‘The independence of Ghana is meaningless’, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah declared before those gathered to celebrate an end to colonial rule at the Accra polo grounds on 6 March 1957, ‘unless it is linked with the total liberation of Africa’. With Ghana's independence, Nkrumah founded the Bureau of African Affairs to aid other African colonial territories in their quest for independence. The new state's constitution pledged to recognize the sovereignty of a United States of Africa over its own, should the occasion arise. Now, during the crucial period of decolonization, Nkrumah and his supporters believed that it was up to the Black Star to lead the way to a United States of Africa, free of European powers' economic and political control, and non-aligned with either East or West in the age of the Cold War.Footnote 1 For many territories in Africa still under colonial domination, Ghana's initiative came not a moment too soon. From 1958 to 1966, the African Affairs Centre in Accra hosted activists and exiles from Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, the Belgian Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia, and Cameroon.Footnote 2 For these African nationalists, Nkrumah's foreign policy constituted the African cornerstone of a Third World solidarity birthed at the Asian–African Bandung Conference held in 1955.Footnote 3
Using Cameroon's decolonization as a case study, this article reassesses the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists on the eve of independence. Historians of the French empire have recently emphasized that African political leaders found the possibilities of postcolonial federation and citizenship in the French Union very appealing as an alternative to national independence in the era of Africa's decolonization.Footnote 4 These approaches seem to present an inter-territorial federation centered on a common metropole as the sole ‘non-national’ option for former colonial territories. Yet African nationalists who set their sights on the promise of Third World independence and hopes of a United States of Africa conceived extra-metropolitan political modalities and alliances.Footnote 5 In other words, alternative visions of federation existed concurrently and in competition with what Gary Wilder describes as those ‘built on the imperial history that bound metropolitan’ and colonial populations ‘together within an interdependent entity’.Footnote 6
For many African nationalists, former French subjects and évolués among them, Afro-Asian solidarity, non-alignment, and political, cultural, and economic rupture with colonial powers both comprised the very foundation of anti-colonial nationalism and opened new routes to Pan-African federation. As the historian Vijay Prashad insists, in the wake of Bandung, the Third World ‘represented a coalition of new nations that possessed the autonomy to enact a novel world order committed to human rights, self-determination, and world peace as outlined by the Bandung communiqué’.Footnote 7 Those political actors who, in discourse and practice, pledged allegiance to the sovereignty of a United States of Africa viewed territorial independence not as an obstacle but as a prerequisite to or an anticipated benefit of inclusion in a larger Pan-African framework.
After the French and British proscriptions of the popular nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), in 1955 and 1957 respectively, thousands of Cameroonian nationalists fled arrest and went into exile, most ending up in Accra. Exiled upécistes (as UPC members called themselves) reconstituted an explicitly extra-metropolitan political movement founded upon the possibilities symbolized by Nkrumah's Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal maquis Footnote 8 rooted in indigenous, locally particular political conceptions of freedom and sovereignty.Footnote 9 With such deeply local and broadly global foundations, the political alternatives that Cameroonian nationalists envisaged seemed achievable, even after the Cameroon territories' official independence in January 1960 (French Cameroun) and October 1961 (British Cameroons).
I begin this history of the UPC's place in the global politics of decolonization by demonstrating why, given the movement's objectives and international foundations, postcolonial citizenship in a ‘greater France’ never held much appeal for party leaders, even before the French proscribed the party. In the second part of the article, I probe the connections, forged after the party's ban, between exiled Cameroonian nationalists and those in the maquis within the Cameroonian territories' borders.Footnote 10 As long as visions of Pan-Africanism shored up Africa's anti-colonialist struggles, the external UPC remained linked to the internal resistance, nationalists' exile worked to bolster the movement within their territory's boundaries, and the UPC's international credibility and visibility increased.Footnote 11 The last part of the article reveals what it meant for UPC nationalism when, as the spirit of Bandung waned, new postcolonial states' territorial concerns began to take precedence over the idea of supra-national unity. For many heads of newly independent African states, Accra freedom fighters represented more of a threat to state power than the embodiment of Pan-African liberation. After the foundation, in 1965, of the Organisation Commune Africaine et Malagache (OCAM), a bloc of thirteen francophone African states including Cameroon, Ghana's support of the UPC in exile became unsustainable. With dwindling support for the UPC's external front, the internal front unraveled as well, closing the door on the UPC's vision of nation.
The UPC failed to gain official power in postcolonial Cameroon and the Nkrumah regime toppled in 1966. But there are at least two important reasons for exploring the ‘failed’ project of continental unity through the lens of a ‘failed’ nationalist movement, and vice versa. First, this history of UPC nationalists' Pan-Africanist trajectory takes seriously the projects of African federation that transcended metropolitan boundaries, languages, and alliances. Doing so complicates Frederick Cooper's assertion that ‘French Community and African federation failed, and they failed together’.Footnote 12 The linkages actively forged between Ghanaian, Guinean, Algerian, Congolese, Cameroonian, and other nationalists, anti-colonialists, and political activists reveal another African federation in formation, one that Cooper does not address. The Accra-centered project of African federation to which UPC nationalists were committed failed not because the French Community dissolved but because its residual alliances reemerged among member states of OCAM in 1965. Joined by a francophone identity and a desire to safeguard each other's national sovereignty, heads of OCAM states used diplomacy to undo Nkrumah's support for freedom fighters and the plans for a United States of Africa. Secondly, the history of UPC's international dimensions illustrates the lasting effects of the political alternatives that nationalists envisioned during the ‘first wave’ of Africa's decolonization. Although the UPC and the United States of Africa ‘failed together’, patterns of political liberation conceived in Accra established a precedent for Pan-African support of exiled freedom fighters that characterized later African liberation movements.Footnote 13
THE UPC: A REVISED HISTORY
In April 1948, Cameroonian demands for political and economic independence and the reunification of territories under British and French rule found voice in the nationalist party, the UPC, created in French Cameroun's port city and economic capital, Douala.Footnote 14 The party grew out of post-war Marxist study circles organized in Yaoundé by French communists traveling around the French territories of Africa after the Second World War.Footnote 15 In October 1946, five Cameroonian participants in the study circles went to Bamako to represent French Cameroun at the inaugural conference of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). RDA leaders from French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and the UN Trusteeships under French rule, Cameroun and Togo, demanded economic and political rights for Africans under French rule and, to this end, encouraged the formation of territorial branches of the RDA throughout French Africa.Footnote 16
Supported by the French Communist Party in its early years, the RDA's initial stance was decidedly anti-colonial and pro-independence until 1950.Footnote 17 In 1947, Ruben Um Nyobé and Felix Moumié, who would later become secretary-general and president of the UPC, respectively, met for the first time at an RDA congress in Dakar, Sénégal.Footnote 18 The following year, both contributed to the formation of the UPC nationalist party as a territorial branch of the RDA. Affiliated with French Communists and the RDA, the early anti-colonialist UPC seemed to be oriented towards francophone solidarity among post-Second World War anti-imperialists. But UPC leaders' purpose and vision would soon expand beyond a ‘common colonial experience’,Footnote 19 metropolitan language, and identity. The key components of the UPC's political platform were, after all, the territories' status as UN Trusteeships and the reunification of the British and French Cameroons. Guided by its political objectives, the movement traversed and transgressed metropolitan borders and boundaries.
From its inception, the UPC and its affiliates – the Union Démocratique des Femmes Camerounaises (UDEFEC), the Jeunesse Démocratique du Cameroun (JDC), and the labor union, the Union des Syndicates Confédérés du Cameroun (USCC) – combined grassroots support with a visible presence in the international political arena maintained through annual visits to the UN General Assembly in New York, publications in sympathetic metropolitan presses, and links with African student groups and social movements throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia.Footnote 20Upécistes advocated higher wages, better working conditions, the right of African farmers to cultivate cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, and bananas for export, and the removal of price controls, export laws, and licensing restrictions that limited the economic autonomy of Cameroonian merchants and planters while benefiting white settlers, who numbered some 17,000 by the 1950s.Footnote 21 Through its various branches and pyramidal organization, the movement's membership grew to include women, wage laborers, small-scale farmers, low-level administrative functionaries, entrepreneurs, and several young traditional chiefs from the Bamileke region.Footnote 22
By 1955, membership and sympathizers had climbed to some 100,000 out of a total electorate of just over 747,000.Footnote 23 But upécistes would never have the chance to participate, as candidates or as voters, in elections after the implementation of universal suffrage in French Cameroun. Soon after remarking that the UPC wielded greater political influence and attracted a greater number of followers than another other political party, the French administration banned the UPC and its affiliates on 13 July 1955, just as the RDA expelled the UPC branch from its ranks.Footnote 24 The proscription prompted the relocation of hundreds of nationalists to British territory, while thousands more joined the maquis (as UPC members called the underground resistance within the territories). The British followed suit in June 1957 and deported the Director's Bureau, including the UPC president, Felix Moumié, the vice-president, Ernest Ouandié, their wives, Marthe Moumié and Marthe Ouandié, the JDC president, Abel Kingue, the UDEFEC secretary-general, Marie-Irène Ngapeth-Biyong, and seven others.Footnote 25 The British proscription forced the exile of hundreds more nationalists who had regrouped at Kumba and Bamenda after the French outlawed the movement.
After its ban in French territory, the majority of the UPC's directors' bureau turned away from collaboration or even dialogue with French administrators and were excluded from the project of inter-territorial federation spearheaded by the RDA. Instead, nationalists pieced together an extra-metropolitan political practice comprised of Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, human rights, and socialism and wed their appropriations of these prevalent ‘Third World’ ideologies with local spiritual and political practices that reawakened indigenous memories of political sovereignty.Footnote 26 As UPC militia based in maquis camps adopted guerilla sabotage after the December 1956 parliamentary elections, the first in which universal suffrage applied, nationalists began to view their fight for independence as revolutionary, and intentionally modeled it on similar campaigns in Algeria and Vietnam.Footnote 27 From 1957 on, UPC nationalism fit a Fanonian, revolutionary, and Pan-African model.Footnote 28 Henceforth the survival of the UPC depended upon exiled leaders' ability to articulate UPC nationalism with Pan-Africanism and thus create a dual anti-colonial front: one located inside the territories and the other outside its borders. This dual front – one external and Pan-African, the other internal and cultivated by farmers, laborers, and fighters in the Sanaga-Maritime, Mungo, Wouri, Bamileke, Mbam, Nkam, Bamenda, and Kumba regions – was of pivotal importance to the UPC nationalist movement.Footnote 29 Yet, even before the UPC's ban, upécistes had never espoused the project of French Cameroun's integration into a ‘greater France’.
THE UPC'S INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM, 1947–1957
From its inception, the UPC and its affiliate women's, youth, and labor parties broadcast the fact that the territories of Cameroon were not colonies, but UN Trusteeship territories, administered jointly by the French and the British. Beginning in 1951, Um Nyobé traveled annually to New York to speak before the UN General Assembly's Fourth Committee and, upon his return from trips abroad, he gave accounts of his visits in public gatherings and UPC congressional meetings. Copies of his speeches circulated as tracts in local meetings.
While the UN facilitated political mobilization within the Cameroonian Trusteeship Territories, it also promoted the formation of Pan-African and anti-colonial networks. In 1951, as Um Nyobé and Abel Kingue, the president of the JDC, traveled to the meeting of the General Assembly Fourth Committee, they did so under a class C visa, which allowed them only to go from the Tudor Hotel to the United Nations building for daily meetings. Harlem was specifically off-limits. However, Um Nyobé and Kingue received visits from North African anti-colonialists such as Bouhafa, the Tunisian representative of Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj in the United States. At meetings such as the League for Human Rights and the American Committee on Africa, Um Nyobé met the future first president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio.Footnote 30
From the moment of the UPC's foundation, the UN became essential to popular conceptions of nationalism and promoted the international alliances – across metropolitan axes, from West to East – upon which nationalist leaders would rely for support after the party's ban. It was this familiarity with the international that enabled nationalists to access the UN directly through the act of petitioning. The men and women of the UPC sent over 45,000 petitions to the UN from 1948 to 1960 – more than from any other UN Trusteeship territory.Footnote 31 UPC militia groups in the maquis had symbolic international code names for their major base camps, such as ‘ONU’, ‘Congo’, or ‘Accra-ville’.Footnote 32 The nationalist narrative was perpetuated through the intersection of local and global, and members' exposure to the international political realm eased upécistes' transition to exile after the party's ban in British and French territories.
Post-war Paris and London had, for decades, been thriving centers of anti-colonial discussion among university students. If the most notorious of these meetings were between the likes of the anti-colonialists Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, one might only imagine the proliferation of such alliances among students less erudite on paper but surely as passionate.Footnote 33 These discussions, taking place in dormitory rooms or student watering holes, promoted a sense of urgency coupled with a realization that students could join in the anti-colonial struggle, benefiting from their access to metropolitan politicians and media, resources, and connections to leftist and communist organizations.
Compelled to action by fellow-students and by an awareness of the struggles back home, progressive Cameroonian students in France soon formed the Association des Etudiants Camerounais (AEC). The French government was alarmed to witness the AEC's swift reaction to the 13 July 1955 proscription of the UPC. Within two days, the AEC organized a meeting that drew 75 students, including representatives from Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Clermont-Ferrand, and Lyon. Student leaders spoke out against the dissolution of the UPC as ‘absolutely illegal, as Cameroun is not a French territory, but a territory under UN Trusteeship’.Footnote 34 After the AEC gathering, a student branch of the UPC, the Union Nationale des Étudiants Kamerunais (UNEK), emerged in France and declared its support for the UPC and its affiliates. Cameroonian students resolved to maintain contact with the leaders of the UPC who fled French territory after the official ban and to send new petitions to the UN protesting the ban and the forced deportation of nationalists.
Student supporters in favor of the UPC became the most crucial leaders of the movement, those who would form its intellectual and political nucleus, particularly during the years of exile after 1957. Many of these students achieved doctoral degrees, such as Osende Afana, in economics, Hogbe Nlend and Woungly Massaga in mathematics, and Abel Eyinga in law.Footnote 35 In 1954, one young member of the AEC, Pierre Kamdem Ninyim, studying at Lycée Pascal in the 16th arrondissement in Paris, returned to Cameroon to succeed his father as traditional ruler of the chieftaincy of Baham in the Bamileke region. Kamdem Ninyim would become one of the dozen or more openly pro-nationalist chiefs in the region, facilitating the articulation between UPC nationalism and traditional governance, thus adding timbre and resonance to the grassroots dimensions of UPC nationalism.Footnote 36
The Fédération des Étudiants de l'Afrique Noire en France (FEANF) was an affiliate of the communist International Union of Students (IUS) based in Prague. FEANF kept abreast of current events in Africa, including the ebb and flow of anti-colonial demonstrations and their suppression by French administrations.Footnote 37 Their missive to Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 demonstrated their familiarity with Ghana's support of revolutionaries and their recognition that this support was threatened or undermined by other African states, including Ivory Coast and Niger, which ‘were not free’ and ‘should be made to shed their imperialist ties’. In order to enable freedom fighters to ‘carry on the struggle for their respective countries’, FEANF students requested that Ghanaian passports and scholarships be granted to students abandoned by their governments for political reasons.Footnote 38 They also expressed their wish to send a delegation to student meetings in Ghana.
Students and other Africans in exile became part of a global network with hubs in Accra, Conakry, and Cairo in Africa, London and Paris in the metropolitan sphere, and Moscow and Peking in the East. African students and activists followed Soviet bloc and Chinese scholarship funds, and participated in international conferences and gatherings such as those arranged by non-governmental organizations such as the Women's International Democratic Federation, the IUS, and the World Congress of Partisans of Peace.Footnote 39 In Accra, African anti-colonialists' transnational ties were strengthened through the work of Ras T. Makonnen,Footnote 40 a Caribbean-born Pan-Africanist who claimed Ethiopian descent, collaborated closely with George Padmore in Great Britain beginning in the 1930s, and attended, with Kwame Nkrumah, the Manchester Pan-African Conference of 1945. Makonnen held a top position in Ghana's African Affairs Committee, and remarked that ‘Africans were not only compelled to think out the position of their own people, but were forced by the pressures of the times into making alliances across boundaries that would have been unthinkable back home’.Footnote 41 He described connections forged among Africans and people of African descent, particularly in metropolitan cities, that Brent Hayes Edwards argues ‘broke the hold of the metropole–colony dichotomy’, allowing for ‘contacts and collaborations that would have been “unthinkable” in the colonial world, so dominated by that dichotomy’.Footnote 42
EXILE AND BORDERS
Following the French administration's proscription of the party on 13 July 1955, upécistes wanted by the administration had two options to avoid imprisonment or assassination. They could go underground, becoming part of the newly formed maquis, or they could flee into British territory, beginning the Pan-African exodus that would lead them further and further from their nation's soil. Both options protected nationalists from European military repression by leading them into new areas where French administrators had no control.
The exiles began their long journey in the British Cameroons, which they claimed as part of the nation they struggled to bring into existence. For the time being, it worked to their advantage that the territory on the British side of the Anglo-French boundary was, for all administrative and legal purposes, a foreign land. UPC nationalists used the Anglo-French frontier strategically, counting on the unwillingness of low-level European administrators to communicate across the border.Footnote 43 Even before the French proscription of the party in July 1955, a hundred or so local UPC, JDC, and UDEFEC committees dotted the Mungo region along the Anglo-French boundary from Nkongsamba all the way down to Loum. By May 1955, the French estimated the UPC to have some 1,200 members in the Mungo alone, and an additional 300 in British territory.Footnote 44
On 25 May 1955, following public demonstrations organized by the UPC to mark the unfurling of its national anthem, flag, and ‘Joint Proclamation’, the French administration arrested a number of nationalists in the Mungo region. Most of the leaders left Nkongsamba that night and headed for refuge across the border in British territory, or back to their villages of origin in the Bamileke region.Footnote 45 In so doing, they used the boundary to escape arrest, establishing a pattern that would henceforth serve the resistance movement. Following the proscription of the UPC and its affiliates, the entire directors' committee, with the exception of the secretary-general, Ruben Um Nyobé, took up residence in Kumba, in British territory. There, they continued organizing the movement in much the same way as they had before, remaining in daily contact with members in French territory owing to the mobility of the nationalists, and the porous border, particularly in the Mungo region.Footnote 46
Without leaving the territory they envisioned as the nation, UPC nationalists became accustomed to a state of exile, that, rather than serving as an obstacle to the movement's growth, could be engaged as a political strategy. One only had to learn how to slip across the border unnoticed and to maintain contact between internally and externally based comrades.
By 1961, long after the UPC leaders had been deported, British authorities estimated that some 1,300–1,500 maquisards from ‘all over the combined Cameroons’ were concentrated along the Anglo-French boundary, forming militia base camps in the dense, mountainous terrain.Footnote 47 The situation only intensified during the first years after Cameroon's independence. In April 1962, President Ahidjo declared a state of emergency in the regions of Kumba, Mamfe, and Bamenda in Anglophone territory to prevent the ‘areas concerned from becoming a refuge for terrorists from east Cameroon’.Footnote 48
A PAN-AFRICAN ‘DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION’Footnote 49
The UPC's survival as a nationalist movement depended upon its ability to influence foreign-policy makers in Africa to support its cause. As though following the recipe for what Matthew Connelly, referring to the Algerian independence war, calls a ‘diplomatic revolution’, exiled UPC nationalists took care to position themselves prominently in all internationally attended Pan-African conferences that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Connelly describes ‘human rights reports, press conferences, … youth congresses, and fighting over world opinion and international law’ as the weapons of greater importance for Algerian nationalists than conventional military arms.Footnote 50 In using the international arenas available to them to sway world opinion in their favor, UPC leaders in exile remained on equal terms with their political opponent in Cameroon, Prime Minister and eventual President Ahmadou Ahidjo, whom they described as a ‘valet’ of French colonialism. UPC speakers used the presence of the international journalists to their advantage, and held press conferences in the hopes of gaining support for their cause. But in order to transform the UPC nationalist struggle into a ‘diplomatic revolution’, upéciste leaders needed the official support of other governments. From the time of upécistes' deportation until 1965, Pan-African conferences provided them with a nearly annual international forum in which to make their case. Ironically, the movement's proscription within the Cameroon territories pushed the UPC to greater international exposure.
On 30 May 1957, the British administration banned the UPC in The Cameroons and arrested 13 members of the UPC, JDC, and UDEFEC directors' committees.Footnote 51 British officials decided not to surrender them to French authorities across the Anglo-French boundary, but instead allowed them to choose the nation to which they would be deported. Sudan was the only nation on the UPC's list of desirable hosts that opened its borders to them. Soon after their arrival, made uneasy by their radicalism and increasing visibility in the international arena, the Sudanese president encouraged them to leave.Footnote 52 Facing censorship in Sudan, Moumié and other UPC leaders continued on to Cairo to establish the UPC Headquarters in exile.
Just months after his forced deportation from the British Cameroons, the UPC president in exile, Dr Moumié, attended the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization's (AASO) first conference, held in Cairo in December 1957, and was elected to serve in the organization's directors' committee along with the representatives of Ghana, Guinea, and Algeria – the nations whose leaders would become the most ardent political supporters of the UPC in the years to come.Footnote 53 The AASO's purpose was to ‘unify the struggle against imperialism and colonialism’ by bringing together AASO national committees, political parties, labor unions, movements for peace, and youth and women's organizations.Footnote 54 At the Cairo meeting in 1957, conference-goers addressed the Algerian war, condemned the ‘barbarous acts committed by Belgian colonialists against the population’ of Congo, and agreed that economic sanctions and boycotts must be applied against the apartheid regime in South Africa. On the issue of Cameroon, the AASO passed a resolution painting the proscription of the UPC as ‘a war of renewed colonial conquest’, and delegates from independent states pledged their support for Cameroon's immediate independence.Footnote 55 During press conferences, AASO spokespersons called for a withdrawal of all French and British troops from the territories of Cameroon, a cessation of American aid to the Cameroonian government, and a UN referendum on the reunification of the British and French territories.Footnote 56
At this initial AASO conference, Moumié built alliances with Sekou Toure and Kwame Nkrumah. The leaders of Guinea and Ghana adopted the UPC as one of their revolutionary projects and helped to get the Cameroon case on the agenda of subsequent Pan-African forums. In fact, it was just the sort of cause Nkrumah needed at the time. From the time of Ghana's independence, Accra became fertile ground for the cultivation of a new, political Pan-Africanism, and at the same time, a harbor for the men and women in exile who struggled to attain independence for African territories still under foreign domination. Nkrumah described the freedom fighters who had congregated in the African Affairs Centre in Accra as the ‘gem of the revolution’. To shape the foundations of the Ghanaian nation-state and define its role in the quest for independence and African unity, Nkrumah relied on the expertise of two Pan-African advisors of Caribbean descent, George Padmore of Trinidad and Ras T. Makonnen. The three of them established the Bureau for African Affairs exclusively to handle contacts with freedom fighters from dependent territories.Footnote 57
In April 1958, the leaders of Ghana, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, the eight independent countries in Africa, convened in Accra to discuss ways to mutually ‘safeguard’ their political and economic independence, to establish and maintain ties between independent states, and, perhaps most importantly, to strategize support for the liberation of the rest of Africa still under colonial rule.Footnote 58 The Conference of Independent African States was a precursor to the more important All African Peoples' Conference (AAPC) to be held the following December, also in Accra. During the April meeting of heads of state, Nkrumah scribbled a handwritten note on the records, suggesting that the upcoming AAPC conference could ‘serve as a useful platform for dependent African territories to air views on matters affecting their destiny and future’,Footnote 59 and listed French Togoland, Nigeria, and the Cameroons as territories that might benefit from a conference forum.
The approaching AAPC provided a sense of urgency to the completion of the African Affairs Centre. Nkrumah delegated the task to Makonnen, who was to institutionalize the Ghanaian government's policy towards the freedom fighters. Because of ‘the imminence of the conference and lack of hotel accommodation’, Makonnen constructed a centre with 25 private apartments, a dormitory that would house 200 visitors, a kitchen and cafeteria, and a staff to prepare food and wait on guests.Footnote 60 By the time of the AAPC conference in late 1958, the Centre had become a common meeting place for African politicians, Pan-Africanists, freedom fighters, and the African Affairs Committee, formed primarily of members of the Ghanaian government.Footnote 61 Apparently in preparation for the AAPC, in November 1958, Sekou Touré of Guinea, Modiba Keïta of Mali, and Nkrumah of Ghana officially declared their three states to constitute the ‘nucleus of a Union of West African States’.
The first AAPC Conference, held in Accra in December 1958, was attended by representatives from the 8 independent African states, 28 African territories under foreign rule, and 62 nationalist organizations, political parties, and/or trade unions.Footnote 62 The conference symbolized the new age of political, anti-colonial Pan-Africanism, and was extremely threatening to metropolitan powers that had yet to loosen the chains on many of their colonies.Footnote 63 In the months leading up to the AAPC, the Franco-Cameroonian regime expressed its displeasure at Ghana's official support of the UPC bureau in exile. Upon learning of the AAPC conference plans in October 1958, Cameroonian Prime Minister Ahidjo told the French High-Commissioner of Cameroun that he would not send any representatives to Accra if Moumié were invited, and requested the intervention of the French ambassador of Ghana to prevent Moumié's participation. Furthermore, Ahidjo demanded that the French submit a strident diplomatic protest to the Ghanaian government.Footnote 64
French colonial administrators shared Ahidjo's indignation at Ghana's position vis-à-vis Moumié and the UPC because they viewed it as an attack on their project to integrate African territories into the French Union. The Minister of Overseas France remarked that the conference ‘constituted a dangerous tribunal for adversaries of the Franco-African community’.Footnote 65 On 18 July 1958, even before Prime Minister Ahidjo had learned of the impending AAPC conference, the French High Commissioner of Cameroon, Torre, wrote to the Minister of Overseas France that, to symbolize the ‘cohesion of the ensemble français’, it was
of the highest importance for us to make sure that Moumié cannot participate in the Accra debates and to obtain permission for the veritable representatives of Cameroonian public opinion to be admitted if this conference is to be attended by representatives of French territory. We must therefore require the political leaders of the other territories that have been invited to Accra, such as Sekou Toure, Djibo-Bakari, or Apithy, to refuse … to attend the conference if they must sit in the presence of an illegal and insurrectional organization, in other words, if the invitation to Moumié is not revoked.Footnote 66
However, in 1958, French diplomatic influence in Africa was too weak to prevent Nkrumah and other AAPC planners from upholding the UPC's prominent position at the conference. Hence, not one delegate from the Ahidjo government attended.Footnote 67
At this first meeting of the AAPC, Moumié was elected to a position in the AAPC directors' committee, chaired by the Kenyan Tom Mboya. Among his colleagues were Ahmed Boumendjel, the representative of the FLN, Patrice Lumumba, future prime minister of Congo, Kojo Botsio, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Ghana, and Abdoulaye Gueye, the representative of the Guinean labor union. As planned, Moumié found himself in the thick of the newly constituted Pan-Africanist body of the AAPC, and this gave him the courage to proclaim at a press conference on 12 December 1958 that the exiled UPC directors' bureau constituted the legitimate Cameroonian government.Footnote 68
On 13 December 1958, delegations in attendance adopted a resolution on the Cameroon question. All anti-colonial organizations and African nations agreed to go before the UN to request total amnesty for members of the UPC and its affiliates, the return of those exiled and deported, a referendum on the issue of reunification, and democratic elections for the National Cameroonian Assembly with a UN-selected commission to organize and supervise all electoral proceedings.Footnote 69 Before the close of the AAPC, Moumié moved the UPC headquarters to Conakry in Guinea. With Moumié established in Conakry, the UPC vice-president, Ernest Ouandié, remained in Accra, where he drew on the resources of the Bureau of African Affairs and the African Affairs Centre.
It was one thing for the AAPC to recognize the UPC in exile as the legitimate government of Cameroon before the country's independence. It was quite another for it to continue to do so at the subsequent AAPC conferences, even after Cameroon's independence in 1960. In Cairo, in 1961, the AAPC passed a resolution severely criticizing the Ahidjo regime for allowing the presence of foreign armies, ‘French, British, and West-German military bases’. The AAPC went on to condemn the agreements signed with the French government ‘eliminating national sovereignty and practically converting this territory into a French department in Africa’, and the ‘bombardment of numerous regions in the Kameroun by the French artillery and the repeated executions of Kameroonese people struggling for independence’. The resolution called for all independent African states to support ‘the immediate and complete withdrawal of French and British military troops’.Footnote 70
THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY PAN-AFRICANISM
International ideological support was perhaps not as crucial as material support for the increasing number of exiles escaping across the borders. Beginning in 1957, thousands of young nationalists set off across colonial borders on the trek to Ghana. Most came on foot. As Makonnen reminisced:
We would be rung up by the police at the frontier and told that some fellows had arrived; they would have no passports … We needed enlightened policemen on the frontiers who would know not to enforce the regulations too strictly.Footnote 71
The exiles included the sons and daughters of Bamileke chiefs or of the nascent Cameroonian bourgeoisie, urban laborers and members of labor unions, the elite cadre of late colonial intelligentsia – school teachers such as Gertrude Omog and Ernest Ouandié, the vice-president of the UPC, doctors such as Félix Moumié, and finally the sons of small-scale farmers and traders, many of whom had had minimal schooling.Footnote 72 In rare cases, elders accompanied the youths.
At the African Affairs Centre, UPC leaders sorted out those who showed intellectual promise from those who had not spent much time in school. Scholarships were obtained for those who would some day make up the national intelligentsia.Footnote 73 The others undertook the military training that UPC leaders expected would ensure the eventual overthrow of the Franco-Cameroonian government in formation.Footnote 74 By mid-1960, if not before, the One Kamerun (OK) party, carrying on the UPC movement under another name in the British territory of The Cameroons, distributed scholarship application forms prepared by Moumié to its members.Footnote 75 By late 1960, the British administration knew of at least four youths studying or soon to be studying on scholarship in Moscow,Footnote 76 and a German ambassador in Accra agreed to provide scholarships to additional students for the academic year 1960–1.Footnote 77 Other students were destined for the University of Peking.Footnote 78
Moumié's father, Samuel Mekou, a permanent resident in the African Affairs Centre, became one of the key figures in Accra, who oriented new arrivals and served as their liaison with the UPC Director's Bureau. Cameroonians on the run knew, by word of mouth, to make their way straight to the Guinean embassy upon arrival in Accra,Footnote 79 where they would be put in contact with the UPC representatives in Accra. Mekou forwarded the names of prospective students or military trainees to the UPC leadership in Accra, Cairo, or Leopoldville, where Moumié was based in August and September 1960. Mekou found places for the youths in transit, usually in the Ghana House, procured passports for them from the Guinean embassy, and provided cab fares for the students to get to the airport, as well as money for food and lodging. He complained bitterly to Abel Kingue, president of the JDC, the UPC's youth wing, of lacking funds to carry out his duties.Footnote 80 Some trustworthy young men and women, such as Emmanuel Fankem (also known as Fermeté), or Cécile Teck, a loyal leader of the UDEFEC, were engaged as couriers to slip across borders and carry funds, arms, and correspondence from Accra to Cameroon.Footnote 81
Class cleavages prevalent in Cameroon resurfaced among the exiles during their stay in Accra. While the youths destined for military training peddled ice water in the streets to earn enough to eat,Footnote 82 the former Bamileke chiefs Marcel Feze and Paul Kemayou ‘never fully forgot their style of life of yesterday’ and therefore weighed on UPC finances.Footnote 83 Many Cameroonian exiles, especially in the later years of the influx into Ghana, could not be funded by the UPC, or by the Ghanaian government.Footnote 84
MILITARY TRAINING
While many young Cameroonian nationalists in exile followed opportunities for scholarly, intellectual pursuits throughout the world, others became involved in transnational military training. In the late 1950s, the upéciste Thomas Emock, secretary of the African Affairs Centre in Accra, communicated to the internal OK-UPC headquarters his intent to form a revolutionary government in The Cameroons as soon as the revolutionary army was ready.Footnote 85 In response, local OK-UPC leaders began to recruit nationalist youths suitable for military training.Footnote 86 Beginning in 1960, if not before, British police and military personnel began to discover ‘terrorists’ who had attended training courses in China and Morocco among the UPC's Armée de Libération Nationale du Kamerun (ALNK) soldiers whom they arrested in the southern Cameroons. They believed that similar courses were being taught in Egypt, Algeria, and the USSR, with pre-course training taking place in Conakry and Accra.Footnote 87 By 1961, British administrators estimated that over a hundred ‘terrorists’ trained overseas had managed to return to the ALNK in both Cameroun and The Cameroons.Footnote 88
Local UPC committees and ALNK base camps in Cameroon recommended literate, intelligent, and physically fit young men in their late teens and early twenties to the overseas training program. The nominees were sent to Henri Tamo (also known as Leconstant Pengoye), the organizer and inspector of ALNK troops, who sorted through applicants and provided those selected with a written mandate that the fighter took with him or her to Accra. Housed most often at the African Affairs Centre, trainees were provided with personal funds, clothing, and other supplies, and then awaited transport by air to the location of their training course.Footnote 89
Officers of the Chinese army trained the freedom fighters in China. Because training was conducted in French, the program was ‘equally suitable for any of the former French territories in Central Africa, for Congolese or for any Algerian, Tunisian or Moroccan youths’.Footnote 90 In both China and Morocco, military training was designed around the tactical teachings of Mao Tse-Tung, and covered the use of weaponry, sabotage, and guerilla warfare. Course instructors stressed the importance of outlining a guerilla strategy based on established red zones of control from which to direct operations and in which fighters could train and congregate. After politically educating the inhabitants of secured red zones, the fighters would advance to create additional bases in the surrounding areas, or white zones.Footnote 91 Trainers familiarized students with the characteristics and handling of small arms, hand grenades, and explosives and detonating agents, and trained them to use these charges to destroy bridges, vehicles, houses, railways, and petrol dumps.Footnote 92 In Cameroon's locally entrenched maquis, culturally specific, indigenous strategies of warfare – magical technologies, the protection of sacred forests, intimate knowledge of the terrain, and hunters' skills – intersected with revolutionary tactics learned abroad as internationally trained troops joined ranks with ALNK fighters who had never left.Footnote 93
THE TRIUMPH OF ‘PUPPET REGIMES’ AND FRANCOPHONIEFootnote 94
Tensions between the Ghanaian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Bureau of African Affairs surfaced early on, as Nkrumah's more nationally oriented advisors chafed under the power and influence wielded by the Pan-Africanists, and feared that the Ghanaian government's sympathy and aid to freedom fighters would develop into a foreign relations nightmare.Footnote 95 Over time, these predictions began to come true. As the political leaders who spearheaded the nationalist movements most invested in Nkrumah's project of a non-aligned United States of Africa began to disappear, so too did the visions of Pan-African unity. On 3 November 1960, the poisoning of UPC President Moumié, ordered by the French government and carried out by the undercover agent Bechtel in Geneva, dealt a final blow to the unity of the UPC in exile.Footnote 96 Two months later, in the night of 16–17 January, Belgians, Katangans, and Congolese collaborated in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, former prime minister of Congo.Footnote 97
Although the UPC had led the way in using revolutionary violence against the postcolonial state government after independence, in the early 1960s, other parties protesting the apparent neo-colonialism in their governments after independence began to follow suit. In 1962, an Association of Freedom Fighters formed, made up of exiled revolutionaries from independent states, as well as from those territories still under colonial control. The organization included representatives of the Sawaba Party of Niger, the exiled UPC, the Northern Rhodesia Independence Party, the United Togolese Front, the Sanwi Liberation Movement of Ivory Coast, and the Peoples' Party of Bechuanaland.Footnote 98 The association's objective was to coordinate anti-colonialist movements as well as struggles against ‘puppet governments’ in ‘most of the independent countries of Africa which are helping to keep Africans under neo-colonialism’.Footnote 99 Several of the association's leaders, if not all of them, had spent time in Accra, and the movement had grown out of alliances formed among the African Affairs Centre exiles.
Members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), formed in Addis Ababa in 1963, agreed that revolutionary nationalists outside the boundaries of their states of origin who collaborated to overthrow official governments in power represented a major threat to postcolonial African states. With the formation of the OAU, Nkrumah's gem turned into his albatross, as post-colonial African leaders began to describe Ghana as a place that harbored and aided political subversives. Rather than fit Nkrumah's formula for African unity, the OAU strove for a mutually agreed national sovereignty couched as ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of states’ and upheld through continued cooperation with metropolitan governments.Footnote 100
The final blow to the UPC's base in a Pan-African Ghana was dealt at Nouakchott, Mauritania, on 12 February 1965. Following nearly a decade of intense debates between African heads of state and policy makers over the nature of African unity, a francophone bloc, made up of 13 French-speaking African countries, including the newly independent Cameroon, emerged as the Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache (OCAM). OCAM drafted a resolution to the OAU condemning Ghana for harboring ‘subversive elements which are openly planning to overthrow established governments in Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta and Cameroon’.Footnote 101 OCAM demanded that the OAU have the ‘subversives’ expelled. Apparently linked by their common attachment to France, members of OCAM rejected Nkrumah's proposed African Continental Union Government in favor of an official, inter-territorial francophone alliance. Writing for the group, and echoing Ahidjo's protests to French officials in 1958, the President of Mauritania presented OCAM's resolution as an ultimatum to Diallo Telli, the secretary-general of the OAU: Telli must ‘require Ghana to expel all subversive elements which are openly planning to overthrow established governments in Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta, and Cameroun’, or OCAM would not attend the upcoming OAU Summit scheduled for October in Accra.Footnote 102
Nkrumah complied after his cabinet members pressured him to send the freedom fighters away, and then only on the condition that the Bureau of African Affairs supply them with return tickets.Footnote 103 Even so, eight francophone states stayed away from the OAU summit, because they accused Ghana of encouraging ‘subversive activities directed against them’.Footnote 104 At the summit, the OAU passed a resolution stipulating that member states were not to tolerate any form of subversion on the part of political refugees, nor any subversive activity directed against any member state from outside its boundaries.
A few months prior to the OAU summit of 1965, Cameroonian exiles were deported from Algeria, following Colonel Houari Boumedienne's overthrow of Ben Bella. Many of them had returned to Accra and were housed at the African Affairs Centre and in the north-western Kokomlemle suburb of Accra. With their Ghanaian base now under the scrutiny of the OAU, the upécistes were once again uprooted and set off in entirely new directions – to Cabinda or the northern forests of Congo-Brazzaville to fight in the UPC's Second Front.Footnote 105 While in the forest, upéciste fighters benefited from further training with Che Guevara's Cuban forces, the Congolese Pierre Moulele rebels, and other militia groups.Footnote 106 From late 1965 through 1968, these men, some of them accompanied by their female companions, launched a number of unsuccessful invasions of Cameroon with the objective of joining the internal ALNK, still fighting under the command of Ernest Ouandié in the maquis.Footnote 107 The Congolese government's eventual collaboration with Ahidjo to root out the upécistes sent the exiles, whose number had dwindled to less than a hundred, off in multiple directions. Woungly Massaga traveled to Cuba, while most of his fighters made their way to Angola. In 1970, Ernest Ouandié, commander of the internal maquis, was rounded up by Cameroonian military forces, and, on 15 January 1971, was publicly executed by firing squad.Footnote 108 Cameroonian exiles, from wherever they learned the news, knew the movement to be finished, and also knew that they could not return home.
CONCLUSION
Frederick Cooper has stressed the need for greater comprehension of the ‘political alternatives’ imagined by political actors on the eve of independence, in order to better understand how and why political possibilities expanded and narrowed.Footnote 109 But to truly understand the political alternatives envisioned by nationalists, we must look beyond the metropole–colony parameters that have so often guided our research, scholarship, and assumptions. This means retrieving the local spiritual, political, and cultural content of nationalist movements such as the UPC, and then following the linkages nationalists created with political actors beyond their territories' borders, even (or especially) when these routes do not lead to Paris, London, or Brussels. By 1965, the shifting geopolitical terrain signaled a disintegration of the project of the United States of Africa, but its failure – at least for the upécistes, Nkrumaists, Guineans, Lumumbistes, and Algerians who had invested in it – occurred beyond the borders of a community linked to a common metropole.
Historians and political scientists of French Africa's decolonization who have worked on the UPC, the Parti Démocratique Guinéen (PDG), or the Sawaba independence movement in Niger have emphasized these movements' radicalism and/or exceptionalism.Footnote 110 But when the historical perspective of decolonization is centered in Accra, Conakry, or Algiers, rather than in Paris, these anomalous, ‘radical’ nationalist movements can no longer be seen as unique, stand-alone affairs. Instead, their interconnectedness suggests that they were part of a different pattern, one that took shape beyond the scope of the French Community. However, because most of the nationalist movements in French-governed territories that referenced Accra or Algiers rather than Paris failed to achieve political power in their home states, historians have mostly overlooked the larger pattern they created.
Although the role of the exiled contingents of Namibia's South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), Mozambique's Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), South Africa's ANC, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) have been well documented,Footnote 111 historians of the ‘first wave’ of African nationalisms, dating from the 1950s and early 1960s, have not often made connections between exile, revolutionary global trends, and liberation movements in culturally particular locales. Yet from 1957 to 1965, the UPC established its headquarters sequentially in Khartoum, Cairo, Rabat, Conakry, Accra, Algiers, and Brazzaville and upéciste freedom fighters interacted with African nationalists and anti-colonial activists from the whole continent, who found themselves on a similar Pan-African circuit. The case of the UPC demonstrates that, even in this first phase of decolonization, exiled nationalists played a role as crucial to the struggle for freedom as those who never left the contested territories that eventually became nation-states.
