CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL: FROM FOREST MAQUIS TO A PAN-AFRICAN ACCRA

Abstract

This article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists in the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization through the lens of Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cameroon's popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in the mid-1950s, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, most to Accra, where they gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-African Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance camps within the territories), rooted in culturally particular conceptions of freedom and sovereignty. With such deeply local and broadly international foundations, the political future that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after the Cameroon territories' official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting. But, by the mid-1960s, postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty over ‘African unity’ and Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, leading to the movement's disintegration.

Entangled political histories of twentieth-century West Africa: The case of Guinean exile networks

“…23 Another notable exile group in Accra was the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), a nationalist movement in the UN-trust territory of Cameroon that had been forced into exile from 1955 to 1957 due to British and French repression. 24 government in exile that sought to create a breakaway republic in the region of Sanwi in neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire as a means to undermine Nkrumah's rival, Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. 25 Regional opposition groups shared Accra with other individuals and movements that extended to the continent as a whole, and indeed the larger African diaspora.…”

Urbanites and Urban Villagers: Comparing ‘Home’ Among Elite and Non-elite Bamiléké Women's Hometown Associations

“…Originating in the mountainous plateau of the Grassfields, the Bamiléké are one of the most populous groups in Cameroon, comprising around 25 per cent of the country's population. Fact and stereotype combine to lend Bamiléké a reputation for their entrepreneurial drive (Dongmo 1981a), their history of political opposition to the central state (Bayart 1993; Joseph 1977; Kago Lele 1995; Nkwi and Socpa 1997; Terretta 2000), and their high birth rates (Wakam 1994). Because the Bamiléké were closely involved with the Union des Populations Camerounaises (UPC), which led an armed conflict against the state (1956–73), and because of their predominance among rural–urban migrants, Bamiléké have been the objects of resentment and exclusionary practices.…”

Itinerant nationalisms and fracturing narratives: Incorporating regional dimensions of memory into peacebuilding

“…Scholars have begun exploring nationalist groups and movements based across borders and are inspired through their exilic experience. Scholarship on national liberation movements in southern Africa has begun to explore the fundamentally “transnational” operation of “nationalist” movements, which were firmly embedded in the region and mobile across borders (see Hayes, 2014; MacMillan, 2013; Terretta, 2010; White and Larmer, 2014). This has certainly been the case for the second wave of liberation movements as well, as the case of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) shows.…”