Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons - From left to right, in the foreground: Ossendé Affana, Abel Kingué, Ruben Um Nyobè, Félix-Roland Moumié, Ernest Ouandié

“The report on France’s role and involvement in the fight against independence and opposition movements in Cameroon from 1945 to 1971”, written by a joint commission of Cameroonian and French historians under the direction of academic Karine Ramondy, and submitted on 28 January to Presidents Macron and Biya, demonstrates with precision and detail the “*extreme violence*” employed by France to maintain its domination.

Cameroon was initially a German one. After the First World War, this Central African country was placed under the trusteeship of the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations), which gave Britain the mandate to administer two small territories bordering Nigeria, and the remainder, nearly three-quarters of the country, to France.

Violent Decolonisation

The latter managed Cameroon identically to its other colonies by exploiting the populations. After the Second World War, the first anti-colonial struggles emerged. In Cameroon, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC) was created, founded primarily by trade unionists. Their demands were twofold: the reunification of the country and immediate independence.

The report highlights the colonial administration’s efforts to try to limit the UPC’s audience by stigmatising its activists and creating pro-French parties, but to no avail. The colonial power banned the UPC and was guilty of the Ekité massacre in 1956, attacking unarmed civilians. Repression only grew thereafter. French officers, most of whom were veterans of Indochina, applied counter-revolutionary warfare methods, particularly by displacing populations to cut them off from anti-colonial fighters and implementing a policy of terror through the use of incendiary bombs dropped on villages.

Hidden History

In France, this colonial violence in Cameroon is largely obscured, like others, whether in Thiaroye against Senegalese soldiers in 1944, a year later in Sétif, in Madagascar and Casablanca in 1947, or in the Ivory Coast in 1949. However, it remains deeply anchored in Cameroon because well after independence, under Ahmadou Ahidjo’s government, France continued alongside the Cameroonian army to fight UPC guerrillas until the late 1960s.

While the commission had free access to archives in France, this was not the case in Cameroon, and for good reason. The current president, Paul Biya, had been in the Ahidjo government since 1962. Thus for decades, it was forbidden to mention the names of Ruben Um Nyobè, Félix-Roland Moumié or Ernest Ouandié, UPC leaders assassinated by the henchmen of colonial France.

The report’s recommendations centre essentially on the official recognition of France’s colonial violence. This will at least prevent individuals like Fillon from declaring: *“I absolutely deny that French forces participated in any way whatsoever in assassinations in Cameroon. All of this is pure invention!”*

Paul Martial