Tugrul Oguzhan YilmazOn the night of December 30, 1956, French forces descended stealthily on the village of Ekité in the Sanaga-Maritime department of Cameroon's Littoral province.
By dawn, 500 civilians were dead. Men, women or children, the killers didn't discriminate.
It was, as Prof Hamadou Adama of the University of Ngaoundere describes it, "the most emblematic massacre" of France's undeclared war in Cameroon.
Yet, for decades, this mass murder and countless other atrocities remained buried in classified archives, and fortified by an impenetrable wall of official denial.
French President Emmanuel Macron's recent acknowledgement of his country's "multifaceted repressive violence" in Cameroon has since reopened wounds that never truly healed.
Understanding the depth of these scars requires examining how a land of ancient civilisations and diverse peoples became the battleground for one of colonialism's most concealed wars.
A land divided
Before European colonisation carved it into pieces, Cameroon was heir to great African civilisations –the Kanem-Bornu Empire, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Adamawa Emirate.
Its land sustained over 250 ethnic groups, including the Bamileke, Bamoun, Bassa, Douala, Ewondo, Bulu, Maka, Pygmy and Kirdi peoples.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this repository of diverse civilisations unwittingly became the prize in a colonial scramble between Germany, Britain and France.
"European colonialism rests on a philosophy based on the denial of the 'other' and of the civilisation and culture that the other possesses," says Dr Gassim Ibrahim of the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, explaining the colonial philosophy that underpinned this conquest.
"The colonisation of Africa was shaped by racial theories that portrayed the continent as one without history, thereby justifying its colonisation under the pretext of implanting the supposedly superior European civilisation."
Germany established control over Cameroon's coastal regions in 1884, coinciding with the infamous Berlin Conference that had been convened to create a framework for the continent's colonisation and exploitation.
As Germany gradually pushed inland, the Adamawa region held out until 1901 before it too fell.
Britain and France joined the scramble soon after, wielding missionary activity as a weapon. France spread Catholicism while Britain propagated Protestantism.
Germany's defeat in the First World War reshuffled the colonial deck. In 1918, British and French forces occupied the territory and divided the spoils. While France took four-fifths of the pie, including the southeast, Britain claimed one-fifth in the west.
The July 1919 London Declaration formalised this partition. Three years later, the League of Nations granted Britain and France authority over their respective portions.
Britain split its territory into Northern and Southern Cameroons, administering them alongside Nigeria. France established its colonial headquarters in Yaoundé.
After the Second World War, the mandate system continued under UN trusteeship, but the artificial boundaries remained.
"In Cameroon, the Germans divided the territory into East and West Cameroon, according to their own interests and without taking local dynamics into account," Dr Ibrahim tells TRT Afrika.
The French approach was equally destructive. "These policies combined acts of discrimination, repression, and violence aimed at making the indigenous population internalise the idea of their own cultural inferiority, followed by encouragement to adopt the so-called superior French civilisation," says Dr Ibrahim.
Stirrings of nationalism
Leaders like Félix-Roland Moumié and Ruben Um Nyobè were at the forefront of the movement against racism and colonial rule, founding the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC) in 1948 to carry the torch.
Um Nyobè took the struggle to the international stage. "In 1952, he gave a speech at the United Nations to contest French presence in Cameroon. Moumié pursued the same line," says Prof Hamadou Adama of the University of Ngaoundere.
While the movement initially didn't breach the rule of law, persistent French atrocities forced the nationalists to take up arms. France's response was to orchestrate the assassination of Nyobé in 1958 and the poisoning of Moumié in Geneva by a French secret service agent, William Bechtel.
Between 1956 and 1961, the war in Cameroon's south and west claimed tens of thousands of lives. As the newly released report states, "On the French side, the Cameroon War remains an unknown chapter in the memory of the colonial past. On the Cameroonian side, it has left deep and lasting scars."
France installed Ahmadou Ahidjo as Prime Minister in 1958. When French Cameroon declared independence on January 1, 1960, Ahidjo became the first President. The war continued nevertheless, with French forces actively supporting operations against UPC fighters.
Max Bardet, a former pilot who served in Cameroon from 1962 to 1964, has testified to the systematic targeting of the Bamileke people.
French forces bombed villages, forced hundreds of thousands into internment camps and tortured them. Even women and children weren't spared. These atrocities were systematically covered up.
Cloaking the truth
France employed elaborate strategies to conceal the war's atrocities from both the French and Cameroonian public.
Prof Jacob Tatsitsa of the University of Ottawa in Canada has researched and written extensively about the systematic cover-up.
"First, in 1955, particularly after France's defeat in Indochina, it decided to teach Cameroon a lesson in revolutionary warfare, a set of measures to be implemented to delegitimise the struggle of Cameroonian nationalists," he explains.
A circular from Roland Pré, who was appointed high commissioner of Cameroon in 1954, prescribed establishing press outlets that would praise the French administration while downplaying the struggle for independence.
As part of the strategy, war zones were closed to journalists. The few who had access were those complicit in France's clandestine activities.
After independence, the censorship actually intensified, says Tatsitsa.
Anyone found with documents supporting the UPC faced arrest and imprisonment under what were called anti-subversion laws. The censorship extended to France much later, with the book Main basse sur le Cameroun by Mongo Beti being banned for its critical analysis of the situation in Cameroon.
"Nominal independence meant independence stripped of all its substance, because the French infiltrated all positions of sovereignty," says Tatsitsa.
A divided legacy
The scars of the colonial era continue to fester in Cameroon.
When Southern Cameroons voted in a February 1961 referendum to unite with the Republic of Cameroon (whilst Northern Cameroons joined Nigeria), the country inherited conflicting colonial systems. East Cameroon carried French culture, language, law and education. West Cameroon bore the British equivalents.
"Although the two Cameroons united under a federal system, the distinct colonial legacies they had inherited and sought to preserve gradually became a source of conflict," says Dr Ibrahim.
The shift from a federal to unitary state in 1972 saw the French-speaking majority – about 80% of the population – impose assimilation policies on the English-speaking minority.
"This problem deepened over time and, by 2016, escalated into an armed struggle led by the Anglophone population demanding full independence. To this day, this externally imported problem has yet to be resolved," rues Dr Ibrahim.
Even after France's formal withdrawal, French advisors remained embedded throughout Cameroon's administration, military and police, supported by local collaborators. The deaths of tens of thousands were deliberately concealed.
Waiting for reparation
While Macron's acknowledgement breaks decades of official silence, it still rings hollow in the ears of many Cameroonians.
"For Cameroonians, this recognition is belated and incomplete, as the term 'reparations' is nowhere to be found in this letter. We are still waiting for an apology and reparations, and then for the archives to be fully opened, digitised and made available to all researchers," says Tatsitsa.
Dr Therence Atabong Njuafac, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations and political science and heads the organisation Humanity Helping Hands Cameroon, points to systemic collusion for this part of the nation's history remaining buried.
"Our leaders have strong relations with France, and it seems they collaborate in many ways. France still has a lot to do within the country. Even our currency is being made in France, so you can tell you how connected the two countries still are," he tells TRT Afrika. "Maybe the masses are angry with France, but not the government."
Adama speaks about Macron's letter leaving "a bitter taste" rather than healing. "France does not address the issue of reparation, the issue of justice. It is content to control the narrative and to try to stretch the cover-up on its side."
But Dr Ibrahim sees this moment as an opportunity. "Following Macron's remarks, I believe the time has come to revisit the history of Cameroon's struggle against French colonial rule by turning back to the archives," he says.
A few critical questions remain unanswered, though. "Will historians and researchers be willing to uncover these archives? And will Cameroon itself allow and encourage such an undertaking?" Dr Ibrahim wonders.
This article was first published on TRT Afrika.
