Where Did Cameroonians’ ‘Fighting Spirit’ Go? Obstructed Memory, Broken Transmission and Citizens without a Memorial Inheritance
Abstract
Cameroonians did not simply forget a tradition of resistance: state censorship, family silence and the absence of public rites prevented its transmission.
Politics, memory and citizenship · Full reading edition
One cannot forget what one never received
The political crisis following the election of 12 October 2025 revived questions about Cameroon’s reputed spirit of resistance. Yet Paul Ricœur’s work suggests that forgetting presupposes an earlier transmission.
Many generations received neither accounts nor testimony about the independence struggle. The voices of trade unionists, messengers, combatants, intellectuals and insurgent farmers were intimidated, criminalised and prevented from becoming durable writing.
The silenced family
Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora show that family is a primary site of memory. In Cameroon, trauma and fear often kept parents from recounting what had happened.
Without family narratives, children learned to admire authorised contemporary figures—the official, mayor, traditional chief, parliamentarian, footballer or influencer—while freedom fighters remained anonymous and clandestine silhouettes.
The postcolonial engineering of forgetting
Since the 1960s, the state has controlled the national narrative by recasting heroes as rebels and resistance as subversion, excluding the independence struggle from public debate and school programmes.
It also discredited critical thought and fragmented national solidarity through the political use of regional and linguistic identities. This state tribalism prevents the formation of a shared historical imagination.
Criminalising resistance
The recent description of young protesters as drug addicts and adults as bandits or terrorists continues a colonial grammar. Such labels pathologise revolt, justify unlimited force and transform political grievances into individual deviance or crime.
From the UPC labelled terrorist in the 1950s to today’s protesters, delegitimation neutralises the historical power of anger and prevents a people from honouring its struggles.
Tradition requires rites
Founding events become tradition through monuments, songs, commemorations, street names, public narratives and school ceremonies. Cameroon has established almost no official ritual capable of staging and renewing the memory of the independence struggle.
The fighting spirit went nowhere: it was linguistically neutralised, historically erased, politically criminalised and ritually obstructed. A people cannot defend a history whose names and dignity it was never allowed to inherit.
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