Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: nationalism, Grassfields tradition, and state building in Cameroon by Meredith Terretta (review)

Popular liberation struggles across the African continent are memorialized today as significant episodes in Africa’s long history to rid itself of imperialists and colonialists. In Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa, liberation struggles are invoked to remind younger generations of the sacrifices their fore-bears made. These cases contrast sharply with those African liberation struggles that failed, and with the considerable efforts deployed by state officials to enforce amnesia about the radically different futures imagined by their leaders. Such is the fate that befell the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), French Cameroon’s leading nationalist movement. Founded in 1948, the UPC spearheaded a powerful liberation struggle that, however, was defeated by French and Cameroonian military forces during the first decade of independence.

In Nation of Outlaws, Meredith Terretta weaves a deep history of ‘the practice and discourse of Cameroonian nationalism’ (p. 2) championed by the UPC. In six chapters, Terretta recounts the existential conditions that inspired the birth of nationalist movements in French Cameroon and explains why the UPC enjoyed tremendous popular appeal, especially among the Bamileke and their migrants in the Mungo River valley. While nationalist struggles resonated with the Bamileke yearning for independence (lepue) and with pan-Africanist dimensions, the UPC was eventually destroyed by the nascent postcolonial state. While Nation of Outlaws is a history about the UPC’s rise and defeat as a nationalist movement, it is, Terretta suggests, ‘also a story of the state’s failure to become a nation’ (p. 4).

The book offers a deep history in terms of the breadth and wealth of sources employed, including archival documents from the UN, France, Great Britain, Ghana and Cameroon, and, importantly, oral testimonies from dozens of individuals in Cameroon and Ghana (p. 3). The book is also unique because it is arguably the first historical account of French Cameroon’s nationalist movements and thus lays the foundation for a much-needed historiographical interrogation of French Cameroon’s late colonial and early post-independence history.

One of the strengths of Terretta’s analysis in Nation of Outlaws is the way it discusses how Bamileke identity, ‘entirely absent before French rule’ (p. 61), emerged in the 1920s in conjunction with Bamileke migration to the Mungo River valley. By 1955, 54 per cent of the total population of the Mungo area came from the ‘Grassfields’, and a majority of them self-identified as ‘Bamileke’. The colonial origins of the Bamileke ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ lie in the economic crisis linked to the Great Depression between 1929 and 1934. As plantation owners, the Bamileke drew on an advantage that autochthonous landowners or even European planters did not have: free labour mobilized through family and patronage networks (p. 72). By the end of the economic crisis in 1934, many autochthonous planters in the Mungo region had lost their plantations to Bamileke migrants. Although organized around their chiefdoms of origin, Bamileke communities in the Mungo region developed powerful networks that provided credit and financial support to fellow migrants, precursors of today’s ‘tontines’. Initially through labour unions that advocated equal treatment for European and African planters and labourers, UPC nationalism took root among these agro-industrial communities (p. 101).

UPC nationalism intersected quite powerfully with yearnings for ‘independence’ or autonomy that resonated with the chiefly Bamileke but eluded the relatively acephalous communities of the Mungo region. When the UPC was banned by French administrators in 1955, its leaders and militants receded to the hills of Bamileke country and to the forest and mountainous zones of the Mungo region and created the underground resistance also known as the maquis (p. 129). The intersection of chieftaincy issues and nationalist politics is best captured by the rise and brutal demise of the Baham chief Fo Kamdem Ninyim, who once declared himself ‘to be the protector of the UPC in the Bamileke Region’ (p. 149). When French Cameroon...