between the internal and external UPC became more difficult to maintain, militia camps became isolated and cut off from each other, and the UPC was irreversibly factionalized. Ideological, political, and strategic differences wedged their way into the ranks of freedom fighters, separating those trained abroad from those who had never left, or fighters in one maquis camp from those in a different region. After 1960, the gendarmes, military, and police maintaining order on behalf of the Ahidjo government clashed daily with maquisards in a several provinces. For fighters on both sides, the structured, organized violence of war unraveled into random violence as a way toward revenge, elimination of personal enemies, looting, and financial profit. Caught in the crossfire, ordinary Cameroonians collectively adopted a strategy of silence as a means of survival, while a distrust of the political seemed all pervasive. The book concludes with a discussion of the residual political and social effects of the postcolonial state’s heavy-handed repression of the nationalist movement, and its punishment of upécistes and their suspected sympathizers.
A HISTORY OF UPC NATIONALISM–NEW PERSPECTIVES, NEW CHRONOLOGIES
Today, Cameroon’s president, Paul Biya, who served as Ahidjo’s prime minister before being selected to be his successor in 1982, cannot spin UPC history as the nation-state’s patriotic narrative as Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has the history of the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front.70 Biya inherited power from the regime the French put in place upon their departure, a regime that made the repression of the UPC its primary goal in the early postcolonial period. Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is neither a nationalist history nor a patriotic one, but rather a history of a nationalist movement that could not achieve its political goals. In a retrospective article on Zimbabwe’s history, historian Terence Ranger writes that there are “two circumstances under which historical scholarship was crucially important.” First, “when people had been denied a history,” and second, “when a single, narrow historical narrative gained a monopoly and was endlessly repeated” as in the patriotic history of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, today.71 In the first instance, history must fill a void, and in the second, it must serve to “complicate over-simplifications” and “to offer a plural history.”72 Ranger’s discussion of the differences between the history of nationalism, nationalist history, and patriotic history and the purpose of each helps to situate this study of the UPC.
In Cameroon, people were denied a history of the UPC for over three decades after official independence. Until 1991, writing the history of UPC nationalism could result in the author’s exile, while books recounting UPC history were banned.73 Since the so-called democratic opening of the early 1990s and the legalization of political parties other than the one in power, scholarly and popular histories of the UPC have proliferated as though to fill a vacuum. And yet they are “too much” in a different way than the official history of ZANU–PF in Zimbabwe: they are so plural and fragmented that they remain at the periphery of Cameroon’s national history.
The history of UPC nationalism is crucial in part because its study was forbidden within Cameroon for so long.74 It is crucial beyond Cameroon’s borders because it illustrates the interlinking of local political cultures with an extraordinarily internationalized political agenda and is thus a part of a larger history of Third World revolution. Finally, because the UPC movement continued past the date of Cameroon’s official independence, its history offers a new chronology for African anticolonial nationalisms by elucidating the lasting political repercussions of a popular nationalist movement’s failure to achieve political power.
The Vernacularization of an International Political Platform
As Achille Mbembe has shown for Cameroon and as other revisionist historians have demonstrated elsewhere, popular African nationalisms were constructed in large part on a retrieval and revalorization of indigenous political culture.75 But, as Nation of Outlaws demonstrates, grassroots nationalisms required more than a cultural renaissance and a refashioning of local political tradition. Emerging as a current of anti-imperialism swept much of the globe, grassroots nationalisms had to undergo a two-way translation in order to achieve meaning in both local contexts and in a larger geopolitical arena. UPC nationalists found ways to express formal political discourse of party platforms in local vernaculars. They also integrated elements of a symbolic cultural reservoir into political practice on a territorial scale. This book examines the mutual influences connecting the political cultures of particular locales to territorial and transregional political currents by considering the local, territorial, and global politics of the 1950s and 1960s in the same analytical plane. In so doing, it builds on—but goes beyond—the rich revisionist histories of African nationalisms that have emphasized culturally specific political practices without exploring the ways in which local politics of decolonization became articulated with international political trends. The case of the UPC shows the ways in which African nationalists and anticolonialists actively sought to link their local liberation struggles with larger global trends and to appropriate, on their own terms, international connections and discourses as alternatives to their continued interdependency with metropolitan centers.76
UPC Nationalism and Postcolonial Politics: A New Chronology
In continuing past the date of Cameroon’s official independence, this book questions the historical usefulness of choosing official independence as a temporal marker in histories of Africa’s decolonization. By emphasizing the beginnings of transitions, and by selecting the date of official independence as a chronological endpoint, all but ignoring their aftermaths, many works on African decolonization fail to assess the effects of preindependence political processes on postindependence nation building.77 Yet the aftermaths are crucial to understanding what kind of states colonial territories became. This study of UPC nationalism details the ways in which French and British administrators barred Cameroonian nationalists from participation in territorial politics and, as a result, limited their access to the postcolonial political terrain.
The policies of the Ahidjo regime, after 1960, undergirded by a strong French military presence, continued the political tactics established during Cameroon’s transition to independence—cordons and searches, interrogations, the imprisonment of political oppositionists, public executions, population resettlements, and curfews. In 1966, Ahidjo reinforced the political tradition of proscription inherited from European administrators when he declared all political parties save his own, the Union nationale camerounaise (UNC), to be illegal.78 By that time, a host of Cameroonian political “exiles,” whether excluded from political processes within territorial boundaries or on the move abroad, recognized that the state that had come into formation was no longer theirs to mold or to govern. In many cases, as in the case of Cameroon, political exclusions enacted during and after the transition to independence restricted political possibilities, shaped political communities, birthed a culture of violence, and dictated a limited vision of what postcolonial states could become.
SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
Research for this book began with the thousands of petitions sent from the Cameroon territories to the UN Trusteeship Council from 1948 through 1960. These petitions, the vast majority of which were sent by men and women who supported the nationalist movement, provide a catalogue of names of nationalists, party chronology, locales where the movement took root, and issues that upécistes found most important at various times and places. As the act of petitioning became more widespread, petitioners, whether literate or relying on scribes, wrote to the UN from towns across the southern Cameroons, including many of the Bamileke chieftaincies, the Mungo Region, and British territory. In the preliminary stages of my research, the petitions served to highlight which concerns and goals of upécistes had not been previously addressed in the scholarship.
The fresh perspective the petitions provided led me to base my research in Nkongsamba, the capital of the Mungo Region, and to consider the region’s connections with the British and French Grassfields. In Nkongsamba, I resided for two years in the home of a Baham notable, Jean-Bernard Pogo dit Defotimsa, who had settled there in 1957.
