Nation of Outlaws

An abridged version of the following article was originally published in Africa / Volume 85 / Issue 04 / November 2015, pp 733 – 735
DOI: 10.1017/S0001972015000728, Published online: 18 November 2015


Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition and State Building in Cameroon. Athen, Ohio: Ohio University Press (978021420690). 2014, 367 pp.

Popular liberation struggles across the African continent are memorialized and celebrated today as significant episodes in Africa’s long history to rid itself of imperialists and colonialists. In countries such as Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa, the liberation struggles are frequently invoked and ritualized to remind younger generations of the sacrifices their forebears made in order for them to enjoy the so-called “freedoms” today. Contrast the prevailing cases with some of the liberation struggles in Africa that failed and the considerable efforts deployed by state officials to enforce amnesia about nationalist movements that imagined radically different futures from those inherited by neocolonial lackeys. Such is the fate that befell the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), French Cameroon’s leading nationalist movement founded in 1948 that spearheaded a powerful liberation struggle that culminated in their defeat by French and Cameroon military forces during the first decade of independence.

In Nations of Outlaws, Meredith Terretta weaves a deep history of “the practice and discourse of Cameroonian nationalism” (2) championed by the UPC. She recounts how these struggles evolved in local, national and international political terrains between the 1950s and 1960s.  In six dense and elaborate chapters, Terretta recounts the existential conditions that inspired the birth of nationalist movements in French Cameroon especially the UPC; why the UPC enjoyed tremendous popular appeal among Bamileke migrants in the Mungo river valley and the Bamileke region, the ways in which nationalist struggles resonated with Bamileke yearning for independence (lepue), the pan-Africanist dimensions and global reach of the UPC and ultimately, its demise at the hands of the nascent postcolonial state aided by French military cooperation. Whilst Nations of Outlaws, is a history about the UPC’s rise and defeat as a nationalist movement, it is, Terretta suggests, “also a story of the state’s failure to become a nation” (4).

I have referred to this book as a “deep history” for good reason but like every history, it is partial – a theme to which I will return. It is deep precisely in terms of the breadth and wealth of sources employed, including documents from the UN, France, Great Britain, Ghana, Cameroonian archives and importantly, oral testimonies from dozens of individuals in Cameroon and Ghana (3). The book is also unique because it is arguably the first historical account of French Cameroon’s nationalist movements that emerged in the 1940s and lasted through the first decade of independence. Given the turmoil and violence of the late colonial period in French Cameroon and more so the bloodbath that ensued in the Bamileke region following official independence, any kind of public or scholarly narrative about the war of independence that included the UPC was suspect and potentially suicidal for scholars. Hence, this book lays the groundwork for a much needed historiographical interrogation of French Cameroon’s late colonial and early post-independence history.

One of the strengths of Terretta’s analysis in Nations of Outlaws includes the ways in which Bamileke identity emerged in the 1920s, “entirely absent before French rule” (61) and how Bamileke migration to the Mungo river valley prepared the cradle for nationalist sentiments and eventually, activism. Remarkably, by 1955, of the total population of the Mungo area, 54% of them came from the “Grassfields” a majority of whom self-identified as “Bamileke”. It is also evident that today, the Bamileke dominate Cameroon’s economic spheres but few know the colonial origins of their so-called “entrepreneurial spirit”. Terretta points out that if anyone benefitted from the economic crisis linked to the Great Depression between 1929 and 1934, it was the Bamileke who dramatically increased their landholdings in the Mungo region during this period of crisis (71). As new agro plantation owners, they drew on advantages that autochthonous landowners or even European planters did not have – free labour. “Planters of Bamileke origin drew on family and patronage networks in their chieftaincies of origin to attract dependants to work in their fields for social rather than monetary compensation” (72). In fact by the end of the economic crisis in 1934, most autochthonous planters in the Mungo region had lost their plantations to mostly Bamileke migrants. Although organized around their specific chiefdoms of origin, Bamileke communities in the Mungo region developed powerful networks that provided credit and financial support to fellow migrants – precursors of today’s “tontines”. It was via these agro industrial communities that UPC nationalism eventually took root, initially through labour unions that advocated equal treatment for European and African planters/labourers. Thus Terretta traces the foundations of the nationalist movement in the Mungo area around the issues of land, labour and the export of cash crops which during the postwar period was dominated by Bamileke populations. It was reasonably, this population that served as the UPC’s backbone (101).

UPC nationalism intersected quite powerfully as well with Bamileke chieftaincies’ yearning for “independence” or autonomy in ways that eluded the relatively acephalous communities of the Mungo region. When the UPC was eventually banned by French administrators, its leaders and militants receded to the hills of Bamileke country and the forest/mountainous zones of the Mungo region and created the underground resistance also known as the maquis (129). The intersection of chieftaincy issues and nationalist politics is best captured by the rise and brutal demise of the Baham chief, Fo Kamdem Ninyim who once declared himself “to be the protector of the UPC in the Bamileke Region” (149). Having outlawed the UPC in 1955 and boosted by the exclusion of the UPC at the assembly elections of 1956, French authorities mounted a fierce campaign to eliminate the UPC despite the party’s wide appeal among the masses in the urban towns of French Cameroon and villages across the Bamileke region. When French Cameroon gained its independence on 1 January 1960 without a constitution (228), Ahidjo inherited all the technologies of violence forged by the French in his determined campaign against the maquis. By invoking “presidential decrees” employed throughout the 1960s, vast areas that harboured the UPC nationalists were placed under states of emergency. A sustained effort between French and Cameroonian authorities also successfully eliminated some of the UPC’s most influential leaders beginning with Ruben Um Nyobé in 1958. The maquis’ recourse to terrorizing the local peasantry also undermined its support among the populations, exacerbated by the dwindling international support the UPC had enjoyed in the late 1950s. These factors and many more account for the UPC’s failure to capture political power as a nationalist movement – and Terretta does a fine job in piecing together the threads and changing fortunes of its key actors.

I stated earlier that despite these strengths, Terretta’s history of the UPC nationalist struggle remains partial, partly because all history is such but even more importantly because there are many documents she could not access during her research. For instance, access to certain documents about French involvement in the UPC affair will only be declassified in 2030 (24) and many documents in Cameroon on this hotly contested episode have either been destroyed by postcolonial authorities or banished to decay in poorly kept archives. Terretta is also not consistent in her distinction between the different Cameroons covered in the book. It needs to be stated that Nations of Outlaws deals almost exclusively with French Cameroon although the British Southern Cameroons lurks in the shadows every now and then. Hence, when she asserts that Cameroon attained “its official independence” (216) on 1 January 1960, it needs to be clarified that it was indeed French Cameroon that got this independence. The story of how the British-controlled portion gained its independence is an entirely different one. Finally, it is not evident in Terretta’s analysis how the UPC’s demise also speaks to the failure of the emergence of a “nation” in Cameroon. Clearly, there is a state in the territory known as Cameroon but it is hard to see how even the nationalist visions of the UPC would have fashioned a “nation” out of the factions and fragments of the diverse peoples that sometimes religiously adhere to their French and British-derived institutions, values and memories. This notwithstanding, Nation of Outlaws has deepened our knowledge of French Cameroon’s war of independence and raised important issues to be pondered on by Africanist historians and Cameroonian and Cameroonist scholars alike.

© Jude Fokwang,

Department of Sociology, Regis University

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