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INTRODUCTION

Layering Nationalism from Local to Global

In Douala in 2003, I was speaking in French with a Cameroonian woman in her sixties about George W. Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq. She was from the West Province, or the Bamileke Region, the portion of the Grassfields that fell under French administration from 1919 to 1960.¹ She was unschooled but spoke fluent French, pidgin English, and her mother tongue, Medumba. She was against the US invasion and, referring to the United Nations Security Council’s vote against military intervention in Iraq, she said, “But all the other villages did not want to go to war.” Her grandchildren laughed at her use of the term village, but her word choice and the youngsters’ reaction to it revealed a generational, linguistic memory gap.

She had lived through “the time of troubles,” as Bamileke survivors describe the conflict that, at its beginning, in late 1956, resembled a nationalist war for independence from European rule; in its middle, the early 1960s, a civil war; and by its end, the late 1960s, seemed to have unraveled into random, unpredictable violence, looting, and revenge. In 1964 the British embassy in Cameroon² reported that between 61,300 and 76,300 civilians had lost their lives as a result of independence-era violence, from December 1956 to June 1964, and that nearly 80 percent of these casualties had occurred in the Bamileke region.³ Inhabitants of the region had plenty of reason during those years to think about the meanings of nation and independence. Since the French and British Cameroons were UN trust territories rather than colonies, Cameroonians who lived through “the time of troubles” also became familiar with the UN and its legal role in the politics of decolonization. In 2003 the grandmother’s words carried a memory of a time when Cameroonian nationalists from the Bamileke region used gung, the indigenous word for chieftaincy, which French administrators had translated and codified as “village,” to define the nation they envisioned. Her words also carried the faint echo of a time when many Cameroonians overestimated the ability of the UN to serve as a forum for international consensus and as an arbitrator and protector in world affairs.

This book recounts the history of the practice and discourse of Cameroonian nationalism, spearheaded by the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC), as it unfolded in intersecting local, territorial, and global political arenas in the 1950s and 1960s. I have found this multidimensional perspective most effective for explaining why the UPC attracted the largest number of members and sympathizers of any political party in French Cameroon, becoming the most popular nationalist movement in the territory. Only by examining the ways in which UPC nationalists engaged shifting local, territorial, and international political currents can we approach a full understanding of why, despite the movement’s grassroots popularity, its support throughout Africa and beyond, and its decade-long armed struggle, upécistes (as UPC members called themselves) failed to achieve political power in the postcolonial state government when official independence was declared on January 1, 1960.

The UPC nationalist party and its affiliated women’s, youth, and trade unionist wings, initially launched to reunify the territories of the French and British Cameroons (administered together as Kamerun during the German colonial period, which lasted from 1884 to 1916) and to gain their independence, soon evolved into an “extrametropolitan” movement that deliberately bypassed inclusion in or collaboration with metropolitan political institutions.⁴ To escape the constraints of European rule, Cameroonian nationalists grounded their political ideology in particular locales within the territory, recycling and, in many cases, rediscovering elements of local political culture that they tailored to their contemporary objectives—independence from European rule, the reunification of the French and British Cameroons, and the establishment of a sovereign nation-state. They also traveled—imaginatively and literally—beyond territorial boundaries, attributing symbolic and political importance to the United Nations, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Asian solidarity, other anticolonial struggles, antinuclear pacifism,⁵ and the burgeoning notion of universal human rights.⁶ In so doing, Cameroonian nationalists sought to supersede the metropole-colony paradigm that seemingly underwrote political processes in late-colonial Africa.

Charting the particularly local and expansively global trajectories of UPC nationalists requires a revision of existing historical accounts of Cameroonian nationalism⁷ and leads us to question the extent to which independence-era politics were guided by affiliations with (or resistance to) metropolitan governments. Historian Frederick Cooper has stressed the need for a greater appreciation of the “political alternatives” imagined by African political actors on the eve of independence, in order better to understand how and why political possibilities expanded and narrowed in colonial territories.⁸ But to truly comprehend the political alternatives envisioned by nationalists, we must look beyond the metropole-colony boundaries that have so often guided our research, scholarship, and assumptions. This means retrieving the local spiritual, political, and cultural content of nationalist movements like the UPC, and then following the connections that nationalists created with political actors beyond their territorial borders, even (or especially) when these routes do not lead to Paris, London, or Brussels.

In following the paths of Cameroonian nationalists where they actually lead, rather than limiting their range to French territory, this study does a number of things that no previously published histories of Cameroon’s decolonization have done. Rather than focus exclusively on French, UN, and Cameroonian documents,⁹ it draws on a breadth of sources from the UN, France, Great Britain, Ghana, and both provincial and national archives in Cameroon, as well as oral material collected throughout Cameroon and in Ghana. This history includes previously unknown actors—traditional chiefs, local politicians, ordinary farmers and workers, and women—in the story of Cameroonian nationalism. The inclusion of subaltern actors is crucial since, by 1957, most of the nationalist party leaders had been deported, and in 1958, the movement’s fountainhead, Secretary-General Ruben Um Nyobé (1913–58), was gunned down by a French military patrol in the forest of the Sanaga-Maritime.¹⁰ And yet, in the absence of central coordination and leadership, the movement only spread, intensified, and increasingly drew on sources of local inspiration.¹¹

Finally, this work is the first published scholarly study of Cameroonian nationalism to examine the nationalist vision that persisted, albeit fragmented and factionalized, for nearly a decade after Cameroon’s official achievement of independence. The primary task of President Ahmadou Ahidjo’s regime during the first postcolonial decade was to eradicate and suppress the ongoing UPC rebellion. The elements of Cameroon’s state building in the early years after independence, many of which were inherited from the French administration in the late trusteeship period, consisted mostly of heavy-handed violence, interrogations, imprisonment, “disappearings,” resettlement and concentration camps, public beatings, intrusive intelligence gathering, and propaganda campaigns designed to instill fear of the state and its agents.¹² While the history of the UPC is a story that ends with the party’s failure to gain access to the seat of power with the dawn of independence, it is also a story of the state’s failure to become a nation.

BLENDING LOCAL AND GLOBAL POLITICS

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UPC nationalism synchretized local, regional, and international political processes. Some of these, including the legitimacy of traditional chiefs, inheritance laws, spiritual technologies, and the translation of nationalist ideas into indigenous languages, derived from remembered political, cultural, and spiritual traditions that predated European rule. Others, such as labor unions, planters’ cooperatives, political parties, and elections, emerged under foreign rule. Nationalists’ awareness of current international politics stemmed from the status of the French and British Cameroons as UN trust territories. From the UPC’s inception, in 1948, leaders quoted from both the UN Charter, which promised autonomy to trust territories, and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The party’s global perspective was reinforced through the alliances that upécistes forged with Nkrumah-style Pan-Africanists beginning in 1957.¹³ UPC nationalist leaders mediated the links between global and local more adeptly than other territorial politicians, and in this mediation lay the source of the movement’s strength and tenacity, and of ordinary Cameroonians’ awareness of the UN, human rights, and anticolonial struggles beyond the territory’s borders.

While the “glocal”¹⁴ political articulation first formed in the minds of a handful of nationalist leaders in the late 1940s, it became stronger as the movement spread from cities and towns to the countryside until, by 1955, a global-local connection guided nationalists’ practice, discourse, and mobility throughout French Cameroon and beyond. Beginning with Um Nyobé and Abel Kingue’s first trip to the United States, in 1952, nationalist leaders traveled internationally with great regularity: to New York to speak before the UN General Assembly, and to Vienna, Stockholm, Budapest, Bucharest, Moscow, and Prague to attend congresses organized by NGOs such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and the World Federation of Democratic Youth. By the late 1950s, Cameroonian nationalists had arrived in Khartoum, Rabat, Accra, Conakry, and Cairo, where they consistently took part in All-African Peoples’ and Afro-Asian Solidarity conferences.¹⁵

There is nothing surprising about an internationally mobile African party leadership. If by the nineteenth century a “black transnationalist imaginary” was already well formed,¹⁶ black internationalism only increased throughout the first half of the twentieth century.¹⁷ The 1950s marked the heyday of traveling anticolonial and nationalist delegations, political leaders, and intellectuals; and scholars have begun to explore the implications of these Third World transregional networks.¹⁸ But the political cosmopolitanism that swept French Cameroon and, later, the British Cameroons belonged not just to a jet-setting elite. Thousands of Cameroonian nationalists gathered en masse or in local committee meetings to listen to traveling leaders’ accounts of their ventures abroad. And thousands of upécistes—regardless of their degree of education, their gender, their age, or whether they lived in cities or villages—laid claim, through the act of petitioning, to the UN, where decisions were made about trusteeship inhabitants’ right to autonomy, human rights, economic independence, and an end to racial discrimination.¹⁹

Although these petitions were addressed to the UN General Assembly and Trusteeship Council in New York, other countries—such as Vietnam, Algeria, Indochina, and Madagascar—figured in petitions protesting the violent repression that upécistes faced at the hands of French administrators. But if petitions to the UN indicated an awareness of anti-imperial global trends and the meaning of trust territory, their content bespoke the local elements of UPC nationalism. For example, petitions often decried the French administration’s “unjust” or “unlawful” deposition of chiefs, describing the violence and humiliation unleashed by a crisis in traditional governance.²⁰ Women who belonged to the Union démocratique des femmes camerounaises (UDEFEC), the women’s wing of the UPC, demonstrated their mistrust of French medical facilities and health care. In early 1957, Mrs. Passa Tchaffi and Mrs. Agathé Matene wrote, “The French . . . have prepared injections and put schoolchildren into a hut, where they gave them these shots to weaken their minds.”²¹ Chrestine Emachoua believed that “when a woman gives birth at the dispensary, they give the baby an injection to kill it,” and ended her petition with “Long live the United Nations! Long live a unified and independent Cameroon!”²² Other petitioners protested the expropriation of land. In a letter to the French high commissioner, a copy of which she included in her petition to the UN Trusteeship Council, Mrs. Lydia Dopo wrote:

On 12 February 1954, a European Official of the Water and Forestry Service asked me to . . . show him the boundaries of my plantation. . . . He refused to accept the boundaries I showed him, and . . . he cut off a large part of my plantation, which was under cultivation, for classification in the private domain. From time to time this European Official . . . tells me that he will send me to prison . . . if I persist in claiming my rights.²³

The thousands of petitioners who cited matters of chieftaincy, land ownership and usufruct, fears of biomedicine, or unjust taxation demanded to be heard on their own terms on issues of local concern, but within the global forum of the UN.²⁴ The act of petitioning and the problems discussed in these missives engendered a new political repertoire within which people—whether literate or not, whether benefiting from French administrative support or on the run to escape arrest, whether urban or rural dwellers—expressed their concerns and aspirations in a changing political landscape.²⁵ The new political repertoire was central to the vernacularization²⁶ of the international political discourses that nationalists found most useful. Through these new ways of speaking, and new channels for expressing their ideas about independence and nation, Cameroonian nationalists constructed a politics of nationalism.²⁷ Speech and writing became one avenue through which Cameroonian nationalists forged the articulation between local political cultures and international politics.

Familiarity with the international politics of decolonization and human rights formed a significant part of UPC ideology even before the nationalist parties’ official proscription—first by the French administration, in July 1955, then by the British, in June 1957. These bans had the effect of strengthening the link between global and local in the minds of UPC nationalists—particularly the movement’s architects—for whom it now became even more pressing to solicit the understanding and support of international allies, whether at the UN or in the human rights NGO affiliated with it, the International League of the Rights of Man (ILRM), on which they relied for support, in newly independent African states, or among the various political sympathizers throughout the West (France, the UK, and the US) and the Eastern Bloc.²⁸ Once the proscriptions rendered the movement illegal, excluding it from the legal, territorial, political landscape, Cameroonian nationalists who were familiar with the international political sphere interwove indigenous political traditions and global revolutionary currents even more deliberately—in practice as well as in discourse. It was as if the official proscriptions allowed the movement to evolve into an explicitly extrametropolitan nationalism.

The articulation between international and local political orders after the movement’s official proscription surfaced, not just in the petitions on record at the Trusteeship Council, but also in the formation and practice of the UPC’s underground militias. UPC soldiers were either former exiles trained abroad or fighters recruited locally. When the British proscribed the UPC, they deported the leaders of the directors’ bureau, who had left French territory in 1955 and taken refuge in the British Cameroons. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, a majority of UPC, Jeunesse démocratique camerounaise (JDC), and UDEFEC leaders, headquartered in turn in Khartoum, Cairo, Rabat, Accra, Conakry, Algiers, and Brazzaville from 1957 to 1968, worked to change the movement into what Matthew Connelly, referring to the Algerian War of Independence, calls a “diplomatic revolution.”²⁹ Others remained within the Cameroon territories but, like Ruben Um Nyobé, the secretary-general, they took to the forests and mountains in their regions of origin, or settled in underadministered zones along the Anglo-French border in the Mungo River valley and the Grassfields.³⁰ Nationalists in exile remained connected to the internal underground resistance—the maquis³¹—that formed in the Sanaga-Maritime in late 1956 and spread into several regions throughout the southern French and British Cameroons. Later, as exiles returned to make up the ranks of the UPC militia groups fighting for independence from foreign rule, the names of maquis camps—Accraville or ONU—and fighters’ noms de guerre—Fidel or Karl Marx—bore witness to the importance of the international in the nationalist imaginary. UPC military strategies paralleled the local-to-global range of the party. Fighters trained abroad used guerrilla tactics of sabotage and terrorism modeled on principles outlined in Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book and learned in China and in Front de libération nationale (FLN) training camps in Algeria and Tunisia. Those who had never been abroad relied on local, culturally specific strategies of warfare—magical technologies, the protection of sacred forests, intimate knowledge of the terrain, and hunters’ skills.³²

A deliberate rejection of metropolitan connections can also be seen in the upécistes’ decision, after the official bans rendered them outlaws, to begin spelling the nation’s name with a K—Kamerun. The German spelling denoted not only the movement’s leaders’ desire to be free of British and French administration and influence but also their goal of reunification of the territories. The letter k became a ubiquitous symbol of UPC nationalism beginning in mid-1957, appearing not only in the nation’s name, but also in nationalists’ spelling of other words such as kolos (colons, or colonialists) or loi-kadre (loi-cadre).

With such a broadly global and deeply local scope, it is no wonder the collective political imaginary of independence-era Cameroon spanned the village, the nation, and the world beyond. Seemingly disparate political practices and discourses converged and overlapped in ways that UN representatives or European administrators may have found surprising. But UPC nationalists gradually fitted these different ways of speaking and practicing politics together over the years, discovering that indigenous political traditions had something in common with the new Third World politics: an optimistic belief in the UN, Afro-Asian solidarity, human rights, nonalignment, and the possibility of political, cultural, and economic rupture with colonial powers.³³ Both were conceived and sustained beyond the governing metropolitan centers that administered the territories of colonial Africa.

CAMEROON: AN EXCEPTIONAL COLONIAL HISTORY?

Cameroonian nationalism lends itself especially well to an extrametropolitan historical analysis. In Cameroon, as elsewhere along Africa’s western coast, European powers came and went throughout the era of the transatlantic trade, and pidgin English spread and took root as a lingua franca among the populations involved in translocal commerce.³⁴ But even after the Berlin Conference allotted Kamerun to Germany in 1885, the revolving door admitting European powers seemed to continue spinning, making the territory’s affiliation with any particular metropolitan power relatively tenuous. Not until 1910 did Germans “pacify” areas in the hinterland, such as the densely populated Grassfields region, which comprised over a hundred hierarchically organized and mostly autonomous chieftaincies. Just a few years later, Britain and France took over the German colony in a joint military operation during the First World War, and divided the spoils at Versailles in 1919 with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary.³⁵

The new international frontier separated several communities, societies, and polities from north to south, including the western portion of the Grassfields around Bamenda, which now fell under British control, from the eastern Bamileke Region, under French administration. In both territories, the British and French were merely administering authorities under the supervision of the League of Nations and then, after the Second World War, the UN.³⁶ In the Grassfields region, as in the northern, Islamized regions, the British and French, who had hastily cobbled together stopgap administrations after the war, relied on African rulers to govern. From the point of view of local populations in regions such as the Grassfields, where rulers had wielded significant power and authority before European occupation, traditional chiefs represented the most consistent form of governance throughout the colonial period, as European administrations seemed to come and go, and political borders shifted.

Despite the territories’ particular status as UN Trust Territories after the Second World War and the relatively brief period of European rule in regions such as the Grassfields, decolonization progressed in much the same way in the Cameroon territories as in other British and French colonies. After the war, the French administration organized elections at the same time as they were held in the rest of France’s territories, while the British permitted the formation of political parties in the Cameroons. In 1956, France held loi-cadre elections to establish parliamentary assemblies to govern internal affairs in French Cameroon, as it did in its other overseas territories. For many of France’s African colonies, loi-cadre meant increased political representation and greater political autonomy, and it was widely viewed as a necessary transitional stage en route to decolonization.³⁷ In French Cameroon, as elsewhere in French Africa, administrators groomed African politicians to eventually take their places in political bodies and institutions that resembled France’s own. The political parties that benefited from French support, including the Évolution sociale camerounaise (ESOCAM) and the Bloc démocratique camerounais (BDC), failed, however, to attract mass followings or to build up a popular base.³⁸

If administrators and pro-French politicians missed noting the significant differences in the legal status and colonial histories of the Cameroon territories, Cameroonian anticolonial nationalists certainly did not. From the party’s inception, in 1948, UPC leaders consciously dismissed the territorial, political, and historical markers that guided French and British decolonization processes in the Cameroon territories and instead built a nationalist movement on a blend of anti-imperial global trends and local political practices. When, after the UPC’s ban, in 1955, the French administration organized the first territorial elections in which universal suffrage was applied, upécistes sent some forty-five thousand petitions to the UN in lieu of votes, claiming their right, as inhabitants of a UN trust territory, to participate in political processes even if French administrators denied their access to elections.³⁹ As French administrators worked with Cameroonian collaborators to make French Cameroon part of a “greater France” through an interterritorial application of loi-cadre, UPC nationalists invoked the UN Charter to argue that implementation of loi-cadre was illegal in a UN trust territory and that Article 76 had in 1946 already granted the right of self-government to territories under European rule. As French administrators sought to do away with traditional chiefs, UPC nationalists protested their deposition throughout the Bamileke Region.⁴⁰ And as French administrators pushed Cameroon toward interterritorial federation with other French colonial territories in 1958, upécistes in exile signed on to Kwame Nkrumah’s plan for a United States of Africa.

Most tellingly, as French administrators sought to standardize political discourse throughout French Africa on the eve of independence, upécistes were primarily concerned with how to translate nationalist terms into indigenous languages. The translation needed to be cultural as well as linguistic, as made clear in the petition that Marthe Penda sent to the UN Trusteeship Council in December 1954, discussing the primary-school curriculum: “The children learn nothing but passages from plays written centuries ago by Molière and no teaching is given on indigenous history, or customary and traditional dancing; the children only learn the history of distant countries so that a child who can recite details of the map of France does not know the name of a river flowing through his own village.”⁴¹

Upécistes’ quest for independence from foreign rule amounted to a struggle to define, on their own terms, what constituted legitimate political practice for a soon-to-be-independent African nation. The UPC definition included a rejection of a metropolitan political modality—based on allegiance to a greater France, electoral politics and évolué elitism—and its replacement with something else. The something else, a blend of contemporary global and neotraditional⁴² local political culture, formed the stuff of Cameroonian nationalism. Although at first glance the blend of international and local elements in UPC nationalism seems exceptional, it is more likely that the articulation between local political culture and global political trends in African nationalisms could be argued to constitute the norm, not the exception. Historians such as Joey Power and Elizabeth Schmidt have shown the ways in which grassroots political activists referenced and reframed transregional political discussions in colonial territories.⁴³ The works of Steven Feierman, Carol Anderson, and others have demonstrated the importance for activists in UN trust territories of petitioning the UN and engaging in human rights talk.⁴⁴ Additional close-up histories of grassroots nationalisms and transnational connections are needed, to shed light on the immediate and residual importance of the independence-era marriage of local and international political processes during Africa’s decolonization.

SETTING THE STAGES: THE FOCAL POINTS

Three geographical focal points anchor this three-tiered history of Cameroonian nationalism: Baham, a strong chieftaincy situated in the densely populated, mostly rural Bamileke Region; Nkongsamba, the capital of the Mungo Region, French Cameroon’s fertile plantation zone; and Accra, Ghana, where the Kwame Nkrumah government that came into power at independence, in 1957, founded the Bureau of African Affairs to support and assist anti-colonial liberation movements in territories still under European rule.⁴⁵ Nationalist activity radiated outward from these three points, creating regional epicenters with overlapping peripheries. Although the present analysis ranges beyond these three centers, each one is symbolic of the local, territorial, and transregional layers of Cameroonian nationalism. The book is structured in three parts of two chapters each, and progresses chronologically against the backdrop of these interconnected locations.

Grassfields Political Tradition and the Creation of a Bamileke Identity

Part One historicizes the political practice of Grassfielders before European rule, and evaluates the formation of a “Bamileke identity” in the Mungo Region under French administration during the interwar period. The Bamileke Region, as the French called the portion of the Grassfields that fell under their administration with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary in 1919, was the most densely populated region in French Cameroon. Some three hundred fifty thousand to half a million people lived in the region itself, which remained mostly rural and agricultural, although Dschang, Bafoussam, and Bangangte developed over the decades into administrative centers and market towns. The rest of the region consisted of a mosaic of chieftaincies (gung), each governed by a chief and a network of notables, associations, and spiritualists.

Before colonization, the Grassfields region was composed of approximately one hundred chieftaincies, some autonomous and regionally dominant, others in a state of subordination to more powerful neighbors.⁴⁶ Alliances between chieftaincies were made and sometimes broken, and boundaries between polities shifted as a result of interchieftaincy battles, diplomatic negotiations, and intrachieftaincy independence movements.⁴⁷ Although by the nineteenth century Grassfields chieftaincies together made up a coherent cultural system distinct from neighboring regions, Grassfielders had no “shared consciousness of belonging to a named group.”⁴⁸ On the eve of colonial rule, Grassfields polities had certain political and spiritual practices in common and manifested these in similar material cultures. Yet linguistic diversity⁴⁹ and the chieftaincy-specific content of political histories (narrating each polity’s foundation and diplomacy), spiritual technologies (particular sacred sites and commemoration of lineage ancestors), and material culture (masquerade performances, architectural style) meant that the identification of Grassfields inhabitants with a particular chieftaincy of origin was far stronger than their sense of belonging to a “Grassfields” collectivity.

Even after the French had labeled the administrative region “Bamileke”—the word a combination of erroneous translation and a mispronunciation first uttered by a German soldier around 1905⁵⁰—inhabitants continued to identify themselves by chieftaincy of origin. Only as they emigrated from their chieftaincies and settled in towns such as Nkongsamba or Douala (the port city) in the territory’s other regions did they begin to apply the term Bamileke to themselves. During the interwar period, a Bamileke identity began to coalesce in places such as the Mungo Region, where host populations and European administrators viewed Bamileke migrants as “strangers.” In the 1950s the meaning of “being Bamileke” continued to evolve concurrently with Cameroonian nationalism as it spread both through emigrant Bamileke communities and through home chieftaincies.

To help understand the engagement of Bamileke actors with UPC nationalism, this book situates the region’s (de)colonization in a Grassfields’ “long time-span”⁵¹ and plumbs the ways in which upécistes engaged Grassfields political tradition to express and define the UPC platform for Bamileke communities.⁵² Chapter 1 focuses on the nineteenth-century traits of Grassfields governance and spirituality that nationalists recycled in the 1950s to “translate the message” of UPC nationalism.⁵³ Bamileke nationalists accented two political concepts indigenous to the Grassfields region—lepue and gung—as the terms used to translate “independence” and “nation,” respectively. In the 1950s, Bamileke nationalists redefined the meanings of these terms through the UPC, in order to restore autonomy and legitimacy to chiefs, and to separate “traitors” (mfingung) from “patriots” (mpouogung). Chapter 1 also presents Grassfields political power and spirituality as inscribed in the communal and familial sacred sites (chuep’si) of each chieftaincy. These sacred sites dotting the landscape were the geographical locus of a spiritual alliance between an invisible, metaphysical world governed by a supreme being, Si, and the visible, material world inhabited by human beings. Throughout the region, this spiritual alliance shaped Grassfields governance and constituted an essential part of the political culture, underwriting power, land distribution and usufruct, and justice within each chieftaincy. During the war for independence, Bamileke nationalists reified the politicospiritual importance of these sites when they risked arrest to travel from the maquis to make sacrifices to deities inhabiting lineage or community chuep’si.⁵⁴

Through the nationalist movement, and the cultural and linguistic translation it necessitated, Bamileke upécistes reshaped understandings of their past.⁵⁵ In this, they were doing nothing new. As elsewhere in equatorial Africa,⁵⁶ in Bamileke communities, identity and political tradition have been “constantly reworked.”⁵⁷ But independence-era constructions of Bamileke identity and reconstructions of political tradition were “nonetheless ‘fixed’ in narratives of the past.”⁵⁸ My intention is to show how “narratives of the past” underwrote the politics of anticolonial nationalism in Bamileke communities. But, as Grassfields political culture shaped nationalism, so, too, territorial political processes reframed the views of Bamileke populations on the political legitimacy of their chiefs, the sovereignty of their chieftaincies, and the political and cultural importance of Grassfields spiritual practice. The Mungo Region and its capital, Nkongsamba, became the channel through which reciprocal influences flowed between Grassfields political culture and territorial politics.

Chapter 2 recounts the ways in which Bamileke migrants kept Mungo towns connected to their chieftaincies of origin in the Bamileke Region and to the city of Douala. By the 1950s, the fertile Mungo River valley, site of European-owned plantations and a flourishing cash-crop economy, had become home to tens of thousands of migrants from other parts of the Cameroon territories.⁵⁹ Drawn by opportunities offered by waged labor and commercial agriculture during the interwar period, migrants from throughout French Cameroon transformed the Mungo River valley into the most ethnically and culturally heterogeneous region in the territory. The majority of immigrants hailed from the adjacent Bamileke Region, located just to the northeast. By the late trusteeship period, Bamileke immigrants made up a significant portion of the Mungo Region’s population, as high as 80 percent in some towns, including Nkongsamba, the regional capital, the third-largest town in French Cameroon and the northern terminus of the railroad from Douala. Situated as it was along the Anglo-French boundary, the Mungo Region became a microcosm of the political, economic, and social tensions that emerged in the Cameroon territories under foreign rule.

Conflicts over land ownership in the Mungo Region encouraged African planters to become familiar with laws, the processes of obtaining titles and deeds, petitioning, and filing grievances and appeals. The relatively high percentage of waged laborers working on the railroad and in plantations ensured that French Communist organizers prioritized the Mungo Region as they organized Marxist study circles and trade unions after the Second World War. The white settler population, the Cameroons’ highest outside Douala, made constant demands on administrators and formed their own defensive political lobbies. In short, the Mungo Region provided fertile ground for UPC nationalism, and Bamileke populations served as conduits for political ideas flowing back and forth from home chieftaincies, via the Mungo River valley, to the largest city, Douala.

Independence (Lepue) and Nation (Gung): Contested Meanings

Part Two shows how the UPC, which formed as a political party in 1948, evolved into a nationalist movement, and examines the ways in which local and territorial politics became articulated in the Mungo and Bamileke Regions. Chapter 3 explains how party leaders “translated” the UPC’s international message throughout the Mungo, Bamileke, and other regions with such success that, by early 1955, upécistes numbered close to 100,000 out of a total electorate of 747,000. French administrators, alarmed by its popularity, remarked that the UPC’s influence was “large relative to [that of] other political movements in the territory,”⁶⁰ and officially banned the UPC and its affiliate youth, women’s, and trade unionist wings on 13 July 1955.

In 1956, just after the UPC’s proscription in French Cameroon, French administrators deposed, imprisoned, and sometimes forced a number of young Bamileke chiefs who had recently inherited power to flee into exile. As chapter 4 recounts, this younger generation of chiefs became spokespersons for UPC nationalism throughout the Bamileke Region and in their emigrant communities. The first one to be deposed, the chief of Baham, Pierre Kamdem Ninyim, was preparing to run for a seat in the territorial assembly in the December 1956 elections. After the young chiefs’ respective depositions, the French replaced them with chiefs less likely to support the UPC and more likely to support the administration’s efforts to eradicate UPC influence in Bamileke communities. In the December elections, five such Bamileke chiefs were elected to French Cameroon’s territorial assembly to serve as deputies in the new loi-cadre administration. After the depositions and the elections, chieftaincy became an idiom through which Bamileke populations, whether residing in their home chieftaincies or in emigrant communities beyond, discussed the politics of decolonization.

In many ways, by outlawing the UPC and its affiliated parties and by selectively deposing traditional chiefs in the Bamileke Region, French administrators shaped electoral processes on the ground in 1956, forcing people to choose one side or the other. The result was a political landscape flattened into two opposing and confrontational sides, and this enabled UPC leaders to simplify their message accordingly, effectively painting anyone who supported the territory’s integration into the French Union rather than the UPC’s envisioned rupture with France as a “traitor” (fingung) while portraying pro-UPC chiefs, notables, and civil servants as mpouogung—patriots or (lit., children of the nation).⁶¹ Bamileke chiefs who chose to ally with the Franco-Cameroonian administration in power as of late 1956 had been in power longer and relied on the French administration as the main source of their legitimacy within the chieftaincy. On the other hand, most of the chiefs who joined the nationalist movement had more recently inherited the stool of power.⁶² They were young and schooled, and sought to establish their legitimacy both through new political developments and through “traditional” culture as they understood it. They enjoyed the support of significant portions of their emigrant populations in Cameroon’s cities—Nkongsamba, Douala, and Yaoundé.

Differences over the role of Bamileke chiefs in territorial politics can be read as the continuation of a long-standing political debate over the meaning of lepue and whether it might best be achieved through diplomatic negotiation or through direct, even violent, confrontation.⁶³ For Bamileke nationalists in the late 1950s, lepue meant reclaiming the chieftaincy as a sovereign space and the chief as the people’s representative, and it was the more dramatic form of lepue—a refusal to submit to foreign rule at all costs—that held the greater popular appeal in late 1956 and 1957. This form of lepue implied a complete political, economic, and cultural break with former colonial powers and facilitated the interweaving of Grassfields political culture with an international Spirit of Bandung, the African cornerstone of which was situated in Accra from 1957 to 1966.⁶⁴

UPC Nationalists Go Global

Part Three considers the importance of the UPC’s international influences and transregional 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 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. From 2001 to 2003, and again in 2005 and 2008, I carried out oral interviews in the Mungo, the Bamileke, and, to a lesser extent, the Bamenda regions. The bulk of the interviews took place in Baham and surrounding chieftaincies in 2002 and 2003 and were carried out with the assistance of Joseph Kiegaing of Baham, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Yaoundé I. Mr. Kiegaing accompanied me on foot throughout chieftaincies of Baham, Bandenkop, Bamendjou, and Bafoussam and served as interpreter for the Ghomala’ language. I selected a number of interviewees with the assistance of Mr. Kiegaing and Mr. Pogo of Nkongsamba who were familiar with my topic of research. Present-day upécistes as well as state officials (most of whom requested anonymity) pointed me toward additional possible interviewees. I also found interviewees as a result of the information I had gleaned from archival records, whether the UN petitions, French sources, or the prefectoral archives of the Mungo Region. While in Cameroon from 2001 to 2003, I was able to make three back-and-forth journeys to France, which enabled me to read colonial sources against oral interviews and vice versa, thus facilitating corroboration and cross-referencing. As a result, the information I gathered from oral sources continually built on the archival material I collected, which in turn led me to new interviewees and to rephrase old questions as I progressed in my research.

The oral interviews largely shaped my understanding of the nationalist-era events in Baham and surrounding chieftaincies. Many of the people I spoke with included fragments of songs in their accounts of the nationalist period. Eventually I began to collect these songs and they proved to be an invaluable historical source. André Gabiapsi, an academically trained linguist from Baham, assisted me with their analysis and transcription, but I also interviewed people for contextual etymological information pertaining to political tradition and history contained in the songs. From 2001 to 2003 I did not stay in one place, with the exception of Nkongsamba, for longer than three weeks at a time. Instead, I came and went, thus returning to the same places and people again and again, which permitted further inquiry based on new levels of mutual familiarity.

I learned not to present my inquiries as political lest I alienate my informants (with the exception of those who had been the most active in UPC politics during the 1950s and, accordingly, are invested in the narration of the movement’s history). Interviewees’ reluctance to “talk politics” or describe their actions as political ultimately strengthened my approach since it encouraged me to leave behind the arena of formal politics and delve into the roots of Grassfields political culture and tradition in my quest to better understand the popularity of UPC nationalism in the Bamileke and Mungo Regions. I had to learn the ways in which survivors of the independence era could comfortably talk about the “troubles” of the independence era in ways that they did not find threatening. These conversations pushed me to reformulate my own understanding of nation and what constitutes the political, to whom, and why.⁷⁹

Written archives can be as elusive and difficult to access as oral ones, and those serving as the foundation of this historical work are no exception. Archival research in both France and Cameroon proved difficult, although for different reasons. I knew of the archival collection in the 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.