As he sat on his easy
chair and thought of his family, Joseph Njike concluded that he had made the
right decision. Moving his family back to the Bamilekéland, precisely to his
ancestral homeland kingdom of Banganté and away from the throngs and rattles of
war in Douala was the right thing to do for their safety.
A sigh escaped his lips
as he recalled his warnings to his friends in Douala before he left the city,
pointing out that the ongoing skirmishes between French forces and the banned
Union of the Peoples of the Cameroons (UPC) were bound to escalate. The French
were already whispering around in some circles that they would never allow the
UPC to realize its program to reunite French Cameroun and British Cameroons and
then lead both United Nations Trust Territories to independence. Why the French
assumed that they could get away with their game plan in complete disregard of
the fact that the UPC commanded the support of the majority of the peoples of
the former German colony, he could not tell. There was something else he was
also sure about—his UPC comrades would fight the French and their puppets to
the bitter end rather than live under the deceptive independence and democracy
that the French were planning to impose on their overseas territories and colonies.
Nevertheless, Joseph
Njike did not want to be involved in the madness of war. He would do everything
within his power to shield his family from the horrors of the deteriorating
situation. He would run away from the war
the way his grandfather tried to do.
Joseph Njike picked up a
copy of the Monday, Dec. 02, 1957, edition of Time Magazine among the papers on
the stool by his side and then flipped the pages over to the article he had
been told about. It read JUNGLE TERROR. He licked his lips and then went on to
read the full article:
Six months after the
French gave internal autonomy to the French Cameroun, a California-sized land
of steaming coastal plains, rain-sodden jungles
and high savannah just above the equator on Africa's West Coast, native Premier
André-Marie Mbida finds himself confronted with a reign of terror spearheaded
by 5,000 hard-core Communist guerrillas-Led by a Prague-trained Communist named
Ruben Um Nyobé, first secretary of the Red-front Union of the Peoples of the
Cameroons (UPC)…in the...heartland of the 120,000-member Bassa tribe, center of
the spreading rebel movement…
Joseph Njike closed his eyes for a
moment and ruminated. He was convinced the UPC was losing the media war. Being
tagged communist was not a good sign at all. He picked up the Mar. 03, 1958,
edition of another Time magazine and settled on the article entitled FALLEN
IDOL.
The French thought
they had found the ideal man last May when they picked André Marie Mbida, 40,
to serve as first Premier of the semiautonomous French Camerouns, the
California-sized territory near the equator on Africa's west coast. His
forehead bears a blue tribal tattoo; he is a Roman Catholic; and like the
French themselves, he does not want to rush into independence before the 3,300,000
African inhabitants are prepared for it. When Mbida wanted to get tough with
Communist-led rebels who were terrorizing parts of the country's coastal
regions from jungle bases (TIME, Dec. 2), the French approved and dispatched
two companies of French troops to help out…But Mbida became careless with the
label of "Communist"—he began to use it against anyone who disagreed
with him. He banished political opponents to remote areas, imprisoned an
opposition editor who published an article written by Ruben Um Nyobé,
Red-trained leader of the rebels. The French themselves gradually became
disenchanted with Mbida…As successor, the French chose Ahmadou Ahidjo, 33, who
had served as Vice Premier and Interior Minister in Mbida's government. Ahidjo
announced his policy: independence (but without a timetable), union of the
British and French Camerouns, cooperation with France on a basis of equality
and confidence—a program that should steal thunder from the supporters of
Moscow and Cairo. Ahidjo also is expected to try to lure the rebels out of the
jungle with the promise that they will suffer no punishment if they
surrender—the kind of offer Mbida had refused to make.
Joseph Njike spent the next hour
reading the other papers in French. The stories were all the same. The media
had succeeded in branding the UPC a communist movement. He put the last newspaper
back on the stool, shut his eyes for a moment and brooded.
“Oh no, no, no,” he
raged. “They have found another puppet to turn the north too against us.”
He opened his eyes again
and looked around him in a dazed manner.
Satisfied that his outburst went unnoticed, he breathed out heavily and looked
at the setting sun and the picturesque view it gave of the rolling hills of
Banganté. Everything looks so peaceful, he thought.
A feeling of relief swept
over Joseph Nkabyo Njike as he thought of his family. He was glad he brought
them back home to the serenity of the life he was born and bred in. Only, he
could not completely dispel the feeling that perhaps he had deserted his
friends at the helm of the UPC party and the mushrooming partisan movement
confronting the French military in French Cameroun. If only they could
understand that his decision not to take sides in the mushrooming war had deep
roots. He could not overlook his past commitments to both sides of the
conflict, a past that sometimes made him smile
and sigh in turns.
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