By Franck Essi

We talk a great deal about Ruben Um Nyobè in Cameroon. We recall his commitment to independence and reunification, his address before the United Nations, his time in the maquis, and his assassination on September 13, 1958. We regularly quote some of his words and commemorate his memory. All of this is necessary. But it is not enough, because by turning the great figures of our history into symbols, we sometimes run the risk of no longer truly reading them or thinking sufficiently about the ideas that guided their actions.

I believe this is particularly true of Um Nyobè. We know the hero more than the thinker, the martyr more than the organizer, the man who demanded independence more than the man who questioned the conditions that would enable a dominated population to become a conscious, organized people capable of taking its destiny into its own hands. Yet it is precisely this dimension of his legacy that seems especially relevant to me today.

Um Nyobè was not an academic intellectual in the classical sense of the term. He did not leave behind a major treatise on political philosophy in which all his ideas were systematically laid out. His thinking is scattered across congress reports, speeches, petitions, letters, articles, his interventions before the United Nations, and texts produced during the clandestine period. When these writings are brought together, particularly those published in Le problème national kamerunais and Écrits sous maquis, a fairly clear coherence nevertheless emerges.

Several questions recur constantly:

• How does a population become a people?
• How can different communities build a nation?
• What does independence really mean?
• How can we move from individual discontent to political consciousness?
• How can this consciousness be transformed into organization?
• What place should be given to law, international institutions, negotiation, popular mobilization, and the balance of forces?
• And above all, how can a society be made sufficiently conscious and organized to actually become master of its own destiny?

These questions are more than seventy years old. Yet they continue to concern us. This is probably one of the best reasons why we must continue reading Um Nyobè—not merely to preserve his memory, but to reflect on the problems he tried to raise.

STARTING FROM CONCRETE PROBLEMS TO UNDERSTAND THE SYSTEM

Um Nyobè’s political thinking was first built through experience. His time in the colonial administration, his involvement in trade unionism, and later his political activity enabled him to observe concretely the inequalities in status between Europeans and Africans, professional discrimination, the limited presence of Cameroonians in decision-making bodies, and, more broadly, the functioning of a system in which those who suffered the consequences of decisions had very few means of influencing them.

Trade unionism seems to have played an important role in this intellectual development. A demand may initially appear strictly economic: a worker asks for a wage increase, a farmer complains about the price at which their produce is purchased, or an African civil servant denounces the discrimination they face. But at a certain point, another question emerges. Who sets wages? Who organizes commercial networks? Who defines the rules governing access to positions of responsibility? Who decides how resources are distributed?

The question is therefore no longer only what problem we are suffering from. It also becomes a question of who decides the rules that produce or perpetuate that problem. I believe this is a first important lesson in Um Nyobè’s way of thinking: he does not stop at the symptom. He seeks to understand the system that produces it.

It is from this perspective that we should understand his famous statement, delivered at the second statutory congress of the UPC in Eséka on September 29, 1952: “Politics touches everything, and everything touches politics.” This sentence obviously does not mean that everything must become partisan. Rather, it means that many realities we regard as individual, social, or economic also depend on collective rules and political decisions.

Concretely:

• education depends on public choices;
• land ownership depends on the law;
• roads depend on public investment;
• trade operates within a framework of rules;
• freedoms depend on institutions;
• the ability to create an association, publish a newspaper, organize a meeting, demonstrate, or participate in an election also depends on political decisions.

In other words, even when we decide not to take an interest in politics, politics continues to affect our lives.

This is why citizenship cannot be limited to living in a territory or possessing a voter registration card. It also requires the ability to understand how power works, who makes decisions, how decisions are made, and how citizens can influence them. Without this understanding, we may spend a great deal of time denouncing consequences without ever truly addressing their causes.

FROM THE SOCIAL PROBLEM TO THE NATIONAL PROBLEM

Um Nyobè gradually moved from these various social and professional demands toward what he called the “Kamerunian national problem.” We must recall the context. The Cameroon in which he acted was not yet a sovereign state. The former German territory had been divided after the First World War between French and British administrations. Populations that had previously belonged to the same territorial entity now lived under two different systems, while the major decisions concerning their future were largely made elsewhere.

For Um Nyobè, the national question therefore had several dimensions. It was necessary in particular to:

• reunify the territory;
• build a national consciousness;
• achieve independence;
• prepare Cameroonians to effectively exercise sovereignty.

It is within this logic that we must understand the constant connection he established between reunification and independence.

Reunification was not simply a sentimental demand linked to the memory of German Kamerun. It raised a directly political question: over what territory should the Cameroonian people exercise sovereignty? How could a lasting political community be built when the territory on which it was to live remained divided between two different administrations?

When he addressed the Fourth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly on December 17, 1952, Um Nyobè therefore defended both the unification of Cameroon, the evolution of the trusteeship system, and the path toward independence. A statement associated with this intervention summarizes his approach well: “We are not asking for immediate independence. We are asking for the immediate unification of our country…” before calling for a timetable leading to independence.

I find this formulation particularly interesting because it shows that Um Nyobè clearly distinguished between the objective and the strategy. The objective was independence. But between the present situation and that objective, there were steps that had to be considered: reunifying the territory, transforming the institutions, preparing for the exercise of sovereignty, and securing a deadline.

We often know what we reject. Sometimes we know what we want. But we think much less about the path that would take us from one to the other. Yet that is precisely where strategy begins. A vision indicates the destination. A strategy organizes the means and stages required to reach it.

INDEPENDENCE IS NOT REDUCED TO A FLAG

There is another important idea in Um Nyobè’s thinking. Independence cannot simply mean that a European official leaves their post and is replaced by a Cameroonian. Nor can it be limited to the existence of a flag, an anthem, a government, an administration, or embassies. The real question is the capacity to decide.

Who defines the country’s major orientations? Who controls the institutions? Who decides how resources are used? Who sets the rules? Who can hold those in power accountable? Behind all these questions lies the problem of sovereignty.

A country can be legally independent and remain deeply dependent in its economic, diplomatic, military, technological, or intellectual choices. Sovereignty is therefore not merely proclaimed. It is built.

It requires, among other things:

• institutions capable of functioning;
• a competent administration;
• sufficient resources;
• women and men capable of designing and implementing public policies;
• informed and organized citizens;
• a collective capacity to define and defend the country’s interests.

Independence thus becomes both a right and a responsibility.

This also explains the importance Um Nyobè attached to international law. Cameroon was not legally an ordinary French colony. It was placed under the international trusteeship system of the United Nations. Um Nyobè and the UPC quickly understood the possibilities offered by this situation. They submitted petitions to the United Nations, requested hearings, discussed the provisions of the trusteeship agreement, and sought to turn the Cameroonian question into an international issue.

The approach was relatively simple: those who had proclaimed certain principles should also be called upon to answer for their implementation. But Um Nyobè never seems to have considered that the United Nations would liberate Cameroon in place of Cameroonians. In Les vraies solutions pour une détente politique et morale au Kamerun, published in 1957, he wrote that “the solution to our problems depended above all on ourselves.”

This idea seems essential to me. We can seek allies, use international law, appeal to external institutions, and mobilize world public opinion. But no one will build our freedom sustainably in our place. External support can alter a balance of forces. It can never replace a conscious, organized society capable of acting.

This lesson remains particularly relevant in societies where we sometimes spend a great deal of time waiting for an external actor, an international institution, a great power, or even a providential leader to solve problems that we must first learn to confront collectively.

BUILDING A NATION WITHOUT DESTROYING OUR DIFFERENCES

One aspect of Um Nyobè’s thinking that seems most relevant today concerns the ethnic question. We know how sensitive this issue remains in Cameroon. We regularly speak of tribalism, denounce hate speech, and affirm our commitment to national unity. Yet community affiliations continue to be used in political struggles, in the distribution of certain positions, and sometimes in the construction of the adversary.

Um Nyobè was already thinking clearly about this problem. In his letter to André-Marie Mbida dated July 13, 1957, he wrote: “We recognize the historical value of the ethnic groups within our people.” This statement is important because it means that building a nation does not require denying the history, languages, cultures, or affiliations of the different communities that make it up.

The problem is therefore not diversity. The problem begins when diversity becomes:

• an instrument for conquering power;
• a means of distributing rights and positions;
• a criterion for deciding who should be supported or rejected;
• a way of politically manufacturing the enemy.

Um Nyobè thus distinguished between two realities that we still too often confuse: cultural identity and its political instrumentalization.

Being Basaa, Bamiléké, Duala, Bulu, Bamoun, Fulani, Bakweri, Maka, or belonging to another community is not a problem. The problem begins when we decide that this affiliation should determine who deserves a position, who should be supported, who should be rejected, or whom we should trust.

We can love our community without hating others. We can defend our culture without building walls. We can preserve particular identities while sharing a common citizenship. The real challenge is therefore to build a political community capable of recognizing differences while preventing them from becoming permanent boundaries between citizens.

I believe this question remains at the heart of Cameroon’s national construction. We will not build a lasting nation by denying our differences. Nor will we build one by turning every difference into a political argument. We must learn to do both things simultaneously: recognize our affiliations and build above them a common interest.

AN IDEA THAT IS NOT ORGANIZED REMAINS WEAK

Um Nyobè is interesting not only because of the ideas he formulated. He was also an organizer. I believe this dimension of his legacy deserves greater study because we sometimes have the impression that being right is enough, that a good idea will naturally prevail, or that sufficiently strong indignation will spontaneously lead to change.

History teaches us something else. An idea can be right and remain without consequence. A population can be deeply dissatisfied and remain politically powerless. Thousands of citizens can share the same diagnosis without ever becoming a genuine collective force. Between an idea and change, there is an unavoidable stage: organization.

Under Um Nyobè’s leadership, the UPC gradually built local structures, held congresses, organized tours, distributed documents, mobilized different social groups, and developed specialized organizations. For an idea to become a collective capacity to act, several things are necessary:

• activists and leaders;
• structures;
• resources;
• meetings and spaces for coordination;
• training;
• discipline;
• transmission;
• continuity in action.

This lesson is even more important in the age of social media. We sometimes confuse visibility with organization. A post can go viral, a video can receive hundreds of thousands of views, a hashtag can dominate conversations, and outrage can mobilize people for a few days. All of this can be useful, but none of it automatically replaces an organization.

An audience is not an organization. Anger is not an organization. Emotion is not an organization. Even individual courage is not yet organization. Organization begins when people decide to work together over time, with objectives, responsibilities, resources, rules, and a strategy.

This is probably one of Um Nyobè’s great practical lessons: an idea becomes a historical force only when it finds men, women, and structures capable of carrying it forward over time.

ACTIVISM MUST ALSO EDUCATE CITIZENS

There is another dimension of Um Nyobè’s political practice that seems fundamental to me: the importance he placed on explanation. It would have been easier to settle for slogans about independence, reunification, or colonialism. But his texts also show an effort to explain the trusteeship system, institutions, the role of the United Nations, the reasons for reunification, and the meaning of sovereignty.

In other words, it is not enough to mobilize. We must also educate.

I believe that any political organization that genuinely seeks to emancipate citizens must take this question seriously. An activist who only knows how to repeat what their leader says is not politically autonomous. Nor is an activist who regards every criticism as betrayal. An activist who does not know the arguments of those who think differently, or who can defend their own positions only through slogans, remains dependent on those who think in their place.

As far as I am concerned, activism should instead help produce:

• citizens who understand problems and institutions;
• citizens capable of arguing and verifying information;
• citizens capable of questioning their own organization when it is wrong;
• citizens capable of defending their convictions without turning those who think differently into enemies;
• citizens capable, ultimately, of thinking and acting for themselves.

Activism should therefore not produce political believers. It should help form conscious citizens. Otherwise, we may perfectly well replace one form of domination with another without ever building a genuine democratic culture.

LEGALITY, REPRESSION, AND THE MAQUIS: AVOIDING SIMPLISTIC READINGS

Um Nyobè’s relationship to violence is probably one of the subjects about which we must be most cautious. We sometimes like to tell history through simple categories: the peaceful hero, the armed revolutionary, the moderate, or the radical. But historical reality is generally more complex.

Between 1948 and 1955, the UPC acted primarily within the possibilities offered by colonial legality: meetings, congresses, petitions, demonstrations, popular mobilization, and appeals to the United Nations. The work of Achille Mbembe shows that during this period, armed struggle was not presented as the preferred path toward independence.

The context changed radically, however, after the violence of May 1955 and the banning of the UPC in July. Leaders went underground, repression intensified, and the legal political space gradually closed. From that point onward, the question of methods of action arose in different terms. Armed actions emerged, military repression intensified, and Sanaga-Maritime became one of the main areas of confrontation.

Nevertheless, Écrits sous maquis reveals an important continuity in Um Nyobè’s personal thinking. He continued to invoke Cameroon’s legal status, sought possibilities for a return to legality, and devoted relatively few texts to the development of a systematic military doctrine.

We must therefore avoid two errors:

• turning Um Nyobè into an absolute and timeless apostle of nonviolence;
• portraying him as a man who had, from the beginning, built his project around armed struggle.

The most interesting question seems to me to lie elsewhere: what happens to a movement’s strategy when the legal space available to it for action gradually closes? This question forces us to reflect on the relationship between objectives, available means, repression, and the consequences of the choices made. Above all, it forces us to avoid turning decisions made decades ago in dramatic contexts into easy slogans.

WHAT I TAKE FROM UM NYOBÈ

Reading Um Nyobè today does not mean turning all his positions into definitive truths. It means trying to identify, in his approach, a few lessons that can still help us think.

• Understand before acting. Indignation may be necessary to awaken us, but it never replaces analysis. We transform more effectively what we understand.
• Look for causes behind symptoms. Unemployment, discrimination, the state of schools, land problems, and economic difficulties do not come from nowhere. They also result from decisions, institutions, and power relations that we must learn to identify.
• Distinguish between a vision and a strategy. Saying what we want is important. Determining the stages, forces, alliances, resources, and means necessary to achieve it is just as important.
• Build unity without imposing uniformity. Our differences will not disappear. The challenge is to build common rules and a shared project that prevent them from being instrumentalized against others.
• Do not confuse popularity with organization. A crowd is not yet an organization. A social media audience is not yet an organization. Organization requires people, responsibilities, resources, discipline, and time.
• Educate citizens, not merely supporters. A movement that seeks emancipation must enable its own activists to understand, question, debate, and think.
• Use alliances without outsourcing your destiny. External partners can help and international institutions can be useful, but no society can sustainably delegate its own transformation.
• Think about the consequences of our methods. We may win a battle today while destroying the conditions for peace tomorrow. The means used to seize power already contribute to building the world that will come afterward.

READ UM NYOBÈ RATHER THAN SANCTIFY HIM

We must finally learn to maintain a more mature relationship with the great figures of our history. Too often, we oscillate between two attitudes: either we destroy them or we sanctify them. In one case, Um Nyobè is reduced to the “rebel,” the “agitator,” or the “communist” described by the colonial administration. In the other, he becomes a perfect hero who was right about everything, all the time.

I believe in neither of these readings.

A politician can be courageous and be wrong. A hero can have limitations. A thinker can evolve. A leader can produce powerful ideas without having all the answers. This does not necessarily diminish their greatness. It simply makes them human and allows us to better understand what they actually tried to do.

Um Nyobè therefore does not need to be turned into a saint in order to be important. We must instead read what he wrote, understand his context, identify his insights, methods, contradictions, and limitations. Several questions remain open:

• What kind of socialism did he defend exactly?
• What economic model would he have wanted for an independent Cameroon?
• How would he have organized political pluralism?
• To what extent did clandestinity transform his thinking?
• How would he have reconciled the construction of a sovereign state with Cameroon’s territorial, cultural, and political diversity?

We do not have all the answers, and we do not need to invent them. To read a thinker is not to make them say what we would have liked them to say. It is to start from what they actually wrote, place their ideas in context, discuss them, and accept the areas of uncertainty.

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS

When I read Ruben Um Nyobè, I therefore see far more than the nationalist leader who died on September 13, 1958. I see a man who tried to understand how to transform a dominated population into a conscious people, how to connect everyday problems to mechanisms of power, how to build a nation from different communities, how to transform consciousness into organization, and how to use law and international alliances without abandoning one’s own responsibility.

Above all, I see a man who raises a question that still lies before us: how can we make a people truly capable of acting upon its own destiny?

Um Nyobè’s answer seems to rest on several demands that remain deeply relevant: understand before denouncing, organize before hoping to bring about lasting change, educate citizens rather than manufacture believers, build unity without denying differences, and never confuse formal access to power with the actual construction of sovereignty.

It is therefore not enough to want to be free if we do not build the conditions of freedom. It is not enough to denounce if we do not understand. It is not enough to understand if we do not organize ourselves. It is not enough to organize ourselves if we do not know clearly where we want to go. And it is not enough to seize power if we do not know what we want to do with it.

This is why I believe we would benefit from talking a little less about Um Nyobè and reading Um Nyobè more. Not merely to look toward the past, but to better understand the responsibilities that are ours today.

Let us awaken our minds.

Franck Essi

#WhatIBelieve
#IdeasMatter
#LetUsAwakenOurMinds

REFERENCES AND RESOURCES FOR FURTHER READING

Texts by Ruben Um Nyobè

Ruben Um Nyobè, Le problème national kamerunais, introduction and notes by J. Achille Mbembe, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1984.
View the publisher’s presentation of the book at L’Harmattan
View the AfricaBib record

Ruben Um Nyobè, Écrits sous maquis, introduction and notes by J. Achille Mbembe, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1989.
View the AfricaBib record
Read Robert Buijtenhuijs’s review on Persée

Ruben Um Nyobè, Les vraies solutions pour une détente politique et morale au Kamerun, 1957.
View the CERDOTOLA record

Ruben Um Nyobè, intervention before the Fourth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, December 17, 1952, A/C.4/SR.309.
View the official United Nations record
Read the official French report

Ruben Um Nyobè, letter to André-Marie Mbida, July 13, 1957.
Read the text on tribalism and ethnic groups

Ruben Um Nyobè, “Naissance du mouvement national au Cameroun,” Cahiers internationaux, no. 52, January 1954.
View the bibliography of the report La France au Cameroun (1945-1971)

Scholarly Studies and Research

J. Achille Mbembe, “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.
Read the article for free on Persée

Richard A. Joseph, Radical Nationalism in Cameroun: Social Origins of the U.P.C. Rebellion, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1977.
View the French edition at Karthala
View the BnF bibliographic record

Karine Ramondy (ed.), La France au Cameroun (1945-1971), report of the “Research” Commission, Hermann, 2025.
View the report’s presentation by Sciences Po
View the report on Cairn

Walter Gam Nkwi, “Ruben Um Nyobe: Camerounian maquis, radical, and liberator, ca. 1948–1958,” in Biographies of Radicalization: Hidden Messages of Social Change, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019.
View the chapter at De Gruyter Brill

Robert Buijtenhuijs, review of Ruben Um Nyobè, Écrits sous maquis, Politique africaine, no. 40, 1990.
Read the review on Persée

Audio and Video

Audio archive of Ruben Um Nyobè’s intervention at the United Nations, December 17, 1952.
Listen to the archive presented by Cases Rebelles

Jeune Afrique, “Cameroon: the full text of Ruben Um Nyobè’s 1952 speech at the UN.”
Listen to the speech on YouTube

Chemins d’histoire, episodes 217 and 218: “France in Cameroon between 1945 and 1971,” April 28, 2025.
Listen to the episodes