During the 1950s and ’60s, France waged a brutal colonial war in Cameroon while managing to keep it largely shielded from scrutiny. The American historian Caroline Elkins refers to the silence that followed the British repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya as an instance of “state-imposed amnesia.” The line likewise applies to Cameroon: everything was done so that this invisible war would never return to haunt official French memory.
This organized amnesia has led to some surprising, or at least telling, episodes. When French prime minister François Fillon visited Yaoundé in May 2009, a journalist asked him about the French responsibility for the assassination of Cameroonian nationalist leaders. He astonishingly replied, in a mixture of ignorance and contempt: “I totally deny that [the] French participated in any way in assassinations in Cameroon. All that is pure invention!”
But ghosts are in the habit of coming back to haunt us. For some years now, a new generation of Cameroonian historians has been leafing through the archives and traveling up and down Cameroon to interview the last survivors. This is a race against the clock, as the archives, poorly preserved, rot quickly in the country’s tropical climate. As for eyewitnesses, there are ever fewer of them in a country where the average life expectancy is just fifty-five.
This is, then, a tough job. It is also a courageous one: the war remains an extremely sensitive subject for the Cameroonian regime. It is today led — as it has been since 1982 — by the ultra-authoritarian nonagenarian Paul Biya, direct heir to Ahmadou Ahidjo (1924–89), the dictator installed by France upon independence. Nonetheless, associations bringing together nationalist veterans, historians, and activists are working to uncover buried memories.
During a state visit to Yaoundé in 2015, François Hollande spoke of the “extremely tormented episodes” that had surrounded Cameroon’s independence. Why would he say such a thing? While these words went almost unnoticed in France, they were greeted with a certain relief by the Cameroonian public.
For the first time, the highest authorities of the French state, in the person of the president of the Republic, recognized that something had indeed happened in Cameroon at the time of decolonization. Referring to repression in Sanaga-Maritime and the Bamileke region, Hollande even said he was ready to “open the history books [and] the archives.”
Seven years later, on July 16, 2022, François Hollande’s successor, Emmanuel Macron, also visiting Yaoundé, likewise announced the beginning of a “fact-finding process” and promised to open the archives to a memorial commission, made up of French and Cameroonian researchers and artists. “Historians have looked into this past: they tell us that a conflict took place, the word war was used,” he said. “It’s up to historians to shed light on the past.”
This strategy enabled him to postpone any recognition of France’s crimes by at least two years, the time allotted for the commission to deliver its report. It also conceals the fact that historians have exploited widely accessible archives for decades, clearly establishing most of the basic facts.
The commission, led by the French historian Karine Ramondy, which presented its report to presidents Macron and Biya at the end of January 2025, unsurprisingly confirmed the conclusions of earlier historians: France did wage a “war” in Cameroon during the 1950s and ’60s, causing tens of thousands of deaths and using the same tactics it had used in Algeria: torture, bombing, villagization, political assassinations, psychological warfare, and so on.
The report, written by fourteen French and Cameroonian historians, drawing on previously known archives and newly declassified documents, was met with skepticism in Cameroon. Beyond offering a few new insights, despite its thousand pages, the report was paired with an “artistic initiative” led by the Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy, tasked with popularizing the commission’s findings and fostering Franco-Cameroonian “memory reconciliation” through a wide range of cultural devices: films, songs, murals, video games, cooking workshops, hairdressing contests, 3D virtual immersions into reconstituted maquis, and more.
Hence the question: Does this commission reflect a real desire to “shed light” on the Cameroon War and to initiate a genuine policy of recognition and reparations, or is it simply another PR gambit on the part of a French president eager to turn historical disputes — with Rwanda, Algeria, and now Cameroon — into illustrations of his “disruptive method”?
In any case, it is clear that the “remembrance initiatives” undertaken by French leaders in recent years are part of a new soft-power strategy. At a time when “anti-French sentiment” is spreading across Africa and rival powers encroach on France’s neocolonial backyard, Paris is on the lookout for new ways to demonstrate its goodwill. The resulting commissions, whose members are directly appointed by the Élysée Palace, give the illusion that a page of history has been turned.
And timid recognition of a few past crimes, doled out in dribs and drabs, gives the impression that there is nothing left to be explored. As the historian Noureddine Amara points out, the “reconciliation” called for by Emmanuel Macron looks more like an exercise in “memorial pacification,” aimed at silencing those who reject the anaesthetizing interpretations promoted by official history.
To understand the Élysée’s embarrassment or caution, it is important to bear in mind that the war in Cameroon does not belong to a bygone era that can be filed away in history books like old papers in a drawer, the better to forget them. Rather, this war remains a burning issue for today.
How can we understand postcolonial Cameroon if we overlook the fact that it was born through war? How can we conceive Cameroon’s future if we do not understand that this war, which officially never existed and therefore has not yet ended, continues in the form of a despotic regime that still rules the country even today? How can we believe in the Franco-Cameroonian friendship that public officials have boasted about for decades when we know that these words conceal a system that has perpetuated a steeply unequal relationship?
Faced with increasingly pressing demands over the historical memory of this conflict, French authorities are caught in a tangle of contradictions. The first, perhaps the most important, is the divide between myth and historical reality. Although France likes to describe itself as the “homeland of human rights,” it stubbornly refuses to take an honest look at chapters of the past that contradict this flattering self-image.
The 2005 call made by a handful of MPs for history textbooks to reflect the “positive aspects” of colonization and the obsessive rejection of any form of “contrition” are just two examples of France’s difficulty breaking out of self-mythology and essentialist narratives. No, France is not naturally generous-spirited: like all imperialist nations, when its material interests are at stake, it has never hesitated to trample on the grand principles it claims to represent.
The decolonization of the former “French Black Africa” is also part of this national mythology, since it is generally described as a peaceful process through which France shepherded its colonies to independence in a completely disinterested manner. But this story is undermined by all those who try to shed light on the bloody events that punctuated the period in question, from the Thiaroye massacre in 1944 to the repression of the Malagasy uprising in 1947 to the punishment of Ivorian political activists in 1948–50 and Operation Écouvillon in Mauritania ten years later.
These too-often-overlooked episodes — and so many others — belie official accounts and prove that from Paris’s perspective the decolonization of French Africa did not spell an end to French influence over the region. The neocolonial dispensation known as “Françafrique” would make sure of that.
Here we see the other contradiction that French leaders in recent decades have walked into. While they constantly swear that they have broken with Françafrique, in practice their policies have consisted, at best, in reforming the traditional instruments of France’s African policy to adapt them to the spirit of the times. In a way, since the turn of the twenty-first century, France has found itself in a situation comparable to that of the 1940s and ’50s, when its leaders decided to reform the colonial system in order not to “lose everything.”
Today it is that system’s successor — notwithstanding periodic reports of its demise — that refuses to give up the ghost. Shaken by globalization, migration, ever-greater access to information, and the emergence of new players on the international scene, African societies — particularly the youth — are losing interest in the former colonial powers.
They are looking elsewhere, to the United States, Canada, Russia, China, or Brazil, and inventing new ways of living, fighting, and resisting. France, which still entertains fantasies of grandeur and has every intention of “retaining its presence in Africa,” has thus fallen into its own trap. It is caught between two eras. One is a stubborn past, that of a Françafrique forged during the Cold War and decolonization.
The other is a future that is growing impatient, driven by younger generations fed up with the old autocrats who serve as functionaries for the former colonial powers. The way in which the people of Tunisia (in 2011) and Burkina Faso (in 2014) swept aside their respective dictators, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Blaise Compaoré — both great friends of France — speaks to this changing of the times. So too the military coups that have shaken the Sahel since 2021, bringing to power juntas hostile to Paris in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Like other countries, Cameroon illustrates in its own way the widening gap between Africa’s elites and the continent’s peoples. Cameroonians are ruled by a president who is ninety-two years of age and who spends astronomical sums on palatial stays in Europe. But the ordinary population, half of whom are aged under eighteen, live in extremely difficult conditions, with an average income of less than €100 a month according to the World Bank.
France’s leaders are well aware that Biya, the direct heir to Ahidjo, under whom he served as prime minister from 1975 to 1982, cannot last forever. They must now choose: continue to support the authoritarian regime in Yaoundé, whose only legitimacy rests on rigged elections, a sprawling system of corruption, and the routine repression of political opponents, or finally listen to a people who wish, like all others, to have a say in determining their own fate.
Today Biya’s system is running out of steam, and impatience is growing in every corner of the country. Cameroon, whose English-speaking regions have been the scene of bloody armed conflict for almost ten years, is on the verge of a fresh explosion. French authorities, having taken a lesson from events in Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Gabon, and most recently Senegal, are all the more conscious of this as they see an anti-French movement rising across the continent.
They know that, having kept silent for so long about their own actions and those of the Françafrique-style regimes they have lifted to power in recent decades, there is a real risk that they will be among the prime targets of a popular revolt in Cameroon. The war that has been buried for too long could then suddenly resurface. Sooner or later, all crimes must be paid for.
Great Job Thomas Deltombe & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
