Late 1950s - Rhode Island
great-grandmother with her baby sister
(I love that you can tell that's her baby)
He has been the president of Cameroon since 1982! He recently "won" the 2025 elections.
Ruben Um Nyobè was killed by the French army on September 13, 1958, in the forest where he was hiding, after French colonial troops located him thanks to information obtained through the torture of a prisoner. After many months of hunting down his supporters, all killed or captured one after the other, his camp was located at the beginning of September 1958 by Captain Agostini, an intelligence officer and by Georges Conan, security inspector. Um Nyobè was shot several times, falling on the edge of a tree trunk which he was trying to climb over; it was near his native village, Boumnyebel, in the Nyong-et-Kéllé department in an area occupied by the Bassa ethnic group from which he was also born.
After killing him, the soldiers dragged his body through the mud to the village of Liyong. This disfigured him, his skin, head, and face being severely mutilated. By so drastically altering his remains, the colonial power sought to "destroy the individuality of his body and reduce it to a formless and unrecognizable mass," writes Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe. It was in this same spirit, he continues, that "he was granted only an anonymous grave" at his burial on September 15, 1958. No epitaph, no particular description was inscribed on it. The colonial authorities had him buried without ceremony, encased in a massive block of concrete.