Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon (New African Histories)

Acknowledgments 10 Abbreviations 14 Introduction 18 Blending Local and Global Politics 21 Cameroon: An Exceptional Colonial History? 25 Setting the Stages: The Focal Points 28 A History of UPC Nationalism 36 Sources and Methodology 39 God, Land, Justice, and Political Sovereignty in Grassfields Governance 46 The Formation of Grassfields Chieftaincies 47 Lepue and Gung 50 Magic and Mysticism 55 God, Land, and Sacred Sites 57 The French Administration’s 63 Customary Laws 73 “Bamileke Strangers” Make the Mungo River Valley Their Home 78 Grassfielders in the Mungo River Valley 81 The Ethnicization of Land Ownership 90 Bamileke-ness, Settlement, and Political 92 Ethnicity and Political Processes 102 Troublesome, Rebellious, Outlawed 114 Greater France or Sovereign Nation 116 The UPC’ s (Inter)national Political Platform 119 The Mungo Region 134 Bamileke Chiefs 137 French Strategies 140 The Uprisings of May 1955 143 Nationalists or Traitors? 151 An Outlawed Political Party 156 Baham as a Theater 158 The National Union, Bamileke Chiefs 161 Parliamentary Elections 168 Political Interpretations 175 The Maquis at Home, Exile Abroad 194 The Maquis 197 Grassfields Spiritual Technology in the Maqui s 205 The Mungo Region Maquis 209 Exile 215 The ALNK-UPC Army under a Centralized Command 220 The Maquis “Court” 231 “Here, God Does Not Exist” 234 State Action against 252 Public Executions 254 The Gray Zone 260 Conclusion 267 Pan-African Federation 272 The Cold War 277 Notes 280 Glossary 354 Bibliography 358 Index 376 Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is the first extensive history of Cameroonian nationalism to consider the global and local influences that shaped the movement within the French and British Cameroons and beyond. Drawing on the archives of the United Nations, France, Great Britain, Ghana, and Cameroon, as well as oral sources, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence chronicles the spread of the Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) nationalist movement from the late 1940s into the first postcolonial decade. It shows how, in the French and British Cameroon territories administered as UN Trusteeships after the Second World War, notions of international human rights, the promise of Third World independence, Pan-African federation, and national citizenship blended with local political and spiritual practices that resurfaced as the period of European rule came to a close. After French and British administrators banned the party in the mid-1950s, UPC nationalists adopted violence as a revolutionary strategy. In the 1960s, the nationalist vision disintegrated. The postcolonial regime labeled UPC nationalists "outlaws" and rounded them up for imprisonment or execution as the state shifted to single-party rule in 1966. Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence traces the connection between local and transregional politics in the age of Africa's decolonization and the early decades of the Cold War. Rather than stop at official independence as most conventional histories of African nationalist movements do, this book considers postindependence events as crucial to the history of Cameroonian nationalism and to an understanding of the postcolonial government that came to power on 1 January 1960. While the history of the UPC is a story that ends with the party's failure to gain access to political power with independence, it is also a story of the postcolonial state's failure to become a nation.-- Publisher description