After World War II: Colonial Tensions and Beginning of The War
After World War II, Cameroun was made a United Nations Trust Territory and unified into the French Union. From the beginning of the 1940s, colonial authorities encouraged a policy of agricultural diversification into monocultural crops: coffee in the west and cotton in the south. Construction of roads allowed for greater exploitation of wood. Of a total of three million inhabitants, the Cameroun territory counted 10% settlers, many who had been resident for decades, and approximatively 15,000 people linked to the colonial administration (civil servants, private agents, missionaries, etc.)
In 1946, a Representative Assembly of Cameroun (ARCAM) was constituted. Paul Ajoulat and Alexandre Douala Manga Bell were elected deputies of the French National Assembly. Some private and public schools were opened, while the best students were sent to Dakar (Senegal) or France to study in college. The colonial administration also built electricity and water infrastructures in large cities. In 1952, the Representative Assembly became the Territorial Assembly of Cameroun (ATCAM).
The Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), an anti-colonialist party created in 1948 and which struggled for unification of both Cameroons and for independence was outlawed in 1955. A colonial war then started and lasted for at least seven years, with the French Fourth Republic leading a harsh repression of the anti-colonialist movement. The conflict found its roots in the opposition between the settlers and the Cameroonese trade-unionists in the cities. After the Brazzaville Conference of January 1944, during which the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) issued several promises concerning progressive self-rule, the settlers organized themselves in 1945 in "General estates of colonisation" (Etats généraux de la colonisation").
A Cercle d'études marxistes (Marxist Study Circle) was created by Cameroonese in 1945, soon followed by the creation of the USCC (Union des syndicats confédérés du Cameroun, Union of Confederate Trade-Unions of Cameroon) at the initiative of the CGT trade-union. Conflicts erupted in September 1945, with the settlers violently debating with the French governor. Members of the USCC were arrested. In 1948, Ruben Um Nyobé became the head of the resistance movement, with a nationalist and revolutionary program. Nyobé's UPC was at first only the local section of the African Democratic Rally created in 1946. However, it refused to split, as did the African Democratic Rally, with the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1950. After some revolts and increasing tensions with the colonial administration, the UPC was outlawed on July 13, 1955 by the governor Roland Pré, forcing Nyobé into hiding, from where he led a guerrilla war against the French administration.
Read more about this topic: Cameroun
Famous quotes containing the words world, war, colonial, tensions and/or beginning:
“That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the world that we know—I mean our human reason—is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One must know that war is common, justice is strife, and everything happens according to strife and necessity.”
—Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“The three of them are enveloped
turning now to go crosstown in their
sense of each other, of pleasure,
of weather, of corners,
of leisurely tensions between them
and private silence.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance—due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful—and possibly the only—help that can be given.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)