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January 1992 - I was on vacation in Douala, Cameroon, with my family. It is customary in Cameroon to constantly have the radio tuned to the national station, which broadcasts a program called ``Avis et Communiques." In those days, e-mail systems were almost non-existent, and telephones were very expensive, not widely available and largely not dependable (the Internet was unheard of in this part of the world). ``Avis et Communiques" dispersed news and information to this part of the world. The broadcast covered almost every topic: announcements of the loss of relatives or friends (sometimes including the cause of death and funeral information), lost and found objects, family reunions, marriage ceremonies, birth announcements, and so on. If for some reason you missed a message addressed to you, you could rest assured that at least a friend or a relative would have caught the program and that he/she would inform you at the first opportunity.
This program has been around for as long as I can remember. I was particularly affected by it when I took part in my first nationwide exam, whose results were broadcast on this program. I was 15 years old, and the exam in question was called the BEPC. To pass outright, the average score from all the subjects covered on the exam had to be above a certain preset limit. If your score was below this limit, but still in a preset range close enough to the limit, you were given a second oral exam. If you passed the oral exam, you would join the group of successful candidates. If you didn't pass, you joined the group that had failed outright. During those years, the results of the BEPC exam were first read on the radio. The results would not be posted on the bulletin boards of the various schools until a few days later. During the radio broadcast of the results, Douala (my hometown) was almost a ghost town; everybody was glued to the radio. Almost every person had a friend or relative who had to take the exam. This was a nationwide event, and the pressure could be almost unbearable for the parents and students.
The results were generally read in the following order: first came those who had passed outright; then came those who were required to attend the second oral exam. Those whose
names were not read on the radio had failed. The year I took this exam, the results arrived at the radio station quite late from the examination board---about 10 p.m. Since the radio station had to end its programming by midnight, the managers of the radio station decided to change the standard routine; they would read just the list of those students who were required to attend the second oral exam scheduled for the next day. The list of those who passed on the first attempt would be read at 6:00 a.m. the following morning. A significant number of my cousins had their names read on the radio. They had made it to the oral exam. I, however, did not hear my name, so I had to wait until the next morning to find out my fate. The pressure, as I have already mentioned, is especially high for students and parents. Having to wait until the next morning only added to the anticipation. I knew that I had performed very well on the calculus section of the exam, but I was not very confident about how I had performed on the spelling section (which was my known weakness).
As if my blood pressure was not high enough, one of my teachers had told my mother earlier in the day that the spelling exam had been quite tough. He doubted that I had passed it the first time. By 6:00 the next morning, I was already glued to the radio. After about 15 minutes, the announcer made it the ``i'' section of the alphabet. Finally the announcer called my name. I had passed, thank God. I will never forget ``Avis et Communiques,'' the order in which the entire operation was conducted, and the trust the people had in the fairness and accuracy of the information on the radio.
Let me return now to something I heard more recently on ``Avis et Communiques" in January 1992. The oldest political party in the history of Cameroon, UPC (Union of the Peoples of Cameroon), which was banned in 1956 by French colonial rulers, was going to hold its first post-independence convention in the town of Nkongsamba, about 50 miles from Douala. The meeting was to be in four days. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, and it was just too important to miss. It was such a great opportunity that even my wife decided to join me.
Since gaining independence in 1960, Cameroon had been under a single party dictatorship like most other African countries. The pro-democracy movements that were sweeping unelected dictators from power in eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War (i.e., the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall) finally had reached Africa, including Cameroon. The Cold War was over, and there was no longer a fundamental reason for former colonial rulers and America to prop up dictators in Africa. After all, the Cold War was described in the West as a fight against evil dictators who suppressed their people and deprived them of basic human freedoms.
Because of the pressure from the pro-democracy movements (who were staging demonstrations relentlessly), and because Western powers no longer supported dictators (and most dictators depended on the military assistance of Western powers), a significant number of governments in Africa, including Cameroon, reluctantly accepted change. They began to modify their constitutions by replacing the single-party system with the multiparty system. In the case of Cameroon, the new constitutional changes were adopted in December 1990. My wife and I were headed to the first convention of the newly relegalized UPC.
The trip from Douala to Nkongsamba took a little more than an hour on partially paved roads. Nkongsamba had only one small motel with a capacity of 50 rooms, and no restaurants. The town was ill equipped to handle the overnight population explosion of 6,000 people caused by those coming to attend the meeting. Every UPC dignitary who was still alive came to Nkongsamba from every corner of Cameroon. Furthermore, even those party members who had been in exile in Congo, Ghana, Egypt, France, the United Kingdom, and many other locations came to the meeting.
My wife and I did not feel out of place at the convention. We actually saw many relatives and childhood friends while there. However, I did not meet any of my colleagues from Yaounde University or Paris University. One of my uncles who attended the gathering was a close confidant of Prince Dicka, an old hat of UPC who had been in exile since the 1960s. Prince Dicka was the architect behind the legalization of UPC in 1991, and he was acting president of the party. My uncle was also a very active member. He was a key member of the Directorate Committee of UPC, a committee that is similar to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union.
My uncle passed my wife and me the latest issue of the leading newspaper in Douala. Four pages of this issue were dedicated to the newly legalized UPC and the convention that was set to take place in Nkongsamba. Most of the other delegates were carrying the same newspaper. I quickly scanned the newspaper while my uncle was reminding my wife that she had never sent him a business suitcase that he had requested from her by phone six months earlier. Within the newspaper I found an article describing how my uncle spent many years underground in the jungles of Cameroon following the banning of UPC in 1956.
(UPC was the largest and most important party in Cameroon through the 1950s. It was the leading opponent of continued French rule. A revolt organized by UPC over French rule in 1956 was put down by the French, with the loss of tens of thousands of lives and massive destruction to the towns. Because of this revolt, UPC was banned by the French. Most of the UPC leaders went underground and lived in the jungles of south Cameroon, where they continued their bitter bloody war for independence. Those who joined the exiled leaders to continue the struggle for independence were known as ``maquisards.'')
The article in the newspaper described my uncle as a former maquisard. To the members of the growing assembly in Nkongsamba, being described as a maquisard was the highest badge of honor that could be placed on a delegate. To my surprise, the number of maquisards attending this UPC convention in 1992 numbered in the hundreds (instead of in the tens). Ironically, my uncle had never been part of the maquisard group. As a matter of fact, I had spent my entire childhood in Douala with him. I was wondering just how many more of the thousands of maquisards in attendance had actually been part of that group.
While I was scanning the newspaper, my uncle made a few connections and managed to create a United Kingdom section for the UPC meeting. Since my wife and I were then living in the United Kingdom, we were the sole dignitaries for that group. We were appointed president and vice president of the UK section and would receive all of the privileges that went along with those titles. The most important of these privileges was that we would be able to sit with the other dignitaries in places of honor. Later we found that these seats were the only places shaded from the midday heat in Nkongsamba.
After meeting my uncle, we decided to visit the location of the convention since, according to the agenda, events should have been under way. Thank God everything was at least within walking distance---the motel, the local high school (that was to be used during the convention as the registration area, dormitory, and cafeteria for delegates), and the soccer stadium, where the convention was to take place.
As we walked toward the stadium, we could not help but notice how the streets seemed to flow like a red river. All of the attendees were covered from head to toe in red scarfs, red hats and red t-shirts that contained images of a black shrimp. (Red is the color of UPC, and the black shrimp is its logo.) The delegates were spread in small groups of five to ten people all along our way from the motel to the stadium. Each group was engaged in intense discussions. As long as people wore a UPC scarf, hat, or t-shirt, they were welcome to join in the discussions. We were compelled to stop several times. What should have been a five-minute walk turned into an hour-long journey.
The key topic of many of these discussions was that Prince Dicka, president of UPC, had accepted the responsibility of forming the next government by being appointed prime minister by the current dictator with the blessing of the French ambassador in Yaounde or the French consul in Douala. The details of these rumors varied from one group to another. Some groups said that Prince Dicka had been given the blessing of French President François Mitterand. According to still other groups, the UPC convention had been called to show the French and Cameroon governments that the Prince and the party still had strength. Perhaps the leaders of the party were trying to get a feel for the party's mood for making a deal with the Cameroon and French governments. The strangest thing about all of the group discussions that we joined was that none of them had even the slightest evidence to support any of these rumors. Members of one group, however, did say they knew for sure that Prince Dicka had been invited to the Congress of the French Socialist Party (the party of President Mitterand) in France. We later found out that the party in power, the CPDM (Cameroon People's Democratic Movement), had also been invited to attend the Congress.
When we finally made it to the stadium, nothing was happening. It was already 2:00 p.m., and the stadium was not even set up for the start of the meetings. The soccer stadium had very few seats, only enough to accommodate about one hundred people, and the playing surface was covered by sand. Those in charge of setting up the stadium planned to set up tents around the stadium and leave a small area in the middle for the speakers' podium. That may have been the plan, but they were still waiting for tent material and chairs to come from Douala before the setup could even begin. In the stadium, the debates were not so much about Prince Dicka dealing with French or Cameroon governments; they were instead about why this convention was being held in Nkongsamba. Many people felt that the convention was being held in Nkongsamba for the wrong reasons. After all, there were no decent facilties for such a large convention, and Nkongsamba was not even a stronghold for the UPC party. One of Nkongsamba's favorite sons, Samuel Eboua, had been chief of staff for the first Cameroon president from 1975 up to his departure in 1982. Moreover, he had just created his own party, NUDP (National Union for Democracy and Progress), in alliance with some northerners. Nkongsamba residents joined his party in large numbers.
The strongholds of UPC were actually, or use to be, Eséka and Edéa (the two main towns of the region, where the first secretary general of UPC and its founder, Ruben Um Nyobé, originated from), Douala (where Abel Kingué, one of the UPC's vice presidents originated from); Bafoussam (the main town of the region, where Félix Moumié, president, and Ernest Ouandié, vice president, originated from); and Ebolowa (where Afana Ossende, vice president, is from). Later, I learned that Prince Dicka decided to hold the convention in Nkongsamba instead of in one of the stronghold cities because he was worried that the whole town may have wanted to become delegates to the convention, thus completely distorting his outcome in favor of a region hosting the convention. So he selected a place
that he considered to be a neutral territory.
Just like the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union, the top position in UPC has always been that of secretary general. When Prince Dicka legalized UPC in 1991, he kept most of the text and organization of the 1950s UPC intact. However, Prince Dicka named himself as interim president and handpicked an interim secretary general who was closely associated with the regime until 1989, when he fell out of favor with his president. In other words, the office of president rather than secretary general became the premier position in the party. Thus Prince Dicka could claim to his party that nothing had changed, and to the international community that UPC is not a Communist party. The debate that UPC had had a significant Communist wing in the 1950s had exercised a lot of people's minds in the West. This issue was totally absent from UPC debates in Nkongsamba and even from the whole national press.
We decided to go back to our motel. On the way back we stopped off at the nerve center of the convention, the local small high school, to pick up our registration forms. This area was really chaotic. Figuratively, it was the front line of the battlefield that was the convention. The more delegates a group had registered, the more chances they would have to affect the outcome of the convention. A tribal war atmosphere existed among the Duala, Bassa, and Bamileke ethnic groups. These three groups composed almost 90 percent of the crowd at the current convention. Each group was supposed to have a pre-set number of delegates according to their total number of members. Unfortunately, the party had been legalized only six months earlier, and the census concerning each group's membership was not reliable. Mayi Matip (who is a Bassa) was even being accused of inflating his numbers. Because of these accusations, the rumor began to surface that Prince Dicka (who is a Duala) sent people back to Douala to bring back two large vans of people. The atmosphere at the high school was very charged, so we decided to pick up our registrations in the morning, hoping that the whole atmosphere would calm down.
As if things were not chaotic enough, we learned that the Cameroon government had given an ultimatum for the convention attendees to leave town within a few hours. Apparently the whole town had already been encircled by the army. Here we found ourselves in the middle of almost nowhere, as far as communications were concerned. If the army had made an assault on the town, it would have taken human rights activists years and years of investigation to figure out what had happened in Nkongsamba.
The locals, very pleased up to that point with the increased activities that the convention had brought to town, were starting to worry that the convention was not such a good thing for the town after all. UPC delegates only had to throw away their scarfs, hats, or t-shirts to look like locals. The previous worries about delegates, stadium arrangements, and Prince Dicka's dealings with the Cameroon and French governments were now secondary. Everyone was instead concerned with the negotiations that the UPC leaders had entered into with the interior minister of Cameroon through the local administrator. We subsequently learned that the UPC leaders had done everything according to the book; they had all legal authorizations to hold the convention. However, for some strange reason, the regional administrator (prefect) decided to authorize the meeting without informing Yaounde (the capital of Cameroon). Sometime after midnight we heard that everything was back on track. The concession was that the prefect would address the convention the next day. Some saw letting CPDM-named officials address their party as a major humiliation for the party. This was the debate for the next morning.
The two key attractions of the region are the Ekoum waterfall and Mount Manengouba. This dormant volcanic mountain dominates Nkongsamba with its 2410-m altitude. The UPC delegates ignored these attractions because they were just too busy with their deliberations, strategies, rumors, and endless arrangements throughout the day. They couldn't even stop to enjoy the nice cool breeze that Mount Manengouba produced at night.
Around 11:00 a.m. the next morning, the stadium was almost ready. All delegates were in place. After all was said and done, everyone attending the convention ended up being registered as a delegate. We couldn't help but wonder why there had been so much chaos the previous day. The master of ceremonies for the proceedings announced that the convention could not begin because we were waiting for the arrival of five dignitaries: (i) the widow of Ruben Um Nyobé, who had come all the way from Eséka for this convention, (ii) Prince Dicka, (iii) Mayi Matip, (iv) Ndeh Tumazah, and (v) Frederic Kodock. With the exception of the widow of Ruben Um Nyobé, whose presence was mostly to legitimize the convention in the eyes of diehard UPC members, these were the de facto leaders of the contemporary UPC.
Prince Dicka had been a key member of the youth organization of UPC and was groomed for a high role in the party and the future UPC government. He went into exile in Ghana in 1959. Ghana was then the mecca of independent movements in Africa. He returned to Cameroon in the late 1970s after some reconciliation with Ahmadou Ahidjo, who was then the president. He became a professor at the University of Yaounde, although he was apparently spending most of his time in Douala as traditional chief of Akwa. (In the 18th century, Douala was a kingdom which was divided into three ``chieferies'': Akwa, Deido, and Bell. These chieferies were headed by the king's princes.)
Théodore Mayi Matip was considered exceptionally intelligent. Like Dicka, he started in the youth organization of UPC. He then had the opportunity to meet Ruben Um Nyobé and express his desire to join the senior organization. Some colleagues of Um Nyobé were very skeptical of the idea of giving full membership to such a young man who had previously worked on the colonial police force. Félix Roland Moumié, president of UPC, for instance, was very worried about potential spies from colonial rulers. Um Nyobé decided otherwise: ``If the colonial administration can infiltrate us, it is a waste of time because our causes are right. It is up to us to turn them into double agents.''
Revigorated and reassured, Mayi Matip became a full party member. He was with Ruben Um Nyobé in his first presentation to the United Nations in 1949. After the massacre which followed the UPC revolt on May 25, 1955, in Douala, Mayi Matip joined the maquis with Ruben Um Nyobé. Other leaders of UPC---Félix Roland Moumié, Ernest Ouandié, Abel Kingué, and others---found themselves banished into exile. They settled first in British Cameroon; then later some of them settled in Accra and Cairo.
In Cameroon, the hunt by French colonial police for UPC leaders who had joined the maquis intensified. Ruben Um Nyobé and dozens of trusted aides, including Mayi Matip, took refuge in the jungle of the Sanaga Maritime, the region from which they had originated. French colonial police were so desperate to capture Um Nyobé that sometimes they ended up massacring entire villages in a desperate attempt to find him. Um Nyobé was finally killed by French colonial police on September 13, 1958, in a place called Boumeybel, which was then the headquarters of the banned UPC.
Mayi Matip is considered, whether it is true or not, as the person who revealed the location of Um Nyobé to French police. One of the stories put forward to try to prove the theory that Mayi Matip betrayed Um Nyobé revolves around the gunfight which led to Um Nyobé's assassination. All of Um Nyobé's aides were killed, and only Mayi Matip survived. Not only did he survive, but he was unwounded. Mayi Matip's has told his account of what happened that day in the bush of Boumeybel many different ways. Thus the stories intensified the speculation that Mayi Matip had betrayed Ruben Um Nyobé.
Another version of the assassination of Ruben Um Nyobé, behind which Mayi Matip has sometimes taken refuge, is that Thomas Mongo was made bishop (the first Cameroonian) of the Diocese of Douala because he was the one who had betrayed the location of Um Nyobé to the French colonial authority. By the way, Bishop Mongo has also been accused of helping the French pierce the secret location of Ngock Lituba, the sacred blessed rock and symbol of the Bassa ethnic group. This was the most important sanctuary for the Bassa people. Apparently, on many occasions, Bishop Mongo asked the elders' permission to enter the rock with a French person, which they always refused, warning him that Judas may have received thirty coins for Jesus but neither Um Nyobé nor the blessed rock would be betrayed. Despite the multiple warnings, Mongo took Bonneau, the person he would later replace as the bishop of Douala, to the blessed rock. My parents told me that Bonneau entered the rock healthy and came out a dying man, one side of his body totally numb. Bonneau died two days later, and Mongo never knew one more healthy day for the rest of his life. I personally knew Bishop Mongo, as my elementary school (Ecole St. Jean-Bosco) was sharing the same compound with the priests' housing and cathedral in Douala. I also attended several masses given by him, although I was not close enough to him to determine how good his health was.
Two years after the assassination of Um Nyobé, Mayi Matip officially quit the maquis, established an office in Yaounde that he describes as representing his fraction of UPC, and declared himself ready to work with the Ahidjo government. The other UPC leaders in exile (Félix Roland Moumié, Ernest Ouandié, ...) were stunned by this bold move by Mayi Matip, but he stuck to his plan. Ahidjo failed to reward Mayi Matip for this gesture until 1966, when the government made Mayi Matip vice president of the House of Parliament for Cameroon. Mayi Matip held this position until 1987. Soon after the relegalization of UPC in 1991, he resigned from the CPDM party to join UPC, calling UPC the ``party of first loves.''
To properly introduce Ndeh Tumazah in the context of UPC, it is useful to know how Cameroon ended up being divided into French-speaking and English-speaking areas. At the end of the 19th century, Europe embarked on a colonial conquest around the world. Africa and Asia were the subject of colonization. Three key colonial powers emerged: England, France and Germany. Each of these nations acquired vast overseas zones of influence. Germany's adventures in colonization, however, were short-lived.
At the peace conference that followed World War I, Germany lost her overseas colonies, including Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda-Urundi, and Tanganyika. These territories were divided between France and England. In some cases, as with Cameroon, France and England divided countries into French sectors and English sectors. Thus, we still talk about French Cameroon (more than 80 percent of the German Cameroon) and English Cameroon, which consists of two separate areas, one in the southwestern highlands (southern Cameroon) and the other in the north (northern Cameroon, now part of Nigeria). As a result, a single country was divided into three parts and governed by two colonial powers.
When UPC was founded in 1948 in Douala, Cameroon, its platform was the independence and the reunification of both British and French Cameroon (in other words, going back to the Cameroon of pre-World War I). UPC operated out of French Cameroon, but it created a sister party in the British sectors, the OKP (One Kamerun Party). The plan was that OKP would merge into UPC after independence if everything went well. OKP was led by Ndeh Tumazah. French Cameroon became independent in 1960, with Ahmadou Ahidjo as president. In 1961, the southern British Cameroon voted to reunite with the French in a plebesite organized under the auspices of the United Nations. The northern British Cameroon voted to remain part of Nigeria. After reunification, Ahmadou Ahidjo carried on as president of the new federal Cameroon. Knowing Ahidjo's feeling toward the UPC party, Ndeh Tumazah fled to Accra and later to England after reunification. He returned from exile less than one week before the convention. He was a complete unknown to the crowd in Nkongsamba, and no one was familiar with his activities in the UK from 1961 to 1992.
Frederic Kodock had worked on Ahidjo's (first president of Cameroon, 1960 to 1982) economic team and later as chairman of Cameroon Airlines until 1989. Since 1992, he had been regularly in and out of Biya's (second president of Cameroon, 1982 to present) government as minister of agriculture. When I asked my uncle about Kodock's UPC credentials, my uncle motioned with his hand as if to say either that he didn't have any credentials or that his experience was just too marginal and not tangible enough to mention.
The first thing that shocked me was the age of these leaders---they were quite old, well beyond 70 years. This reminded me of the members of the old Soviet Polit Bureau, the likes of Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksey Kosygin, and Yuri Andropov. Where was the next generation of UPC leaders? Africa had changed, for better or for worse, from the Africa of the 1950s. I asked my wife the rhetorical question, "The struggle of the 1990s is to end neocolonialism, and the struggle of the 1950s for independence is long over. Did these old men turn out here by mistake?"
Let us return to the UPC convention. When the dignitaries arrived around 12:30 p.m., the whole stadium erupted in a sigh of relief. Delegates sang the UPC anthem with a new refrain that was added in 1991: ``UPC in power.'' The Cameroon national anthem then followed. Prince Dicka introduced the prefect and asked him to say a few words. That was the first big mistake by Dicka at this convention. The delegates had had no input in this decision, and they erupted in anger. Dicka tried in vain to convince his audience to let the prefect speak. The poor prefect saw the writing on the wall and decided to leave in disgrace.
The next stage of the convention was set aside for the presidents of each section to speak. The master of ceremonies found out that UPC had 150 sections. If each president of each section were to speak for five minutes as planned, the convention would have needed a full day for the speeches. Apparently the people who had put the program together did not even know the number of UPC sections. Anyway, how could they have known the precise number, since sections had been created on the spot, like the UK section that had been created for my wife and me. I'm sure we were not the only ones to have our own new section.
A five-minute break was called to sort out this unusual turn of events. A compromise was reached to shorten the list of speakers to twenty. This was good news for me and my wife, since all European UPC sections were combined into one. We did not have to speak, and that was a relief for us. The French UPC delegations were going to speak for all of us. They handed me a very good French speech with many good catch phrases. I approved it without hesitation as far as the UK section was concerned.
Finally, the series of speeches by the presidents of the sections started. None of the speakers stuck to the five-minute time limit. After about ten speeches, it became clear to the master of ceremonies and to the audience that we had heard enough. All of the speeches repeated the same themes: the numbers of members, the balance sheets, and the pro-democracy stands. So far, only one speech had gotten to the real debate that the convention seemed to be waiting for. That speech was given by the president of the section from Yaounde. The speaker had just recently returned from exile in France. He launched a scathing attack on Dicka's back-door dealings with the current regime. The most powerful line of his speech was the one in which he modified the name of Prince Dicka nya Akwa (i.e., Prince Dicka of Akwa) to Prince Dicka nya Mvomeka (i.e., Prince Dicka of Mvomeka, Mvomeka being the village of the president of Cameroon, Biya). The fact that the speaker was originally from the same village as the current president of Cameroon seemed, in the eyes of the other UPC members, to increase the credibility of his attack.
Later that day, the convention moved to the next series of speakers, which consisted mainly of the dignitaries that the crowd had been waiting for earlier that morning. The widow of Ruben Um Nyobé, Mayi Matip, Ndeh Tumazah, Frederic Kodock, and Prince Dicka all spoke. Prince Dicka gave a good rhetorical speech with many good catch phrases and proverbs, but it did not address any of the concerns about his dealings with the current government. Basically, he just asked the delegates to trust him.
After this series of speeches, which ended around 7 p.m., the meeting was adjourned and was set to reconvene at 10 p.m., when the working commissions would meet. For the next three hours, the only debate of concern to the delegates was where to find food and drinks.
My wife had become very fascinated by Mayi Matip. She was impressed by his distinguished look. His wrapper1 was always tied around his waist and was worn long, down to his legs. He wore a brown/golden shirt and a red hat that was well fitted to his head. He held a horse tail in his hand, either to chase mosquitoes or use as a symbol of power. My wife was desperate to be introduced to him. When she finally did get to speak to him for about five minutes, she found him to be very articulate.
By the end of the day, I was really beginning to become disillusioned about the pro-democracy movement. I heard nothing about how this crowd could rise to power. I heard nothing about the program of government that the party was supposed to be putting forth. I heard nothing about any contacts with other pro-democracy movements around Africa. I had a chance to speak with Prince Dicka. After I congratulated him on his good speech, I mentioned to him some of my concerns. He was apparently surprised and a little lost. I believe that it was only then that the parallel between the pro-independence movement in the 1960s and the pro-democracy movement in the 1990s occurred to him.
After all, he had spent time in exile in Accra (Ghana) because of the pan-Africanization2 of the pro-independence movement. One might have suspected that because of his background, his instinct would have been to pan-Africanize the pro-democracy movement. Unfortunately, he either forgot or did not know how to do it.
My understanding before going to Nkongsamba was that the pro-democracy movements of 1990s were going to be different from the pro-independence movements of the 1950s. The fundamental difference between these movements appeared to be that in the 1950s the struggle was to end colonial rule, whereas in the 1990s the struggle was to end neocolonialism. Unfortunately, from what I saw up to that point of the proceedings in Nkongsamba, it looked more and more like I was going to be wrong. At best, the pro-democracy movements would only temporarily change the methods of changing governments in Africa. For more than thirty years (from the time of independence from colonial rule in 1960 to the 1990s) changes in government came almost exclusively through coups. At this point, I did not see how the movement in Nkongsamba would end neocolonialism.
Like the rest of the UPC delegates, I wanted to find a seat at a dinner table somewhere. Some of the female UPC members had skipped most of the day's deliberations to set up a makeshift kitchen in a high school to cook dinner for delegates. For a number of delegates, this was their first real meal in two days. Unfortunately, I cannot describe what was offered to eat at the high school, which had become the main restaurant at the convention. My wife had an alternative. After hearing four or five speakers that afternoon, she left the meeting to visit Nkongsamba and the surrounding areas. She hired a local driver to help her in her tour. I mentioned earlier that there were no restaurants in Nkongsamba. That was not entirely true. There are popular ``Cameroonian restaurants'' called circuits. However, only locals know their location and their opening times. These circuits do not have signs in front of them and they do not advertise or list themselves on any public documents. Basically, a family decides to use part of its house, and in some cases its whole house (except the one bedroom they use for storing private items), for serving food and drink. The local driver whom my wife hired took us to what he considered to be the best circuit in town. The place was very clean and very well furnished. To convince us that we were in the best place, the waiter told us that this was the prefect's favorite circuit. (Circuits do not pay any taxes, and they are not regulated nor authorized by the Cameroonian government, yet their best customer is the local prefect. That is Cameroon for you.)
There were three of us in the corner of the circuit: my wife, my uncle, who was a member of the Directorate Committee of UPC, and me. My wife ordered a dish called PDG (PDG is the French equivalent of CEO, a bizarre name for a dish) for us. However, it was very delicious. The whole circuit was filled with UPC delegates. At 10:00 p.m. we were supposed to return to our individual committees. My wife, my uncle, and other members of UPC who had joined our corner decided to stay put and carry on with their ``fringe" UPC meeting with cold drinks on relaxing sofas. I returned alone to the stadium around 10:30 p.m. I could not believe it. I was only thirty minutes late, yet my committee was already in session; this was very unlike UPC. Most UPC meetings were usually at least three hours late getting started.
The role of this committee was to draft the constitutional reforms that UPC would carry out in the government. The draft had to be ready early the next morning for approval by the entire convention. I now understand why my uncle had not bothered coming back. The whole thing was becoming a bad joke. Since there were no mobile telephones in Cameroon in those days, I had to stay at the convention until midnight, when my wife was scheduled to pick me up. As I was wondering whether there was anything useful I could do while waiting for my wife to pick me up, the chairman of the committee entered into a high-tempered discussion with another delegate about the best way to set up audit systems for the government and for private companies. Even though I was not an expert on this topic, it was clear to me that both men were quite ignorant of this process. I was barely able to resist laughing. To make the matter worse, another delegate asked the entire committee
if there was a person there who had ever participated in an audit operation or who had studied audit systems in school. I believe everyone there knew what the answer was going to be, but I believe the only reason this question was asked was to see whether I had any experience. I was one of the few people at the convention whom people were not really familiar with. Not one single delegate responded, and the whole committee exploded with laughter, even two who had been vehemently arguing a minute earlier. Thank God my wife came back early, so I could excuse myself from the committee.
By the third day of the convention, the delegates were getting restless. Most of the delegates had not been sleeping well, and a number of them hadn't bathed for more than two days. The third day, by consensus, was going to be the last day of the convention. That was the message that the grassroots participants were sending to their leadership that morning. I were very also pleased to heard this message as my wife was now keen for us to return to Douala.
The third day of the convention started with the reports from the various commissions concerning their overnight work. The delegates at the convention were more sophisticated than their old leaders, maybe even too sophisticated. They approved, without discussion, all reports from all of the commissions (I guess they figured these reports were a pure waste of time), except the one that really mattered at this stage: the report from the commission in charge of the modernization of the party platform. From the first three delegates who intervened after the commission's report, it became clear to me that the proposals of this commission included, among other things, shifting some power from Directorate Committee to the president or general secretary. Since I was not really knowledgeable about the UPC text, this discussion was a little too detailed for me. One thing, however, was becoming abundantly clear. The convention had decided to the leave the UPC platform from the 1950s intact for the time being. After more than an hour of useless debates, the advocates of modernization realized that they were not making any headway on this topic,
so they threw in the towel. Finally we moved to the most-awaited event: the elections of the president, three vice presidents, the general Secretary and his deputy, the Directorate Committee, and other positions.
The most important votes at this stage were those for president and general secretary. This was quite an open process, and any delegate could put himself forward for any position. I was disappointed that only two candidates came forward for the position of president: Prince Dicka and Ndeh Tumazah. For the position of general secretary, only two candidates put themselves forward: F. Kodock and another old hat of UPC from the 1950s, P. Sende.
I heard that Mayi Matip had made an alliance with Ndeh Tumazah overnight. Ndeh Tumazah was going to put himself forward for the presidency with Bamilike's support. (Bamilike is a ethnic group from which Tumazah originates, and its support is almost a given for him. The alliance with Mayi Matip will provide him a significant number from
the Bassa group, which was supporting Mayi.) I could easily see from the faces of Dicka's supporters that they were no longer as confident as they had been the day before. They were doubting whether they had the number of supporters necessary to win the presidency of the UPC party. Moreover, the rumors were starting to fly that Dicka had also alienated a significant number of his Bassa supporters by not giving them prominent positions in the organization of this convention. When I asked my uncle about these two rumors, he confirmed the first one about the Mayi Matip and Ndeh Ntumazah alliance, but he declined to tell me more about the second one. Later, after the convention, he told me that both rumors were accurate.
The Dicka people needed time to improve their numbers. Maybe that was the reasons why the discussions on the voting sequence and modality dragged on until 10:00 p.m. without interruption. Some, mainly Dicka's supporters, wanted the election to start with the fifty or so members of the Directorate Committee and to finish with the election of president. One could wonder why all of the votes could not be conducted simultaneously. The reason is that there are unwritten rules in this party regarding the ethnic composition of these positions. If a Duala is president, none of the three vice presidents could be Duala. Furthermore, no other ethnicity could have more than one vice presidency. The president and the general secretary must also be of different ethnicities, and, moreover, the Bassa think that they own the general secretary's office. After more than three hours of sometimes chaotic discussions, a compromise was reached to start the elections with the election of president, general secretary, and vice president and to finish it by electing the members of the Directorate Committee.
The election process appeared to be a reliable and transparent procedure. One delegate at a time would vote. Each delegate moved to the podium, which was placed where everyone at the convention could see him vote. This process ensured that no one could vote twice (by voting two separate times or by putting in two ballots). Each candidate's representatives were also on the podium, along the with two election officials, who had been chosen by the delegates of the convention.
The two candidates for the presidency were asked to talk about their plans. Prince Dicka spoke first. Again, he failed to take on his critics or to highlight for the convention what Tumazah had contributed in the last thirty years. Ndeh Tumazah did not really address the problems,either, but he did speak about the concerns he had about Prince Dicka's dealings. It was becoming clear to Ndeh Tumazah from the amount of applause that he received that he had the upper hand. During a ten-minute break which followed the speeches (for consultation within the sections), the European UPC sections had decided to vote for Ndeh Tumazah. For some reason they were not happy with Dicka's dealings; they were really not voting for Ndeh Tumazah, but instead they were voting against Dicka. Actually, everybody who voted against Prince Dicka seemed to do so because of grievances against the back-door dealings of Prince Dicka with the Cameroon government, and not because of the qualities of his opponent. Since I was not really a member of UPC, I decided to abstain from voting. My wife abstained by default, since she had already left to go back to the motel to sleep for a couple of hours before we started going back to Douala. The voting went on for at least four hours, and the counting wasn't finish until 6:30 the following morning. During the two hours while counting was taking place, the silence was complete, and the atmosphere was very tense. I was probably the only relaxed person in this convention of 6,000. Around 6:30, Ndeh Tumazah was announced as the new president of UPC; he won only by a small margin. Everybody began to leave immediately. There was no time for another vote, no time for concession speeches. The convention was, de facto, over. Strangely enough, despite all the chaos, we probably witnessed the fairest and most transparent election the country had ever known for three decades. My wife joined me thirty minutes before the announcements, so she also witnessed the last counts. I left Nkongsamba wondering what this old man (Ndeh Tumazah), who had not set foot in Cameroon for more than thirty years, was going to do such a complex job in such a dynamic environment in the early 1990s.
As the cars and vans started arriving in Douala, all colored with UPC red that late morning, most people seems dismay about the vote of Ndeh Tumazah. I started realizing the mistake that the convention had made; people in this town did not know Ndeh Tumazah. Moreover, the press in Douala had already revealed that Ndeh Tumazah is a member of another opposition party (SDF), that he had left UPC for a long time, and that he was not active in exile. Even the newspapers which had blasted Dicka about his dealings were now thinking that the convention went too far by removing Dicka without a credible alternative. Unfortunately, that is the danger of a sequestered jury; the outcome can be very unpredictable.
After a week tour around Cameroon, we stopped again by Douala to say goodbye to our relatives. My uncle who created a UPC section in Nkongsamba for my wife and I, is also at the airport. I was very excited to see him and to learn how UPC is doing. He told me that the Cameroon government will soon be announcing a plan for a legislative election. He also told me that his party is going through a rough period. Serious divisions are emerging because the French do not want to deal with the English-speaking Ndeh Tumazah. Moreover, the French are asking them to participate in the coming legislative election which is a position opposite to the all pro-democracy movements in the country. I was totally confused about this information, so he explained that an effort to reinstate Prince Dicka is on the way. I left Cameroon at the end of January more confused about the pro-democracy movements than when I came.
Three months later, in April 1992, Cameroon held its first multiparty legislative election. UPC members, along with most opposition parties, decided to boycott the elections because they were worried about their fairness, especially since it was directly operated and controlled by Biya's own Ministry of the Interior. A breakaway faction of UPC, led by Frederic Kodock, entered the election. The authority of Ndeh Tumazah, which was already weak inside the party, became nonexistent. Party members all called for Dicka to come back; the old man instead decided to be an observer. He carried on, attending all the key UPC meetings, and he from time to time led the pro-democracy marches. From the 20 or so candidates that the breakaway fraction of UPC put forward, 18 were elected. Another small party (NUDP), with a significant following in northern Cameroon, did very well, since its only opposition was Biya's party. So despite the boycott of the bulk of the pro-democracy movements, Biya's party lost its overall majority in the parliament. Biya included four UPC members, including Kodock, in his new government, which was formed just after the election.
When Biya called for a presidential election six months later, in October 1992, all opposition parties were prepared to put candidates forward. As one of the party leaders said at the time, ``We will participate in this election and worry about its fairness later on.'' UPC again turned to another unknown old man (Dr. Hogbe Nlend), who did not even bother showing up in Nkongsamba. Although less frail than Ndeh Tumazah, Dr. Nlend's UPC credentials were to say the least, ambiguous. He was apparently a UPC members of the late'50s and constantly snaked his way between UPC, UNC of Ahidjo, and CPDM of Biya before rejoining the party of "first loves" (as Mayi Matip put it) for the occasion of the presidential election. His candidacy never made it past the UPC ranks. Moreover, his tenure as UPC leader turned to catastrophic failure from which the party and even the entire opposition have still to recover. As they said in the UPC quarters in Douala his legacy is the introduction of computerized UPC id that most members cannot afford. In the meantime, he has joined the club of sacked ministers of Biya's governments. Yet, he is today a key member of so-called coalition of the opposition.
(1)Piece of cloth that has an opening for the head but is not sewn on the sides---like a robe.
(2)Pan-Africanism is a general term used for various movements in Africa that have as their common goal the unity of Africans and the elimination of colonialism and western supremacy from the continent.
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