Ahmadou Ahidjo
Ahmadou Ahidjo took Cameroon to independence while fighting a war the French army fought for him, and resigned twenty-two years later into an exile and a death sentence. He was a radio operator from the Muslim north, a compromise candidate acceptable to France precisely because he was not from the movement that had been demanding independence for a decade. That movement, the UPC, had been banned in 1955 and driven into armed rebellion in the south and west, and its leaders were killed one after another - one assassinated in Geneva, one shot in the bush. The war continued after independence in 1960 and was fought with French advisers, aircraft and napalm into the early 1970s. Estimates of the dead run into the tens of thousands, and the whole episode was largely absent from French and Cameroonian public accounts until recently. He unified the country in 1961 when the British Southern Cameroons voted to join rather than go to Nigeria, ran a federal state for eleven years, and then abolished the federation by referendum in 1972 - which is the root of the anglophone conflict now. He built a one-party state by absorbing the opposition parties rather than banning them, merged them into a single movement in 1966, and ran appointments on a north-south balance that gave the Muslim north the presidency and the Christian south the administration. The security service reported to him alone. The economy grew on cocoa, coffee and then offshore oil, whose revenues he kept off the national budget entirely. In 1982 he resigned in favour of his prime minister, expecting to keep the party and the real power. Within a year they had fallen out; he was tried in absentia for plotting a coup, sentenced to death, and died in Dakar without returning. The successor he chose has governed Cameroon ever since.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 1989 CE
- Nationality: Cameroonian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
