The war in Cameroon began at the turn of the 1950s with the rise of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), a nationalist movement demanding independence and reunification of the French and British mandate territories. Paris responded with a campaign of repression that escalated into a protracted counter-insurgency from 1955, using methods familiar from its other colonial conflicts: mass internment, collective punishments, aerial bombardment of villages, targeted assassination. By the time of formal independence in 1960, France had installed Ahmadou Ahidjo, a conservative northern politician, as president, while continuing military operations against the UPC until the early 1970s. Ahidjo’s single-party state, backed by French advisers and intelligence, crushed opposition and built a loyal clientelist apparatus, providing a stable base for French oil and commercial interests. His successor Paul Biya, in power since 1982, has maintained the same neo-colonial edifice under the trappings of multi-party rule, combining authoritarian repression with selective liberalization, ensuring the continuity of a regime whose origins lie in the violent suppression of Cameroon’s independence struggle.
This war, euphemized as ‘disturbances’, has long been relegated to the margins of official historiography in France. In recent years its scale and ferocity have been brought to light by Thomas Deltombe, Jacob Tatsitsa and Manuel Domergue, whose meticulous reconstruction of the armed struggle and its suppression has become the standard reference. An updated English edition of The Cameroon War: A History of French Neocolonialism in Africa is now available from Verso. Earlier this month, NLR spoke to Deltombe – a historian and editor at La Découverte, born in Nantes in 1980 – about his research in light of the French government’s recent release of a report on the conflict, set against the backdrop of Macron’s attempt to preserve France’s influence over its former African possessions.
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To begin, could you sketch your own trajectory: how did you come to focus on Cameroon and its colonial and post-colonial history?
My work on colonial history – and what is usually called ‘decolonization’ – goes back to my first book, published twenty years ago, on Islamophobia in France. Trying to trace the roots of contemporary racism led me to France’s colonial past, and I soon realized how much of what I’d been taught rested on myths and omissions. One of the most tenacious myths is that France’s sub-Saharan colonies gained independence peacefully, by mutual understanding with Paris. A sharp line is drawn between so-called ‘black Africa’ and North Africa, above all Algeria, where independence was won by force. That story has endured for decades by blotting out the bitter – and mostly unsuccessful – armed struggles for independence in sub-Saharan Africa. What is now known as the Cameroon War is perhaps the most striking example of these forgotten campaigns, and that’s what drew me to it.
When I began working on this history in the mid-2000s, with the journalist Manuel Domergue and the historian Jacob Tatsitsa, I found that the conflict had left few traces in conventional historiography. At most, it appeared in a footnote, described as ‘disturbances’ that cost a few hundred lives. By contrast, some activists – notably Cameroonian – who sought to break the silence around this period spoke instead of a ‘genocide’ with hundreds of thousands of victims. Faced with these sharply divergent accounts, we set out to establish as clearly as possible what had actually happened in Cameroon in the 1950s and 1960s. We immersed ourselves in the existing literature – little known or long forgotten – produced by militants, journalists and academics. These writings are valuable but often dated or focussed only on the earliest stages of the conflict. Our aim was to reconstruct the entire sequence, from the creation of the UPC in 1948 through to the execution of its last major leader, Ernest Ouandié, in 1971. For five years we worked in France and Cameroon, as well as in Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, gathering as much archival material as we could find and recording as many testimonies as possible.
Our conclusion, presented in Kamerun! (2011), was that France had indeed waged a war in Cameroon in the 1950s and 1960s. Hence the title of our second book, La Guerre du Cameroun (2016), which built on and expanded our earlier research. The designation ‘war’ is crucial: the term had scarcely been used by earlier scholars, and then only in passing. From 1955 onwards, France employed in Cameroon the same techniques it was using in Algeria, theorized as the doctrine of ‘revolutionary warfare’. We saw no reason to call one case a war and not the other. If there was a war in Algeria, there was a war in Cameroon.
What explains the discrepancy between how the two conflicts are remembered in France today, both in the historical literature and more widely?
The first difference is scale: Cameroon’s population was far smaller than Algeria’s. The second is status: Cameroon was not a settler colony but a UN trust territory. And the outcomes diverged completely. In Algeria, the independence movement prevailed; in Cameroon, it did not. Both states were granted ‘independence’, but of very different kinds. Another contrast lies in the chronology of the conflicts. Algeria’s war had a clear beginning and end: the insurrection of 1 November 1954 and the Evian accords of 19 March 1962. In Cameroon, matters are less straightforward. The colonial administration steadily tightened the screws on the UPC, which in turn began to plan, and then to launch, armed resistance around 1955–56. The conflict reached its climax at the moment France granted the country nominal independence, in 1960, then dragged on into the early 1970s, gradually losing intensity. It was a war – but an undeclared one, with no official start or finish.
There is a third major difference: the Algerian war resounded across France and beyond; the war in Cameroon was fought in secret. To understand this, one has to look at Cameroon’s particular legal status. After the end of German colonization in the First World War, the territory was placed under international trusteeship – like Palestine, Togo, Rwanda – and entrusted mainly to France, with a smaller portion entrusted to Britain. These two ‘administrating powers’, as they were called, had pledged to abide by certain rules of conduct and recognize certain rights for the local population. Under the UN Charter of 1945 and the Trusteeship Agreements of 1946, they were charged not only with maintaining ‘internal law and order’, but also with guaranteeing ‘freedom of thought’ and preparing the people of Cameroon for ‘self-government and independence’. It was precisely because France was breaking these international commitments that it conducted the war in secret.
‘Silence must reign’, ordered the head of the colonial administration in Cameroon in 1958. The demand was all the more pressing because France was simultaneously fighting the war in Algeria, provoking outcry at home and international censure of the self-styled ‘homeland of human rights’. Silence persisted after Cameroon’s independence. Having forcibly installed a ‘friendly regime’ in Yaoundé, French leaders had no interest in publicizing the military operations that continued in a country now deemed ‘independent’. Any publicity would have thrown the illegitimacy of the neocolonial regime into sharp relief. The silence then deepened as the new regime hardened into a brutal dictatorship, under President Ahmadou Ahidjo, with ongoing French support. Well into the early 1980s, even mentioning the ‘disturbances’ could mean arrest by the political police and disappearance into some grim ‘administrative internment camp’.
The French government actively abetted this policy of erasure. When Mongo Beti published Main basse sur le Cameroun with Maspero in 1972 – the first book to expose the sordid underside of Cameroon’s ‘decolonization’ – the authorities immediately banned and seized it. In time, and with censorship still in place, the record was effaced or reshaped in favour of the victors. True independence militants were branded ‘terrorists’, while Ahidjo was held up as ‘Father of the Nation’ and a devoted ‘democrat’ – a fable dutifully endorsed by the French press.
Another factor contributing to the silence is the extraordinary indifference – I might almost say contempt – of the French elite towards what happens south of the Sahara. Colonial racism, which for decades ranked ‘whites’, ‘Arabs’ and ‘blacks’ in strict hierarchy, lives on to this day: what affects ‘whites’ is of paramount importance, what concerns ‘Arabs’ deserves some attention, what happens to ‘blacks’ is apparently of no consequence. This is not uniquely French, but the racial ordering – now implicit – remains deeply entrenched in the French media.
In 2023, Emmanuel Macron entrusted Karine Ramondy with a commission to investigate the Cameroonian war – one of a series of presidential initiatives aimed at revisiting France’s relationship with its colonial past. In your view, what does the report contribute?
From the start, Macron placed questions of memory at the centre of his political and diplomatic agenda. Even before his election in 2017, he caused a stir by declaring on Algerian television that colonization was a ‘crime against humanity’, which called for ‘apologies’ from France. The main purpose of this dramatic statement, in my view, was to showcase his own daring and the novelty of his approach. Barely in his forties at the time, he took pains to highlight his youth and his willingness to ‘break taboos’ as a way of distinguishing himself from other presidential contenders. Commentators constantly referenced the fact that he had worked with Paul Ricoeur on a book devoted precisely to issues of memory. In short, candidate Macron – who claimed to transcend the left-right divide – promised ‘disruption’ in this field as in others.
Once elected, he watered down his stance. In continuity with his predecessors, he sought to use memory politics as a tool of symbolic pacification, in a French society often described as riven by ‘memory wars’ between the descendants of settlers, harkis, African nationalists, Jews and others. At the same time, he tried to turn memory into an instrument of soft power in Africa, where French imperialism is ever more openly challenged. In both domains – domestic and foreign – the watchword has been ‘reconciliation’. From the Élysée, Macron has sought, through carefully staged memorial exercises, to ‘reconcile’ France with itself and with its African partners. I’ve described the recruitment of media-savvy historians as part of a strategy of memory washing. The most prominent are Benjamin Stora and Pascal Blanchard. Stora, a specialist on Franco-Algerian relations, was asked by Macron to produce a report on the subject in the wake of the mass protests against police violence in the spring of 2020. Blanchard, who runs a memory-focused communications agency and has long worked for corporate clients, compiled – ‘under the high patronage of the president’ – a catalogue of historical figures ‘from diverse backgrounds’ who should be given greater prominence in public space. In both cases the declared aim was to offer symbolic gestures to the descendants of the colonized, on either side of the Mediterranean.
The same logic underpins the various commissions created by the presidency since 2017. The best known was chaired by Vincent Duclert, charged with examining France’s role in the Rwandan genocide. Delivered in March 2021, its report duly confirmed that France bore ‘serious and overwhelming responsibilities’ in the Tutsi genocide. But above all, it served to unfreeze Franco-Rwandan relations after a quarter-century of tension. Since then, France has invested heavily in the country, while the Rwandan army protects Total’s gas installations in Mozambique. As the American historian Nathaniel Powell has noted, ‘the Duclert Report, ironically, served as cover for French rapprochement with a bloody-minded and aggressive dictatorship in Kigali’.
Soon enough, the Élysée saw the advantage of involving Africans in this undertaking. Hence Macron’s enlistment of the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe for a ‘Franco-African summit’, held in Montpellier in 2021, and the launch of ‘commissions mixtes’ bringing together French and African scholars. The first such joint body was the commission on the Cameroonian war that you mentioned, convened in 2023–24 under the joint leadership of Ramondy and the Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy. Its report was submitted in January 2025. Since then, Macron has announced the creation of a joint commission on Franco-Malagasy history, and another on France and Haiti. Symptomatically, a further commission on the Algerian War was announced only to founder amid deteriorating diplomatic relations between Paris and Algiers.
It is important to emphasize that the purpose of these commissions is less scholarly than political, diplomatic and communicational. They have so far added little to what specialists already knew. What they do supply is a roster of ‘experts’ who, having agreed to collaborate with the Élysée, are bound to lend media support – and the imprimatur of academic authority. The strategy goes further still. By playing on the corporatist reflexes of the French academy, and on the climate of fear induced by political power in an increasingly precarious and vulnerable profession, the presidency has effectively nipped any challenge to its memory politics in the bud. Those historians who have put themselves at its service are seldom, if ever, criticized in academic circles, at least in public. On the contrary, they are invited to any number of seminars and conferences, where no one asks whether their role should really be to work for the Élysée and shake hands with France’s ‘friendly’ African autocrats.
The Élysée is using memory politics to muffle dissent from Africans and their descendants in France. Paul Max Morin and Sébastien Ledoux show this clearly in their study of Macron’s Algerian policy, and their conclusions apply just as well to his approach to sub-Saharan Africa. By means of a few symbolic ‘gestures’, Macron hopes to dampen the growing wave of anti-French protest south of the Sahara and to counter what he calls the ‘memory manipulations’ of rival powers, above all Russia. In this respect he is continuing a long colonial and neo-colonial tradition, accepting some of the criticism directed at France in order to neutralize anti-imperialist opposition. His reformism extends that of his predecessors who likewise sought to prolong France’s vaunted ‘presence’ in Africa – Mitterrand’s term in the 1950s – through cosmetic innovations.
The parallel with Mitterrand, which I explore in my latest research, is striking. In the early 1950s he served first as Minister for Overseas France (in effect, minister for the sub-Saharan colonies), then as Interior Minister, with responsibility for Algeria. He was one of the main theorists of neo-colonialism, devising a strategy to deflect radical protest with reformist concessions. A few minor adjustments, he argued, combined with alliances with the more moderate local elites – the ones most likely to accept the ‘outstretched hand’ of the colonial authorities – would best preserve what could be salvaged of French interests on the continent. Macron stands squarely in this neo-colonial tradition. The ‘plan of reconquest’ he spoke of during his state visit to South Africa in May 2021 closely resembles the one sketched by Mitterrand seventy years earlier: relying on African entrepreneurs, intellectuals and artists to counter movements demanding a clean break with the former colonial power – promptly branded ‘anti-French’. This is the project that lies behind the rhetoric of Franco-African ‘reconciliation’ and the endlessly repeated slogans about ‘our shared history’.
It was in order to preserve this supposedly shared history – imposed without the consent of the colonized and their descendants – and because ‘France has so much to do on the continent’, that Macron declared in Yaoundé in July 2022 the need to ‘clear away the obstacles of the past’. ‘If we take this path’, he argued, ‘we can even turn these misunderstandings into an opportunity. An opportunity for France, of course, because I believe that between France and Cameroon, between France and the African continent, there is a deep love story.’ The rest of the speech, devoted entirely to France’s economic interests in Cameroon and the international rivalries over Africa’s resources, left little doubt as to what sustains this ‘relationship’. The ‘obstacles of the past’ stand in the way of safeguarding France’s economic and strategic stakes in Africa.
Has there not been a shift in official discourse, all the same? After all, Macron did acknowledge for the first time that the Republic had fought a war in Cameroon.
If one follows the Élysée’s spin, relayed by the French press, scholarship paved the way for politics: a commission of historians established that there had been a war in Cameroon, prompting the president of the Republic to acknowledge France’s responsibility. In reality, things unfolded quite differently. As I described, the president effectively co-opted historians to adorn an exercise in memory-based soft power. I know this first-hand, since I myself was approached by the Élysée a few days before Macron’s trip to Yaoundé in late July 2022. I was invited to ‘challenge the president publicly’ on the Cameroon war, so that he would have a suitable occasion to announce the creation of his commission. I naturally refused this curious proposal. In any case, Macron had no doubt about the reality of the conflict. ‘It’s clear there were atrocities, a war and martyrs’, he declared during the same visit. ‘Much work already exists, and no one now disputes the essential facts’, confirmed Mbembe, who accompanied Macron on the trip and played a significant role behind the scenes.
That is not to say the work of the commission’s historians is worthless. It contains a wealth of detail of real interest, and ventures into still underexplored terrain – for example, the functioning of the judicial apparatus in late-1950s Cameroon. But many crucial issues remain in the shadows, above all the question of French interests. The commission steered clear of France’s economic stakes in Cameroon and sidestepped the conflict’s geopolitical purpose. Clearly the aim was to avoid embarrassing the grandees of today’s Cameroonian regime, the direct descendant of the one put in place during the war. It is also striking that the commission attempted no precise reckoning of the human toll. Falling back on figures cited by earlier authors, it merely confirmed that the war caused ‘tens of thousands of deaths’. Given the considerable financial resources at its disposal, one might have expected a demographic study capable of clarifying this sensitive point.
Another delicate issue swept aside was the legal status of the crimes committed by France – torture, the burning of villages, mass deportations. War crimes? Crimes against humanity? Genocide, as some have claimed? Instead, the commission declared that it was not the role of historians to provide legal definitions of past crimes. I can accept that view. But why, then, when asked in June 2025 about the legal nature of the crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, did President Macron say it would be for historians to decide whether these amounted to genocide? If politicians and historians keep passing the buck to one another when will justice ever be done to the victims of colonial crimes?
Macron issued his own statement on Cameroon in the form of a letter, correct?
It’s an astonishing document. First, the letter was addressed to Paul Biya, heir of the terror regime installed by France during the war. Why not address it to the Cameroonian people, the true victims of the conflict, who have endured Biya’s autocracy since 1982? From a symbolic standpoint, the choice is staggering. Second, the letter, presented everywhere as an ‘official’ acknowledgement, has in fact never been published on any official platform. It appears nowhere on the Élysée’s website, nor on government social media accounts. It was only ‘leaked’ to the press in mid-August 2025, when most French people – including journalists – were on holiday. Notably, the leak coincided with the news from Cameroon that Maurice Kamto, Biya’s main opponent, had been barred from contesting the presidential election scheduled for 12 October. At best, then, it was an unofficial recognition – if such a thing exists. A hollow, shabby gesture, which moreover feeds into Biya’s electoral propaganda.
Taken line by line, Macron’s letter is scandalous. True, he speaks of a ‘war’, as he had already done in 2022, but there is no longer any mention of ‘atrocities’, let alone ‘crimes’. Instead we are treated to euphemism: ‘repressive violence of various kinds’. He cites the names of four nationalist insurgents killed by France, but in so doing erases the tens of thousands of victims of the conflict. Worse still, he lapses into outright denial over the death of Félix Moumié, president of the UPC, poisoned in Geneva in October 1960 by a French secret-service agent – even though senior French officials have long acknowledged Paris’s responsibility for the assassination.
Another striking feature of the letter is that it refers only to the so-called period of ‘decolonization’. The historians’ commission did the same, confined by its mandate to the years 1945–71. In this way, the Franco-Cameroonian historical dispute is neatly limited to that single span, allowing many pressing questions to be pushed aside: the crimes committed by France up to 1945 – an era of staggering plunder and mass forced labour; and the unwavering French support for an autocratic, repressive regime that has endured in Cameroon for decades – years likewise marked by the wholesale extraction of resources, to the benefit above all of French multinationals such as Total and Bolloré.
And yet, this letter – offering neither apology nor any suggestion of reparation – is hailed in the press as a ‘major memorial turning-point’ (to quote the ever-obliging Pascal Blanchard). To my mind, it looks more like a bad joke – one in very poor taste, given the scale and gravity of the crimes at stake.
In Cameroon, talk of the war was long repressed under Biya’s regime. Yet the massacres, the burned villages, the political assassinations left deep scars. How does this memory circulate today within Cameroonian society? Do you have any sense of how the Ramondy commission’s report has been received there?
I am not best placed to describe how Cameroonians view Macron’s memorial initiatives. But in the testimonies we gathered from Cameroonians, they told us, time and again, that ‘the war is not over’. This phrase struck Manuel, Jacob and I deeply. For this war without end, waged at low intensity for decades, could easily flare up again in Cameroon. In other words, it is not only a matter of history. It remains a burning issue in the present. Here lies Macron’s error. Through his memorial gimmicks, he seeks to consign to the past historical phenomena that are not, in truth, concluded. His grand idea, as I’ve said, is to ‘clear away the obstacles of the past’, to demand of his African counterparts that they ‘turn the page’. In reality, this is an exercise in self-absolution: now that ‘we’ have acknowledged our crimes, let us stop dwelling on the past. But it is hard to write a ‘new page of history’ when the political script comes straight from Mitterrand-era neo-colonialism, and when Paris continues to prop up ageing pro-French dictators.
France’s recent reverses in the Sahel – the withdrawals from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, the gradual winding down of Operation Barkhane – seem to mark the end of a cycle of military and political activity. In this setting, is Françafrique still a useful lens for understanding today’s Franco–African relations, or should it be retired as a dated category?
In the book I co-edited on the history of Françafrique, we defined it as a highly flexible neo-colonial system. For nearly forty years its death has been proclaimed, yet French neo-colonialism has continually adapted to major global shifts – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ‘war on terror’, the rise of China. Every election brings promises of a break with this neo-colonial past; once in office, leaders do the opposite, seeking instead to reform the system in order to prolong it. This was Mitterrand’s doctrine at the time of decolonization in the 1950s, and the same logic has been at work since the mid-2000s. As I have said, Macron stands in this tradition: reforming Françafrique to keep it alive. But faced with unusually strong hostility in Africa – shaped by the historical conjuncture and compounded by his own arrogance – he has been far less successful than he hoped. His African policy, like the rest of his domestic and foreign record, is a failure. France is now reviled across much of the continent; former bastions of its pré carré have turned against their old patron – Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and, to some extent, Senegal. Yet beneath these sometimes dramatic shifts, which have monopolized attention, there are continuities. Certain regimes remain loyal to France – Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, the Republic of Congo. Core mechanisms, such as security cooperation and the CFA franc, remain firmly in place.
Cameroon, which has had only two presidents since 1960, is a textbook case of this continuity. Macron would certainly prefer a younger, ‘cooler’, more business-friendly counterpart in Yaoundé. But he continues to back the Biya regime. He has not suspended security cooperation, even as a war has raged in the Anglophone regions of the country – 6,500 dead and 700,000 displaced since 2017. As part of that cooperation agreement, he dispatched the head of the French gendarmerie to Cameroon this past June, a visit that drew scrutiny at a time when Biya’s government is doing everything in its power to stage-manage the forthcoming presidential election. The visit marked ‘a new stage in the strengthening of security relations between the two states’, as Jeune Afrique put it.
The erosion of French influence in Africa has cleared the way for other powers: Russia, as you mentioned earlier; China, omnipresent through loans and infrastructure; Turkey, with its growing diplomatic and military reach; the United Arab Emirates, seeking to expand their presence through investment and security partnerships. How should we understand this new multipolar configuration? Is it an opportunity for African societies, able to play competing powers against one another, or simply a shift in dependency?
It is not for me to say with whom Africans should work. What interests me is the official and media discourse in France. Here, again, the parallels with the 1950s are striking. Then, too, France – anxious to hold on to its African empire – looked nervously both at African popular demands and at the imperial competition of rival powers (the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union). The fear of ‘loss’, omnipresent among commentators in the 1950s, remains vivid today. Newspaper articles and television programmes are full of it: ‘Let us not lose Africa!’, ‘Is France losing Africa?’, ‘How Emmanuel Macron lost Africa’. A telling vocabulary – sixty-five years after independence.
The corollary of this (post-)colonial anxiety is the assumption that Africans, incapable of choosing their own destiny, are condemned to live under tutelage: if not under France’s, then under Moscow’s or Beijing’s. The implication being that France may not always have behaved blamelessly in Africa, but Africans would be far worse off under the sway of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Even supposing that were true, the French are hardly in a position to hand down such lessons.
Access to the archives remains a decisive issue for the history of the Cameroon war, as for other colonial conflicts. In France, official announcements of ‘opening’ are often hedged with restrictions which, under the guise of protecting privacy or national security, in practice maintain secrecy. On the Cameroonian side, access is likewise extremely limited, both for the colonial period and the decades that followed. How do you see these challenges?
The question of archives raises several issues. One of the least discussed, but perhaps most important, is their preservation. In Cameroon, files are often left to rot in damp, poorly ventilated rooms. Another issue is availability. In broad terms, many archives relating to the Cameroon war are open. With Jacob and Manuel, we were able to consult thousands of documents in France and Cameroon, which, I believe, allowed us to piece together a reasonably precise history of the conflict. Macron’s commission was given access to some additional material – notably the records of the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage (SDECE) – but it was barred from the National Archives in Yaoundé, which we ourselves had consulted a few years earlier, officially because they were under renovation. Other collections remain closed, such as the files of the Service de coopération technique de police (SCTIP) in France, or the central police and gendarmerie records in Cameroon.
All researchers working on colonial questions are well aware of the profound asymmetry – and injustice – here: citizens of the former imperial powers enjoy far easier access to archival resources than others. This is why we have long demanded that the archives relating to Franco-Cameroonian history be fully digitized and made available online. The Ramondy–Bassy commission, for its part, at least recommended that a hard drive containing the documents it had consulted be sent to Cameroon, so that local researchers could work with them. In his letter to Biya, Macron did not grant this very modest request. He merely pledged that the commission’s archives would be gathered in a single location at the French National Archives. Cameroonian researchers will therefore only be able to consult them if France grants them a visa and if they can raise the funds to travel to Paris. A paltry concession from a man who fills his speeches with talk of ‘shared memory’. . .
Read on: Marc André, ‘Algeria in the Archives’, NLR 149.