La revue académique ‘Modern & Contemporary France’ chronique le livre Kamerun ! This is a mammoth work. Nearly 800 pages in length, it covers a little-known aspect of Franco-African relations: the decolonisation of Cameroun. In most of sub-Saharan Africa French decolonisation passed off without large-scale violence. The major exceptions to this were Madagascar, where some 90,000 people were killed during an anti-French uprising in 1947–48, and Cameroun where, according to the authors of this book, as many as 100,000 people may have been killed between 1955 and 1971.The wars of decolonisation in Indochina and Algeria have attracted much attention from historians and commentators; in contrast, the repression in Madagascar and Cameroun has been little studied. This work is therefore very welcome. The central question addressed by the authors is: why did successive French governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics become involved in such extensive repression? Organised in four parts and covering the period from the end of the SecondWorldWar to 1971, the authors show the continuities between the colonial and post-colonial periods. They analyse the decolonisation process, the war and the links between French and Camerounian political leaders. Using archival sources, correspondence, newspaper articles and oral testimonies, they show in great detail the personal relations between military personnel, colonial administrators, diplomats, industrialists and well-placed politicians in France, such as Pierre Messmer, whose complex and interlocking political, strategic and economic interests come together to promote the repression. The book furnishes a wealth of material that will be of interest and value to historians. It is also a ‘good read’, in the sense that the authors present their material in the style of investigative journalists, whose mission is to expose the underbelly of Franco-Camerounian relations and the hidden face of the war. The problem is that, in adopting this approach, the authors raise at least as many questions as they are able to answer. For example, the neo-colonialist, Françafrique framework, focusing on networks of individuals, is not accompanied by an analysis of the wider historical context. The historian is thus left wondering what the ‘bigger picture’ is. The ideology of revolutionary war is accompanied by attempts to promote health and welfare reform and modernisation.How are we to understand this? And how are we to understand the role of Camerounians, apart from the leaders of the Union des Populations du Cameroun, in thisunfolding tragedy? They were not simply puppets of the (ex-)colonial master: why did some choose to take part in the rebellion while others took part in the repression? Another problem with the authors’ approach is that it appears to suggest, although they are careful not to make the claim, that there is some grand, underlying ‘French strategy’ underlying the unfolding of events in Cameroun. Certainly, the French authorities had the military and technical power to undertake the repression, but this historian was left wondering how far they were actually in control of policy. However, to raise these questions is to take the book to task for something that was not its objective. It is—and ispresented as—a livre grand public, not as a work of academic history, and this is its strength. TONY CHAFER, University of Portsmouth tandfonline/doi/abs/10.1080/09639489.2013.776031
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:29:45 +0000