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