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