The Helsinki Notebooks

Cameroon’s Violent Legacy

On February 14, 2020, local security forces attacked the village of Ngarbuh in North-West Region of Cameroon, killing at least 21 civilians, including 13 children and a pregnant woman, while burning homes and plundering property. This massacre, documented by Human Rights Watch,¹ was allegedly a reprisal against communities suspected of harbouring separatist fighters – labelled “terrorists” by the government – in the ongoing Anglophone crisis. Initially denied by authorities, the incident prompted an inquiry after intense national and international pressure, leading to charges against three soldiers in June 2020. As of 2025, justice remains elusive, with victims’ families awaiting accountability amid a conflict that has claimed about 6,500 lives since 2016.

This violence is not isolated. It reflects a deeper historical pattern of state repression in Cameroon, rooted in German Herrenvolk² policies, French colonial atrocities, and postcolonial authoritarianism, embodying proto-fascist mechanisms of control, racial hierarchy, and systematic repression operating well beyond Europe’s borders. Long marginalised in academia, these parallels have gained traction with the decolonial turn, revealing colonialism’s fascist underpinnings.

Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of “imperial durabilities” – the persistence of colonial structures in the present³ – I trace these continuities through a genealogical approach, highlighting how military, ideological, and penal mechanisms have transformed and yet endured across eras in Cameroon. While focusing on state violence, this analysis nevertheless acknowledges the complexity of local conflicts, including separatist abuses, to provide a nuanced view. By examining these dynamics, the essay contributes to emerging scholarship on fascism’s global manifestations and underscores the urgency of historical reckoning for addressing Cameroon’s current crisis.

The German Period (1884-1916)

Beneath its stereotype of “island of peace” in West/Central Africa, Cameroon has harboured a long history of violence. It was colonised in 1884 with Gustav Nachtigal’s annexation of the Douala coast, establishing Kamerun as a German colony until 1916 – when WWI allied forces ousted Germany from Africa. The Germans in Kamerun, guided by Herrenvolk ideology – a racial supremacy doctrine prefiguring Nazi policies –, planted early seeds of colonial violence in the country through land expropriation, forced labour, and suppression of resistance, emphasising total dominance over “inferior” populations.

Prisons emerged as key instruments of control shortly after colonisation. By the late 1880s, facilities like the one on Manoka Island were built to detain resistors analogous to South Africa’s Robben Island.⁴ In typical fascist tradition any dissenting voices were crushed. Resistance fighters such as Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, Ngoso Din, Samba, Mbita, Mandola, the traditional rulers of Miindiff, and members of the court of Maroua who fought against Germany’s plans to dispossess the Duala people from their land and create European quarters, were executed by hanging.

The French Period (1916-1960)

Germany lost Kamerun to Allied forces in September 1916 during the WWI Cameroon Campaign – a series of military operations by British, French, and Belgian troops –, leading to its partition, with France administering four-fifths as part of French Equatorial Africa then. French rule perpetuated and intensified German legacies, embedding violence in administrative policies like the indigénat code, which deprived indigenous Cameroonians of rights to criticism, association, and movement. This system empowered colonial authorities to impose penalties without trial for minor offenses, including up to 15 days’ imprisonment or fines, expandable in practice to harsher terms.

Prisons proliferated in places like Tcholliré, Mantoum, Douala, Edea, Nkongsamba, Dschang, and Maroua, featuring torture rooms with instruments like the balançoire, a device originating in Algeria, where victims were suspended and beaten. Albert Mukong’s autobiography, Prisoner Without a Crime, describes doors inscribed with “Il n’y a pas de Dieu ici” (“There is no God here”), underscoring the dehumanising ethos of the French colonial regime. These camps paralleled Nazi concentration facilities in their role as hallmarks of violent regimes – scaled to colonial contexts.

The twilight of French rule saw the escalation of violence against the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC, Union of the Populations of Cameroon), formed in 1948 to demand independence and unification of French and British Cameroons.

In the 1950s, amid France’s crumbling empire in Indochina, Algeria, and Madagascar, authorities banned the UPC and unleashed horrific repression. Scholars like Thomas Deltombe, Manuel Domergue, and Jacob Tatsista in Kamerun! Une guerre cachée aux origines de la Françafrique (1948-1971) detail French forces and local militias burning villages in the Sanaga-Maritime and Bamiléké regions, beheading suspected terrorists. This repression, while aimed at preserving empire, revealed proto-fascist traits: ideological control through racial and political exclusion, and militarised terror to crush dissent.

Post-Colonial Period (1960-Present)

Independence on January 1, 1960, marked a formal end, but French influence persisted. Post-colonial Cameroon emerged in this space as a Gaullist state under Ahmadou Ahidjo, handpicked by France to safeguard interests after assassinating UPC leader Ruben Um Nyobé on September 13, 1958. In 1971, Ahidjo executed Um Nyobé’s deputy, Ernest Ouandié, by firing squad in Bafoussam. Until Ahidjo’s 1982 resignation, dissent was silenced through censorship, spy networks, and agents provocateurs inherited from French indigénat policies.

The 1961 UN plebiscite unified Cameroon with British Southern Cameroons, a smaller territory administered by Britain after the 1916 partition, creating the bilingual Republic of Cameroon – Anglophone and Francophone. However, Anglophone Cameroon’s minority status – representing roughly 20% of the population – fuelled grievances over political marginalisation, cultural erasure, and unequal access to education, leading to tensions between the Anglophone and Francophone Cameroon.

By 2016, these tensions ignited protests by lawyers and teachers against Francophone-dominated legal and educational systems, escalating into the Anglophone crisis by 2017, with separatists declaring “Ambazonia,” an imagined state grounded in historical claims to self-determination. The state’s response was this: security forces burned villages (including people, to their death), executed suspected separatists, and displaced over 700,000 civilians, as seen in the Ngarbuh massacre.

Separatist abuses compounded the crisis, with groups like the Ambazonia Defence Forces kidnapping civilians, attacking schools, and killing traditional leaders (well undermining their liberation narrative).⁵ Under Paul Biya since 1982, this authoritarianism persists, marked by fraudulent elections, media censorship, and restricted humanitarian access prolonging the crisis as of 2025. The 2025 crisis updates show no resolution.

Conclusion

Cameroon’s violent genealogy reveals fascism as not confined to Europe but as embedded in colonial mechanisms: racial hierarchies (Herrenvolk), penal terror (prisons, torture), and ideological suppression (indigénat, UPC bans), where German executions evolved into French beheadings and post-colonial burnings, sustaining state control. Comparatively, Algeria’s balançoire torture parallels Cameroon’s, highlighting fascism’s adaptability in Africa.

But, as Stoler asserts, recognising “imperial durabilities” is key to dismantling them. France’s 2025 acknowledgment of “repressive violence” is a step, but true justice demands reparations, accountability for all sides, and dialogue to address root causes. Only then can Cameroon transcend its violent legacy toward equitable peace.

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1. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/25/cameroon-civilians-massacred-separatist-area ↩︎
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Herrenvolk ↩︎
3. Stoler, A. L. (2016). Duress: imperial durabilities in our times / Ann Laura Stoler. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373612 ↩︎
4. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/916/ ↩︎
5. https://archives.au.int/bitstream/handle/123456789/8303/African%20Journal%20on%20Terrorism%20June%202018_E.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y ↩︎

To cite this article:

Walter Gam Nkwi, ‘Tracing the Proto-Fascist Origins of Conflict in Cameroon,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 21 (15 September 2025).

Featured image: Zohra Bensemra/REUTERSA Cameroonian government soldier walks past a burnt car while patrolling in the city of Buea in the anglophone Southwest region, October 2018.