French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France waged a war marked by “repressive violence” in Cameroon before and after the country’s independence in 1960 in a letter made public Tuesday.
It is France’s first official acknowledgment of its repression of Cameroon’s independence movement as a war.
The letter sent last month to Cameroonian President Paul Biya, follows a report released in January by a French-Cameroonian commission of historians. The report revealed that France carried out mass forced displacements, detained hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians in internment camps, and backed brutal militias to suppress the country’s fight for independence and sovereignty between 1945 and 1971.
The commission was established by Macron during a 2022 visit to the capital Yaoundé. It examined France’s role leading up to Cameroon’s independence on Jan. 1, 1960, and in the years that followed.
“At the end of their work, the historians of the Commission clearly highlighted that a war had taken place in Cameroon, during which the colonial authorities and the French army carried out multiple forms of repressive violence in certain regions of the country — a war that continued beyond 1960 with France’s support for actions carried out by the independent Cameroonian authorities,” the letter from Macron read.
Macron also acknowledged France’s role in the deaths of independence leaders Ruben Um Nyobè, Paul Momo, Isaac Nyobè Pandjock and Jérémie Ndéléné, who were killed between 1958 and 1960 in military operations under French command.
Cameroon was a German colony until the end of World War I, when it was divided between Britain and France. The French-administered territory gained independence in 1960, and the southern British Cameroons joined in a federation the next year.
The independence war began in the 1950s when the nationalist UPC launched an armed struggle for full sovereignty and reunification. Even after independence, the French-backed government continued to fight the UPC for years,
The letter follows earlier moves by Macron to address France’s colonial past, including his recognition of French responsibility in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Senegalese riflemen after World War II.
However, the French president has so far ruled out an official apology for torture and other abuses committed by French troops in Algeria.
The letter comes at a time when France’s presence in its former colonies in Africa has become increasingly contested, particularly in the Sahel region.
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Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.
