Publisher's Synopsis
Legend has it that the end of France's empire in sub-Saharan Africa was a peaceful affair. This book tells a very different story, exposing the shocking violence of a secret war. Its theater was Cameroon in the 1950s and '60s, where a mass movement for self-determination emerged under the leadership of a pro-independence party, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC). In response, the colonial power opted for brutal repression. Employing the same methods as in Algeria, French forces waged a counterinsurgency campaign of extraordinary violence, eventually eradicating the opposition and installing a client dictatorship in Yaoundï+½. At the height of the Cold War, with attention focused on the Algerian bloodbath, the conflict in Cameroon received little attention at the time. Subsequently, its devastating consequences - and tens of millions of victims - would be intentionally obscured by French authorities and their local collaborators. The Cameroon War uncovers this hidden history for the first time. It illuminates a forgotten struggle for decolonization at the origin of neocolonial rule in Francophone Africa that persists to this day.
