Betrayal of Too Trusting a People. The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons: The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons

5. A Black Colonialist Makes an Expansionist Claim

Chapter Five A Black Colonialist Makes an Expansionist Claim Cameroun Republic asserts sovereignty over the Southern Cameroons. The claimed bases of that assertion are two arguments, one founded on “history” and the other on so-called “popular consent to incorporation.” According to Cameroun Republic, the 20-odd years of German colonisation of a swathe of territory at the hinge of Africa created a “Kamerun nation” Cameroun Republic succeeded to that “nation” on 1 January 1960 when it attained independence from France and became an international person. Further, Cameroun Republic also acquired, on account of its larger spatial and demographic configuration compared to that of the Southern Cameroons, the status of “mother country” with a historic mission to reassemble all the territories that made up the extinct German Kamerun protectorate and so create “Greater Cameroun Republic.” A former Cameroun Republic academic and later a government minister starkly expressed the territorial ambition of Cameroun Republic in these terms: L’un des objectifs fondamentaux de la République du Cameroun est d’arriver à réaliser l’unité du territoire.1 Lorsque la République du Cameroun proclame [...] le respect des frontières nées de la décolonisation, elle vise les frontières du Cameroun telles qu’elles se présentent en 1910 […] elle revendique le retour aux frontières coloniales.2 In 1961, Ahidjo canvassed for the first time Cameroun Republic’s expansionist argument. Making his closing speech at the aborted Foumban constitutional meeting in August 1961, Ahidjo told the unsuspecting Southern Cameroons’ delegation: Consequently, it fell upon Cameroun Republic which already enjoyed its international sovereignty and which already 64 Betrayal of Too Trusting a People had its institutions, to adjust its very constitution in order to form a union with the brother territory of the Southern Cameroons.3 That was an elliptical statement. In effect this is what Ahidjo was saying: there was no new constitution to be worked out by common bargain between the two parties; Cameroun Republic would simply tinker with its existing constitution to facilitate the constitutional accession of the Southern Cameroons to Cameroun Republic. A few weeks later, Ahidjo expressed his expansionist pretensions in plain language. Addressing his country’s National Assembly later in the month, Ahidjo claimed that the United Nations, by its Resolution 1608 (XV), ‘imposed on us the obligation to adjust the institutional structures of Cameroun Republic so as to receive back a dismembered part of our country.’ 4 Ahidjo’s “Federal Constitution” was thus an entirely Cameroun Republic affair, drafted by Cameroun Republic and adopted by the legislature of that country. The long title of the document rehearsed the expansionist argument by declaring that Cameroun Republic amended its constitution ‘so as to allow for the return of part of its territory.’ In a speech to the congress of his Union Camerounaise political party in Ebolowa in July 1962, Ahidjo put his expansionist claim much more bluntly: The reunification of the Southern Cameroons and Cameroun Republic did not necessitate a fundamental change of the constitution of Cameroun Republic, but only a minor amendment to allow for part of the territory to rejoin the mother land [...] It was Cameroun Republic which had to transform itself into a Federation, taking into account the return to it of a part of its territory, a part possessing certain special characteristics.5 Ahidjo was no lawyer and was of course not talking law. His French advisers ‘forget’ to tell him he could not credibly talk of ‘recovering lost territory’ because the very fact of the UN-ordained plebiscite in the Southern Cameroons was in itself the complete 65 A Black Colonialist Makes an Expansionist Claim legal and political rebuttal, by the international community, of his nonsensical talk about ‘recovery of lost territory’. If indeed, the Southern Cameroons were a lost-and-found part of Cameroun Republic, there would have been no need for the plebiscite; the UN and Britain would simply have returned the Southern Cameroons (and the Northern Cameroons as well) to Cameroun Republic in the same way Spain returned Ifni to Morocco and Britain returned Hong Kong to China. The legal implications of the plebiscite were that the UN recognised the fact that the native inhabitants of the Southern Cameroons constitute a people within the meaning of the right of self determination; that the people of the Southern Cameroons have the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination; that the people of the Southern Cameroons...