Cameroon

About the Book

Cameroun was “conceived” in 1947 at the Unicafra Congress in Douala, attended by all the aspiring political actors, from which sprung Racam (Rassemblement Camerounais) that declared itself the Cameroun government in embryo. Shocked by that effrontery, the French colonial state immediately banned Racam. From the ruins of Racam emerged Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) in 1948 that stood opposed to French policies in Cameroun. It opposed France in Cameroon for ten years until the French assassinated its leader—Ruben Um Nyobe—in September 1958. In January 1959 France decolonized and granted Cameroun independence at a time when the people were still reeling from the trauma of Um Nyobe’s death. Cameroon: Traumas of the Body Politic examines the traumatic events that have shaped the contours and influenced the trajectory of Cameroon’s political history from the 1940s to the 1990s: the momentous power shifts of 1958 and 1959 in the two Cameroons; rupture of coastal and hinterland cooperation in Southern Cameroons; the political revolution called “anlu” that changed the course of politics in Southern Cameroons; the disappointment of reunification and the genesis of the Anglophone Problem; Ahidjo’s quarter-century reign of terror; the succession schism, attempted coup d’état, political liberalization, and the “New Deal Society” experiment; the quest for multipartyism and “Operation Ghost Town”, etc. These events are explored anew through critical analysis, synthesis, and re-interpretation with uncommon explanatory power.

About the Author

Emmanuel Konde is Professor of History at Albany State University (ASU) in Georgia. Prior to joining the faculty of ASU, Konde taught at Tuskegee University, Morris Brown College, Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta College, and Knoxville College. Emmanuel received the United States Senior Fulbright Scholar award for teaching and research in Sub-Saharan Africa for the 1998-1999 academic year, and spent his Fulbright year abroad teaching and researching at the University of Buea in Cameroon. Born in Cameroon, West-Central Africa, Emmanuel moved to the United States in 1978 to pursue postsecondary education. He earned the B.A. in Political Economy from Hillsdale College in 1982, the M.A. in Political Science in 1984, from Northeastern University, and the B.A./M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History in 1985 and 1991, respectively, from Boston University. Konde is the author of six book length monographs: The Bassa of Cameroon (1917, 1998); European Invention of African Slavery (2005); African Women and Politics: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Male-Dominated Cameroon (2005); Bassa Antiquity in Contemporary Limbe (2010); African nationalism in Cold War Politics (2012); and The New African Diaspora: Anatomy of the Rise of Cameroon’s Bushfallers (2012). Emmanuel has contributed several articles to scholarly journals but his most cited are two specialized working papers in African Studies: “The Use and Abuse of Women in African Nationalist Politics: The 1958 “Anlu” In Cameroon” (1990), and “Reconstructing the Political Roles of African Women: A Postrevisionist Paradigm” (1992).