Ruben Um Nyobè
Ruben Um Nyobè asked the United Nations for Cameroon's independence in 1952, was driven underground for it, and was shot in the forest by French troops in 1958, two years before the independence France then granted to men who had opposed him. He was born in 1913 in the Bassa country south of Douala, was educated by Presbyterian missionaries, worked as a court clerk, and came to politics through the trade unions the French allowed after 1944. In 1948 he founded the Union des Populations du Cameroun with a programme that was, for its time and place, plain: the reunification of the French and British Cameroons and a date for independence, which as a UN trust territory Cameroon was entitled to ask for. He put the case to the Trusteeship Council in New York three times, in 1952, 1953 and 1954, in speeches that made him the most famous African nationalist the French had. The administration answered by rigging the elections he stood in and, in May 1955, by putting down UPC demonstrations in Douala and Yaoundé with a violence that killed dozens and by dissolving the party. Um Nyobè went into the Bassa forest in the maquis with a few thousand fighters. The war that followed was the one the French have never counted, fought with the methods being learned at the same time in Algeria: regrouped villages, napalm on the forest, the heads of guerrillas displayed in the markets. On 13 September 1958 a patrol found him near Boumnyebel and shot him, and the body was dragged through the villages and buried in concrete so that there should be no grave. Ahidjo, who had never asked for independence, received it in January 1960. the UPC fought on in the Bamileke country for a decade, its second leader was poisoned in Geneva and its third shot in public in 1971, and the name Um Nyobè was unlawful to say in Cameroon until 1991. His people called him Mpodol, the one who speaks for others.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1958 CE
- Nationality: Cameroonian
- Roles: nationalist, political_leader, trade_unionist
