a long-standing political debate over the meaning of lepue and whether it might best be achieved through diplomatic negotiation or through direct, even violent, confrontation.63 For Bamileke nationalists in the late 1950s, lepue meant reclaiming the chieftaincy as a sovereign space and the chief as the people’s representative, and it was the more dramatic form of lepue—a refusal to submit to foreign rule at all costs—that held the greater popular appeal in late 1956 and 1957. This form of lepue implied a complete political, economic, and cultural break with former colonial powers and facilitated the interweaving of Grassfields political culture with an international Spirit of Bandung, the African cornerstone of which was situated in Accra from 1957 to 1966.64
UPC Nationalists Go Global
Part Three considers the importance of the UPC’s international influences and transregional support by focusing on the strategies that upécistes employed after the movement’s proscription in the Cameroon territories—transnational exile, Pan-African connections, and violence. It charts the progression of violence in the Mungo and Bamileke Regions before and after independence, and documents the lasting effects of the Cameroonian state’s eradication of the movement from the postcolonial political landscape.
In 1957, Ghana opened its borders to political activists deemed radical by their respective colonial administrations. Under the direction of Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-African cabinet members, including Ras T. Makonnen and George Padmore (who helped create the Bureau of African Affairs), Accra became the site of an African Affairs Centre, which from 1957 to 1966 hosted anticolonial activists and exiles from Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, the Belgian Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia, and Cameroon.65 For upécistes, this Pan-African political support proved essential and came not a moment too soon. Nkrumah declared his intent to fight for Africa’s liberation and in March 1957, just a few months after UPC party leaders had decided to organize an armed offensive within the territory and only three months before the party’s proscription in British territory, described anticolonial freedom fighters as “the gem of the revolution.” Facing arrest within their own territories, upécistes needed a place to go. To sustain the maquis within the Cameroon territories, they required funds, access to weapons, and military training. It was in Accra and Conakry that UPC directors found the diplomatic, financial, and military support necessary for the movement at the moment of its revolutionary turn.
In November 1958, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana officially declared their two states to constitute “the nucleus of a Union of West African States” on which a United States of Africa would build. A month later, Nkrumah hosted the first All-African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC), in Accra. At the assembly of anticolonial political activists and intellectuals, which included Tom Mboya of Kenya, Holden Roberto of Angola, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and UPC president Félix Moumié, Frantz Fanon declared that violence was the only path to economic, psychological, cultural, and political decolonization.66 His legitimization of revolutionary violence and the Pan-African foothold gave Moumié sufficient confidence to proclaim at a press conference on 12 December 1958, less than three months after FLN leaders announced the establishment of the Republic of Algeria’s provisional government (Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne—GPRA), that the party’s exiled directors’ bureau constituted the legitimate Cameroonian government.67
By late 1958, the UPC fit Frantz Fanon’s recipe for anticolonial revolution, itself modeled on the Algerian case, as if it had been made to order. Bourgeois intellectuals, members of a lumpenproletariat, and significant numbers of the “peasantry” had all signed on to the movement. It had spread through cities, towns, and rural areas. UPC militia camps had been put in place throughout southern French Cameroon and near Tombel, in British territory. Exiled upécistes sought out the ideological circuits of Pan-Africanism, socialism, and Afro-Asian solidarity, ensuring that Cameroonian nationalism would not stop with national liberation but would be a part of a transnational, perhaps eventually global, revolution defining “a new humanism both for itself and for others.”68 Faced with the movement’s exclusion from territorial political processes and the UN’s unwillingness to intervene to restore the movement to legality, upécistes turned to violence as the only path to liberation from foreign rule. Although upécistes continued to petition the UN to have the proscription lifted, to offer amnesty to political prisoners, and to organize elections under its supervision, from 1957 forward, violence became the new channel linking the UPC to international political currents.
Chapter 5 historicizes the formation, organization, and operation of internal maquis camps in the Bamileke and Mungo Regions and shows how, in its early stages, violence within the maquis worked in tandem with the activities of the UPC in exile. The UPC’s use of violence in the postproscription phase coincided with the period in which increasing numbers of upécistes left their homes and began long years of peripatetic exile or hiding out in the hills and forests of the internal maquis. Through the mobility of exiled upécistes, UPC militia camps located along the Anglo-French boundary and in the Sanaga-Maritime, the Bamileke, the Mungo, the Mbam, the Nkam Provinces, and the Dja-et-Lobo Department became connected to Accra, Conakry, and Algiers, and to military training camps in China and Morocco. Ernest Ouandié, who had left the British Cameroons in 1957 as UPC vice president and returned in 1962 as commander in chief of the UPC paramilitary, the Armée de libération nationale du Kamerun (ALNK), after years spent in Khartoum and Accra, sought to organize troops, training, and the location of maquis camps. The connection between the internal maquis and the international sites of revolution thrived in the nationalist imaginary and in the leaders’ planned military strategies. It lived in the exiles who returned to replenish the troops of the UPC army, the and in the couriers such as Emmanuel Fankem, alias Fermeté (Steadiness), who crisscrossed international boundaries to keep upécistes in contact.69 Exiles were the go-betweens who brought the international to life in the minds of freedom fighters and translated the local fight into global, revolutionary terms.
The disintegration of the movement and its armed resistance, the rising then falling degree of complicity of civilian populations, and the French, British, and Cameroonian administrations’ methods of eradicating the UPC rebellion are evaluated in chapter 6. As the war raged on
