Seeking Repair in Cameroon: The Franco-Cameroonian Joint Report on Colonial Violence

When the Franco-Cameroonian joint report^[1] on colonial violence was handed with so much pomp and circumstance to Presidents Emmanuel Macron (France) and Paul Biya (Cameroon), it was lauded as an overdue rupture with the long architecture of denial regarding Cameroon’s so-called discreet or ‘forgotten war’ of independence.^[2] Yet the question that matters for Cameroonians whose lives and political horizons were structurally shaped by France’s multi-decades counterinsurgency was never whether Paris would finally admit that a war took place nor even the scale of the violence, but whether such an admission would be permitted to rearrange power, redistribute resources and unmake the very post-colonial institutions that were built through France’s targeted elimination of anti-colonial futures and sovereignty.^[3] The violence that is detailed in the report played a constitutive role in shaping the governance and settlement strategies of the post-colonial state, including its pro-French economic arrangements, pro-French administrative elite and ethnicized security apparatus. For this reason, the French counterinsurgency campaign in Cameroon is said to mark the birth of la Françafrique.^[4] This history is inseparable from the uneven targeting of particular groups today, especially the Bassa and Bamiléké, whose regions were the primary theatres of colonial repression and whose continued post-colonial marginalization and exclusion means the state lacks the political will to argue for collective restitution or further political action.

The Commission—made up of seven French and seven Cameroonian historians—was mandated by Emmanuel Macron in July 2022 to examine France’s role in suppressing independence and opposition movements (primarily Union des populations du Cameroun or UPC) and allied movements, including the Union Démocratique des Femmes Camerounaises and Jeunesse Démocratique du Cameroun, between 1945 and 1971. It follows on other important publications, including Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue and Jacob Tatsitsa’s Kamerun! Une Guerre Cachée aux Origines de la Françafrique, 1948-1971, as well as their second edition La Guerre du Cameroun: L’invention de la Françafrique and Meredith Terretta’s Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition and State-Building in Cameroon. 

The some 1,000-page report is incredibly powerful but also overwhelming to read for the sheer detail of extreme violence archived. The Commission’s findings describe a decolonisation war marked by arbitrary detention, surveillance, torture, executions, disappearances and sexualised attacks on women; collective violence through bombings, incendiary cartridges and the control and withholding of food; the intentional drownings of political prisoners in rivers; the destruction of villages sometimes on a wide scale; collective massacres in rural areas including those documented at Ékité on 30–31 December 1956 and at Balessing on 28 May 1960; and forced displacement of civilians into ‘regroupment’ (concentration) camps that ‘caused long-term damage’. These practices were embedded within exceptional military zones characterised by a counter-revolutionary reorganisation of society within French war doctrine that mirrored their campaigns in Indochina and Algeria. The authors track the targeted assassinations of Cameroon’s nationalist leaders, including: 

Isaac Nyobè Pandjock (17 June 1958)

Ruben Um Nyobè (13 September 1958)

Félix-Roland Moumié (3 November 1960)

Paul Momo (17 November 1960)

Jérémie Ndéléné (24 November 1960)

None of these nationalist figures is currently celebrated in any official capacity within Cameroon. Indeed, for most of Cameroon’s post-colonial history, the term for the clandestine independence fighters (‘les maquisards’) was an insult. 

The report’s authors show that independence intensified rather than terminated the repressive sequence as French support and command structures persisted through cooperation, including the organisation of ‘regroupement’ under French command authority.^[5] France trained, equipped, and supervised the Cameroonian security forces that would continue the counterinsurgency operations after independence and in several passages, the report acknowledges that repression was systematic and coordinated across colonial and postcolonial administrations under Ahmadou Ahidjo (who was first appointed Prime Minister of French Cameroon in 1958 by the French High Commissioner, Pierre Messmer, who had served in Algeria and Indochina). The same security structures, intelligence networks, and military doctrines developed during the colonial war were integrated into the postcolonial state under Ahmadou Ahidjo and, although unaddressed by the report given the timeline, largely maintained under Paul Biya’s Presidency. Biya, Cameroon’s second president, assumed office through a non-electoral transfer of power, as the post was vacated by Ahidjo in 1982. 

The report was published last year, during a time of rising visibility in international reparations politics and discussions. The African Union had adopted ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations’ as its Theme of the Year for 2025.^[6] The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) had also issued a Ten Point Plan by then that defines reparatory justice as development and reconstruction—thus going beyond mere compensation.^[7] UN human rights materials engage with reparatory justice as a framework for addressing the continued harms rooted in slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism.^[8] On 25 March 2026, Ghana secured a UN General Assembly resolution describing the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as ‘the gravest crime against humanity.’^[9] The resolution calls for reparations alongside apologies, cultural restitution, and guarantees of non-repetition, even as many European states abstained and claimed concerns about establishing a ‘hierarchy’ of atrocities.

The containment of the joint report, I argue, is a reflection of the continuing political marginalisation and persecution of the Bassa and Bamiléké peoples within Cameroon’s elite-controlled political order—the two groups targeted by French-backed violence in the colonial period. The acts documented in the report were not evenly distributed harms: French colonial and later post-colonial violence was concentrated in the regions where anti-colonial resistance was the most intense and well organised, this included the Bamiléké western highlands regions, Nkam, the urban nationalist and union networks in Douala and in Sanaga-Maritime, the latter of which was a key base of Bassa mobilisation. Postcolonial Cameroon inherited the register of state-making through plunder and permanent counterinsurgency, in which French interests were protected by violence and by the systematic manufacture of compliant political parties, racialised juridical practices and the management of international perception (first under UN trusteeship, and later through the strategic absences of Biya internationally).

The targeted arrests, harassment, crackdowns and political exclusion of Bamiléké and Anglophone peoples have been foundational to the current government for decades in both official and quasi-official registers, including leaked diplomatic accounts of senior Cameroonian officials asserting that a successor acceptable to ruling coalitions cannot be Bamiléké according to leaked documents^[10] and openly hostile public statements. Achille Mbembe, for example, has recently spoken of the ‘anti-Bamiléké fixation’ as a ‘technology of power’ in Biya’s Cameroon; this is the operationalisation of an ethnically coded fear, namely the ideologically produced spectre of the overly ambitious, greedy Bamiléké as a permanent scapegoat and an internal enemy to justify total and violent political elimination.^[11] This fractures solidarity and would foreclose alternate political futures. Being a state apparatus that is deeply invested in the technology of post-colonial violence, those in power cannot credibly lead a reparations agenda that would empower the very communities that have been systematically alienated, marginalised and targeted.^[12]  Of course, the critical scholarship on reparations has shown that calls to action tend to emerge from political calculation, and the protection of power, and from legal obligation.^[13] In Cameroon, the state was built through counterinsurgency violence; it will not work for justice on behalf of those it continues to exclude and kill, nor will it finance the dismantling of its own inheritance. 

In this context, the Joint Report has so far been managed as a kind of ‘memory diplomacy’ and strategic geopolitical signalling rather than as a basis for reparations^[14]. This memory diplomacy in Cameroon is a stark contrast to the forms of restitution, even if imperfect, in Kenya when, in 2013, the British government agreed to pay £19.9 million to some 5,000 claimants who had been mistreated, tortured and wrongfully imprisoned during the Mau Mau rebellion and colonial counterinsurgency. In Cameroon, atrocities are named but there is no transfer of power, we have not yet seen significant calls for reparations nor public memorials and material redistribution. Reparations for colonial violence in Cameroon will need to be insulated from elite capture and designed with Bassa and Bamiléké survivors and descendants. 

Amber Murrey is a geographer interested in power, global extractive capitalism and neo-imperialism, focusing on domination, resistance, life under duress, and solidarity in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere. She is the editor of A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacy of Thomas Sankara and co-author, with Patricia Daley, of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies.

Endnotes