The Cameroon War

Legend has it that the end of France’s empire in sub-Saharan Africa was a peaceful affair. This book tells a very different story, exposing the shocking violence of a secret war. Its theater was Cameroon in the 1950s and ‘60s, where a mass movement for self-determination emerged under the leadership of a pro-independence party, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC). In response, the colonial power opted for brutal repression. Employing the same methods as in Algeria, French forces waged a counterinsurgency campaign of extraordinary violence, eventually eradicating the opposition and installing a client dictatorship in Yaoundé. At the height of the Cold War, with attention focused on the Algerian bloodbath, the conflict in Cameroon received little attention at the time. Subsequently, its devastating consequences — and tens of thousands of victims — would be intentionally obscured by French authorities and their local collaborators. The Cameroon War uncovers this hidden history for the first time. It illuminates a forgotten struggle for decolonization at the origin of neocolonial rule in Francophone Africa that persists to this day.