France has acknowledged its role in decades of violent repression of independence movements in Cameroon, the latest stage in a slow process of reckoning with its brutal colonial past.
In a letter to the Cameroonian president, Paul Biya, dated 30 July, Emmanuel Macron said it was “up to me today to assume the role and responsibility of France in these events”.
The letter, which was disclosed on Tuesday, conveyed the findings of a joint Franco-Cameroonian commission that investigated the colonial-era repression of independence movements from 1945 to 1971.
It also took into account crimes committed by the French-allied post-independence government of Ahmadou Ahidjo in Cameroon. Biya served as prime minister under Ahidjo from 1975 to 1982.
Macron said in the letter: “The commission’s historians clearly established that a war took place in Cameroon, during which French colonial authorities and military forces committed various forms of violent repression in several regions of the country, a war that continued beyond 1960, with France’s support for actions taken by the independent Cameroonian authorities.
However, Macron did not apologise or mention any form of reparations.
In 1884, the area today known as Cameroon became the German colony of Kamerun. During the first world war, British and French forces seized the territory, which was later split between them by the League of Nations after Germany’s defeat in 1919.
In January the commission, which was announced at a joint press conference given by Macron and Biya in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, in 2022, submitted its findings in a 1,035-page report. The human toll of the state-sponsored repression is estimated to have been tens of thousands, included the assassination of the nationalist leader Ruben Um Nyobè.
The Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy, a co-head of the commission, said: “We are only at the beginning of a process that will require several years … to locate and identify the bodies in mass graves and also to address to land issues that continues to affect a large number of Cameroonians today.
“But before anything else [there should be] national mourning, and proper funerals for our compatriot who died for the nation must be organised,” said Bassy, whose 2019 album 1958 paid homage to Nyobè.
“On the French side, public outreach is crucial, integrating this history into the school curriculum so that it is never repeated and also to ensure that the French population can truly understand and accept the country’s history.”
For years, France had refused to confront the ghosts of its colonial empire that stretched from Algeria in northern Africa to Benin in the west. But in recent times a new guard of historians and activists, many from former colonies, have categorised official French narratives that barely mentioned the violence of colonial exploits in the 20th century as polished fiction.
This has coincided with a sustained wave of anti-French sentiment in Francophone Africa that has partly spurred coups against governments in the region deemed to be puppets of Paris.
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The former French leader François Hollande admitted the existence of “extremely troubled, even tragic episodes” while visiting Yaoundé in 2015. But Macron, more than any of his predecessors, seems to be responding to this pressure with a series of strategic gestures that are often criticised as incomplete.
In 2018, his government initiated the restitution of 26 cultural artefacts to Benin, a direct response to a groundbreaking report he had commissioned. The report, co-authored by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr, argued that these objects were not merely museum pieces but living parts of a cultural memory that belonged back home. A 27th artefact traced to Finland was returned to Benin this May.
Correspondence seen by the Guardian in July revealed that the French government had signalled a willingness to discuss reparations with Niger for the massacre of thousands of citizens in the 1899 mission Afrique centrale (MAC), one of the most violent colonial campaigns in Africa. Again, it stopped short of apologising for its role.
Experts say the conversation now has to move from cultural restitution to a more direct discussion of historical debt and hope that official acknowledgments usher in the real work of reckoning.
Bassy said: “We are at the point in time when Africa is confronting its history … to come to terms with itself but also to approach its future with greater clarity and confidence.”
