Colonial & Post-independence Cameroon : France’s Role Now Traceable
- Par Godlove BAINKONG
- 29 janv. 2025 06:54
- 0 Likes
President Paul Biya yesterday January 28, 2025 at Unity Palace presided over a ceremony to present a report of the France-Cameroon Commission on France’s role and commitment against independence and opposition movement in Cameroon from 1945 to 1971.
Anyone desiring to know the good, the bad and even the ugly role France played in Cameroon’s colonial and post-independence era can now conveniently turn to a freshly-established document detailing the sweet-bitter history. Cameroon’s Head of State, Paul Biya, yesterday January 28, 2025 presided over a ceremony at Unity Palace during which a report on France’s role and commitment against independence and opposition movement in Cameroon from 1945 to 1971 was presented.
This was done by a France-Cameroon Commission set up by the government of France in 2023 to throw light on actions of the French government during the colonial and post-independence era in Cameroon. Yesterday’s report presentation came after a similar ceremony at the Elysée Palace in Paris, France a week ago (January 21) to French President, Emmanuel Macron. The Minister, Director of Civil Cabinet of the Presidency of Cameroon, Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, represented the Head of State. The 14-man joint Commission, co-chaired by French historian, Karine Ramondy and Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy, and made up of 12 multi-disciplinary researchers, was tasked with examining France’s role in Cameroon in the fight against independence and opposition movements between 1945 and 1971.
The report is the result of a commitment made by French President Emmanuel Macron during the joint press conference that marked his official visit to Yaounde in July 2022. He solemnly said at Cameroon’s State House that, “What I want is for us to be able to work together and launch a joint project by Cameroonian and French historians, who will then have access to all our archives. I hereby make a solemn commitment to open up our archives in their entirety to this group of joint historians who will enable us to shed light on the past in terms of individual situations and to qualify things very precisely. In other words, the involvement of France and the role of the Cameroonian authorities at the time, before and after independence.” To say the least, it is a pivotal period in Cameroon’s history, due to the severe repression that marked it, forcing several nationalist political leaders into exile and others to go underground.
It emerged from the report-presentation ceremony that in order to clarify this period of history, many aspects of which remained unclear, the members of the “Memory Commission” as it was known, worked tooth and nail to consult archives, gather testimonies and consult written documents. The report, in its four sections, therefore traces the genesis of the confrontation between the colonial authorities and the opposition to independence in the long-term colonial situation (1945-1955), the shift from political, diplomatic, police and judicial repression to the war waged by the French army (1955- 1960), which continued despite Cameroon’s political transition and independence (1960-1965) as well as the continuation of French aid on the basis of bonds between the two countries (1965-1971).
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