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.
We have to go back some five years before Moumie’s death to understand the internal and international context of the UPC armed rebellion in Cameroon, and France’s brutal repression of that rebellion.
Cameroonian context
Founded in 1948 in Douala by Felix Moumie, Ruben Um Nyobe, Ernest Ouandie and Abel Kingue, the UPC political platform was for immediate independence from France, unification of the French and British Cameroons, and non-adherence to the French Union– a platform that put it at loggerheads with French colonial administrators who were determined to establish in Cameroon “a conservative regime that would preserve the economic interests of the metropolis”. In 1954 the crackdown on the UPC increased dramatically with the arrival of a new French High Commissioner, Roland Pré.
In May 1955, the port city of Douala was rocked by a series of pro-independence riots that were savagely crushed by the French colonial administration. A few days later, Moumie, who was serving as a medical doctor in Douala, fled to the British Southern Cameroons. He was followed shortly thereafter by Abel Kingue, Ernest Ouandie and a host of other UPC militants. UPC leader, UM Nyobe, remained in the French Cameroons.
On July 13, 1955, Roland Pré banned the UPC and the party went underground.
In December 1956, elections for seats in the Assemblée Législative du Cameroun (ALCAM) were held without the banned UPC. UPC sabotage efforts to derail the elections marked the beginning of its armed rebellion. Within a year, Cameroun was embroiled in a full-fledged civil war that pitted the constantly-reinfroced French army against what Time Magazine of December 2, 1957 described [in typical Cold War-speak] as “5,000 hard-core Communist guerrillas”.
UPC leaders who had fled to Southern Cameroons eventually became the nucleus of the party’s external wing or the “UPC in exile”, while Um Nyobè, Yem Mbak, Mayi Matip and others who remained inside French Cameroun became the leaders of the internal wing or the “UPC in the Maquis”.
On May 30, 1957, the British also banned the UPC in the British Cameroons. According to Awasum,
Thirteen of its leaders were arrested and detained before being deported on grounds that the party had a knack for violence, and would likely transform the Southern Cameroons into a battleground. Felix Moumié, its President, Abel Kingué, its first Vice President and Ernest Ouandié, its second Vice President, were sent to jail in Lagos where they were detained for eight days before being deported to Egypt. Many more were deported to Sudan with their families.
On September 13, 1958 UPC leader, Um Nyobe was ambushed and killed in his native Sanaga Maritime region. Within days of his death, leaders from the UPC internal wing, such as Mayi Matip, began to rally the Ahidjo regime under the banner of what became known as the “legal UPC”. That year, the UPC transferred its headquarters from the Bassa region - which was effectively “pacified” with the death of Um Nyobe - to the Bamileke region in the western part of the country. The UPC militia was renamed the Armée de Liberation Nationale du Kamerun (ALNK) and placed under the command of Martin Singap. [Click here for pictures three former ALNK fighters]
Earlier in 1956, France passed the loi-cadre which gave French Cameroun partial autonomy. This “Framework Law” created a legislative assembly and a quasi-autonomous executive branch headed by a Cameroonian Prime Minister. In May 1957, the rabid anti-communist and Francophile Andre Marie Mbida became the first Prime Minister of Cameroun. Mbida immediately teamed up with the French in a bloody and merciless military campaign against the “communist” UPC. As Mbida stated in a letter to Time Magazine of January 6, 1958:
So far as the legal government of the Cameroons is concerned, the UPC is a Communist-front party that aims to establish by force a Marxist "popular republic" in the Cameroons. Most of its leaders, including Um Nyobe and Félix Moumié, have been indoctrinated in Communist countries. I have a copy of a letter written some years ago by Moumié to Molotov (when he was Foreign Minister), in which Moumié admits that he is a Communist. Like all Communist-front parties, the UPC poses as a truly democratic party fighting "colonial suppression," but in fact its methods are totalitarian.
However, due to his erratic behavior and outlandish pronouncements, he was forced to resign barely nine months later on February 18, 1958. The French replaced him with a protégé of Foccart’s, the “more malleable” Ahmadou Ahidjo.
Although Ahidjo eventually appropriated the UPC political platform of immediate independence and unification, the UPC rebellion continued unabated because the party considered Ahidjo a usurper and puppet of French and imperialists interests.
Therefore, when French Cameroun obtained its independence from France on January 1, 1960, the UPC rebellion was still raging on, this time under the leadership of Felix Moumie, who was now on exile in the Republic of Guinea, and operating from an office in the national assembly building in Conakry.
Dibussi Tande:
I encourage your efforts to tell the world of this history. But imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link to the pictures of ALNK fighters only to see my own copyrighted photographs as the ones listed. Nowhere did you credit my work, nor did you get the permission of those fighters to post them on your site. Is this right to steal the work of others without crediting them even to fight the good fight? I don't think so. We who are familiar with Cameroon's history know the destructive havoc that corruption can wreak. I am surprised that you did not first contact me to ask permission before placing the link to my photographs on your site. I look forward to hearing from you, comrade.
DJUISSI
Posted by: djuissi | November 15, 2006 at 01:11 PM
Hello Djuissi,
Your accusation is grossly unwarranted:
1. Contrary to your claims, I did not post any of your photographs on my site. I simply placed a link to your flickr page from within my site. And, as you must have noticed, the link to your flickr page opens in a brand new window, thereby eliminating any possible confusion between your site and mine. So we cannot even begin to talk of copyright when NOTHING was copied!!!!!!
2. It was not necessary to specifically credit you within this article because all the relevant info is on your Flickr site. When it opens up it is boldly written that it contains “Djuissi's photos”. The credit is there for everyone to see….
4. Equally relevant is the fact that it is clearly stated on your page that your photos are “Public photos”. What this means is that they can be tagged (e.g., using the "Cameroon" tag) or referred to on weblogs such as this without any specific authorization from you - no different from creating a link to a story in the New York Times or a video on Youtube.
5. I actually did the most honorable thing by giving your site ample exposure and making sure that anyone who clicked on the said link would be led directly to your flickr page. That is what the “World Wide Web” is all about; an intricate set of information on all topics freely linked together in a web-like manner…. Without links there will be no WWW! As it has rightly been pointed elswhere: "One of the hopes and goals of the designers [of the www] was that after the passage of some years, a meaningful fraction of the sum total of human knowledge would be on the Web, and that it would be fully cross-linked."
6. It has long been established by the courts that a URL is like a telephone number in a phone book, or even a street number. Hence, linking to a URL is similar to telling a tourist that they should check out the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during their visit to Washington DC. I don't need the White House's permission to do that – the same rule applies web linking.
7. Finally I was intrigued by your pictures of ALNK fighters. I wanted to know more but alas, your flickr page had no contact information... It will be interesting to put a story behind these and other related unpublished pictures that you might have in your collection. If this is something you are inclined to do, just drop me a note at [email protected].
Regards,
Dibussi
Posted by: Dibussi Tande | November 15, 2006 at 04:52 PM
Djuissi Dude those are very nice pictures you have there on your site. You should be thanking Dibussi for linking you up, otherwise they would be invisibleIt would be like a disservice to those heroes. BTW when are you guys going to write their story? I hope not when they are dead and buried. There has to be somebody who is writing their story down, right? Be nice to Dibussi and let him link you up some more. It is about eyeballs on the internet, number of clicks, that sort of thing and Dibussi has that game down. sixty thousand clicks in the short time he has operated this site. He has to be doing something right.
Posted by: Njemba | November 15, 2006 at 05:21 PM
This is exactly the problem Cameroon has and let not expect that country to change if its people can not change.
Hatred, jalousie and egoism and all for nothing.
why do you need credit for a link and that a link on blank pictures. You should have at least given some descriptions to your pictures cause as they are, they mean nothing.
Posted by: Kenny | July 25, 2014 at 05:12 AM