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

ACCRA
Author(s): MEREDITH TERRETTA
Source: The Journal of African History, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2010), pp. 189-212
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40985070
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Journal of African History, 51 (2010), pp. 189-212. © Cambridge University Press 2010 1 89
doi:io.ioi7/Soo2i8537ioooo253

CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL:


FROM FOREST MAQUIS TO A PAN-AFRICAN
ACCRA*

BY MEREDITH TERRETTA

Ottawa University

abstract: This article reassesses the political alternati


nationalists in the 'first wave' of Africa's decolonizat
Cameroonian nationalism. After the proscription of Cam
movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (
thousands of Cameroonian nationalists went into exile, m
gained the support of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan- African B
The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's internal m
called the underground resistance camps within the
turally particular conceptions of freedom and sover
local and broadly international foundations, the political
nationalists envisaged seemed achievable: even after t
official independence, UPC nationalists kept fighting
postcolonial states prioritized territorial sovereignty
Ghana's support of the UPC became unsustainable, lea
disintegration.

key words: Cameroon, Ghana, decolonization, nationalism, Pan- Africanism.

'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.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

* A Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell


University provided support for the research and writing of this article. I am grateful to
Abdoulaye Gueye, Naomi Davidson, Eric Alina-Pisano, anonymous readers for the
Journal of African History, Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali, Carina Ray, Edward Baptist,
Sandra Greene, and Martin Bernal for valuable comments and suggestions.
On this point, see D. E. Apter, 'Ghana's independence: triumph and paradox',
Transition, 98 (2008), 6-23.

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IÇO MEREDITH TERRETTA

Affairs Centre in Accra hosted activists and exiles from Egypt, Kenya,
Uganda, Malawi, the Belgian Congo, Angola, Lesotho, Zambia, and
Cameroon.2 For these African nationalists, Nkrumah's foreign policy con-
stituted the African cornerstone of a Third World solidarity birthed at the
Asian-African Bandung Conference held in 1955.3
Using Cameroon's decolonization as a case study, this article reassesses
the political alternatives imagined by African nationalists on the eve of in-
dependence. 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.4 These
approaches seem to present an inter-territorial federation centered on a
common métropole 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.5 In other words,

2 Ras T. Makonnen, Pan-Africanism from Within as Recorded and Edited by Kenneth


King (Nairobi, 1073), 214-15.
3 The Conference of Bandung signaled an anti-imperial shift in the global political
economy and engendered the non-aligned movement and the emergence of a 'Third
World'. See A. Burton, A. Espiritu, and F. C. Wilkins, 'The fate of nationalisms in the
age of Bandung', Radical History Review, 95 (2006), 147 ; C. J. Lee (ed.), Making a World
After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH, 2010);
J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference
(Princeton, 2010), 427.
4 See, in particular, F. Cooper, 'Possibility and constraint: African independence in
historical perspective', Journal of African History, 49:2 (2008), 167-96; and G. Wilder,
'Untimely vision: Aimé Césaire, decolonization, utopia', Public Culture, 21:1 (2009),
101-40. Elizabeth Schmidt calls this perspective into question by demonstrating that, by
the time of the September 1958 referendum organized in France's African territories over
whether or not to join the French Community, France's 1958 constitution had made the
terms of confederating with France much less attractive to African states. See E. Schmidt,
'Anticolonial nationalism in French West Africa: what made Guinea unique?' African
Studies Review, 52:2 (2009), 6. Other recent works suggest that administrations
throughout French West Africa used hefty doses of coercion to push significant portions
of the populations to vote in favor of inclusion in the French Community. See, for ex-
ample, K. van Walraven, 'Decolonization by referendum: the anomaly of Niger and the
fall of Sawaba, 10=58-1050.', Journal of African History, 50:2 (2009), 269-92.
5 I use 'extra-metropolitan' to describe movements that deliberately bypassed
inclusion in or collaboration with metropolitan political institutions and frameworks.
Other historians have emphasized the 'extra-metropolitan' dimensions of anti-colonial
movements in former French territories. See, for example, K. van Walraven, 'From
Tamanrasset: the struggle of Sawaba and the Algerian connection, 1 957-1 966 ' Journal of
North African Studies, 10:3-4 (2005), 507-27; M. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution:
Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002) ;
E. Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958 (Athens, OH, 2007)
which historicizes Guinea's shift towards what I describe as an extra-metropolitan pol-
itical practice. For an account of an 'extra-metropolitan' alternative available to Muslim
Africans under French rule on the eve of decolonization, see G. Mann and B. Lecocq,
'Between empire, umma, and the Muslim Third World: the French Union and African
pilgrims to Mecca, 1946-1958', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East, 27:2 (2007), 361-83.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL ICI

alternative visions of federation existed concurrently and


what Gary Wilder describes as those ' built on the im
bound metropolitan' and colonial populations 'together
dependent entity'.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 foun-
dation 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 com-
muniqué'.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 mem-
bers called themselves) reconstituted an explicitly extra-metropolitan pol-
itical movement founded upon the possibilities symbolized by Nkrumah's
Bureau for African Affairs. The UPC's external support fed Cameroon's
internal maquis8 rooted in indigenous, locally particular political conceptions
of freedom and sovereignty.9 With such deeply local and broadly global
foundations, the political alternatives that Cameroonian nationalists en-
visaged seemed achievable, even after the Cameroon territories' officiai
independence in January i960 (French Cameroun) and October 1961
(British Cameroons).
I begin this history of the UPC's place in the global politics of decol-
onization 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,

6 Wilder, 'Untimely vision', 108.


7 V. Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York,
2007), 45-6. See also C. J. Lee, 'At the rendezvous of decolonization: the final com-
munique of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, 18-24 April 1955',
Interventions. 1 1 : 1 (2000), 87.
8 As upécistes called the underground resistance military camps - surely a reference to
the French resistance during the Second World War. Algerian revolutionaries also used
the term maquis.
A. Mbembe, 'Domaines de la nuit et autorité onirique dans les maquis du sud-
Cameroun (1955-1958)', Journal of African History, 31:1 (1991), 89-121; idem, La
naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (iç2O-ig6o) (Paris, 1996), for the vernacular-
ization of the UPC's nationalist ideology in the region of the Sanaga-Maritime. See
M. Terretta, "'God of independence, god of peace": village politics and nationalism in
the maquis of Cameroun ', Journal of African History, 46 : 1 (2005), 75-101 , for an account
of a similar process among Bamileke communities.

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IÇ2 MEREDITH TERRETTA

forged after the party's ban, between exiled Cameroonian nationalists


and those in the maquis within the Cameroonian territories' borders.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 in-
creased.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'.12 The
linkages actively forged between Ghanaian, Guiñean, 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 dis-
solved 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

10 Maquis camps were based on both sides of the Anglo-French boundary. See below
and J. Takougang, 'The Union des Populations du Cameroun and its southern connection',
Revue Française d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer, 83:310 (1996), 8-24.
11 Although UPC leaders in exile did not achieve an international media campaign on
the same scale as the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA),
they utilized the same methods as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) of Algeria
and the GPRA, attempting to transform the UPC's claims into a 'diplomatic revolution'.
See M. Connelly, 'Introduction, in Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution, 3-13.
12 Cooper, 'Possibility', 168.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL I93

support of exiled freedom fighters that characterized later


movements.13

THE UPC: A REVISED HISTORY

In April 1948, Cameroonian demands for political and economic inde-


pendence 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.14 The party grew out of post-war
Marxist study circles organized in Yaounde by French communists traveling
around the French territories of Africa after the Second World War.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, en-
couraged the formation of territorial branches of the RDA throughout
French Africa.16

13 Curiously, although the case of the UPC demonstrates that, even in this 'first phase'
of Africa's decolonization, exiled nationalists played a crucial role in the struggle for
nation, the literature does not reflect this. To my knowledge only one historical study
considers the UPC's external activity: see D. Pouhe Pouhe, 'Les liaisons extérieures de
l'UPC, 1948-1960', (unpublished MA thesis, University of Yaounde, 1999). In contrast,
the role of exile in later liberation movements in eastern and southern Africa is well
documented. See, for example, L. H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and
National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995); J. D. Sidaway and
D. Simon, 'Geopolitical transition and state formation: the changing political geo-
graphies of Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia', Journal of Southern African Studies,
19:1 (1993), 6-28; S. Ellis, 'The historical significance of South Africa's Third Force',
Journal of Southern African Studies, 24:2 (1998), 261-99; R. Suttner, 'Cultures of the
African National Congress of South Africa: imprint of exile experiences', Journal of
Contemporary African Studies, 21:2 (2003), 303-20; N. Manghezi, The Maputo
Connection: The ANC in the World of F RELI M O (Johannesburg, 2009); M. G. Panzer,
'The pedagogy of revolution: youth, generational conflict, and education in Mozambican
nationalism and the state, 1 962-1 970', Journal of Southern African Studies, 35:4 (2009),
803-20.
14 My purpose in this article is not to recount the history of the UPC's activities in
French Cameroun, but rather to emphasize its international foundations and its spread
beyond French territory after its proscription. For the standard political history of the
UPC nationalist movement in French Cameroun from 1948 to 1956, see R. Joseph,
Radical Nationalism in Cameroun : The Social Origins of the UPC Rebellion (Oxford,
1977); for a classic approach focused mostly on 'formal' politics, see V. Le Vine,
The Cameroonsfrom Mandate to Independence (Westport, CT, 1977). Revisionist histories
from various disciplinary perspectives have proliferated, beginning with Mbembe,
Naissance. But see also: J. Onana, Le sacre des indigènes évolués : Essai sur la professional-
isation politique (l'exemple du Cameroun) (Paris, 2004); E. Tchumtchoua, De la Jeucafra à
l'UPC : L'éclosion du nationalisme camerounais (Yaounde, 2006); and B. A. Ngando, La
présence française au Cameroun (iqi6-iq5q) : Colonialisme ou mission civilisatrice?
(Marseille, 2008).
G. Donnât, Afin que nul n'oublie: L'itinéraire d'un anticolonialiste (Paris. 1086).
16 Cameroonian representatives included Ruben Um Nyobé, an active trade unionist at
the time; Mathias Djoumessi, the ruler of the Bamileke chieftaincy of Foreke-Dschang;

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194 MEREDITH TERRETTA

Supported by the French Communist Party in its early years, the


RDA's initial stance was decidedly anti-colonial and pro-independence
until 1950.17 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.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',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 metro-
politan presses, and links with African student groups and social movements
throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia.20 Upécistes 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.21 Through its various
branches and pyramidal organization, the movement's membership grew to
include women, wage laborers, small-scale farmers, low-level administrative

and Celestin Takala, a Bamileke merchant based in Douala. See E. Mortimer, France and
the Africans, 1044-1060 : A Political History (New York, 1969), ch. 5.
17 As part of its initial constitution, the RDA stipulated that each territory should have
the right to choose whether or not to join the French Union. Not until October 1950
did the RDA, guided by the leader of the Part Démocratique de la Côte d'Ivoire,
Félix Houphouët-Boigny, break with the French Communist Party and move towards
collaboration with the metropolitan French Assembly and support for the French Union.
See Schmidt, Cold War, 25-7, 30-67.
18 Y. Pouamoun, 'Félix Roland Moumié, 1925-1960: l'itinéraire d'un nationaliste in-
stransigeant' (unpublished thesis, DIPES II, Ecole normale supérieure, Yaounde, I997),
18. For a biographical sketch of Ruben Um Nyobé, see A. Mbembe, 'Introduction', in
Le problème national kamerunais (Paris, 1984), 18-25.
19 See Cooper, 'Possibility', 167.
20 A. Gueye, Les intellectuels africains en France (Pans, 2001); J.-M. 1 chaptchet,
Quand les jeunes africains créaient l'histoire (Paris, 2006); J.-P. Ndiaye, Enquête sur les
étudiants noirs en France (Paris, 1962).
21 Joseph, Radical Nationalism, 170-1.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL I95

functionaries, entrepreneurs, and several young traditiona


Bamileke region.22
By 1955, membership and sympathizers had climbed to so
of a total electorate of just over 747,00o.23 But upécistes wo
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.24 The proscription prompted
the relocation of hundreds of nationalists to British territory, while thou-
sands 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.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 UP


bureau turned away from collaboration or even dialogue w
administrators and were excluded from the project of int
federation spearheaded by the RDA. Instead, nationalists pi
an extra-metropolitan political practice comprised of Pan-Afri
imperialism, human rights, and socialism and wed their app
these prevalent 'Third World' ideologies with local spiritu
practices that reawakened indigenous memories of political sov

Ibid.; Mbembe, Naissance; Le Vine, Cameroons. On women's involvement see


M. Terretta, 'A miscarriage of revolution: Cameroonian women and nationalism',
Stichproben: Vienna Journal of African Studies, 12 (2007), 61-90. On the involvement
of Bamileke chiefs, see Terretta, 'God of independence', and Terretta, 'Chiefs, traitors,
and representatives: the construction of a political repertoire in independence era
Cameroun', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 43 : 2 (2010), 227-54. I use
Bamileke region to refer to the portion of the Grassfields under French rule, following the
French administration's classification after the delineation, in 191 9, of the Anglo-French
boundary. ' Grassfields ' refers to the region stretching west to east from the Cross river to
ae Mbam, and from the Katsina Ala river in the north to the Manengouba mountain
range in the south. See J.-P. Warnier, Echanges, développement, et hiérarchies dans le
Bamenda pré-colonial {Cameroun) (Stuttgart, 1985); P. N. Nkwi and J.-P. Warnier,
Elements for a History of the Western Grassfields (Yaounde, 1082).
23 See Onana, Sacre, 293-308, for this and other political statistics from post-war
French Cameroun.

24 Centre d'Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (CAOM), Affaires politiques


3335/1, 1955, Synthèse sur l'implantation de l'UPC au Cameroun. For an account of the
UPC's relationship with the RDA see Ngando, Présence. 260.
25 Terretta, 'Miscarriage'; Marthe Moumié, Victime du colonialisme français (Paris,
2006).
26 A. Mbembe, 'Mémoire historique et action politique', in J.-F. Bayart, A. Mbembe,
and C. Toulabor (eds.), Le politique par le bas en Afrique noire : Contributions à une pro-
blématique de la démocratie (P 'aris, 1992), 147-256.

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IQ.6 MEREDITH TERRETTA

UPC militia based in maquis camps adop


December 1956 parliamentary elections, the
applied, nationalists began to view their figh
ary, and intentionally modeled it on sim
Vietnam.27 From 1957 on, UPC nationalis
and Pan-African model.28 Henceforth the s
exiled leaders' ability to articulate UPC n
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.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-I957

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.

27 The UPC was the sole nationalist movement in francophone sub-Saharan Africa to
use arms in the struggle for independence. Although upéciste leaders did not refer to
South Africa explicitly (as they did with Algeria and Vietnam), there are striking parallels
between the UPC's military strategy post- 1957 and that of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the
armed wing of the ANC and South African Communist Party, formed in 196 1. See Ellis,
'Historical significance', 264.
28 UPC leaders in exile would have had occasion to cross paths with Franz Fanon in
1958 at the All African Peoples' Conference discussed below. However, my intent is not
to suggest that upécistes read and evoked Fanon, but rather to classify UPC nationalism
as fitting a Fanonian model. See F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Pilcox
(New York, 2004), 130, 142. For Fanon, anti-colonial revolution in African colonies ne-
cessitated equal parts of social and political consciousness, and violence was a necessary
path to liberation from colonial rule. Yet he warned against the revolutionary 'intellec-
tual' who overlooked the contributions of a local peasantry and/or lumpen proletariat.
29 The UPC's armed struggle began in the Sanaga-Maritime in late 1956 and spread to
the Bamileke region in late 1957. The complex history of the UPC maquis in the Mungo,
Wouri, Mbam, Nkam, Bamenda, and Kumba regions (the latter two in Anglophone ter-
ritory) has yet to be written. As the years progressed, UPC militia groups became in-
creasingly factionalized and it would be misleading to present the maquis as a unified
front. What is certain is that there were numerous resistance camps in regions that the
conventional historiography has entirely overlooked. Several MA theses have begun to
explore the histories of specific maquis. For the Mbam, see L.-C. Oubel, 'La rébellion
dans la subdivision de Ndikinimeki (Région du Mbam), 1955-1969- approche historique'
(unpublished MA thesis, DIPES II, Ecole normale supérieure, Yaounde, 1999); for an
interesting perspective on the UPC in British territory, see T. Sharp, ' Binaries of nations :
the "Anglophone problem" in Cameroon and the presentation of historical narratives on
the internet' (unpublished MA thesis, University of Manchester, 2008).

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 197

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 presi-
dent 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 re-
ceived 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, Urn Nyobé met the future first president of Togo,
Sylvanus Olympio.30
From the moment of the UPC's foundation, the UN became essential
to popular conceptions of nationalism and promoted the international al-
liances - 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 i960 -more than from any other
UN Trusteeship territory.31 UPC militia groups in the maquis had symbolic
international code names for their major base camps, such as 'ONU',
'Congo', or ' Accra-ville'.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 Leopold Senghor, one might only imagine the proliferation of
such alliances among students less erudite on paper but surely as passion-
ate.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

30 CAOM, Affaires politiques 3335/1, Lassalle, Bureau de Documentation de l'AEF-


Cameroun, n.d, apparently mid-1955.
1 Elsewhere, I have estimated the petitions sent by upécistes at around 6,000: Terretta,
'Miscarriage', 62. But Janvier Onana, citing New Commonwealth, 30 April 1956, writes
that upécistes sent 45,000 petitions in the year 1056 alone: see Onana. Sacre. 228.
32 Interview with Ignace Djoko Néguin, Baham centre. Mar. 2002.
33 For a history of Cameroonian students' political mobilization in France, see
Tchaptchet, Quand les jeunes.

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IQ.8 MEREDITH TERRETTA

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'.34 After the AEC gathering, a student branch of the UPC, the
Union Nationale des Etudiants 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 protestin
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 student
achieved doctoral degrees, such as Osende Afana, in economics, Hogbe
Nlend and Woungly Massaga in mathematics, and Abel Eyinga in law.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 be-
tween UPC nationalism and traditional governance, thus adding timbre and
resonance to the grassroots dimensions of UPC nationalism.36
The Fédération des Étudiants de l'Afrique Noire en France (FEANF) was
an affiliate of the communist International Union of Students (I US) 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.37 Their missive to Kwame Nkrumah in 1965 demonstrated
their familiarity with Ghana's support of revolutionaries and their recog-
nition 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 re-
quested that Ghanaian passports and scholarships be granted to students
abandoned by their governments for political reasons.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 par-
ticipated in international conferences and gatherings such as those arranged
by non-governmental organizations such as the Women's International
Democratic Federation, the I US, and the World Congress of Partisans
of Peace.39 In Accra, African anti-colonialists' transnational ties were

34 CAOM, Affaires politiques 3335/1, Note de renseignements, 24J11L 1955, Section de


coordination, France d'Outre-Mer.
35 Centre Historique d'Archives Nationales, Paris (CHAN), Section du vingtième
siècle, Foccart papers, Fonds privés 153, Eyinga deportation file.
36 On this point see Terretta, 'God of independence'.
37 Gueye, Intellectuels, eh. 2.
38 Ghana National Archives, Accra (GNA), SC/BAA/287 B, Mr. F. Dei Anang's
summary of the letter from the Federation of African Students in France, 6 Dec. 1965.
39 Pouamoun, 'Félix-Roland Moumié', 53.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 199

strengthened through the work of Ras T. Makonnen,4


Pan-Africanist who claimed Ethiopian descent, collabor
George Padmore in Great Britain beginning in the 1930
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'.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'.42

EXILE AND BORDERS

Following the French administration's proscription o


I955, upécistes wanted by the administration had t
prisonment or assassination. They could go undergro
the newly formed maquis, or they could flee into Bri
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 strategi-
cally, counting on the unwillingness of low-level European administrators to
communicate across the border.43 Even before the French proscription of the
party in July 1955, a hundred or so local UPC, JDC, and UDEFEC com-
mittees dotted the Mungo region along the Anglo-French boundary from
Nkongsamba all the way down to Loum. By May 1955, tne French estimated
the UPC to have some 1,200 members in the Mungo alone, and an additional
300 in British territory.44

40 Ras T. Makonnen was named George Thomas Nathaniel Griffith by his parents at
the time of his birth in British Guiana. He later changed his name, claiming that his father
was of Ethiopian origin, when he became involved in anti-colonial and Pan-African
politics. See H. Adi and M. Sherwood, Pan-African History : Political Figures from Africa
and the Diaspora since 1787 (London, 2003), 1 17-22.
41 Makonnen, Pan- Africanism, 155.
42 B. H. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora : Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 242.
43 See, for example, British National Archives, Kew (BNA) FO 371/155344,
Mr. Eastwood, Colonial Office, to Sir Roger Stevens, Foreign Office. 14. Aug. 1061.
44 CAOM, Affaires politiques, 3335/1, Propagande et action psychologique des
groupements extrémistes au Cameroun, s.d. apparently 1955; CAOM, Affaires poli-
tiques, 3309/1, Note de synthèse sur les activités politiques et sociales du mois de janvier
1955-

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2OO MEREDITH TERRETTA

On 25 May 1955, following


to mark the unfurling of its n
the French administration arr
region. Most of the leaders lef
across the border in British te
Bamileke region.45 In so doi
establishing a pattern that wo
Following the proscription of
committee, with the exception
took up residence in Kumba
organizing the movement in m
in daily contact with membe
of the nationalists, and the
region.46
Without leaving the territory they envisioned as the nation, UPC nation-
alists 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 main-
tain contact between internally and externally based comrades.
By 1 96 1, 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.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 ¿amenda in Anglophone territory to prevent the 'areas
concerned from becoming a refuge for terrorists from east Cameroon'.48

A PAN-AFRICAN 'DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION'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

45 CAOM, Affaires Politiques, 3337, Chronologique des événements survenus à


Nkongsamba, 22 mai-30 mai 1955, Délégation du Haut-Commissariat.
46 CAOM, Affaires Politiques 3347/1, Rapport de Surêté, Note de renseignements,
22-29 Oct- J955> Yaounde, 29 Oct. 1955; Interview with Ignace Djoko Néguin.
47 BNA, FO 371/155344, 'Threat of terrorists on the border of S. Cameroons and the
possibility of combatant forces coming in before the Ist Oct.', Mr Eastwood, Colonial
Office, to Sir Roger Stevens, Foreign Office, 14 Aug. 1961.
48 BNA, FO 371/161610, British embassy, Yaounde to Foreign Office, 28 Apr. 1962.
49 Matthew Connelly uses the phrase to describe the Algerian struggle for indepen-
dence. See Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 2OI

military arms.50 In using the international


world opinion in their favor, UPC leaders
with their political opponent in Cameroo
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 inter-
national 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.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 in-
creasing visibility in the international arena, the Sudanese president
encouraged them to leave.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.53 The AASO's purpose was to 'unify the struggle against
imperialism and colonialism' by bringing together AASO national commit-
tees, political parties, labor unions, movements for peace, and youth and
women's organizations.54 At the Cairo meeting in 1957, conference-goers

50 Ibid. 4.
51 BNA, CO 554/2367, Despatch No. 18 from British Embassy, Yaounde to FO, 6 June
i960.
52 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds privés 149, Service de documentation extérieure et
de contre-espionage (SDECE), 'Soudan-Cameroun (UPC)', 30 Sep. 1958.
Ail information on the AASO is taken from CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics
2092, Note d'information, 'La conférence de solidarité Afro-Asiatique de Conakry
(11-16 Avril i960)', Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Dir. de l'Afrique-Levant.
54 The AASO's Director's Committee was comprised of 27 members, each one
representing a particular nation: Algeria, Cameroun (UPC), Peoples' Republic of China,
Belgian Congo, North Korea, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan,
Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Mongolia, Morocco, Uganda, Pakistan, Somalia, Southern
Rhodesia, South-West Africa, Tunisia, UAR, USSR, North Vietnam, and Yemen. The
organization's permanent secretariat was made up of 12 members chosen by the directors'
committee: Algeria (FLN), Cameroun (UPC), China, Congo, Guinea, India, Indonesia,
Iraq, Japan, UAR, Uganda, USSR. The UPC held seats in both the Director's
Committee and the permanent secretariat. Ibid.

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2O2 MEREDITH TERRETTA

addressed the Algerian war, c


by Belgian colonialists against
economic sanctions and boyco
regime in South Africa. On t
resolution painting the proscript
conquest', and delegates from in
Cameroon's immediate indepe
spokespersons called for a withd
the territories of Cameroon, a c
government, and a UN referend
French territories.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 inde-
pendence, 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 con-
gregated in the African Affairs Centre in Accra as the 'gem of the revol-
ution'. 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.57
In April 1958, the leaders of Ghana, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Morocco,
Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, the eight independent countries in Africa, con-
vened 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.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',59 and listed French
Togoland, Nigeria, and the Cameroons as territories that might benefit from
a conference forum.

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.
57 The bureau was constituted informally from the date ot Ghana s independence, and
given a legal status in 1959 after Padmore's death: see K. Armah, Peace Without Power:
Ghana's Foreign Policy, 195J-1966 (Accra, 2004), 27. I am grateful to Akosua Darkwah
for providing me with a copy of this publication. 58 Ibid. 58.
59 GNA, SC/BAA/136, Conference of Independent African States, 15 Apr. 1958.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 203

The approaching AAPC provided a sense of urgency t


of the African Affairs Centre. Nkrumah delegated the ta
who was to institutionalize the Ghanaian government's
freedom fighters. Because of 'the imminence of the confe
hotel accommodation', Makonnen constructed a centre with 25 private
apartments, a dormitory that would house 200 visitors, a kitchen and cafe-
teria, and a staff to prepare food and wait on guests.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.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 at-
tended by representatives from the 8 independent African states, 28 African
territories under foreign rule, and 62 nationalist organizations, political
parties, and/or trade unions.62 The conference symbolized the new age o
political, anti-colonial Pan-Africanism, and was extremely threatening to
metropolitan powers that had yet to loosen the chains on many of their col-
onies.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 Octobe
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.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'.65 On
18 July 1958, even before Prime Minister Ahidjo had learned of the im-
pending AAPC conference, the French High Commissioner of Cameroon,

60 See Makonnen, Pan- Africanism, 212-24. 61 Ibid.


62 Ibid. 58.
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper write that 'older forms of pan-Africanism ' had
withered by the mid-1950s and that, by that time, 'already the devolution of power to
territorial structures was underway' (Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 425). And yet the
AAPC convened in 1958 (and the AASO Conference held in 1957), symbolized the
growth of a 'new form' of Pan-Africanism that premised inter-territorial cooperation
over territorial sovereignty.
64 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics, Directeur des Affaires Politiques, 3e bureau,
Ministre de la France d'Outre-Mer à M. le Ministre des Affaires Étrangères, 31 Oct.
1958.
CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics, Ministre de la France d'Outre-Mer au
Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, Direction des Affaires Politiques, 3e Bureau, 15 Jul.
1958.

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2O4 MEREDITH TERRETTA

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.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.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 Guiñean
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.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 re-
ferendum on the issue of reunification, and democratic elections for the
National Cameroonian Assembly with a UN-selected commission to organ-
ize and supervise all electoral proceedings.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 legit-
imate 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 i960. 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

66 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics, Torre to Minister de la France d'Outre-


Mer, Directeur du Cabinet, Directeur des Affaires Politiques, Paris, 18 Jul. 1958.
67 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics, Telegram from Directeur des Affaires
Politiques, M. Pignon and Chef du 3e Bureau, Rostain, to High Commissioner,
Cameroun, 19 Dec. 1958.
68 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics 2092, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères,
Directeur d'Afrique-Levant, 15 Dec. 1958.
69 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics 2092, Spécial Outre-Mer, Bulletin Sud-
Sahara, 11 Dec. 1958.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 205

bases'. The AAPC went on to condemn the agreements sig


French government 'eliminating national sovereignty and
converting this territory into a French department in A
* bombardment of numerous regions in the Kameroun by the F
and the repeated executions of Kameroonese people strug
pendence'. The resolution called for all independent African
port ' the immediate and complete withdrawal of French and B
troops'.70

THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY PAN- AFRICANI SM

International ideological support was perhaps not as cr


support for the increasing number of exiles escaping ac
Beginning in 1957, thousands of young nationalists set
onial 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.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.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.73 The others undertook the military
training that UPC leaders expected would ensure the eventual overthrow
of the Franco-Cameroonian government in formation.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.75

70 Resolutions adopted by the All African Peoples' Conference, Cairo, 23-31 Mar.
1061.
71 Makonnen, Pan- Africanism, 215. Those housed at the centre included Patrice
Lumumba from the Belgian Congo, Felix Moumié and Ernest Ouandié of Cameroon,
Holden Roberto of Angola, the Egyptian President Nasser's representative, Dr Gallai,
Rabaroca and Mulutsi of the PAC, Banda and Kenneth Kaunda from southern central
Africa, and Mbiyu Koinanee and Odinera of Kenva.
Interviews with Job Njapa, Nkongsamba, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008; with Ignace
Neguin Djoko, Baham, 2002, 2003, 2004; with Fo Marcel Ngandjong Feze, Bandenkop,
1999, 2001, 2002, 2003; with Marie-Irène Ngapeth-Biyong, Yaounde, 1999; and with
Jacqueline Kemayou, New Bell. Douala. 200«;.
73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.
75 Ibid, and BNA, FO 371/146650, 'Jeanne', 85 Brecknock Rd., London to 'Felix'
[Moumié], Accra, 22 Aug. i960, in British Embassy, Leopoldville, Congo to
E. B. Boothby, Esq., Africa Department, Foreign Office, 28 Oct. i960.

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2O6 MEREDITH TERRETTA

By late i960, the British administration kn


or soon to be studying on scholarship
bassador in Accra agreed to provide scho
the academic year 1 960-1. 77 Other studen
of Peking.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 thei
straight to the Guiñean embassy upon arrival in Accra,79 where they
be put in contact with the UPC representatives in Accra. Mekou forw
the names of prospective students or military trainees to the UPC le
in Accra, Cairo, or Leopoldville, where Moumié was based in August and
September i960. Mekou found places for the youths in transit, usually in the
Ghana House, procured passports for them from the Guiñean 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.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.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,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.83
Many Cameroonian exiles, especially in the later years of the influx

76 BNA, CO 554/2367, Extract from South Cameroons Intelligence Report for


Dec. 1060.
77 BNA, FO 371/146650, Samuel Mekou, African Affairs Centre, Accra to
Kingue, 3 Sep. i960 in British Embassy, Leopoldville, Congo to E. B. Boothby, E
Africa Department, Foreign Office, 28 Oct. i960. Mekou did not indicate which Ge
ambassador, East or West.
78 The scholarships increased from i960 to 1961. There were 33 scholarships aw
to Cameroonian students through the UPC-OK during the single month of July
BNA, FO 371/155340, British embassy, Yaounde, to Secretary of State for the Co
Secret, 19 Aug. 1961.
79 Interviews with Job Ngoule Njapa, Jacqueline Kemayou, and Woungly Mas
Yaounde, 2003, 2005. See also BNA, CO 554/2367, B. A. Flack to R. C. Cox,
Commonwealth Relations Office, London, 26 Feb. i960 re Petition to High
Commissioner (22 Feb. i960) from 4 persons, political refugees from Cameroon.
80 BNA, FO 371/146650, Samuel Mekou, African Affairs Centre, Accra to Abel
Kingue, 3 Sep. i960 in British Embassy, Leopoldville, Congo to E. B. Boothby, Esq.,
Africa Department, Foreign Office, 28 Oct. i960.
81 BNA, CO 554/2367, Governor-General of Nigeria to the Secretary ot State tor the
Colonies, 30 Sep. i960. 82 Interview with Job Ngoule Njapa.
83 BNA, FO 371/146650, Ernest Ouandié, Accra, to Félix R. Moumié in Leopoldville,
4 Sep. i960, in British Embassy, Leopoldville, Congo to E. B. Boothby, Esq., Africa
Department, Foreign Office, 28 Oct. i960.

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 207

into Ghana, could not be funded by the UPC, or by the


ment.84

MILITARY TRAINING

While many young Cameroonian nationalists in ex


for scholarly, intellectual pursuits throughout the
volved in transnational military training. In th
Thomas Emock, secretary of the African Affairs
nicated to the internal OK-UPC headquarters hi
utionary government in The Cameroons as soon
was ready.85 In response, local OK-UPC leaders b
youths suitable for military training.86 Beginn
British police and military personnel began to disc
attended training courses in China and Morocco am
Libération Nationale du Kamerun (ALNK) soldie
the southern Cameroons. They believed that si
taught in Egypt, Algeria, and the USSR, with p
place in Conakry and Accra.87 By 1961, British ad
over a hundred 'terrorists' trained overseas had
ALNK in both Cameroun and The Cameroons.88
Local UPC committees and ALNK base camps in Cameroon re-
commended 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 pro-
vided with personal funds, clothing, and other supplies, and then awaited
transport by air to the location of their training course.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'.90 In both China and
Morocco, military training was designed around the tactical teachings of

84 Ibid. These unfortunate youths were told to return to Cameroon, although to do so


would have placed them in severe jeopardy. It is more likely that many stayed and fended
for themselves in Accra or moved on. Male exiles sometimes arrived accompanied by
their wives. In some cases, scholarships could be obtained for men, while their wives and
families had to be sent home.
85 BNA, CO 554/2367, Extract from South Cameroons Intelligence Report for
Sep. i960, 'Part II '. Kumba, because of its proximity to the now independent territory of
Cameroun, established a militia base in the thick forest area along the border. Young
soldiers showing military promise were probably recruited through this base.
86 Ibid.
87 BNA, FO 371/1.55341. Annex 'A' to PERINTREP No. 8/61.
BNA, FO 37I/I5534I- See 'Peking training young Africans in terrorism: disruption
planned', Sunday Telegraph, 23 Jul. 1961, and 'Overseas training of ALNK terrorists',
Under-Secretary of State for War, 16 June 1061.
89 Annex 'A' to PERINTREP No. 8/61. 90 'Peking training'.

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2O8 MEREDITH TERRETTA

Mao Tse-Tung, and covered the use of w


warfare. Course instructors stressed the im
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.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.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.93

THE TRIUMPH OF 'PUPPET REGIMES' AND FRANCOPHONIE94

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.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 i960, 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.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.97

91 ' Overseas training'. 92 Annex 'A' to PERINTREP No. 8/61.


93 On local strategies of warfare, particularly fighters' use of spiritual technology
and knowledge of the landscape, see S. Mbatchou, 'Contribution à la connaissance de
l'histoire de l'Armée de libération nationale kamerunaise (ALNK), 1 959-1 971 ' (unpub-
lished MA thesis, Yaoundé-I, 2007). See also Mbembe, 'Domaines'.
94 In the 1960s, upécistes described the Ahidjo government as a 'puppet regime'
(gouvernement fantoche) and enumerated its neo-colonial characteristics. See, for example,
Message du Président du Comité Révolutionnaire (Ernest Ouandié), 22 Feb. 1967, in
Archives de la Préfecture de Nkongsamba, Mungo (APN), Présidence de la République
fédérale, Direction du service d'études et de documentation, Brigade Mixte Mobile,
Bamenda, 6 Mar. 1967.
95 For one former cabinet member's account, see Armah, Peace, 158-61.
96 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds privés 151, 'Les activités de l'UPC, Paris, 6 Jan.
1961. Of course, factionalization is characteristic of political movements initiated
or upheld in exile. See Y. Shain, Frontier of Loyalty : Political Exiles in the Age of the
Nation States (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005).
97 L. De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London, 2001).

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 2OO,

Although the UPC had led the way in using r


the postcolonial state government after ind
other parties protesting the apparent neo-colo
after independence began to follow suit. In 19
Fighters formed, made up of exiled revolution
as well as from those territories still under co
included representatives of the Sawaba Part
the Northern Rhodesia Independence Party, the United Togolese Front,
the Sanwi Liberation Movement of Ivory Coast, and the Peoples' Party
of Bechuanaland.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'.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 con-
tinued cooperation with metropolitan governments.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 o
intense debates between African heads of state and policy makers over th
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 'sub-
versive elements which are openly planning to overthrow established gov-
ernments in Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta and Cameroon'.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,

98 On Sawaba, see van Walraven, 'Decolonization'.


99 BNA, FO 371/161611, British Embassy, Yaounde to R. J. Stratton, Esq., West and
Central African Department, Foreign Office, 24 Sep. 1962.
100 See Armah, Peace, 96-104 for an explanation of the emergence of three blocs of
African states from i960: the conservative, francophone Brazzaville group, which became
the Union Africain et Malgache in December i960; the Casablanca group, of which
Ghana was a member, which advocated a Pan-African assembly, political and economic
committees, and High Command of Chiefs of Staff, and which pledged 'aid and assist-
ance to nationalist forces'; and the Monrovia group, which took issue with political
subversion and pledged 'non-interference in the internal affairs of states'.
101 GNA, SC/BAA/372, Moktar Ould Daddah to Diallo Telli, Secretary-General of
OUA, 18 Feb. 1965.

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2IO MEREDITH TERRETTA

and echoing Ahidjo's protest


Mauritania presented OCAM
the secretary-general of th
subversive elements which
governments in Côte d'Ivoir
OCAM would not attend the upcoming OAU Summit scheduled for
October in Accra.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.103 Even so, eight franco-
phone states stayed away from the OAU summit, because they accused
Ghana of encouraging 'subversive activities directed against them'.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.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.106 From late 1965 through 1968, these men,

102 J. H. Williams, Ambassador of Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville to Kwame Nkrumah,


8 Apr. 1965. For Ahidjo's say in the matter, see N. Morton, British Embassy, Yaounde to
Mervyn Brown, Esq., West and Central African Department, Foreign Office, 17 Aug.
1965. 103 Armah, Peace, 17 and GNA, SC/BAA/357.
104 CHAN, Foccart papers, Fonds publics, 454, * Conférence des Chefs d Etats .
105 The history of the UPC's Second Front, established in the northern regions of the
Republic of Congo, has yet to be researched. No published scholarly accounts exist,
although J.-F. Bayart makes brief reference to it, as does Victor LeVine. See J.-F. Bayart,
L'Etat au Cameroun (Paris, 1979), 1 19-120; V. LeVine, The Cameroon Federal Republic
(Ithaca, NY, 1971), 128. It seems that, rather than a unified 'Second Front' controlled
by the Chinese as the early accounts suggest, there were at least two factions of exiled
upécistes. One group was stationed near Ouesso and under the command of Osende Afana,
who was killed on the Cameroonian side of the Ngako river during an attempt to recruit
supporters for the UPC and the ALNK. Scholars do not agree on the date of Afana's
death: Bayart has some time in March 1966, while LeVine cites 3 December 1967;
Woungly Massaga himself states that Afana was killed on 15 Mar 1966. The other group,
under the command of Woungly Massaga (aka Commandant Kissamba), was located near
Alate. Various pockets of fighters loyal or potentially loyal to the ALNK ranged along
Cameroon's southern border around Mouloundou, Lomié, and Djoum. See D. Abwa,
Ngouo Woungly -Massaga alias Commandant Kissamba: 'Cameroun, ma part de vérité'
(Paris, 2005), 129, 165, 172, 187, 199. While scholars ascribe UPC exiles' factionalization
to the Sino-Soviet split in the mid-1960s, Massaga's own testimony suggests that there
may be more to the story.
106 Interviews with Woungly Massaga and Job Ngoule Njapa. See also W. Massaga,
Une histoire politique du Cameroun, 1944-2004 (Paris, 2004) ; E. Guevara, African Dream :
The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (New York, 2000).

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CAMEROONIAN NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL 211

some of them accompanied by their female c


of unsuccessful invasions of Cameroon with t
ternal ALNK, still fighting under the com
maquis.101 The Congolese government's eve
to root out the upécistes sent the exiles, who
than a hundred, off in multiple directions. W
while most of his fighters made their way to
commander of the internal maquis, was roun
forces, and, on 15 January 1971, was publicly
Cameroonian exiles, from wherever they lear
ment to be finished, and also knew that they

CONCLUSION

Frederick Cooper has stressed the need for greate


'political alternatives' imagined by political actor
dence, in order to better understand how and why
panded and narrowed.109 But to truly understand t
envisioned by nationalists, we must look beyond
parameters that have so often guided our researc
sumptions. This means retrieving the local spiritu
content of nationalist movements such as the UPC,
linkages nationalists created with political actors
borders, even (or especially) when these routes do n
or Brussels. By 1965, the shifting geopolitical terrain signaled a disinte-
gration of the project of the United States of Africa, but its failure - at least
for the upécisteSy Nkrumaists, Guineans, Lumumbistes, and Algerians who
had invested in it - occurred beyond the borders of a community linked to a
common métropole.
Historians and political scientists of French Africa's decolonization
who have worked on the UPC, the Parti Démocratique Guiñeen (PDG),
or the Sawaba independence movement in Niger have emphasized these
movements' radicalism and/or exceptionalism.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 interconnected-
ness suggests that they were part of a different pattern, one that took

107 While maquis camps remained in the Mbam and south-eastern Bamileke regions, the
invading second front had a lot of ground to cover from their point of entry at Dja and
Lobo before reaching the first 'red zone' several hundred miles due north-east.
108 On Ernest Ouandié's arrest, see APN, Secteur militaire du Littoral, Qtr. de
Nkongsamba, Bulletin de renseignements, Objet : Rapports entre ressortissants Dschang
et Bangangté à Mbanga, 22 Sep. 1970. On Ouandié's execution, see E. Kamguia K.,
'39 ans après: Ernest Ouandié reste immortel', La Nouvelle Expression, 15 Jan. 2010;
J.-A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 119;
M. Beti, 'Le Cameroun d'Ahidio'. T emits Modernes. ^16 (Nov. 1072).
109 Cooper, 'Possibility'.
110 Joseph, Radical Nationalism; Schmidt, 'Anticolonial nationalism'; van Walraven,
' Decolonization ' .

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212 MEREDITH TERRETTA

shape beyond the scope of th


of the nationalist movements
Accra or Algiers rather than
their home states, historians h
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,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 fight-
ers 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 decolo-
nization, exiled nationalists played a role as crucial to the struggle for free-
dom as those who never left the contested territories that eventually became
nation-states.

111 See note 13 above.

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