Mémoire nationaliste versus mémoire colonialiste

Abstract

For fifteen years, from 1956 to 1971, Cameroon under French tutelage was the scene of a war of independence led by the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC) against the colonial power. The nationalist party would lose this war and power would fall to the forces that collaborated with the colonial administration. But since the independence of 1960 and, to a greater extent, since the end of this war of national liberation in 1971, the authorities in Yaounde have acted as if the nationalist movement had never existed. Its memorial policy foregrounds French colonial figures and their Cameroonian collaborators. However, if this state silence on the nationalist movement has been able to prosper for thirty years, without contradictions at the national level, since the beginning of the 1990s more and more dissonant voices have been heard. This conflict of memory, thus born, is perpetuated and accentuated over time. Our article seeks to decipher its roots and motivations.

Keywords

• Cameroon
• UPC
• Nationalist Memory
• State Amnesia
• Official History