When Britain and France defeated the German overseas army in Kamerun, the German colony in the central African region from 1884-1916, and then occupied the land, it was considered a strategic decision to deprive Germany of its richest colony in Africa, and therefore some of the raw materials it needed in its war effort against its enemies in World War One.
The Treaty of Versailles -- the most important of the peace treaties signed on 28 June 1919 that brought World War I to a close by ending the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers, confirmed the loss of German Kamerun, and gave a seal of approval of Kamerun's partition by Britain and France into British Cameroons (one quarter of the territory) and French Cameroon (the remainder of pre-1911 Kamerun).
Why was there no Kamerunian resistance to this partition, or why were there no vocal voices protesting the division of Kamerun?pundits would ask.
The answer lies in the fact that at the onset of the First World War (The Great War), the German colonial army in Kamerun executed the leaders (Martin-Paul Samba -- born Mebenga Mebono, Rudolf Duala Manga Bell and their collaborators Edande Mbita and Madola) of the land's civic-nationalist movement that was formed in 1910 with the goal to liberate it from German colonial rule.
The people of the partitioned Kamerun would rue this economic and social disruption of their lives and ponder the high deceleration in development that ensued under the rule of their new foreign patrons. Still, they would be sober enough to side with Britain and France against Nazi Germany and its allies during the Second World War; still, they would serve in their thousands in the British and French Armies that fought in Africa, Asia and Europe. In fact, after Germany invaded France, occupied the north of the country and established Vichy France (the successor of the Third Republic from July 1940 to August 1944) in the south of the country -- a de facto client and puppet state of Nazi Germany, French Cameroun would be the first French overseas territory to oppose Vichy France and side with Charles De Gaulle, the French general who refused to accept France's surrender to Nazi Germany and who vowed to resist Germany from abroad.
French Camerounians went on to form the bulk of General Charles De Gaulle's Free French Forces that was formed in Africa, and then went on to kick Vichy rule out in French Cameroun and French Central Africa, before marching all the way to Libya and challenging Italian forces there, a move that would lead to the Allied liberation of North Africa from Axis (German-Italian)control. French Camerounians would continue playing an active role in the fight that liberated Paris and the rest of France from German control.
So, when these French Camerounian former soldiers who fought for France returned and joined forces with other Kamerunian civic nationalists demanding the reunification and joint independence of French Cameroun and British Cameroons, it was a resuscitation of the cause of liberation snuffed outed by the Germans when they executed Martin Paul Samba, Rudolf Duala Manga-Bell and their associates. The formation of the Union of the Populations of the Cameroons (French: Union des Populations du Cameroun - UPC) on 11 April 1948 in French Cameroun, and the rise of UPC offshoots and sister parties in British Cameroons attested to the seriousness of the reunification and independence agenda. However, that agenda conflicted with French designs on the land and Francophone Africa.
Even so, the UPC did not see it coming when the French authorities embarked on suppressing it, starting with its ban on 13 July 1955, thereby forcing most of the party's leadership to flee into exile to British Southern Cameroons, then Egypt. Guinea, Ghana and China.
That was how France's relentless drive to thwart the "Kamerunian Dream" (Cameroonian Dream) began. That was France's first step that has led to the continuous frustration of the popular drive to found "THE NEW CAMEROON".
Janvier Tchouteu is the author of " The Mistakes To Be
Avoided in Building The New Cameroon"
Cameroon: France’s Dysfunctional Puppet System in Africa
by Janvier Tchouteu,
