French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday asked historians to “shed light” on France’s action in Cameroon during the colonization and after the independence of this country, announcing the “entire” opening of the French archives on “painful” and “tragic moments”. “I wish that we could have and launch together a joint work of Cameroonian and French historians”, proposed Emmanuel Macron, during a press conference in Yaoundé with his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya. Before Cameroon’s independence in 1960, the French authorities bloodily repressed nationalist militants engaged in the armed struggle against the colonizer.
Cameroonian associations demand that Macron recognize the “crimes of colonial France”
“I make here the solemn commitment to open our archives in their entirety to this group of historians who will allow us to shed light on this past,” he said. “It is necessary to establish factually” “responsibilities”, added the French president. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, the League of Nations (SDN, ancestor of the UN) had entrusted most of the German colony of Kamerun to the tutelage of France and the rest – the western part bordering Nigeria – to Great Britain.
On Monday, a group of Cameroonian political parties called on Emmanuel Macron to recognize the “crimes of colonial France”. “We have a historic dispute with France (…) We are taking the opportunity to wake up Cameroonians to the problem with France which is to put all the crimes of France on the table and settle it definitively if we want have a peaceful relationship,” Bedimo Kuoh, a member of the African Movement for New Independence and Democracy (Manidem), said on Monday at a press conference in Douala.
Announcements already made by Hollande
During the last visit of a French president to Yaoundé, François Hollande conceded in 2015 that there had been “extremely tormented, even tragic episodes”. “We are open so that history books can be opened and archives too,” he added. The discourse on this period “feeds a form of distrust and fantasies” which tarnishes the image of France, comments a French diplomat.
Avoid the Rwandan precedent
With this announcement by Emmanuel Macron, “it is a question of being faithful to the method that we have set ourselves: not to enter a political sequence before the work of historians has been done, as we have done with Rwanda and the Duclert report”. Published in March 2021 and based on the analysis of French archives, the report of the Duclert commission concluded with the “heavy and overwhelming” responsibilities of France in the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.
“We must meet the conditions to go to the end of this writing of history”, added this diplomat about Cameroon, in particular by giving direct access to military and diplomatic archives. The president’s entourage also made the connection with the process undertaken on colonization and the war in Algeria since 2017.