Um Nyobe: Carcass for the jackals

Large or small, men are never anything but men. Some like Um live their lives fighting and dying for principles and becoming symbols and legends and reference points for future generations; like de Gaulle, Churchill, Kennedy, Mao and others for their countries, he is too big for any individual or faction to claim for themselves!

By Tazoacha Asonganyi, Yaounde

13 September 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Ruben Um Nyobe, Cameroon’s premier revolutionary leader. To mark the event, many people wrote and are still writing articles in praise of his multi-faceted qualities. Some sought to claim him for themselves; others saw him more as a moral compass for all Cameroonians, and an ideal guide for the present struggle to bring change to our country.

In discussing his legacy, some have expressed views considered unpalatable by others; and yet others have laid exclusive claim to his legacy and elected themselves high priests and repositories for the whole history of the struggle of the ’50s and ’60s. This generated disputes, but such disputes are on past events which at the time of their planning in the ’50s, required foresight because they were unknown “future” events. From our positions today with the help of hindsight, there is more clairvoyance, less speculation and more certainty since we are dealing with the past. There is therefore very little room for disputes about such past events that have become our common history.

Um was a victim of bad luck. He was unlucky because he had to do with colonialists like de Gaulle, Churchill and others who, in spite of Um’s repeated denial, considered him and his comrades as communists working to establish a totalitarian regime in Cameroon. De Gaulle had learned from his Jesuit education to consider communism as atheist and therefore inherently evil, so he instinctively detested it by temperament and upbringing. In exile, in spite of serious differences with Churchill, he is known to have enjoyed the support of Britain because Churchill would rather have a de Gaulle than a Communist France. Overall, the general disposition of European leaders at that time was that if communism found its way into hell by force, they would at least view the devil with some condescension!

And so the French secret service was extended to Cameroon. As there was the “Main Rouge” to eliminate pro-independent African nationalists and their supporters in Europe, so there must have been a version in Cameroon to eliminate Um and his supporters in the country, with their task made easy by SEDOC.

Um also suffered from overconfidence; he believed that in all contests between good and evil, good always triumphed. He did not know his enemy well. Therefore he did not keep his options open, and had no reserve plan in case the preferred tactic failed. It can be said that when the politics of the ballot box failed and his party was banned, he turned to a reserve plan which was the launching of the revolutionary war; but the timing and manner of his death indicate that this option was not well prepared for!

Like some of our contemporaries in Cameroon, Um, while he was free, pulled crowds in rallies. They represented the moral upsurge of a humiliated population that sought to assert its dignity by refusing to play along with a compromised system. He succeeded to transform this moral upsurge into a political choice. But so long as the only power that these crowds represented was their sweat and their applause, it only helped to reinforce the hopelessness of the situation. This hopelessness was incarnated by the absence of both the ballot box and the gun, the real sources of power in that context!

Um depended on the people for his power, but his only hold on them was the insecure one of words. The fury of the people offered nothing. It could burn a neighbourhood, or hold up traffic; this would vent their anger, but that would be it, so long as there was no true internal source of power like organised trade unions, capital, the ballot box or firepower!

When the UPC was banned in 1955 many took cover, except Um and others that volunteered for the revolutionary war, unlike in South Africa where “a thousand flowerheads of resistance” which could not all be crushed by the apartheid regime, emerged after the banning of the ANC. Following the banning of the ANC, its members created an alternative political culture underground, and sensitised the people through non-public arenas; they created an invisible network of small groups bound together by shared values and aspirations, submerged in daily life but laying siege on the regime.

These groups of resistance created and animated by members and sympathisers of the ANC soon assembled in the United Democratic Front (UDF). The UDF became the legal front for the banned ANC in South Africa. The groups included all types of civil society groupings, and rendered the black townships ungovernable. The ANC had firebrand guerrilla leaders who were intent on using violence, while there were other leaders like Mbeki who in addition, decided to charm their adversaries – the whites - through the negotiation paradigm. So there was a bush war, township actions and negotiation, all of which combined to produce victory.

On the UPC side, following the banning of the party, members and sympathisers who were not actively involved in the bush war either went on exile or remained on the spot, but folded their hands and waited, instead of forming local groups to create a visible front for the UPC. Those that created contacts with the regime like Mayi Matip and later, Kodock, Dika, Ntumazah, Wougly, Hogbe and others did so to be consumed, not to charm the regime on behalf of the UPC. And so it all has a semblance of having ended in failure, except that the name of the UPC and its emblematic leader are like carcasses for the jackals!

Large or small, men are never anything but men. Some like Um live their lives fighting and dying for principles and becoming symbols and legends and reference points for future generations; like de Gaulle, Churchill, Kennedy, Mao and others for their countries, he is too big for any individual or faction to claim for themselves! And yet others are good with theory, but are hardly ever consistent with it when it comes to practice.