This dissertation is a diplomatic history from below of Cameroon’s relationship with China and Taiwan during the Cold War. At the center are the diverse array of Cameroonians who forged and mediated Cameroon’s shifting alliances in the Cold War: nationalists, guerrilla fighters, healthcare workers, and politicians – women and men alike. By taking seriously the diplomacy of Cameroonian citizens not normally considered to be diplomats, I challenge understandings of African international relations as perpetually dominated by foreign powers and their rivalries. Instead, I demonstrate that such narratives understate the experiences and agency of Africans in shaping their own foreign relations. Employing a transregional methodology, my arguments draw on sources from Cameroon, China, Taiwan, France, and the UK, including state archives, oral histories, and “grassroots” sources that I found and purchased in China. First, I argue that Cameroonian nationalists practiced gendered forms of diplomacy with China, and that women were particularly effective in this work, despite remaining largely invisible to historians relying on official colonial archives. Second, by recognizing Cameroonian healthcare workers as diplomats in their work alongside Chinese colleagues at two hospitals in Cameroon, I demonstrate that China did not merely influence African knowledge production in a one-directional display of power – as has generally been assumed – but that knowledge flowed in both directions. Lastly, examining how Cameroonians navigated three separate alliances with Taiwan and China also illuminates crucial dynamics of African decolonization and the Cold War. These alliances formed and shifted in ways that cannot be explained by the traditional emphasis on ideology, foreign aid, and great power competition, as they demonstrate that Africans exercised far more diplomatic power than appears in histories of African decolonization focused on the West. Bringing Cameroonian, Chinese, and Taiwanese sources into conversation also complicates the narrative in Chinese and Taiwanese historiography on relations with Africa during the Cold War. Scholars tend either to critique China and Taiwan by asserting that all their dealings with Africans were disingenuous, or to claim a harmonious and enduring relationship with Africa. In both cases, the result is to make China or Taiwan the actor, and to cast Africans as credulous participants. By studying how governments in China and Taiwan responded to African diplomacy, my research brings new insight to scholarship on the international relations history of China and Taiwan.
Read
