Maintaining order through terror under French colonial administration in Cameroon (1945-1956)

Abstract

This paper, entitled “Maintaining order through terror under French colonial administration in Cameroon (1945-1956)”, aims to highlight a fundamental but little-known aspect of France's presence in Cameroon, namely the disproportionate use of repression and administrative violence to suppress any attempt at self-determination after the Second World War. It is part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the events of May 1945 in Algeria, particularly in Sétif and Kherrata. For security and strategic reasons, the French colonial administration adopted an approach that left no chance for protest movements to flourish. It did not hesitate to deploy military means to violently suppress demonstrations. Thus, during the events of September 1945, May 1955, and December 1956, it mobilized an entire military arsenal and enjoyed the support of the colonists who wanted to maintain control over the country's economic potential. France also carried out repression by bringing in soldiers from other territories, strafing civilian populations, using aircraft to fire from the air, distributing weapons to European civilians, and carrying out summary executions.

Our paper therefore addresses the issue of France's colonial crimes in Cameroon from 1945 onwards, focusing on the approach adopted by the French administration in response to the rise of anti-colonial protests from 1945 onwards, the strategies deployed to silence the protesters, and the consequences for the momentum of the Cameroonian nationalist movement. To achieve this, we adopt a multidisciplinary and socio-historical approach to show that, in terms of maintaining order, France used all means at its disposal to silence local protests against colonial arbitrariness.

The corpus used consists of books, articles, reports, operation bulletins, and archives collected from documentation centers in Cameroon and abroad. It appears that colonial France in Cameroon institutionalized means of repression and massacres in September 1945, and the main repercussion was the suppression of any attempt at self-determination through terror, particularly during the events of September 1945, May 1955, and the massacre in Ekité in December 1956.

Keywords: Cameroon, Terror, Law enforcement, Massacre.