As a complement to the treatment given in the long article ‘The Great Eras of African History’, we append this review of the political movements now leading the struggle against colonialism in black Africa and Madagascar. Such work has become relevant again following the farce of the Gaullist referendum, which, according to the demagogic presentations of it given by the general on his trip through the French African possessions, is supposed to mark a turning point in relations between the metropolis and the colonies. So, by accepting the new para-fascist constitution, are the French colonies supposed to set themselves on the road to liberation? Has French capitalism, which has supported innumerable colonial wars, conducted horrendous repressions and arrogantly pursued a policy of deceit towards the black peoples it exploits, finally come to its senses and converted to a peaceful policy?

The truth is that French capitalism allowed Africans to have their say in an electoral consultation, provoked above all by the internal contradictions of the metropolis, for the simple reason that it knew in advance it would obtain the adhesion of the indigenous notables, tribal chiefs and the indigenous auxiliaries and bootlickers of the colonial administration. In addition to the influence it had won within the indigenous privileged castes by means of a cunning policy of bribery and intimidation, French colonialism relied, in order to run the referendum scam, on the blackmail with which it traditionally paralyses the action of African political movements, which are also for independence. When De Gaulle, in his ‘oceanic gatherings’ in Tananarive, Brazzaville, Conakry and Dakar, issued in a defiant tone his ultimatum: either adherence to the ‘Franco-African community’ or ‘economic isolation’, he was spesking as one who knows the opposing political camp‘s vulnerable spot. As we said in the article quoted above, the great obstacle in the way of the African parties, which are passionately attached to the independence principle, is the fear of being on their own, their lack of faith in the capacity of the future African nation-state to march alone without the intervention of French capital.

On his pre-election trip, De Gaulle encountered coldness and mistrust from his listeners, and in Dakar the crowd even staged a lively anti-French demonstration, cheering on the Algerian Liberation Front. But the fact is, amidst all the African men of politics, only Sékou-Touré, president of Guinea’s ‘Council of Government’, announced his people’s negative vote. ‘We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery,’ Sékou-Touré proudly exclaimed in his welcome address to De Gaulle. The pugnacious African politician belongs to the left wing of the R.D.A. (Rassemblement Democratique Africain), which we will discuss later. For now, it is enough to know, to get an idea of the contradictions that vitiate the African independence movement, that R.D.A. president Houphouët-Boigny himself is a minister in the De Gaulle cabinet. However, the announcement has already come that ex-French Guinea, with its 2.26 million inhabitants on 275,000 sq. km. with its iron, tin and diamond deposits, has become independent, having answered no to the Gaullist referendum, and that the French response was, immediately: ‘we will cut off your food supplies! We will not give you any more money!’

By promising the African peoples new federal-type ties with the metropolis, De Gaulle exploited another deficiency of the nationalist parties, namely the tendency to conceive of new relations with France precisely on a federal basis. But he was quick to set limits on the autonomy that the government in Paris was prepared to grant to the overseas possessions. What does the proposed Franco-African ‘community’ ultimately boil down to? ‘Each will have the complete freedom to govern itself’, De Gaulle proclaimed in Brazzaville on 24 August, but immediately afterwards added that in the community ‘there will be a pooled area which (...) will include defence, external, political and economic affairs, the direction of justice, education and more long-distant communications’. Anyone can see that the expression ‘pooling’ the administration of these fundamental departments was a hypocritical euphemism used to avoid saying that France grants itself the right to continue to enjoy, indefinitely, its prerogatives of privilege and its position as the dominant state. What’s left, in reality, of ‘autonomy’ to the future ‘federated’ governments of black Africa?

The followers of federalism, who still hold dominant positions in the main African nationalist parties, have been attended to. They now know what sort of ‘federation’ France intends to grant. Nothing more, in essence, than what was already granted with the famous ‘framework law’, passed in February 1956 by the Mollet government. It was inspired by the old paternalistic principles with which colonialism has long governed its colonies; indeed, it breathed new life into them. In fact, while the new organs of indigenous self-government envisaged by the framework law did not undermine the powers of the governor, who was rebaptised with a new official title for the occasion, they offered ample pasturage to feed the ambitions of African politicians in the service of the colonialist authorities.

In the course of this review, we will consider all the facts and issues we have listed here. To give the reader a clear view of the events, it is necessary to arrange the whole matter in chronological order. Moreover, without losing sight of the sense of the general political evolution taking place in French Africa, we treat the events territory by territory. We will begin with Togo and Cameroon, which represent a special case, being governed as territories entrusted by the UN in trusteeship to France. We then move on to West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, and end by dealing with the struggle taking place in Madagascar, a territory that ethnically and historically does not belong, as we know, to black Africa.

These territories, together with Algeria, the Comoros and Réunion islands, and French Somalia, make up the immense colonial empire of Paris in Africa. It is a vast, immense area, of over 10 million square kilometres, i.e. more than a third of the Continent and larger than the whole of Europe. French domination over this huge, sparsely populated expanse covered a total population of over 42 million.

Before addressing the first topic, i.e. the political evolution of Togo (of which it has already been announced that it will gain independence in 1960) and Cameroon, it is appropriate to make a few very brief remarks on the natural and economic conditions of the two territories.

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Togo is a thin rectangular strip of land, with a surface area of 56,500 sq. km., stretching between the republic of Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) and Dahomey, overlooking the Gulf of Guinea for a short distance. Savannah and sparse forest, represented by steppes associated with scrubland, prevail there. Indigenous agriculture is highly developed, being based on intensive culture and rational fertilisation. The main crops are maize, rice, cassava, sorghum and millet, and sweet potatoes. But the most important is cocoa, introduced by French colonists and managed in a capitalist form. But while in British-administered Togo, currently part of Ghana, cocoa takes on the character of a monoculture, with all its inherent negative aspects, this is not the case in French Togo. Some comparative figures: Ghana, the world’s largest producer of cocoa, produced 2,237,000 quintals of beans in 1955, whereas Togo reached 54,000 quintals in the same year. The country enjoys a fair amount of railway development, linked precisely to cocoa production. The population in 1956 amounted to 1,095,000, of which 1,300 were of European origin, mostly French. The indigenous population is predominantly black-Sudanese, divided into numerous tribes. In the south reside the Ewe, who cultivate the land and represent the most important ethnic group.

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Much larger than Togo in size and population is Cameroon (432,000 square kilometres; population 3,146,000, of which 14,100 are Europeans, mostly French). The density is lower than in Togo due to the inhospitable lowlands, but it is higher than the average for the rest of Equatorial Africa. Cameroon is a land of mutable landscapes. Nestled between British Nigeria and the A.E.F. territories, it overlooks the eastern coast of the Gulf of Guinea. The hot and humid equatorial climate becomes drier as one ascends from the slopes of Cameroon’s volcanic massif, almost entirely within British borders, towards Lake Chad; as a result, the equatorial forest thins out to give way to gallery forest, savannah and steppe.

The variety of natural conditions is matched by a diversification of economic activities. Livestock farming is limited to the northern savannah (about one million cattle, and as many sheep and goats) and is carried out by black Sudanese people, among whom there are Fulbe groups. There is no need to dwell on the criteria followed by the colonialist powers, starting with the Berlin Conference of 1895, to draw the boundaries of the African possessions. But the plight of the Fulbe, who we have seen also reside in Togo, shows how the colonialists never bothered to preserve the ethnic unity of the oppressed peoples, on the contrary, they contrived, in a premeditated way, to go in the opposite direction by inventing absurd mosaics of races, in order to then be able to declare that the ‘African nation’ is a utopia. But let us continue.

The entire forest area that occupies more than 40% of the entire surface is inhabited by Bantu negroes, among whom the most active and evolved are the Duala, fishermen and traders. Indigenous agricultural products are cassava, taro, yam, potatoes, forest products and rice, sorghum and maize in the savannah areas. Counterposed to the indigenous social structures, which perpetuate ancient forms of agricultural patriarchalism, is the European economic-social sector, which is based on the capitalist plantation. Introduced by the Germans, the capitalist agrarian holdings were inherited by the French, who in forty years prioritised the most profitable industrial crops, such as cocoa, which grows happily in the hot-humid climate of the coastal regions, and coffee, which is better suited to the inland highlands. Oil palm is also cultivated in large plantations, managed by large European companies. Equally important are other oil producing plants, such as peanuts and sesame.

Needless to say, while indigenous agriculture serves the people’s diet, the industrial crops in the hands of Europeans are entirely for export. Some figures: cocoa: 580,000 quintals of beans produced in 1955 (Cameroon ranks third as an African cocoa producer after Ghana and Nigeria); coffee: 108,000 quintals; oil palm: 206,000 quintals of nuts. Forest products for export include valuable timbers such as mahogany, ebony and iroko, a tree similar to teak.

Cameroon has an excellent railway and road network, which was created to meet the needs of the export trade. Some of the railway lines were built by the German administration, but there are also new ones, such as the Duala-Mbalmayo line, which connects the coast to the plateau in southern Cameroon. Very important is the phenomenon of urbanisation. The indigenous people tend to shirk the authority of chiefs and concentrate in the towns and ports, attracted by modern forms of social organisation. And this concentration explains the causes of the country’s political evolution, which for some time now has taken on very interesting aspects.

In our brief examination, it is not without reason that we give absolute precedence – see the introduction to the previous issue – to Togo and Cameroon. The modern history of African independence would not be well understood if one ignored the political evolution of these two territories since the end of the Second World War.

The independence movement managed to develop in Togo more successfully than elsewhere because, like Cameroon, it benefits from special favourable conditions due to the fact that it is not formally a French colony: indeed, both countries are administered by France on behalf of the United Nations. In official language, Togo is therefore a territory ‘in trust’, which is then the same as the infamous ‘mandates’ that the League of Nations entrusted to the colonialist powers. Therefore, the Togolese have never felt themselves to be French subjects, but have always looked upon France as a provisional guardian, to be broken free from as soon as possible. Moreover, the U.N. is officially committed to redeeming the territory from French tutelage and making it independent. Under these conditions, France had to use a very different attitude than in Madagascar or Algeria. Unable to use the guillotine, it resorted to cheating; but it could not prevent Togo from reaching an evolutive stage, which had important repercussions throughout black Africa.

As in all matters of history, to understand the present, it is necessary to go back to the past, to the German conquest. The territory, in spite of the mythologies built on ‘Germanic barbarism’, was acquired for the Kaiser’s Germany by the traveller Nachtigal who, in 1884, managed to conclude treaties with the most influential tribal chiefs in the region. It is a well-known fact that the upper section of society, be it a tribal caste or a modern economic class, is the one that usually makes deals with the foreigner. German rule in Togo came to an end on 27 August 1914, when the small garrison surrendered to the Entente allies.

With hostilities at an end, the new masters fraternally divided the spoils of the vanquished between them, and the League of Nations intervened to sanctify the transaction, heedless of the fact that the French and British had mutilated the territory. It is not to be believed that masterpieces of international justice, such as the separation of the two Koreas or the two Indochinas, or, worse, the two Germanys, are the result of degeneration. The international bodies birthed by imperialism have never manoeuvred borders other than as scimitars on peoples’ bodies. However, the partition that the brigandish Geneva body sanctioned on 20 July 1922, greatly aggravated the congeneric operation already carried out by the not-yet-rivals Germany and England. In fact, the two powers, with the conventions signed in 1890 and 1900, had divided up the area occupied by the Ewe tribe. Thus the division of the territory into Togo under French mandate and Togo under British mandate came to divide the already divided. Today, the Ewe, although speaking the same language and sharing the same ways of life, find themselves separated into three distinct parts. The Ewe are a people of active Negro Sudanese farmers and constitute the largest ethnic group in the region.

According to recent statistics, there are 400,000 Ewe in the Gold Coast; 150,000 in the southern part of British Togo and 175,000 in the southern part of French Togo.

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The political vibrancy of the Togolese independence movement can first be explained by the strongly rooted tendencies towards reunification among the Togolese people. The issue of the reunification of Togo was first addressed in 1947, when the independence party (Pan-Ewe Conference) of British Togo petitioned the UN Guardianship Council demanding the reunification of the territory inhabited by the Ewe tribes under one administration. The opposition of Britain and France, hypocritically disguised behind the usual legal masquerades, is well understood. As fiduciary powers, they have always schemed to push the political evolution of the territories in such a way that a constitutional structure would be created that would allow its ultimate incorporation into their respective colonial empires. That is to say, they worked to ensure that when the trusteeship expired, the two Togos were placed in an impossible position to give themselves an independent existence, and to reunite. Thus Great Britain has always focused on the incorporation of Togoland into the Gold Coast (now Ghana), aiming to foment racial divisions in the constituting African state. With no less arrogance, France pursued a parallel policy, striving for the ultimate capture of Togo under its mandate, and, in order to achieve this undeclared aim, it sought any constitutional reform that, under the guise of ending the trusteeship, would elevate Togo to an autonomous territory and then immediately incorporate it into the Union française prison structure.

This was a dangerous game. The white racists, by dint of repeating that the blacks were an inferior race, were persuaded that every trick and every deception, even the crudest, would allow the whites to have their way with the black, the eternal child. Proclaiming the trusteeship of Togo to have lapsed in order to annex it, following a fraudulent election, into the French Union, i.e. into the colonial empire of the French capitalists, is an act that reveals an incurable racist mentality. In fact, not only have the Togolese kept their aversion to colonialism intact, as the recent serious electoral defeat showed the colonialist authorities and their servants, but the autonomies granted to the Togolese, albeit with great mental reservations, were to create a ‘precedent’ to which the political formations of the whole of French black Africa struggling for emancipation would refer.

It will be good to follow the events with chronological rigour so that the reader gets a clear idea of their significance. In 1948, France and England, in order to silence the demands for reunification, mounted yet another scam by creating a joint Anglo-French Commission, whose proclaimed aim was to coordinate the two countries’ policies in certain areas, such as tax collection, economic management, cultural activity. But the Togolese parties refused to participate in this fraudulent body, whose collegiate formation had been scrupulously dosed so that the black element, as usual, was in the minority. Not betraying its nature, the Commission was dissolved in 1950, after rejecting a new request for unification made by the Ewe tribes. In its place, a ‘Common Council for Togolese Affairs’ was established, but this monstrosity also came to a swift end. The efforts of the administering powers towards the reunification of the two Togos did not go beyond this hypocritical carousel of commissions.

But perhaps the United Nations behaved better? They theoretically have the right to decide in the last resort on the fate of the territories under their protection: well, the only thing the worthy successor body to the League of Nations did, apart from the usual byzantinism of the plenary assemblies, was to send commissions to Togo.

To amuse the reader, we will tell their story. The first commission visited the country in 1949 and reported that ‘the aspiration (of the Togolese) for unification was gaining momentum’, i.e. it found out what the whole world knew. The second, sent in 1952, travelled the length and breadth of the country to convince itself that those who had preceded it had misinterpreted the feelings of the population. In fact, it stated in its report that there was no majority in favour of a particular solution. Evidently, over the course of three years, the population of Togo had undergone a profound psychological crisis, and had plunged into an incredible Hamletism: they did not know what they wanted! The mystery was unravelled by the protests of a number of Togolese organisations that rose up to accuse the French authorities of taking measures of ‘intimidation and coercion’ to prevent the free expression of the blacks. In 1953, the UN General Assembly invited France and Britain to reconstitute the Common Council for Togolese Affairs, but the request fell on deaf ears. Evidently, the two administering powers were opposed to any innovation that might appear to be a concession to the demands for unification made by the Togolese independence parties. But France did more. In fact, in 1955, the French authorities decided to stage, in defiance of the UN decisions, the constitutional farce we noted earlier.

On 16 April, Togo, first among all the overseas territories, was granted a ‘government council’ and ‘district councils’. This proves how Togo marched in the vanguard of the anti-French independence movement. In fact, this arrangement, which marks the first collapse of French colonialism in black Africa, even though the new organs do not affect the substance of colonial rule, was only extended to the other territories in July 1956. As we shall see better in French West Africa and Equatorial Africa, such organs had and still have a merely nominal power, the source of actual power still being the governor of the territory, even if his title, too closely linked to colonialist traditions, was changed. However, their introduction into the old colonial system marked the end, in a certain sense, of an era: that of the absolutism of the colonial bureaucracy.

The institutional ‘reform’ was followed by new elections. Having understood the French game, the nationalist parties in favour of the reunification of the two Togo states into one, boycotted them. This resulted in the election of a Territorial Assembly made up solely of pro-French collaborationists. In July, the comedy played out exactly as the French directors had hoped. The Assembly voted through unanimously (note: unanimously!) a motion calling for the abolition of the international guardianship regime and proclaiming the ‘will of the Togolese to continue their evolution in close association with France’. That is to say, the government in Paris aimed, with a single blow, to marginalise both the United Nations, which had the right to give the territory under ‘trusteeship’ a definitive arrangement, and the camp of the independence parties. We believe that the French ‘esprit’ is not indispensable for concocting such manoeuvres. Such shameless tricks, made possible by the venality and cowardice of a few brutes, are within the reach of any swindler.

The impudence of the colonialist authorities reached its peak the following year, when the Territorial Assembly approved (10 August 1956) a new statute drawn up by the French government. According to it, Togo became an ‘autonomous republic within the framework of the French union’. In other words, at the very instant Togo became ‘independent’, it was annexed to the French Union, aka the French colonial empire. What do we do at this point: do we laugh or do we get angry? Certainly the illustrious directors of French colonial policy must have been rubbing their hands together when the news came from Lomé confirming the success of the odious manoeuvre. But they were only fooling themselves. With such harlequinades one does not save a colonial empire from ruin.

That the new statute perpetuated, under the usual legal frills, the old colonial relationship is proven by even a very basic review of the attributions and competences of the new organs. The territorial assembly became a legislative assembly elected by universal suffrage for five years, while the old ‘government council’ was promoted to the rank of a council of ministers, responsible for all internal administration. But the Togolese government thus designed was deprived of the administration of internal and external security (i.e. the armed forces), which remained in the hands of the French commissioner, the former governor. Likewise reserved for the central organs of the French Republic, i.e. the government and parliament in Paris, were defence, foreign relations and public services. With no different criteria, De Gaulle would invent the Franco-African ‘community’.

Democratic hypocrisy required that the new statute, drawn up by the French government and approved by the Togolese puppet government, be put to a referendum. Little wonder: the bourgeoisie, in the metropolis or in the colonies, calls elections that it knows in advance it will win. The referendum, from the point of view of the special (and inane) jurisprudence of the UN, was illegal, since it was not up to France, the trustee power, to direct the political development of Togo. The UN refused to send observers. But the referendum still took place on the fixed date, namely 28 October 1956. Once again, the nationalist parties boycotted the consultation, managing to get 20% of the registered voters to follow them. 77% of the voters voted, with the following results: 71% were in favour of the new statute, i.e. for joining the Union Française; 5% were in favour of retaining the guardianship.

The way in which Salan and Massu’s praetorians organised the elections in Algeria, where voters received two differently coloured ballot papers, so that those voting for independence knew they were immediately identified by the thugs around them, threw a lot of light on France’s ‘democratic’ methods. What is happening today entitles one to cast doubt on all popular consultations organised by the French authorities in the colonies. What is certain is that the Togolese referendum was held without any control by UN observers. On the other hand, at the time the consultation took place, the president of the puppet government was Nicola Grunitzky, a well-known advocate of ‘independence within the framework of close cooperation with France’, the same as saying annexation to France. That the voters were misled by the promise of independence, and really believed that the proclamation of the termination of the guardianship marked the beginning of an independent existence whereas it only served France to oust the UN from the territory, is amply proved by the results of the Legislative Assembly elections in April this year.

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This consultation also has its own history. The reader may be surprised that we, anti-electionists and abstentionists, deal extensively with bourgeois electoral struggles. But, as we have had occasion to say elsewhere, one is the electoral competition that takes place in the milieu of the national-democratic revolution, where it happens that people put down their ballot papers in order to take up arms; quite another is the squalid card-carrying hullabaloo that takes place in capitalist countries, where all parties are tied together feeding from the same trough.

The United Nations, which had refused to oversee the referendum, did not accept the French argument that the territory was ripe for the end of the guardianship regime and postponed any decision until after the election of a legislative assembly by universal suffrage. Here again, the shamelessness of the French colonialists stands out: they fought the UN by claiming that the Togolese were now politically ripe to remove themselves from the guardianship regime, but immediately afterwards hastened to deny them the right to govern themselves, actually and not on paper.

Over the same period, the UN appointed a commission (another one!) to go there ‘to examine the overall situation in Togo resulting from the practical application of the new statute, and the conditions under which the statute itself had been implemented’. This time the commission (composed of representatives from Canada, Denmark, the Philippines, Guatemala, Yugoslavia and Liberia) saw things more perspicaciously, although it could not shake off the spirit of compromise. Indeed, it published a report in August 1957 in which it expressed ‘serious reservations about the extent of the autonomy granted to the Togolese government’, but described the 1956 statute as an ‘important, but not definitive step’ on the road to Togo’s political emancipation. Clear example of ‘a made in the ONU’ judgement. Here is France putting ‘international legality’ under its feet; the UN ‘commissioners’ are careful not to condemn it. What is an open arbitrariness on the part of France (the decision to end the guardianship regime in order to incorporate the territory into the French Union), is pilatesquely described as an ‘important step’ on the road to Togolese political independence! On the other hand, the report was approved that also insisted on a new election for the Togolese Legislative Assembly.

The collapse of the entire edifice of miserable deceptions artfully constructed by the French officials occurred as soon as the new electoral consultation took place. That it was a major defeat for French colonialism and its servitors is shown by the comments in the bourgeois press. On 29 April 1958, ‘Il Tempo’ headlined its correspondence from Lomé as follows: ‘The people of Togo vote for independence’ with the subtitle: ‘The elections, held under UN supervision, have shown that the former colony wants to break away from France’. Certain truths cannot be hidden. What is certain is that a radical political reversal was taking place in Togo, foiling all the manoeuvres of France and proving that the electorate, which two years earlier had approved the new statute imposed by the colonialist authorities, had been cleverly deceived, as the pro-colonialist camp had foreseen accession to the French Union as the beginning of independence. Instead, the experience was to open his eyes and show him that true Togolese independence was still to be won.

The elections of 27 April 1958 saw the overwhelming victory of a coalition of opposition parties. Of the 46 seats in the new legislative assembly, 28 went to the main opposition party, the ‘Committee of Togolese Unity’. The government parties, in favour of ‘independence within the framework of close cooperation with France’ suffered a resounding defeat. They barely managed to snatch 13 seats, 10 of which were allocated to the ‘Union of Chiefs and People of the North’ and 3 to the ‘Togolese Progress Party’, whose leader was Peter Grunitzky, an ardent supporter of the ‘Franco-African community’ and, at the time, outgoing prime minister.

The Togolese question remains open to this day. If France manoeuvred to achieve a de facto demise of the guardianship regime, the UN must have its final say. But more than the response of the assembly of what is the highest body of international conservation, what counts is the unequivocally expressed will of the Togolese people. That Togo does not intend to remain under French rule can no longer be denied by anyone. It is a small country created by the imperialists and not a product of natural conditions. On its own its development will be stunted, like almost all the territories that France has arbitrarily severed from the body of African nations: independence, under such conditions, will only make sense if it strengthens the unifying tendencies of the peoples that the current borders unnaturally divide. The fact remains, however, that the whole of black Africa subjected to French colonialism has been set in motion by Togo’s political evolution.

Following the outline given in the first article of this series, we move on to describe the stages of Cameroon’s political evolution. Without abandoning the chrono-historical form, we present the reader with the raw mass of events, deferring a more scrupulous sifting until later. Such a reservation is necessary because, among other things, it is not possible to derive information from sources other than the Atlantic bourgeois press, which tends to be pro-colonialist, and the Stalinist press, whose data and political judgments are no less tendentious because, while it poses as a protector of the colonies’ independence movements, it cannot but serve the great diplomatic operations of Russia, which nonchalantly grants patents of socialism and pro-socialism to Afro-Asian regimes that are orienting themselves, in the political but not social sphere, against the politico-military bloc of the West.

We started this review from Togo because this territory, which is not very large and certainly not among the most important from an economic and social point of view, was the first to embark on the road to independence, unblocking a situation that had lasted practically in the whole of black Africa since the Berlin Conference, the Conference of the Partition of Africa. The rupture of colonial forms in this territory was to, we now know, give a great boost to the independence movement that had been stirring up the whole of French black Africa since the end of the Second World War, with its epicentre in the advanced urban populations of western Sudan. French colonialism, everywhere on the rout, had deluded itself by entrenching itself in the residual positions it had preserved in Africa. But since capitalist France was forced to come to terms with Togolese independence, the attempt could be said to have failed.

A fact that fills those with satisfaction who conceive of the historical movement dialectically, is that the defeat of French colonialism in Togo was caused not so much by the opposition, however tenacious and courageous the independence parties were, but by the insoluble contradictions into which colonialism is falling as a result of the clashes between the imperialist forces which permanently confront each other on the terrain of world partition.

Togo, or rather the two French and British Togos derived from the partition of the old Germanic colony, had a trusteeship regime, i.e. they were nominally placed under the guardianship of the League of Nations yesterday, the UN today, but were ‘entrusted’ to French and British administration. And what differentiates a colony from a territory ‘in trusteeship’ if not a different relationship, not between the indigenous peoples and the occupying power, but between the latter and the other imperialist brigands? Everywhere, the pirates of French and British colonialism could not agree, after the First World War, on the partitioning of the Turkish and German colonial empires; and they had to fall back on the compromise of ‘mandates’ wherever they clashed with the appetites of the other imperialist marauders (USA, Japan, Italy, etc.). That is, it avoided the definitive assignment of a territory to the power that coveted its possession, staging the legal comedy that attributed to the international organisation the title of ‘mandating power’ and to the governments that materially occupied it that of ‘mandated power’, authorised to administer it temporarily while waiting for the territory under mandate to become ‘ripe’ for independence.

The regime of ‘mandates’ carried on until, in the upheaval caused by the Second World War, modern national parties arose in the colonies. Relying on the commitments made by the ‘mandated’ powers, they were quick to demand their implementation. On the other hand, the other powers framed in the United Nations body (the United States, Russia and so on) had no interest in supporting the manoeuvres of England and France to evade their commitments: on the contrary, they pursued and are pursuing new plans to partition the world. In situations like these, the unfolding of events seems to belie the materialist thesis that, in a class society, the only agent of conservation, and therefore of revolution, is force. But in fact, if the regime of mandates has everywhere collapsed and from its ruins have risen the new states of Syria and Israel, as in 1960 that of Togo will rise, this has happened not because the ‘mandated’ powers have spontaneously decided to respect the commitments they had made and to withdraw, but because the convergence of the independentist thrust of the local nationalist parties and the expansionist aims of the most powerful imperialist states allowed no other solution. By necessity, Togo, and like it Cameroon, as trusteeship territories, constituted the weakest point of the French colonialist array. The governing absolutism exercised by the French colonial bureaucracy throughout the immense overseas empire was undermined by the fact that it was overlaid, albeit formally, with UN jurisdiction. This circumstance allowed the independence parties to openly campaign for the liberation of the territory without France being able to treat them as rebels, as it did in 1946 in Madagascar and as it has done since 1954 in Algeria. The only saving grace for colonialist privilege was the local collaborationists, i.e. the social forces that make a living in the wake of the big colonialist monopolies, acting as matchmakers, intermediaries or employees, or who rely on the perpetuation of colonialism to preserve the privileges of tribal castes.

We have seen how French colonialism worked tenaciously to form in Togo an indigenous political class subservient to its interests, to which it formally entrusted the administration of the Togolese state, whose birth it was powerless to prevent. Unfortunately, this political mechanism which, in spite of the various Grunitzkys, was a miserable failure in Togo, was still made to work by the French colonial bureaucracy in Cameroon. Here, colonialism was able to divide the African forces across the political spectrum by subjugating a part of it and making it an instrument of repression against the independence movement which, on the strength of the Togolese experience, demands the end of the trusteeship, the expulsion of the French, and independence. Thus, the political evolution of Cameroon is marked by frequent outbreaks of violence, with revolts followed by ferocious repression.

We have already provided some background on the natural conditions of the territory, showing its economic importance. Alongside the indigenous sphere of production, which passes on archaic forms in the process of dissolution, lies the modern capitalist economy, which by now has fairly old traditions, having been introduced by the Germans, who became masters of the territory in 1884. The cornerstone of capitalist-type production is the large plantation, which produces for export and gives rise to important forms of distinctly capitalist economic activity, such as rail and road transport, and to social phenomena characteristic of the transition periods to capitalist industrialism.

What we are alluding to above all is urbanisation, which in Cameroon is on the rise, causing the asphyxiation of the old patriarchal-tribal order. Suffice it to say that, according to data provided by ‘Cahiers du communisme’ and ‘France nouvelle’ (two French Stalinist periodicals), the impact of the working class on the total African population, which in Togo barely touches 1.6%, reaches its maximum in Cameroon with 4.1%. That is, Cameroon is the territory in black Africa where the concentration index of the wage-earner is highest. It is no coincidence that French colonialism, which in recent times has churned out large industrial plant projects, envisaged for Cameroon the huge mining and hydro-electric complex of Edéa, the town on the banks of the Sanaga, the river to be dammed.

The presence of relatively large masses of proletarians concentrated mainly in the Sanaga-Maritime (southern Cameroon) originated from the forced labour introduced by the harsh German colonisation and inherited in full by their worthy French successors. It explains the radicalism that characterises the trade union and political struggles in Cameroon, with its history over recent years having been punctuated by major strikes, armed clashes, and ruthless repression. If capitalist colonialism, like ancient colonialism, aims at the conquest and exploitation of slaves, without whom a country’s wealth would remain unusable, one can understand France’s doggedness in their fight to retain territory and to succeed as direct administrator to the mandate regime that tends to indefinitely prolong, under other forms, a political structure of convenience. From the ports of Douala, Bonabèry and Kribi move the export currents that bring cocoa, coffee, bananas, rubber and precious woods into the commercial circuit of the metropolis, all products that would remain in the state of raw elements in Cameroonian soil without the hard slave labour of the indigenous workers. It also explains the obstinacy and cynicism of the Mbida collaborationists in their repression of the militants of the ‘Union of the Peoples of Cameroon’, which has been living in the bush since 1956.

Let us now try to retrace the steps of the movement for the redemption of the peoples of Cameroon, as we have already done for Togo, and as we will do later for the AOF, the AEF and Madagascar, in accordance with the need felt in our movement to have at hand an orderly reconstruction of the facts which the great press of these gentlemen passes over in silence or notes only in passing, never suspecting that in Africa, even in black Africa, which has been plunged into a lethargic sleep for centuries, the great wheel of history was being set into motion again.

Cameroon, about a century ago, was occupied by the Portuguese who introduced this name into political geography by christening the Wouri River ‘rios dos camaroes’, i.e. River of Shrimps. Unfortunately for them and their successors, it is safe to say that Cameroon emerged... a crayfish in a hurry to march off. Subsequently, the territory passed into the hands of the Dutch. Finally, in July 1884, the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal, whom we have already seen negotiating the purchase of Togo, planted the Germanic flag at the mouth of Cameroon. Expansion into the interior took place mainly as a result of the subjugation of the powerful Adamawa sultanate and was able to reach as far as the shores of Lake Chad. The State of Adamawa was founded by Fulbe conquerors from the Fouta Djallon, who invaded the country in the third decade of the last century. The state capital was Yola, which now belongs to Nigeria. A series of conventions between Germany, France and Great Britain between 1893 and 1898 put an end to the indigenous kingdom. Germany took the central part, Great Britain the western edge and France the north-eastern edge, which it incorporated into the territory of Chad. The partition was motivated by the excuse that the Adamawa state practised trafficking, i.e. an industry invented by Christian Europe and loudly insisted upon by post-Columbian America.

The German ‘liberators’ wasted no time in putting the conquest to good use: they covered the country with forts and subjected it to a military domination similar to that which the Shan-tung Chinese had to experience in the same period. Economic exploitation was at first limited to the commercial sphere, but later forced labour plantations were introduced. This period saw the birth of capitalism in Cameroon.

Germanic domination lasted until the year 1916, when Anglo-French troops, not without resistance, occupied the country. At the end of the conflict, Cameroon was again partitioned. The former colony of the Kaiser was split in two and divided by good thieves between the French and the British.

One fact should be noted that reveals the usurpatory mentality of the colonialists. In November 1895, France and Germany had agreed on another partition of the African prey. Since the government in Paris had an interest at the time in deflecting the German annexationist aims in Morocco, it thought it useful to cede to Germany a territory contiguous to the German possession that reached as far as the Congo, at the mouth of the Sanaga. Germany, which was in full colonising euphoria, took the bait. It was the time when German diplomacy dreamed of joining the territories bordering the Gulf of Guinea to what was then called German East Africa, thus founding a continuous colonial empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. At the end of the war, France only then realised that it had miscalculated: it incorporated the territories ceded to Germany in 1895, and had four fifths of the territory assigned to it as a ‘mandated’ power. As a result of this colonial arithmetic, the territory of Cameroon, which at the time of the German occupation was 795,000 square kilometres, was reduced to 520,000 square kilometres. The fifth that escaped the clutches of the French, namely the border strip with Nigeria, a British colony, would still pass as a mandate to Britain and was practically incorporated into Nigeria. It was with methods no different to these that the great colonial empires, glories of the European slave-trading bourgeoisie, were formed.

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Cameroon’s independence movement began in its modern form in the aftermath of World War II. In fact, with the exception of Senegal, the countries of black Africa only emerged from the lowest, and most atrocious, stage of colonialism a few years ago. France, the ‘great democracy’ dear to Blum and Herriot, as to Duclos and Thorez, kept alive until a few years after the end of the war not only racial discrimination, but forced labour as well. That is, the indigenous African differed little – in the face of the capitalist master – from the common criminal that French justice once sent to Cayenne. The abolition of such infamies, which we hope to see soon documented by African historians, was won through grandiose struggles, such as the memorable West African-wide strike of 1952, and the no less important strikes of 1953.

Cameroon, which gave birth to combative political and trade union movements, actively participated in the renewal process. It was in 1948 that the ‘Union of the Peoples of Cameroon’ (UPC) was founded: the largest Cameroonian independence party, a left-wing national-democratic party, with communist elements, aligned against the moderate and collaborationist camp, which had become an instrument of French policy. Its programme is based on the principles of immediate independence, the unification of the country, and the foundation of a Cameroonian national state with a republican form. According to ‘l’Unità’ of 20 February 1958, the Union of Cameroonian Peoples is closer even than the independence parties of the Algerian Liberation Front type to the political orientation of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. We have no way of checking this characterisation, but, holding to the general principles followed by Marxism in the national question, the communist revolutionary is mainly interested in the fact that the independence parties in the colonies truly constitute a revolutionary force in the face of imperialist colonialism and the archaic local social ugliness that colonialism keeps alive.

In 1950, Um Nyobè, general secretary of the UPC, presented the first official demand for independence to the UN, the ‘guardian power’, namely the end of the trusteeship. At the African leader’s gesture, the French governor Roland responded with a phrase that sums up the colonialists’ mentality very well: ‘If you want independence, it will be done with gun shots’. Thereafter, Um Nyobè had to, on several occasions, present the Union’s demands to the UN, demanding above all the revision of the protection clause that made the country a territory practically annexed to France.

The wave of strikes that swept across West Africa in 1952-53 was taken as a pretext by the colonialist thugs to launch a furious repression in Cameroon. The French carried out large-scale round-ups, burnt entire villages, and deported thousands of people. At the beginning of the following year, the terrorist action was still ongoing. In May the ‘roasting operation’ took place. In the cannibalistic language of the colonialists, this was the name given to the police assault on the UPC headquarters in Douala. The ‘civilisers’ found it edifying to douse the premises with petroleum and set fire to them, but not without locking all the people inside. The massacre spread throughout the country. Similar deeds were carried out in Yaoundé, Mbanga, Nkongsamba, Loum, Penja and other locations. Over 100,000 people, a huge number in relation to the population of the territory, found refuge in British Cameroon.

Finally, in 1955, the government authorities, supported by the collaborationists, made the long-premeditated coup: they declared the UPC illegal and ordered its dissolution. The decision followed popular uprisings, which broke out in Douala following a provocation by the French government, and in the course of which a number of Frenchmen were killed. The governor, who did not expect otherwise, launched a ferocious repression against the nationalist movement, having dozens of UPC militants killed and entire villages loyal to Um Nyobé burnt down. Hundreds of men were forced to flee back to British Cameroon or go into hiding. These were terrible days for the independence revolutionaries. Since then, the clandestine activity of the UPC has been strong, especially in southern Cameroon, where the repressive methods of the colonialists and their indigenous servants are accordingly more ruthless.

When the Mollet government, at the suggestion of the Minister of Overseas Territories, enacted the infamous ‘framework law’ (June 1956), the UPC promoted a national campaign against this law. It was no coincidence that this ‘reform’ was enacted by the Social Democratic government and men of their ilk. It pursued the usual objectives of social-democratic reformism: tweaking the legal institutions of capitalist rule and weakening the revolutionary camp. In fact, by creating supposed organs of local government, which in no way affected the absolutist powers of the governor and the police, the reform aimed to give vent to the ambitions of indigenous politicians inclined to compromise with the colonialist rulers. It would be interesting to see to what extent the application of Mollet-Defferre’s ‘framework law’ prepared De Gaulle’s African electoral triumph from afar, but this is beyond the scope of our argument.

To combat the ‘framework law’, the National Union was created, a kind of ‘popular front’. But the UPC’s move proved to be wrong. Uniting all the country’s political forces against colonial power was an illusion, given that there existed in the country tenacious collaborationist currents whose existence was mainly explained by the convergence of interests between colonial exploitation and the economic activities of the indigenous social strata linked to the capitalist planters. The dissolution of the ‘front’ was not long in coming. In August, the French government, in application of the framework law, dissolved the old territorial assembly and called elections for an assembly to discuss the new statute to be put to the country. Colonialism faithfully applied the political methods already tried in Togo and aimed to create an elective body that suited it, made up of subservient elements, from which to have new constitutional forms approved, aimed at formally putting an end to the mandate regime, but which would ensure the continuation of French domination, of the ‘présence française’.

The National Union demanded, as a condition for participating in the elections, that all UPC leaders, who were held in prison, be amnestied and allowed to stand as candidates. A naive request, to say the least. Allowing the future Assembly to be dominated, or at least to have strong nationalist opposition, meant that France was losing the game right from the start. Indeed, the government in Paris allowed the amnesty project to be buried. In November, the break-up of the National Union took place. President Paul Soppo Priso, secretary of the Territorial Assembly and deputy with links to the socialists, made a sensational about-turn by declaring himself willing to participate in the consultation, thus betraying the pact with the UPC.

The fraudulent elections were held in December in an atmosphere of a state of siege. A week before the consultation, the UPC, from the underground, called on the citizens to boycott the elections by all means but not to fall for French police provocations. The decision, which came to correct the mistake made with the establishment of the National Union, met with the approval of the majority of the electorate. In fact, about two thirds of the population abstained from voting. In the Douala Region, the most populous and advanced region of Cameroon, out of 90,000 voters, 15,000 showed up at the polls. The boycott struggle thus achieved a victory that was all the more significant because the authorities and collaborationist elements tried by all means to immobilise the opponents. Armed clashes took place between UPC militants and police forces, aided by the collaborationists. Once again, blood flowed. The official reprisals organised against the abstentionists resulted in the usual burning of villages causing hundreds of deaths.

The results of the elections, announced after a few weeks, gave the palm of victory to the two Cameroonian collaborationists, the so-called Soppo Priso and André Marie Mbida. What value these results had can be seen by considering that 18 deputies were elected to represent 13,000 Frenchmen, while three and a half million Africans were given 32 seats. That is, one Frenchman was worth 120 black people. Given such precedents, it can only shock hypocrites or traitors that thousands of Cameroonians took refuge in the forests and started guerrilla warfare against the occupier. Communist revolutionaries are firmly on the side of the rebels against the colonial yoke.

The obscene manoeuvre devised by the colonialist exploiters and carried out through slaughter and deceit ended in May 1957 when the puppet Assembly, dominated by the Mbida and Priso, approved the status of a ‘state under protection’. With such tomfoolery, France presented itself to the world no longer as a mandated power, but as the maternal protector of a lesser people, who ‘freely’ asked Paris to continue in the administration of the country. What value such ‘innovation’ had, one reads in ‘International Relations’, which, to maintain its links to the official political world, can hardly be suspected of ‘subversivism’: ‘Cameroon, which legally is a territory under French trusteeship, received on 10 May last year the status of “State under guardianship”, which was supposed to mark for it the first phase of the start towards a Togolese-type autonomy but which today seems instead to serve certain French exponents by unmasking a colonial-type intervention in the political and economic life of the country and to put the brakes on the hoped-for evolution towards independence’ (1958, no. 9).

The colonialists’ game – ruling the colony with an iron fist while hiding behind the straw men of collaborationist politicking – was fully revealed with the establishment of the regime of André Marie Mbida, the first president of the Cameroon ‘Council’ to emerge from the 1957 elections. He openly followed the policy of the French governor, resuming repression against UPC militants. The arrests, round-ups, deportations, previously carried out by the colonial authorities, now also benefited from the legal sanction of an indigenous governing body, nominally autonomous and held up by French bayonets. Mbida flung himself against the independence movement, receiving the applause of the local colonial bureaucracy and the old guard of Parisian parliamentarianism.

It is no coincidence that the main target of the ferocious repression he carried out with French troops was still Sanaga-Maritime, where the resistance of the clandestine Union of the Peoples of Cameroon was most animated. But in February of this year, Mbida, who had gone in vain to plead his cause with Coty and the leaders of the colonialist right, Pinay and Duchet, had to resign from office as he was outvoted by the parties in his own coalition.

However, this did not substantially change the situation in the territory. Recently, Cameroon’s representative at the Permanent Secretariat of Solidarity between Afro-Asian Peoples in Cairo, Osendé Afana, described the situation in his country to a ‘Vie Nuove’ correspondent. Sanaga-Maritime lives under a ‘state of emergency’ regime. An anti-colonial revolt has been raging in this region since December 1957. The Franco-Cameroon government responded to the revolt with drastic measures: curfews, suppression of markets and public transport, and military action against UPC adherents. The inhabitants of Sanaga are now living in appalling conditions. They have been forcibly grouped into ‘mushroom villages’ surrounded by 7-8 metre high palisades over which sentries stand guard day and night, mercilessly shooting peasants who dare to sneak into the fields. The concentration camps have locked up 50,000 people out of a population of 3.5 million. Nevertheless, the UPC guerrilla warfare extends to the entire south and west of the country.

With such methods, which are those that have never ceased since colonialism, French capitalism manages to keep the indomitable populations of Cameroon subdued. But the abhorrent era of colonialism that ended elsewhere will not last long in Africa. We hope to see the victory of the Cameroonian revolt soon. People who fight with such courage against an ultra-powerful enemy, such as French imperialism, deserve the admiration and support of communist revolutionaries.