Famous Political Assassinations in the Last Two Centuries: (An excerpt of "A DEATH IN GENEVA THAT PUT A NATION IN A COMA AND TRAUMATIZED AFRICA: The Assassination of Félix-Roland Moumié and Cameroon’s Unfinished Liberation")

Chapter Six

Félix-Roland Moumié

 

Félix Moumié

 

UPC Leaders (L. to R.) front row: Castor Osendé Afana, Abel Kingué, Ruben Um Nyobé, Félix Moumié, and Ernest Ouandié

Cameroon on a map of the world

Born in 1926, Félix-Roland Moumié, was an anti-colonialist Cameroonian leader and Pan-Africanist. His assassination in Geneva on  November 03, 1960 by William Bechtel of the SDECE (the French Secret Service) with thallium is regarded as the most brazen crime committed by the French secret service abroad, and perhaps the biggest single blow suffered by Cameroonian civic-nationalists fighting for the liberation of the land from French neocolonial control.

Dr. Felix-Roland Moumié was the head of the UPC (Union des Populations du Cameroun, also called Union du Peuple Camerounais — "Union of the Populations of Cameroon") from 1958-1960. The UPC was the first historic political party to emerge from the territories of the former German colony of Kamerun. Founded in 1948, the UPC operated in both French Cameroun and British Cameroons --- Trust Territories that emerged from the 1884-1916 former German Kamerun following its partition between Britain and France as agreed in the 28 June 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War I to a close by formalizing the end of the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. The party’s primary objective was the reunification and independence of British Cameroons and French Cameroun, Trust Territories that were the successors of the League of Nations mandates, and that came into being when the League of Nations ceased to exist in 1946.

The French Trusteeship administration banned the UPC in 1955, accusing it of fomenting civil unrest, thereby forcing the party into exile in the summer of 1955. However, The UPC resurfaced in 1956 and challenged France via the international media. The British colonial authorities also banned the UPC in British Cameroons in 1958, thereby forcing most of its leadership that escaped French Cameroun and sought sanctuary in British Cameroons to flee to Egypt, Ghana, China, and other countries that were supportive of the Cameroonian cause for its reunification and independence. Ruben Um Nyobé, the party’s leader  and Secretary General; Ernest Ouandié and Abel Kingué, the party’s two vice presidents; and Felix Moumié pledged to carry on with the struggle for the reunification and independence of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, despite France’s resolve to divide and rule the peoples of the former German Kamerun. After all, the UPC commanded the support of most the people of French Cameroun and its offshoots and sister parties in British Cameroons commanded the support of the electorate there. In fact, more than 80% of educated Cameroonians supported the party and its cause for the reunification and independence of the lands of the former German Kamerun.

However, the party received its first major trauma when three years after the ban, at a time that some pundits were beginning to think that France would allow the party to start operating again as a legal political entity, the security forces of the French Trusteeship administration assassinated the UPC’s first leader Ruben Um Nyobé on September 13, 1958, near his home village.

So, when Dr. Felix-Roland Moumié succeeded Ruben Um Nyobé, he was forced to operate from exile, even though the UPC was the only party in French Cameroun that enjoyed the overwhelming support of French Camerounians and that shared a similar program with sister parties or offshoots in British Cameroons. Undeterred, he challenged France’s crackdown on the UPC in a more determined manner, so that UPC partisans were in control of much the countryside of the southern half of French Cameroun before France handed French Cameroun’s political control or sovereignty to its puppet Ahmadou Ahidjo, declared the land independent on January 01, 1960, and at the same time concluded a series of socio-economic and political agreements with the infant state that virtually made it a backyard of France.

Considered by some as the “African Che Guevara in the making”, Félix Moumié was an astute leader as well as a great organizer who before his death had met that summer of 1960 with Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine international revolutionary and second-in-command in the new anti-American and anti-Western government of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In addition to that development, the Cameroonian partisan leader had successfully developed a special rapport with the bellicose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Pan-Africanist president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, and the stubborn nationalist Guinean head of state Sékou Touré who defied France and whisked Guinea out of the neocolonial clutches of  its former colonial master.

Many pundits think France and its Cold-War allies feared the new UPC leader’s drive in forging strong relationships with  some of the other leaders in the communist bloc who hoped to see Africa emerge one day as an economically united and politically integrated continent. The fact that those leaders promised to increase their support to Moumié’s partisan group made France and Ahmadou Ahidjo extremely nervous.

 The exiled second leader of the Cameroonian civic-nationalist movement was on a mission to Europe in October 1960, when William Bechtel invited him to dinner in a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, posing as a journalist.  In fact, he was a member of the "Main Rouge," an offshoot of a special unit in the French secret service charged with eliminating anti-French and pro-independence African nationalists and their supporters in Europe.

Distracted by a summon to the phone by a restaurant staff, Moumié left his unfinished drink that Bechtel contaminated by pouring a lethal dose of thallium into it.  But Moumié did not drink it upon his return. So, Bechtel created another distraction, during which he poured another dose of thallium into Moumié's wine. Moumié ended up gulping down both drinks and died in a Geneva hospital on November 3, 1960, days before his return to Guinea, and much earlier than his killers had planned. The fact that the Cameroonian liberation leader took an overdose of the poison thwarted the plot France had hatched to blame Felix Moumié’s death on Guinean president Sekou Touré, who had been acting as the UPC leader’s host during his exile in the Guinean capital of Conakry.

Cameroon over time

1. German Kamerun (1884-1911)
2. German Kamerun (1911-1916)
3. British Cameroons & French Cameroun: 1916-1960
4.  British Cameroons & La Republique du Cameroun (1960-1961)
5. British Southern Cameroons & La Republique du Cameroun (1960-1961)
6. Reunited/Independent Cameroon today.

Félix Moumié’s assassination would be followed less than a year after by the horrendous assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo. The deaths of these two African civic-nationalists with a Pan-Africanist vision would be followed by a bloody repression of the popular resistance to the neo-colonial regimes in their respective countries....

Janvier Tchouteu is the author of “FALLEN HEROES: African Leaders Whose Assassinations Disarrayed the Continent and Benefitted Foreign Interests”

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