La politique de regroupement au Cameroun sous administration française et au Cameroun Post colonial de 1922 à 2020 : le cas des régions du centre, littoral et l’ouest

Abstract

The regroupment policy refers to all the methods, procedures, choices and strategies used by the administration to move populations from their areas of settlement to strategic locations, in order to better administer or protect them, but with the unavowed goal of improving the economic exploitation of the territory. The work poses the problem of the need for regroupment through its capacity to satisfy the needs of the administration and the population. Using a diachronic and synchronic approach, and a multidisciplinary and objective methodology, the analysis is based on the foundations of the regroupment policy in Cameroon, the population responses, and the consequences of regroupment at the political, economic and social levels. In fact, the reorganisation of Cameroon's administrative units by France from 1916 onwards marked the country's desire to bring the administration closer to the people. On the ground, the geographical setting of the administrative units was the main obstacle to achieving this goal. In order to overcome this natural challenge, France resorted to a regroupment policy. At specific historical periods, different methods were used to move and stabilise populations. From 1922 onwards, this led to authoritarian regroupments along roads. Then, as from 1957, during Cameroon's First War of Independence, regroupment camps were used by France to efficientlyfight UPC nationalist troops. And from 1960, the outbreak of Cameroon's Second War of Independence caused other regroupment camps and the impulse of population transfer operations combining security and land development. The war waged by the State of Cameroon against Boko Haram in 2012, the Ambazonian secessionistsand the policies for developing certain localities pushed the population for further displacements. The resultsfrom this three-part study show that the regroupments facilitated the implementation of the French colonial system in Cameroon; economy, security and administration motivated the practice of regroupment. Also, on the whole, almost all the peoples of Cameroon were resistant to any type of displacement that severed the links between man and his ancestral land for good. The regroupment policy was therefore advantageous to the French colonial administration as it provided short-term solutions to the economic, social and security problems it faced. In short, the regroupments were contrary to theemancipation of the peoples’ civilization of Cameroon for whom lifestyles and mental representations were linked to and conditioned by their habitat. The link between the people and their ancestral land causedthe return of a major part of the population to their former sites, despite the government's manifest desire to keep the people in the settlements. To this day, some of the people gathered together as part of the pacification process during Cameroon's wars of independence, and their descendants still have a burning desire to return to their ancestral lands