Ahmadou Ahidjo

Ahmadou Ahidjo was born in Garoua, in northern French Cameroon, on the twenty-fourth of August 1924, the son of a Fulani village chief. He took his early education at the École supérieure de Yaoundé and worked as a radio operator in the French colonial postal service through the 1940s.

He entered politics in 1946 as a deputy in the Cameroonian Territorial Assembly. He became Prime Minister of self-governing French Cameroon in February 1958 and Cameroon's first President at independence on the first of January 1960.

His most consequential political achievement was the reunification of the formerly British and formerly French Cameroons. The October 1961 plebiscite in the British-administered Southern Cameroons produced a vote for union with the independent French-Cameroonian state. Ahidjo negotiated the federal constitution that brought the two regions together as the Federal Republic of Cameroon on the first of October 1961. The federal structure operated until 1972, when a referendum unified the country as the United Republic of Cameroon.

He maintained an authoritarian one-party state under the Cameroon National Union (CNU) through twenty-two years. He suppressed the radical wing of the independence movement (the UPC, whose leader Reuben Um Nyobè was killed by French troops in 1958), maintained French commercial primacy in the Cameroonian economy, and developed the oil and coffee sectors that financed the state through the 1970s.

He resigned voluntarily from the presidency on the fourth of November 1982 — one of very few African heads of state of his generation to do so. His chosen successor Paul Biya assumed the presidency. The relationship between the two men deteriorated; Ahidjo went into exile in France and Senegal.

He died in Dakar on the thirtieth of November 1989, age sixty-five.

He is honored here as the first president of Cameroon and the negotiator of the 1961 reunification.