Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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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 after Cameroon’s independence, transregional support dwindled, the connection 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