Dibussi Tande: Scribbles from the Den

The Political Legacy of Ruben Um Nyobe 50 Years After His Assassination

Dibussi Tande

"Ruben Um Nyobe is too little known among Anglophone africanists, he was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant political thinkers and organizers to emerge after the Second World War in Africa. Had he survived to lead his country to independence, he would most certainly be ranked today on the same level as Julius Nyerere, and the late Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba." Richard Joseph

Exactly 50 years ago, on 13 September 1958, Ruben Um Nyobe, leader of the nationalist Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) was assassinated by French forces in the outskirts of Boumnyebel in the Sanaga Maritime division. Um Nyobe’s death set in motion a series of events that culminated in the elimination of the UPC as a political force in Cameroon, the exiling and/or assassination of its entire leadership, and the establishment of a French-controlled neo-colonial police state in Cameroon led by individuals who either played a marginal role in the struggle for independence or were even opposed to that struggle.

Statue In Honor of Ruben Um Nyobe in Eseka

"The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the newly opened Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an indicator of the collective memory." (Anonymous)

After nearly half a century of institutional attempts to erase Ruben Um Nyobe from Cameroon's collective memory, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) began the slow process of redefining the nationalist leader's legacy by constructing a monument in his honor in the town of Eseka where he is buried.

The project went ahead - inspite of the lukewarm attitude, if not hostility of the Biya regime -because the Eseka municipal council is now controlled by the UPC, the party which Um Nyobe founded in April 1948.

Movie Review: Cameroun - Autopsy of a Bungled Independence

Gaëlle Le Roy et Valérie Osouf Cameroun. Autopsie d’une Indépendance. France 5, 2008.

Early this week, the French TV network, France 5, broadcast a fascinating documentary on France’s macabre role in the violent decolonization of the French Cameroons. Using archival footage, most of which is being made public for the first time, the documentary shows how the French crushed the UPC armed insurgency. More extensive than Frank Garbely's equally compelling documentary on the assassination of Felix Moumie, autopsie covers the period from the 1944 Brazzaville conference to the 1971 execution of Ernest Ouandie, the last historic leader of the UPC.

The documentary includes revealing interviews with some of key actors from that period such as the infamous Governor of Cameroun, Pierre Messmer, who died last year. Defiant to the end, Messmer, insists that the UPC was a terrorist organization and its leader, Ruben Um Nyobe, an outlaw who deserved to die. The filmmakers also achieve the improbable feat of finally getting General Pierre Semengue to talk about his role in crushing of the UPC insurgency.

Cameroun - Autopsie d'une Indépendance

Gaëlle Le Roy et Valérie Osouf Cameroun. Autopsie d’une Indépendance. France 5, 2008.

Here is the documentary on the decolonization of the French Cameroons in its entirety. Enjoy!

Memory Lane: January 15, 1971- UPC Leader, Ernest Ouandie, Executed

As soon as the first salvo is fired, he shouts: "Long live Cameroon" and then falls to the ground. A European officer detaches himself from the group of spectators, walks toward the dying man, puts his hand on his holster, leans forward and shoots... [cited in Jean Ziegler, Les Rebelles: Contre l'Ordre du Monde: Mouvements Armes de Liberation Nationale du Tiers Monde]

Ernest Ouandie, the last historic leader of the nationalist Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) under heavy guard.

Saturday, January 16, 1971: YAOUNDE. CAMEROON. A firing squad publicly executed three men in a public square in Bafoussam Friday on charges of plotting rebellion against the government. The men had been sentenced to death with Roman Catholic bishop Albert Nkongmo. But the bishop's sentence was commuted to life in prison by President Ahmadou Ahidjo.

Documentary on the Assassination of Felix Moumié Now Available in English

POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS: Death in Geneva: The Poisoning of Felix Moumié. 52 mins. 2007. (Format - DVD; System - NTSC/PAL)

On November 3rd, 1960, Félix Moumié, the famous independence fighter of Cameroon, also called Cameroon’s Lumumba, died in Geneva. An agent of the French secret services poisoned him. His body was transferred to Conakry, Guinea, where it was embalmed and secured in a sarcophagus.

To this day, Cameroon authorities refuse to bury one of his great sons in his own country. It was a commando group of sabotage and killers of the French secret services that organized the murder of Moumiéin Geneva. Swiss authorities knew the murderer, but under pressure of France, never judged him. The judicial inquiry ended by a dismissal of charges.

Once Upon a Time… Osende Afana (II)

Dibussi Tande

On March 15, 1966 at 10:30 am, comrade Osende Afana, Secretary General of the bureau of the Steering Committee of the UPC gloriously fell at the battlefront, his heart cowardly pierced by bullets of the imperial armed forces and their Kamerunian lackeys… French imperialism, along with its sinister manservant Ahidjo, has perpetrated a horrible crime against the Kamerunian people…. Editorial of l’Etudiant d’Afrique noire

The Death of Moumie and the UPC Split
Following the assassination of UPC President Felix Moumie in Geneva, Switzerland in November 1960, cracks began to appear in the hitherto solid edifice of the UPC in exile. This ultimately led to a split within the party.

Once Upon a Time… Osende Afana (I)

By Dibussi Tande

'the majority of them... when they returned to Africa shamefully betrayed the noble ideals which they defended... in Paris'. They joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie and adopted the motto FVVA (Femmes, Villas, Voitures, Argent). Only a few militants like Osende Afana practised what they had preached and died for the causes in which they believed: that of revolution." Gonidec, African Politics. p. 73

On March 15, 1966 Osende Afana, one of the last of the “intellectual revolutionaries” died in Ndélélé subdivision deep in the dreaded Djoum forest in what is today Kadey division in the East Province of Cameroon. The circumstances of his death are still unclear to this day but what is known is that he was tracked down by Ahmadou Ahidjo’s security forces, ambushed, killed and then beheaded. While his headless body was buried in an unmarked grave, legend has it that his head was taken to Yaounde and put on display for some members of the Ahidjo regime as a “war trophy”.

The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba - January 17, 1961

"The day will come when history will speak... Africa will write its own history... it will be a history of glory and dignity." - Patrice Lumumba

BY Kevin Whitelaw

It was the height of the Cold War when Sidney Gottlieb arrived in Congo in September 1960. The CIA man was toting a vial of poison. His target: the toothbrush of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's charismatic first prime minister, who was also feared to be a rabid Communist.   

Lumumba being humiliated after his arrest while an elated Mobutu looks on

As it happened, Lumumba was toppled in a military coup just days before Gottlieb turned up with his poison. The plot was abandoned, the lethal potion dumped in the Congo River.

France's Dirty War in Cameroon: The Frank Garbely Documentary Now Online

Update January 16, 2007: The Moumie documentary is no longer available on the DailyMotion website. It was apparently uploaded on the site in violation of copyright regulations. Interested parties can order the documentary directly from Triluna Film AG.

Swiss filmmaker Frank Garbely's fascinating documentary on the Moumie assassination titled "L'assassinat de Félix Moumié. L'Afrique sous contrôle" ("The Assassination of Félix Moumié: Africa under Control") is now available online. (Click the Play button below to watch the entire documentary in French).

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon (VI): The French Expeditionary Force

Dibussi Tande

Between 1957 and 1960, the French insisted that their « advisers » in Cameroon were simply taking part in a  « peace keeping operation », a « police action » rather than a military campaign. This terminolgy was not an innocent one. Because Cameroon was a United Nations Trusteeship territory, France could not legally carry out full-fledged military operations in the country without a specific UN mandate, which it never received.

However, once the territory gained independence on January 1, 1960, President Ahmadou Ahidjo signed a series of « cooperation » (ie military) agreements which gave France military carte blanche  in Cameroon - something which it, ironically, could not get when it was colonial power in the French Cameroons.

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon (V): The “Pacification” of the Sanaga Maritime

Dibussi Tande

Far from the glare of the international community which was distracted at the time by the liberation war in Algeria, literarily given a free pass by Western governments obsessed with the “Red Menace” on Africa; and egged on by a Western media which saw terrorism in every UPC declaration and action (sounds familiar??), France unleashed a bloody reign of terror in the French Cameroons from 1956 to 1964 which many have not hesitated to label genocide.

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon (IV): The UPC Communist Boogeyman

Dibussi Tande

The UPC maquis started in 1956, just a few months after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and barely two years after France’s defeat in Indochina and the start of the Algerian war of independence. The French were therefore determined to prevent a repeat of either an Algerian-type escalation in Cameroon, or an African version of the Indochina debacle. The French believed that either of these scenarios would push Cameroon out of the French orbit, and also threaten French economic and political interests in both French Equatorial Africa, and French West Africa.

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon (III): The UPC and the French "Pacification" Campaign

Dibussi Tande

Here's for those who have gently - and not-so-gently - requested that I complete the series on France's bloody decolonization of French Cameroons.

In the first two parts of this series, we focused on the assassination of Cameroonian nationalist leader Felix Moumie by the French secret service. In the remaining parts, focus will be on the Union des Populations du Cameroun's armed rebellion against the French.

Article Review: Political Assassination as a Strategy Against Liberation Movements

The feature story in today's issue of Pambazuka Newsis an abridged version of Victoria Brittain's earlier article on the assassination of nationalist leaders in Africa and the Middle East which initially appeared in Race & class, and which I cited at the beginning of the series on Felix Moumie.

Brittain’s article complement's the Felix Moumie story by placing it in a broader context of "current power relations between the Third World in general, and the dominant Western and imperialist powers"; relations which, Brittain argues, are the "product of the war of attrition which the West has waged, particularly by political assassinations, which have robbed Africa and the Middle East of some of their great leaders, and weakened their important political organisations."

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon (II): The Assassination of Félix-Roland Moumié

By Dibussi Tande

So who exactly ordered the hit on Moumie and how high up in the French government did the crime and cover-up go? For years, French authorities strongly refuted any French government involvement in the Moumie assassination.

 
Jacques Foccart, "Mr. Francafrique", with President De Gaulle

Initially they even denied that Bechtel was a member of the French intelligence service, even though all the evidence pointed to the contrary.It wasn’t until after Bechtel’s death that tongues began to loosen. And it became apparent that the plot against Moumie directly involved the Matignon and even the Palais de l'Élysée.

France’s Dirty War in Cameroon: The Assassination of Félix-Roland Moumié (I)

By Dibussi Tande

The use of political assassinations against key leaders of liberation movements has had a major impact on the course of history in Africa and the Middle East. Not only have some of the greatest of Third World leaders been killed but so, too, has the hope for political change they embodied - Victoria Brittain [Race & Class, Vol. 48, No. 1, 60-74 (2006)]

Early in October 1960, Dr. Félix-Roland Moumié, the exiled leader of the Camerounian nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, on a mission. On the eve of his return to Conakry (Guinea) where the UPC had set up its headquarters in exile, he was invited to dinner by an individual whom he had met earlier in July in Accra, Ghana. The individual, 66-year old William Bechtel, claimed to be a journalist interested in the UPC’s armed struggle against the French-backed regime of Ahmadou Ahidjo.