Abstracts of papers: 

The Chimalpahin Conference 2008:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Sybille N. Nyeck

Department of Political Sciences

University of California (UCLA)

(Estados Unidos)

On January 31, 2006, the privately-owned newspaper Anecdote published “Le Top 50 des Homosexuels Présumés du Cameroun,” a list of fifty names of people believed to be the most corrupt men and women in Cameroon. The crime of these government officials, economic agents, CEOs, successful journalists, Church leaders, members of civil society, and cultural and sport promoters was their alleged homosexuality. An expanded version of the homosexual list, “La Suite de la Liste des Homosexuels,” published by the same newspaper the following day added twenty-seven names. 

The first list included three women and forty-seven men. Of the forty-seven men, three were deceased former government officials. The supplementary list of twenty-seven included two more deceased persons, former clerics of the Roman Catholic Church. Curiously, both lists had neither an opposition figure, nor a military official. The ethno-political and religious configurations of the lists indicate that political discourse on gender and sexuality in Cameroon surfaces deep-seated mistrust of state institutions. This mistrust is based on the assumption that the Cameroonian state has always been a pawn of neocolonial networks that use homosexuality to recruit allies among the elites. 

The publication of the lists was followed by an elaborated conspiracy theory that presented as a historical fact the allegation that Amadou Ahidjo, the first president of Cameroon, was sodomized by the French doctor Louis-Paul Aujoulat, a lay catholic worker who became governor of the French Equatorial Africa after his arrival in Cameroon in the early 1930s. From Ahidjo to President Paul Biya today, homosexuality has allegedly become a mainstream practice in the circles of power. This assumption is made by self-appointed nationalists, the so-called defenders of the people against the state and its alleged neocolonial, capitalist, freemasons and international exploitative networks. In formulating and codifying contemporary political views on homosexuality in Cameroon, Dr. Louis Paul Aujoulat appears as the central abject figure around whom history is remembered and the future envisioned. 

In this essay, I review the life and work of Dr. Aujoulat in Cameroon, to show that he represents not the archetype of perversion, but the embodiment of psychodrama of ideological and political fragmentation that characterized the period of decolonization. The life and work of Aujoulat is Cameroon highlights the nature of ideological fragmentation between French citizens with regard to de-colonization, the ambiguous role of non-military French citizens in mandated territories, the ethno-social configuration of ideological dissent among Cameroonian nationalists, and the limits of French politics of assimilation. I use Louis Hartz’s theory of fragmentation and the development of new societies, Nandy Ashis’s theory of psychological colonialism, and Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject to elaborate on the nature of the psycho-political dilemma that Aujoulat and Cameroonian nationalists faced after World War II. While fragmentation could help begin a journey toward freedom and autonomy, freedom as a product of fragmentation is both symbolic and ironic in the sense that nationalism arises not necessarily because of enemies, but because enemies do not, and cannot exist without self-mutilation and misremembering.

About Sybille N. Nyeck