Revolt and Repression

In April 1964, Marguerite Mbida emerged as the head of the list of PDC to April 1964 elections. The PDC is the only political party to have dared to present these elections. The Cameroonian opinion leaders of that time were either in exile or in prison. PDC voters demonstrated their victory being stolen in the elections. The Cameroonian government of 1964 sent the police to villages and protesters were arrested and sent to the infamous concentration camps of Mantoum, Tcholliré and Mokolo.  The Ahmadou Ahidjo government continued the fight against the UPC and its armed wing (KNLA).

He signed defense agreements with France, the French personnel were responsible for conducting the organization, supervision and instruction of Cameroonian armed forces." This triggered a bloody violent riot at the Bamileke and Bassa region.

Controversy overthe number of victims

About the number of victims who were involved in this atrocity, opinions differ. The French helicopter pilot Max Bardet, who operated in Cameroon at that time they allegedly committed this Genocide declared: “In two years, the army took the Bamileke country from south to north, and completely devastated it. They killed about three or four hundred thousand Bamileke and almost rendering this group almost extinct. Spears against automatic weapons, Bamilékés had no chance. The villages had been ramshackled. Like Attila, “You come, you leave nothing’’. Few French intervened directly, of these, I’ve known three or four, that’s all”.

In 2001, the Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti stated: “Estimates ranged from as low as sixty thousand dead. The figures were brandished by the official leaders, to record four hundred thousand statistically as claimed by radical nationalist leaders. It was well known, the executioners always minimized as the victims always MAXIMIZED”.

However, the historian Marc Michel, who had studied the specific question of the independence of Cameroon, said that most of the fighting took place after independence. He believed that “most likely, the war claimed tens of thousands of people, mostly victims of the civil war after independence”.

For the historian, Bernard Droz, author of a book on decolonization, the events of the period from 1955 to 1959 will be of the order of tens of thousands of deaths, whether colonial military repression or internal struggles with the UPC. The Cameroonian schools history textbooks refer to these happenings as “a harsh repression”.

Misinformation and denial of agitators to these happening are mostly marked as the pre and post independence periods. Some ethnic groups tried to affiliate themselves to the victimization as the affected group of this struggle, while in reality all the people of Cameroon were involved.