Histoire sociale / Social History

This book is a valuable contribution to the current effort to reframe and reinvigorate our understanding of the nationalist period in African history. It illustrates richly how far our understanding has improved, and pushes us to go farther. The first generation of scholars examining the era of African decolonization celebrated African nationalists donning the mantle of modernity, joining the inevitable triumph of human progress. This gave way, in the post-colonial decades of despair, to accounts which highlighted the multiple, fractured, even self-delusional qualities of nationalist movements. Nationalism and nation-building agendas were in some cases seen as impositions by certain state-linked groups on a general population ignorant of or hostile to this agenda. Terretta offers quite a different picture, telling the story of Cameroonian nationalism led by the popular Union des populations Cameroun (UPC). It is not a triumphal story, because the UPC’s progressive nationalism was defeated by the colonial French regime and the postcolonial Ahidjo regime which followed it. But it is an account which reveals the nationalist movement here to be far from superficial or imposed.

The story is told in terms of the connections and influences between three layers of activism: the local, the territorial, and the international. Part I examines the history of the Grassfields region of French Cameroon from the nineteenth century through the colonial period. Chieftaincy governance involved different types of power in complex relations: chiefly and notable, visible and invisible. Politics was about, importantly, pursuit of lepue (sovereignty) on behalf of the gung (chieftaincy/state). As German and then French administrators tried (rather erratically) to manipulate chieftaincies to serve colonial needs, these political ideas adapted. As the French perverted chiefs’ power by recognizing only the visible forms of power, notables turned to sacred sites, spiritual knowledge and other invisible forms of power to defend gung. As Grassfielders migrated south toward the economic hub of the Mungo Valley in the twentieth century, these politics traveled with them and took on new forms. Many emigrants found modest success [End Page 228] in new economic roles, but were not allowed to colonize the valley in ways they might have done without colonial oversight. Instead of cutting ties with home, however, they invested in and reinvented them, becoming “titled emigrants” (p. 91) in Grassfields polities, and adopting the colonial ethnic category Bamileke to name this wider community.

Part II traces the rise of UPC nationalism in the Mungo Valley where locals, Bamileke sojourners, European planters, and the colonial administration, all competing for land and labour, generated the grievances which drove nationalist discontent and the organizations which structured it. UPC organizers, informed by French Communists (among others) articulated programmes for addressing economic and political problems, linked to rejection of French plans for imperial association and demands for the unification of British and French Cameroon. Some chiefs back in the Grasslands – born in this colonial generation, supported and informed by titled migrants with interests in the Mungo Valley, and deposed by colonial edict – helped connect these nationalist ideas to their evolving local politics. In time, gung came to connote both chieftaincies and the Cameroon nation, and the pursuit of lepue entailed both realms.

The ways the UPC sought its goals in a variety of international forums are outlined in Part III. Cameroon’s status as a United Nations mandated territory led them to make their case at the UN. Accra became a link to Pan African, Afro-Asian, and non-aligned networks that were alive with possibilities in these years. The links from the local, through the UPC, to these worlds of anti-colonial and progressive ideas were strong. Ordinary Cameroonians sent thousands of petitions to the UN, invoking principles of national self-determination and drawing on the emergent universal human rights discourse to make their case for lepue at the level of both the chieftaincy and the nation. When the UPC was declared illegal in 1956, and an underground...