Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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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. A number of crossroads regions, such as the Mbam, played an important role in the UPC’s armed struggle, and there is evidence that regions as far away as the extreme northern and eastern provinces witnessed far more nationalistic activity than is reflected in the scholarship to date. Finally, the paths of exiled nationalists, as this book shows to some extent, were varied and far-flung. The influence of these exiles on the postindependence phase of UPC nationalism—or on political processes in the states that hosted them, including Ghana, Guinea, and Algeria—has yet to be analyzed in depth. The FLN’s GPRA files may contain a wealth of information on the activities of UPC exiles and their Pan-African connections. Undoubtedly, fresh new leads will be opened up with the release of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Predecessors Records of Former Colonial Administrations, also known as the Migrated Archives. The Cameroons’ files, which unfortunately had not been released at the time of the completion of this book, have since been made available to the public.
PART ONE
Grassfields Political Tradition and Bamileke Identity
1
Two words and the history of their use encapsulate the genealogy of Cameroonian nationalism, as practiced and spoken of by Bamileke populations in the late-trusteeship period of the 1950s: gung, which translated as nation, and lepue, the word for independence. The word gung, in present-day Mifi, Menoua, Haut-Nkam, and Nde Departments of the West Province (formerly the Bamileke Region, under French rule), designates the entirety of a population or chieftaincy, its government (composed of a fo, or chief, and his notables), and the land they occupy.1 Gung can be contrasted with la’a, which refers to a district2 within a chieftaincy or to the family compound, the birthplace of one’s forefathers. One might use a singular possessive pronoun to describe one’s own home—as in la’a tcha, my home or compound—but in speaking of gung, only plural possessives are used, suggesting that this larger polity could only belong to a community, not to an individual. Since Cameroon’s independence, these words together, la’a gung (lit., village-country), have been used to designate Grassfields chieftaincies such as Baham in order to differentiate them from gung, the nation-state. When referring to their native chieftaincy, Grassfielders have almost completely omitted gung from their common speech, effectively reducing their gung of origin to the lesser status of la’a, or village.
The discursive belittling of Grassfields chieftaincies began in the colonial period, when administrators referred to them as villages. But during the fight for independence, Grassfielders recalled the historical sovereignty of powerful chieftaincies through the words and events they selected to frame their nationalist narrative. The two key words recurred in independence songs from that era: gung, then commonly used as equivalent to nation, and lepue,