The process of decolonization has been decisive in the history of Cameroon and in many ways has deeply marked the country's development since then. Unlike in most other French territories in Africa, decolonization in Cameroon was extremely violent and was followed by one of the most repressive postcolonial African regimes. Under the dictatorship of Cameroon's first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, seen by many contemporaries as a ‘puppet of the French’, military and police forces as well as the secret service were omnipresent, any form of political opposition was brutally repressed, and any positive mention of the radical nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), censored. Until today, the UPC's rise and defeat as a nationalist movement remains an uneasy topic in public and academic debates in Cameroon and refers to the country's highly fractured and thorny landscapes of memory.

Meredith Terretta thus rightly considers the history of the UPC as ‘a story of the state's failure to become a nation’ (4). Her engaged and innovative study offers new insight and perspectives on the history of nationalism in Cameroon and beyond. Nation of Outlaws analyzes the practice and discourse of Cameroonian nationalism spearheaded by the UPC and gives special attention to the intersecting local, territorial, and global political arenas that shaped the UPC's activities and ideologies. Following Frederick Cooper's call for a greater appreciation of the range of political alternatives and of non-territorial projects imagined by African politicians in the era of decolonization, the strength of the book lies precisely in highlighting the constant interplay between global and local influences. In order to substantiate this perspective, Terretta draws on a wide range of sources including a variety of archival material, among them the thousands of petitions sent from the Cameroon territories to the UN Trusteeship Council from 1948 to 1960, as well as numerous interviews.

The book is divided into three parts of two chapters each. The narrative is anchored around three geographical focal points that symbolize the local, territorial, and transregional layers of Cameroonian nationalism: Bahan, a chieftaincy in the densely-populated Bamileke region in west Cameroon and one of the hot spots of the UPC rebellion; Nkongsamba, the capital of the Mungo region in the Cameroon littoral and one of the country's most important agricultural centers that attracted a large number of Bamileke migrants; and, finally, Accra in Ghana, which after independence in 1957 under Kwame Nkrumah became an important site of support and assistance for anticolonial liberation movements in other parts of Africa.

Part One begins at the local levels of the Bamiléké region. As Terretta elucidates, for a long time most ‘Bamileke’ had no conception of themselves as such but rather identified with the particular chiefdoms from which they originated. There were more than a hundred of these entities spread across the Bamileke homelands. They usually exercised considerable control over the lives of their subjects, whether at home or in emigration. A Bamileke ethnic consciousness appears to have emerged only in the course of the later colonial era. The author shows that the leitmotifs of the independence struggle – independence (lepue) and chiefdom/nation (gung) – were deeply engrained in local spiritual, political, and cultural traditions, but does not sufficiently reflect on the extent to which related tropes and discourses were constructed in the colonial period.

Part Two reconstructs how the UPC, formed as a political party in 1948, evolved into a nationalist movement until it was banned by the French authorities in 1955. The author emphasizes the fact that from early on the UPC made systematic use of international forums and anticolonial support networks. This international orientation was by no means restricted to a small party of elite, but included many ‘ordinary’ people. This is attested by the many petitions sent by Cameroonians (numerous women among them) to the UN Trusteeship Council in New York, documents that ‘must be read as a part of the new nationalist narrative composed of both a postwar international anticolonial rhetoric and local vernaculars’ (114). The colonial administration's attempt to eradicate the UPC was paralleled by French measures against younger and often pro-UPC chiefs, who were deposed, imprisoned, and sometimes forced to flee into exile. The result was a political landscape flattened into two opposing and confrontational sides.

The administration's interference with the selection process of chiefs subsequently became an important source for the terror that shaped Cameroon after formal independence. In Part Three, Terretta recounts the spiral of violence and counter-violence, beginning with the campaign of the UPC against pro-government chiefs, followed by a permanent state of emergency declared by the Ahidjo regime. ‘Like those of the UPC soldiers’, Terretta stresses, ‘the tactics of state security forces quickly metamorphosed from a controlled fight against the rebels into disorganized, undisciplined and often criminal attacks on civilians, thus contributing to a culture of violence’ (220). Despite initial external support partly orchestrated by the Nkrumah government in Ghana, the different fractions of the UPC, increasingly internally fractured, could not oppose the government forces and even provided a pretext for the Ahidjo regime to proceed with an iron hand against the slightest articulation of opposition.

In her book, Terretta tells a moving and tragic story about a nationalist movement that could not achieve its political goals. She admirably analyzes how political possibilities in late colonial Cameroon expanded and then narrowed and brings out in exemplary ways the importance of transnational networks and affiliations for the politics of African nationalism. Nation of Outlaws sets a model for overcoming the metropole-colony boundaries still prevalent in studies about these politics.