Diplomacy and Nation-Building in Africa

Franco-British relations and Cameroon at the End of Empire

Mélanie Torrent

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848857773
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Cameroon stands as a remarkable example of nation-building in the aftermath of European domination. Split between the French and British empires after World War I, it experienced a unique drive for self-determination at the turn of the 1960s, culminating in both independence from European power and the re-unification of two of its divided territories. This book investigates the influence of foreign policy on nation-building in West Africa in the context of both the Cold War and European integration. Shedding fresh light on the challenges of bridging the political, economic and linguistic divide that France and Britain had left, Melanie Torrent explores the evolution of a nation, charting both Cameroon's importance in Franco-British relations and Cameroon's use of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy in asserting its independence. This work should be essential reading for students of African studies, International Relations and the post-colonial world.

CHAPTER 1

THE REUNIFICATION DIALOGUES: COORDINATING DECOLONISATION IN THE COLD WAR

Early consultations

During the Franco-British talks of February 1959, as discussions were about to resume after lunch, a message was given to the British delegation by a member of staff of French Secretary of State Louis Jacquinot: French Prime Minister Michel Debré was ‘personally interested and regarded the future of the Cameroons as a test case for Anglo-French co-operation in Africa’.¹ Rather than an ominous warning, this was an indication that the French welcomed the consultations and wanted the exchange of information that had operated throughout the decade to continue. There had been tensions and disagreements, constantly alerting both sides to the formidable contrasts in their colonial policies, but the two European neighbours had not allowed them to prevail.

The issue of Cameroonian reunification had indeed been a recurring item of Anglo-French consultations since it was first promoted by early nationalist leaders on both sides of the River Mungo in the late 1940s. Ruben Um Nyobé and the UPC in the French Cameroons had called for independence and reunification, generating interest among Dr Emmanuel Endeley’s Cameroons Federal Union across the colonial border.² The movement gathered pace in 1951 when UPC leaders and Dr. Endeley’s transformed party, the Kamerun National Congress (KNC), met. A few months before the Franco-British conversations of April 1952, official correspondence underlined the initial determination of both sides to cooperate against the Cameroons unification movement. The British Commissioner advised giving the French authorities ‘full information regarding the political activities in the British Cameroons of people from the French Cameroons’.³ In Paris, the French authorities were reluctant to grant too much negotiating power to their officials on the ground in Africa: it would interfere with the chain of command, as ministers had yet to agree on a common policy, and it might in fact encourage the nationalists, if they learnt that they now had a place on colonial agendas.⁴ However, they welcomed exchanges at the metropolitan level⁵ and the Cameroons unification movement was one of the three central issues discussed in April 1952 – with the Ewe movement in Togo and the Pan-African Congress in Accra.⁶

Both France and Britain initially opposed reunification, yet their common objective stemmed from distinct motives. British officials opposed the unification movement in Cameroon because they themselves favoured the integration of the British trust territories with their much larger Nigerian neighbour. Yet if independence came through reunification with the French Cameroons rather than integration with Nigeria, there was no reason to ‘regard it as a failure’:⁷ no date had been determined but self-government and separation from the metropolis were already planned. The general feeling seems to have been that reunification would essentially be a great inconvenience, given the wide disparities between the French and British Cameroons. Conversely, as British officials underlined, the French position derived from a fundamental opposition to nationalist movements, which conflicted with the ultimate purpose of ‘assimilat[ing] the Trust Territories into the French Union’.⁸ Ruben Um Nyobé had clearly asserted his opposition to French organisations and would warn the Fourth Committee in December that links with the French Union would be an act of ‘political swindling’.⁹

How the French interpreted British colonial policy in the neighbouring territories certainly magnified their concerns. Black African nationalism was to be contained in Central, Eastern and Southern African territories, which white settlers would turn into Commonwealth dominions, but encouraged, if not actually welcomed, in Britain’s four West African territories – Nigeria, the Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast – as long as British financial and economic supremacy remained virtually untouched.¹⁰ French officials were increasingly concerned that their attempts to ‘departmentalise French Africa’¹¹ contrasted with constitutional conferences leading to black self-government in British West Africa. In a sense, both France and Britain, through the French Union and the Commonwealth, aimed to keep territories within a privileged realm of influence. Only in April 1949 had the British Monarch become merely the symbol of the Commonwealth association, when leaders had decided that securing continued membership for the Indian Republic should prevail over all other considerations. In 1956, the British Government still saw Britain as ‘the keystone of the Commonwealth arch’, ‘incomparably more important internationally than even the most important of the Commonwealth countries’.¹² But more rapid evolutions in the British spheres at a time when pressure for decolonisation was stepped up at the UN alarmed the French, who noted that ‘every important event on British territory [had] immediate repercussions on French territory’.¹³ Nationalist and unificationist calls in both Togo and the Cameroons had in fact emanated from the British side and were fuelled by progress towards self-government in Nigeria. French officials acknowledged that ‘[a]ppropriate reforms’¹⁴ would become necessary but also took comfort in the fact that the size of the French Cameroons played in their favour.¹⁵

The French and British authorities were equally determined that cooperation should prevail and their respective impressions of the April 1952 talks were very positive. As French officials acknowledged at the end of the decade, the major objective of Franco-British consultations was not to work towards any real partnership but to gather information – on nationalist movements, on plans for decolonisation, on global forces, in order to devise more efficient policies in the French territories and in international organisations.¹⁶ The French highlighted the need for regional stability, for colonial cohesion at the UN,¹⁷ and pleaded for all officials in the Cameroons to ‘slow down’¹⁸ the unification movements. While British officials saw ‘no reason whatever to take any active steps to harry the Movement or its members’, the delegation was instructed, ‘in order to allay potential French suspicion’, to express a ‘desire to maintain the status quo’ and ‘reject as hypothetical’ all suggestion that the British Cameroons might opt for reunification.¹⁹ The unification movement was portrayed as ‘artificially inflated and unrepresentative in scope’²⁰ and not to be encouraged.

The talks of April 1952 strengthened the British resolve to resist all attempts by nationalist movements to drive a wedge between the colonial powers by ‘discrediting’ the French and praising the British.²¹ This proved essential as Cameroonian movements sought to instrumentalise diverging colonial policies. The year the Southern Cameroons was given ‘quasi-federal status’²² and Endeley elected Leader of Government Business, following the Nigerian constitutional conferences of 1953 and 1954, the appointment of Roland Pré as French Commissioner opened a period of intense violence in the French Cameroons.²³ UPC leaders and nationalist demonstrations were repressed in May 1955 and December 1956 and the movement was outlawed, forcing leaders into the maquis or exile abroad. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was contacted by the UPC in August 1955²⁴ and the British delegation to the UN also received correspondence from the Association of Cameroonian Students in France in January 1957, in the hope that Britain would support the case for reunification at the UN.²⁵ Both letters appealed to British political liberalism and love of freedom while condemning French policies. To some extent, British leaders and officials were concerned about the situation in the French Cameroons, particularly as the Southern Cameroons was the UPC’s first port of call. However, it only offered temporary refuge. Firstly, John Foncha’s newly-formed KNDP did support reunification, which the KNC had abandoned, but opposed any resort to violence – only the small OK Party could provide the UPC with very limited support.²⁶ Secondly, the British authorities outlawed the UPC in 1957 for fear of growing insurrection and remained convinced that reunification was a daunting prospect. At the Nigerian constitutional conference of 1957, the Colonial Secretary emphasised that the prolongation of the British mandate would be among the options offered to Cameroonians²⁷ but union with Nigeria remained the preferred option.²⁸

At the regional level, British and French policies continued to diverge widely. On 11 May 1956, the Colonial Secretary had announced that the Gold Coast would become independent on 6 March 1957, accelerating the pace of constitutional conferences in the rest of West Africa.²⁹ As historians have emphasised, Macmillan’s so-called ‘Wind of Change’ speech in February 1960 merely confirmed previous plans for decolonisation, after the Conservative victory in the 1959 general election had given the Government the confidence to press ahead with plans first evolved in 1956. Within the French Empire, the French Union was reformed through the Loi-Cadre, and in Cameroon itself, André-Marie Mbida became the first Cameroonian Prime Minister following elections. However, as T. Chafer has demonstrated, the reforms of 1956 were ‘a belated and reluctant recognition by the French government of the increasing lack of acceptance of empire’, ‘a question of modernising the imperial link so as to make it more sustainable for France and more acceptable to Africans’, and essentially, a way of ensuring a French presence beyond independence. In reality, through the Loi-Cadre, power was moved from the federal to the territorial level and to Paris, dreams of unity were ended, a greater financial burden was placed on Africa itself, and France retained control of all strategic matters.³⁰

As nationalist movements and calls for reunification gathered momentum in the Southern and French Cameroons, the two territories were simultaneously pulled further apart by economic and financial evolutions in the French and British empires. Within the British Empire and Commonwealth, the system of imperial preference as established at the Ottawa Imperial Economic Conference in 1932 prevailed. Reciprocal agreements were signed which favoured intra-imperial links, while customs tariffs against foreign countries were raised. Financial relations between Britain and its African territories were organised around three main principles: ‘the automatic exchange of local currencies with the pound sterling on demand; the full backing of the local currencies with the pound; and the compulsory investment of sterling funds in Britain’.³¹ Nigeria benefited from imperial preference and section 2(3)(d) of the Import and Duties Act of 1958 confirmed that ‘countries administered by Her Majesty’s Government under the Trusteeship system of the United Nations shall be part of the Commonwealth Preference area’.³² Conversely, the French Cameroons belonged to the franc zone and all currency matters were overseen by the Institut d’émission of French Equatorial Africa and Cameroun – which became the BCEAC in April 1959.³³ More importantly, the French Cameroons became an associate member of the Common Market, after the Treaty of Rome³⁴ was signed in 1957 by France, West Germany, Italy and Benelux, while Britain itself remained outside. Under Part IV of the Treaty of Rome, a number of territories in Africa and the Caribbean were given special status in trade outside the EEC. France wanted the Common Market but equally wanted to pursue its ambitions for a symbiotic Eurafrican relationship and a reinforced Franco-African union. During the negotiations in 1956, Gaston Defferre and Christian Pineau, respectively Ministers for Overseas France and Foreign Affairs, had made clear that unless special preference was granted to its overseas territories, France would pull out, and the principle was eventually accepted at the Venice Conference of May 1956.³⁵ Part IV intended to support development in the associated territories through an investment fund, the EDF, to be reviewed after five years. It was to be distinct from bilateral aid, and as I.W. Zartman has observed, it did begin ‘in a small way to dilute bilateral colonies ties through multilateralization’,³⁶ while a number of councils, committees and courts were created to deal with association matters. Although no competition with European agricultural produce would be allowed and association was in fact not ‘an act of decolonisation [but] a means of protecting colonial markets and assuring supplies of primary products for the Six’,³⁷ the British were very much aware of the dangerous divisions brought about by the Treaty of Association:

the Six, over a period of twelve to fifteen years, [would] eliminate their customs tariffs again...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Reunification Dialogues: Coordinating Decolonisation in the Cold War
• 2 Out of Commonwealth Dynamics: Cameroon’s Retreat from Britain’s International Legacy
• 3 Francophone Diplomacies: Opportunities and Dangers for the Cameroonian State
• 4 New Partnerships: the Stakes and Limits of Integration in Cameroon and Europe
• 5 The Cameroonian Bridge? Elusive Multilateralism in a Globalising World
• Conclusion
• Maps and Tables
• Map 1. Cameroon (shaded relief), 1975
• Map 2. The Commonwealth of Nations, 1960–1975: an expanding organisation
• Map 3. The emerging Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT) and the Niamey signatories (1970)
• Table 1. Bilateral Overseas Development Assistance to Cameroon, 1964–1975
• Table 2. Cameroon in British bilateral aid to Africa, 1964–1975
• Table 3. Canada’s bilateral development assistance to Africa, 1964–1975
• Table 4. Cameroon in French bilateral aid to Africa, 1964–1975
• Table 5. Distinct spheres, 1968
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index