New Friends, New Enemies: Cameroon and the Rival Chinese Governments during the Cold War

What meanings did “friendship” carry for the diverse array of people who invoked this term while navigating the rival alliances of the global Cold War? This paper examines this question in the context of the new Cameroonian state’s relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the PRC, a complex diplomatic space where categories of friends and enemies shifted rapidly.. Throughout the first decade of Cameroonian independence, from 1960-1971, President Ahmadou Ahidjo’s regime maintained diplomatic relations with the ROC, and both right-wing regimes spoke often of their friendship. During this time, the PRC provided moral and material aid to Ahidjo’s greatest enemy, the leftist anticolonial Union des populations du Cameroun (UPC) party, whose members wrote passionately of their friendship with the PRC. In the spring of 1971, however, once the last UPC leader had been executed, Ahidjo abruptly switched to recognizing the PRC, a move Taipei decried as “most unfriendly” in its press release severing relations with Cameroon. The resulting alliance, between Ahidjo’s right-wing government and the PRC under Mao, was a contingent and strategic one shaped more by the shifting pressures of the Cold War than by any ideological solidarity – and yet still both parties immediately spoke glowingly of their friendship. Drawing on oral history and archival research in Cameroon, China, Taiwan, and France, this paper explores how the Chinese and Cameroonian diplomats, anticolonial activists, and intellectuals at the center of this story understood “friendship” as a new diplomatic category for the newly decolonizing world. Putting PRC sources into conversation with those from “friendly” right-wing countries complicates the traditional picture of PRC isolationism and ideological rigidity in its early international relations, revealing how Chinese diplomats and their African counterparts both understood “friendship” as a diplomatic category with material, strategic, and affective power in the Cold War.