Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
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Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is the first extensive history of Cameroonian nationalism to consider the global and local influences that shaped the movement within the French and British Cameroons and beyond. Drawing on the archives of the United Nations, France, Great Britain, Ghana, and Cameroon, as well as oral sources, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence chronicles the spread of the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalist movement from the late 1940s into the first postcolonial decade. It shows how, in the French and British Cameroon territories administered as UN Trusteeships after the Second World War, notions of international human rights, the promise of Third World independence, Pan-African federation, and national citizenship blended with local political and spiritual practices that resurfaced as the period of European rule came to a close. After French and British administrators banned the party in the mid-1950s, UPC nationalists adopted violence as a revolutionary strategy. In the 1960s, the nationalist vision disintegrated. The postcolonial regime labeled UPC nationalists “outlaws” and rounded them up for imprisonment or execution as the state shifted to single-party rule in 1966. Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence traces the connection between local and transregional politics in the age of Africa’s decolonization and the early decades of the Cold War. Rather than stop at official independence as most conventional histories of African nationalist movements do, this book considers postindependence events as crucial to the history of Cameroonian nationalism and to an understanding of the postcolonial government that came to power on 1 January 1960. While the history of the UPC is a story that ends with the party’s failure to gain access to political power with independence, it is also a story of the postcolonial state’s failure to become a nation.
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Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN AND ALLEN ISAACMAN
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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
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