How a cause becomes an organization, and an organization becomes a force
By Franck Essi
A cause can be just and still remain weak. An idea can be brilliant and never change reality. A population can be dissatisfied, suffer, denounce injustice for years, and still remain unable to alter the balance of power.
This is perhaps one of the most important lessons we can draw from the journey of Ruben Um Nyobè and the experience of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon: a just cause does not spontaneously become a political force. It has to be built.
That is the question I want to explore here. How do we transform an aspiration into collective power? How do we move from individual frustration to shared understanding? How does that understanding become organization? How do we train people who can, in turn, explain, recruit, connect and organize others? How do ideas circulate? How do we connect local work, communication, resources, petitions, institutions and international action? How does an organization learn to act, endure and adapt when its environment becomes hostile?
Looking at Ruben Um Nyobè and the UPC from this perspective helps us understand something fundamental: major political transformations do not rest only on the quality of ideas or on the courage of a few leaders. They also rest on a multitude of quieter, more patient and often far less spectacular practices: explaining, training, structuring, financing, connecting, mobilizing, coordinating, documenting, executing, evaluating, learning and starting again.
This is obviously not about turning the UPC into a perfect organization or mechanically imposing contemporary categories of activism on the 1950s. Its history is that of a movement marked by tensions, uneven regional presence, material difficulties, strategic disagreements and increasingly violent colonial repression. Yet that history allows us to ask a question that remains highly relevant today: how does a dispersed population, confronted with different forms of injustice, gradually become capable of recognizing itself in a common cause and acting collectively?
From this perspective, Ruben Um Nyobè and an entire generation of women and men involved in the struggle remain a genuine school in the construction of collective power.
1. STARTING FROM LIVED PROBLEMS TO BUILD A SHARED UNDERSTANDING
People do not mobilize sustainably simply because they are presented with a grand theory. They are more likely to mobilize when ideas help them make sense of what they are actually experiencing.
Ruben Um Nyobè’s trade-union experience was crucial in this respect. It brought him into direct contact with very concrete issues: wages, working conditions, discrimination, precarity, workers’ rights, administrative injustice and inequalities between colonized people and settlers. The nationalism carried by the UPC gradually connected these concerns to other issues: taxation, land, cash crops, public freedoms, administrative repression, access to positions of responsibility, political representation, reunification and independence.
The method, therefore, was to start from different situations and progressively show what they had in common. The worker first thinks about wages. The planter worries about the prices paid for produce and the conditions imposed on them. The African civil servant experiences discrimination. The peasant worries about land, taxes, forced labour or administrative abuse. A family thinks about school, health, housing or security. Political work then consists in showing that behind these apparently separate experiences lie institutions, rules and power relations.
This is how an individual problem can gradually become a collective question. It is also in this sense that Um Nyobè’s well-known statement that “politics touches everything and everything touches politics” takes on its full meaning. It does not mean that everything must become partisan. It means that many everyday problems are not merely private misfortunes: they are also linked to collective decisions, institutions and relations of domination.
The shift can be summarized quite simply:
- “I have a problem”;
- becomes “many of us are experiencing related problems”;
- then “these problems have causes”;
- and finally “we can act collectively on those causes.”
This shift is fundamental because thousands of dissatisfied people do not automatically constitute a movement. They may suffer separately, attribute their difficulties to different causes, seek individual solutions or simply adapt to injustice.
The UPC did not create the dissatisfaction of Cameroonian populations out of nothing. It helped connect it, name it, document it and place it within a national language of rights, dignity, sovereignty, reunification and independence. But this consciousness was never produced in a purely top-down manner. People were not merely passive recipients of a discourse coming from the leadership. Their experiences, complaints, petitions, meetings, family networks, workplaces and local practices also helped give concrete substance to Cameroonian nationalism.
The power of a movement therefore begins when it enables people who are separated from one another to recognize that they are experiencing, in different forms, the effects of the same political order.
2. GIVING THE CAUSE AN INFRASTRUCTURE, RELAYS AND RESOURCES
Shared understanding is not enough. The consciousness that has been developed must then be able to circulate, reproduce itself and survive those who initially carried it. This is where organization becomes decisive.
Historical studies of the UPC show that the movement was far more structured than the image of a nationalist struggle resting solely on a few major figures might suggest. From its early years, it developed leadership bodies, territorial structures, specialized responsibilities and mechanisms designed to organize political activity. Sources notably point to a central committee, a political bureau, a secretariat, local committees and specific responsibilities, including the political training of cadres.
These details may appear administrative. They are not. A political idea needs a human infrastructure. A movement must know where it is present, who does what, how information circulates, how decisions reach local structures, how information from the ground reaches leadership and how activists are trained.
We must therefore distinguish between the popularity of an idea and the organization of a force. An idea may be popular without being organized. Thousands of people may support a cause without being connected to one another, without clearly defined responsibilities, without coordination tools, without regular spaces for discussion and without the capacity for common action.
Organization consists precisely in transforming diffuse sympathy into collective capacity. At a minimum, it requires:
- structures, which provide a lasting framework for action;
- responsible organizers, who distribute tasks and prevent everything from depending on one person;
- local relays, able to maintain links with communities;
- trained activists, able to explain objectives and coordinate activities;
- channels for the circulation of information, linking the different parts of the movement;
- material resources, however limited, to finance travel, meetings, printing, communication and other organizational needs;
- regular points of coordination, allowing people to assess, correct and redirect the work.
This final dimension deserves emphasis. We often talk about ideas, courage and organization while forgetting that all militant work also has a material economy. Travel costs money. Printing costs money. Bringing people together requires places. Circulating documents requires resources. Hosting activists, supporting those who have been sanctioned or maintaining networks requires money, time and solidarity.
A political force is therefore not built with good intentions alone. It also depends on women and men who give their time, their skills, sometimes their money, their spaces, their networks and part of their personal security.
Training is equally essential. A movement expands its capacity for action when it no longer depends exclusively on a national leader to explain its objectives, hold meetings, distribute texts, recruit supporters or resolve local difficulties. An organization in which everything has to be referred back to the top may seem efficient when it is small; it quickly reaches its limits when it seeks to grow.
Building a militant force therefore requires moving from a logic of addition to a logic of multiplication. In a logic of addition, one leader convinces one hundred people. In a logic of multiplication, that leader helps train people who, in turn, become capable of training, mobilizing and organizing others.
The central question is therefore no longer only: how many members do we have? It also becomes: how many people have enough understanding, skill and autonomy to contribute directly to the expansion of the movement?
In contemporary language, one might distinguish several levels: the sympathizer supports, the member formally joins, the activist acts, the cadre organizes, and the leader creates the conditions in which others themselves become capable of acting and organizing. This typology should obviously not be mechanically imposed on the historical categories of the UPC. It nevertheless helps clarify an important distinction: accumulating names is not the same thing as developing capacities.
The difference between a temporary mobilization and a durable political force often lies here. A crowd can appear quickly. An organization is built slowly.
We must nevertheless avoid imagining the UPC as a perfectly ordered and continuously controlled apparatus. Its presence varied considerably across regions, social groups, languages, mobility conditions and levels of colonial surveillance. Its strength therefore did not lie in total organizational control, but in its capacity, always fragile and threatened, to create political links in an environment designed to prevent them.
3. COMMUNICATING TO CONNECT, EDUCATE AND ORGANIZE
We often think of political communication primarily in terms of visibility. How many people know us? How many read a publication? How many follow a leader? How many share a message?
The UPC experience suggests another way of thinking about communication. Between 1948 and 1956, the movement used several channels: public meetings, correspondence, newspapers, publications, brochures, petitions, statements and interventions in the institutional spaces available to it. Yet this communication unfolded in an environment of surveillance, growing restrictions, seizures and attacks on freedom of expression.
Communication therefore did not simply serve to make the movement known. It also became a means of connecting, educating and organizing.
The sequence that followed Ruben Um Nyobè’s first appearance before the Fourth Committee of the United Nations on 17 December 1952 illustrates this particularly well. His intervention gave international visibility to the UPC’s demands. Yet Um Nyobè did not turn the trip to New York into a mere symbol of personal prestige.
Back in Cameroon, the international intervention became the subject of genuine political restitution. When he returned before the Fourth Committee on 5 December 1953, Um Nyobè stated that he had held 83 public meetings to report on his mission and explain its significance to the population. He also referred to 10,000 copies of the brochure What the Cameroonian People Want, which reproduced, among other things, his 1952 intervention, and which he said had been seized by the French authorities.
The sequence is particularly instructive:
international event → political content → restitution → meetings → written support → new discussions → wider mobilization.
But a second dynamic must be added:
circulation → surveillance → censorship → seizure → adaptation.
The UPC did not communicate in a free public sphere. The circulation of ideas had to contend with bans, searches, seizures, arrests and the colonial authorities’ determination to reduce the movement’s influence. Communication must therefore be understood as organizational activity under constraint.
International information returned to the grassroots. It was explained. It fed meetings. It gave activists arguments. It helped connect people who were far removed from centres of decision-making. In other words, communication became a stage in the process of organization.
In the age of social media, this lesson remains particularly useful. One publication may generate ten thousand views and almost no activists. Another may be seen by five hundred people, bring fifty of them to a meeting, allow twenty to be trained and lead to the creation of new local teams.
Which one has produced more power?
We therefore need to look beyond audience figures and follow a more demanding chain:
visibility → understanding → relationship → trust → participation → commitment → organization.
If we stop at visibility, we have communicated. We have not necessarily built a force.
4. MOVING FROM DENUNCIATION TO CAMPAIGNING AND EXECUTION
In his report to the first UPC congress in Dschang on 10 April 1950, Ruben Um Nyobè wrote:
“It would be pointless to observe and denounce […] if action is not organized to put an end to it.”
What matters here is not only the criticism of denunciation. It is the word organized.
Action is not organized simply because several people do something on the same day. Organizing action means transforming indignation into an objective, the objective into tasks, the tasks into responsibilities, the responsibilities into execution and execution into collective learning.
It means moving from “this must change” to a much more precise approach: this is what we want to achieve; this is who has the authority to make the decision; these are the people who must act; these are the resources available; this is the realistic timeline; and this is how we will know whether we are making progress.
That is what a campaign is.
The UPC’s demands — independence, reunification, political rights, denunciation of colonial abuses and defence of local populations — did not remain abstract principles. They could be carried through petitions, meetings, texts, public interventions, approaches to trusteeship institutions and different forms of mobilization.
A serious campaign should be able to answer a few basic questions:
- What result are we trying to achieve?
- Who has the power or capacity to produce that change?
- Which populations are directly concerned?
- Which allies can help expand the balance of power?
- What sequence of actions should be used?
- Who is responsible for what?
- What timetable guides the action?
- How do we verify that decisions are actually being implemented?
- How do we learn from what works and what fails?
This last point is fundamental. An organization does not become strong simply because it knows how to make decisions. It becomes strong when it knows how to translate decisions into executed tasks, monitor execution, correct deviations and learn from results.
There is therefore a discipline of action that must complement the justice of the cause. A public statement may be useful. It must not be confused with the campaign itself. A meeting may be necessary. It does not automatically amount to strategy. A mobilization may be spectacular. It does not necessarily produce results if it is not connected to an objective, continuity and follow-up capacity.
Militant action truly begins when anger acquires an objective, a method, responsibilities, resources, a timetable and a capacity for learning.
This does not mean political action must become cold or bureaucratic. Indignation is often the necessary starting point. But it becomes a force when it is connected to strategy and the capacity to execute.
5. MAKING DIFFERENT ARENAS WORK TOWARD THE SAME OBJECTIVE
The experience of Um Nyobè and the UPC also shows that a struggle does not have to choose between local work, institutions, law, communication and international action. It can seek to connect them.
The United Nations trusteeship system offered the UPC a particular lever. The movement used petitions, UN mechanisms and hearings before the Fourth Committee to carry Cameroonian demands beyond the territory administered by France. Um Nyobè’s intervention in December 1952 formed part of this strategy. It was simultaneously a diplomatic act, an effort at documentation and an attempt to frame the Cameroonian question within an international language of rights, sovereignty and decolonization.
But the UN should not be idealized. The international arena provided a platform, legal language, visibility and a means of documenting abuse. It was not enough to prevent repression or abolish colonial power relations. International action remained constrained by the interests of the administering powers, the ambiguities of the trusteeship system and the balance of forces within international institutions themselves.
This is precisely why internationalization only made sense when connected to a local political base. International action could provide resources for work on the ground. Work on the ground could provide international advocacy with legitimacy, information, testimony and social depth.
Later, Pan-African networks also provided resources, solidarity and spaces for reorganization to Cameroonian nationalists. The principle remained the same: a balance of power is rarely built in only one arena.
An organization can act simultaneously:
- in communities, to build a base;
- in public space, to impose an issue;
- in institutions, when a lever exists;
- through law, when it can protect or widen the space for action;
- in the media, to reach wider audiences;
- with national, regional or international allies, to increase resources and influence.
Strategy consists in ensuring that these arenas do not operate separately. International action that never strengthens the grassroots can become diplomacy without a people. Conversely, local implantation that is unable to use legal, institutional or external levers may remain trapped in an extremely unfavourable balance of power.
The relevant question is therefore not always: which is the best arena?
It is often: how do we make several arenas work toward the same objective?
6. DISTRIBUTING LEADERSHIP AND PREPARING FOR RESILIENCE
Talking about Ruben Um Nyobè’s leadership carries a risk: reconstructing the history of the UPC around one exceptional man and making the work of thousands of others disappear. Yet the power of a movement is measured precisely by its capacity to produce action far from its principal leader.
Studies of Cameroonian nationalism show the importance of local activists, young people, trade unionists, workers, peasants and women within the broader anti-colonial ecosystem. The Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, the UDEFEC, was not merely a decorative structure or an appendage without autonomy. It had its own leadership, its own statutes, its own organizational practices and specific forms of political action.
Women activists notably played an important role through petitions, which served to document abuses, formulate demands, connect local experiences and challenge trusteeship institutions. These petitions addressed independence and reunification, but also very concrete problems: forced labour, administrative abuses, economic hardship, access to rights, education, health, child protection, living conditions and women’s dignity.
A petition was therefore not merely an administrative document. It could simultaneously be:
- a way of making injustice visible;
- a tool for learning about rights;
- a means of collectively formulating a grievance;
- a support for discussion in meetings;
- evidence submitted to international institutions;
- a mechanism linking local realities to a national cause.
In some contexts, messages and petitions also circulated through public reading. Women who could read were able to orally transmit the content of texts to other participants. This allowed the message to reach far beyond those who were literate in French.
This reveals an especially important mechanism: the word multiplies.
It no longer belongs only to the secretary-general. Local organizers explain. Women activists draft, collect, circulate or read petitions. Young people pass on messages. Newspapers relay slogans. Territorial structures maintain links.
A movement truly begins to exceed its leaders when action no longer has a single source.
We must nevertheless avoid presenting women’s involvement as a simple delegation granted by an enlightened male leadership. UDEFEC activists developed their own demands, practices and organizational spaces, even though they operated within a nationalist universe whose hierarchies remained largely male. Recognizing this tension helps us understand that building collective power also means creating new political actors.
This distribution of leadership becomes even more important when repression intensifies.
The UPC experienced uneven implantation, strategic disagreements, internal changes and severe material constraints. Its activists were exposed to surveillance, arrests, searches, intimidation and bans. Repression did not begin with the banning of the UPC in July 1955, but that prohibition marked a major rupture. A period of relatively open political activity gradually gave way to clandestinity, dispersal, exile, war and, in some areas, armed struggle.
This rupture profoundly transformed the nature of political action. When meetings became dangerous, methods of mobilization had to change. When publications were seized, distribution networks had to adapt. When leaders were arrested, exiled or killed, the organization had to learn to operate without them. When structures were infiltrated or dispersed, trust became a scarce resource.
The question then became:
what allows an organization to withstand shocks?
There is obviously no simple answer. But this history draws attention to several dimensions:
- the distribution of responsibilities;
- the training of several levels of cadres;
- the diversification of communication methods;
- the existence of local structures capable of taking initiative;
- the ability to document abuses and circulate information;
- the maintenance of solidarity networks beyond a single territory;
- anticipation of adverse scenarios;
- the ability to learn rapidly when the environment changes.
An organization must therefore not only know how to grow when conditions are relatively favourable. It must also think about what will allow it to continue to exist when its environment becomes hostile.
Resilience is not improvised once a crisis begins. It is prepared in advance through training, distributed responsibilities, diversified resources, strong relationships and local initiative.
A MILITANT FORCE IS BUILT
The experience of Ruben Um Nyobè and the UPC obviously does not provide us with a recipe that can simply be reproduced today. Cameroon in the 1950s is not Cameroon today. Technologies have changed, societies have changed, states have changed, media have changed, means of surveillance have changed, and forms of political engagement have also changed profoundly.
But some of the fundamental problems of militant action remain.
A cause gradually becomes a force when a movement succeeds in carrying out at least five operations.
- Politicize: connect lived problems to their collective causes without losing touch with everyday realities.
- Organize: give ideas structures, resources, responsibilities and coordination mechanisms.
- Multiply: train people who can, in turn, explain, mobilize, train and act.
- Connect: make different arenas, instruments and actors work toward the same objective.
- Adapt: learn from results, anticipate shocks and change methods when the environment changes.
If I had to summarize the first dynamic in a single chain, it would be:
Lived problems → shared understanding → consciousness → organization → training → mobilization → coordination → balance of power → change.
But a second chain must be added, one that is just as important:
Organization → surveillance → repression → adaptation → resilience or dispersal.
We often try to skip several stages. We want change without having built enough organization. We want mobilization without having produced enough understanding. We want large numbers of activists without investing enough in their training. We sometimes want thousands of people in the streets without first building the structures capable of connecting them, guiding them, protecting them and giving continuity to their mobilization.
In reality, we sometimes want to harvest what we have not sufficiently planted.
What the experience of Ruben Um Nyobè and the UPC ultimately reminds us is quite simple: major historical movements rest on an immense amount of invisible work. Behind the leaders history remembers are people who explain, write, organize, collect, transport, host, document, transmit, mobilize and train others. It is the accumulation and coordination of all these small acts that gradually creates collective power.
The question, then, may not only be where are our great leaders?
It is also:
where are the organizations capable of sustainably transforming understanding into organization, organization into capacity for action, and that capacity for action into a balance of power?
From my point of view, this is one of the most important questions that Ruben Um Nyobè, the women of the UDEFEC and that entire generation of activists continue to ask us.
Let Us Switch On Our Brains.
Franck Essi
#WhatIBelieve
#IdeasMatter
#ThePeopleFirst
#LetsSwitchOnOurBrains
REFERENCES AND RESOURCES FOR FURTHER READING
Primary sources
Um Nyobè, Ruben. Le problème national kamerunais. Introduction and notes by J.-Achille Mbembé. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1984.
Um Nyobè, Ruben. Écrits sous maquis. Introduction and notes by J.-Achille Mbembé. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
United Nations. Statement by Ruben Um Nyobè before the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly, 17 December 1952, document A/C.4/226/Add.1.
United Nations. General Assembly, Eighth Session, Fourth Committee, 393rd Meeting, 5 December 1953, document A/C.4/SR.393.
Scientific and historical studies
Joseph, Richard A. Radical Nationalism in Cameroun: Social Origins of the U.P.C. Rebellion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Mbembé, J.-Achille. “La palabre de l’indépendance : les ordres du discours nationaliste au Cameroun, 1948-1958.” Revue française de science politique, vol. 35, no. 3, 1985, pp. 459-487.
Ramondy, Karine, ed. La France au Cameroun, 1945-1971. Paris: Hermann, 2025.
Tatchou Nounkeu, Christian. “Political Communication Strategies of Sub-Saharan Africa Nationalist Movements in the Era of (De)colonization: The Case of the UPC in Cameroon, 1948-56.” Journal of African Media Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2020.
Terretta, Meredith. “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global: From Forest Maquis to a Pan-African Accra.” The Journal of African History, vol. 51, no. 2, 2010, pp. 189-212.
Terretta, Meredith. Petitioning for Our Rights, Fighting for Our Nation: The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949-1960. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG, 2013.
Audiovisual resources
Contextualized audio archive of Ruben Um Nyobè’s intervention before the Fourth Committee of the United Nations, 17 December 1952:
Video version of the intervention published by Jeune Afrique:
franckessi.com 