DAKAR, Senegal — French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that France waged a war marked by “repressive violence” in Cameroon before and after the country’s independence in 1960 in a letter made public Tuesday.

It is France’s first official acknowledgment of its repression of Cameroon's independence movement as a war.

The letter sent last month to Cameroonian President Paul Biya, follows a report released in January by a French-Cameroonian commission of historians. The report revealed that France carried out mass forced displacements, detained hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians in internment camps, and backed brutal militias to suppress the country’s fight for independence and sovereignty between 1945 and 1971.

The commission was established by Macron during a 2022 visit to the

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