From the outset, Free France faced monumental difficulties in Africa: chronic shortages of legitimacy, matériel (i.e., military hardware), and numbers. Soon, it engineered the exploitation of resources and populations in regions that colonial stereotypes had consistently depicted as the most backwards of the empire. One needs to add another item to this list of hurdles. In many ways, Free French Africa proved to be dysfunctional. Indeed, the movement soon experienced both internal and external dissonance. Administrators who arrived with utopian reform schemes found themselves digging through avalanches of conflicts and having to forestall their grand projects until the postwar. The proximity of Vichy-controlled French West Africa, as well as the presence of pro-Pétain elements in Free French Africa, further fueled tensions. These cleavages were anything but trivial. Through them, one can gauge the weight and reach of institutions, networks, ideologies, and colonial structures, as well as the impact of the massive shifts brought about by the three glorious days of 1940.

As reflected in the work of many novelists such as Marguerite Duras, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Georges Simenon, Jean Paulhan, and Andr'e Gide, the colonial universe bore a reputation for rivalry, pettiness, and dysfunction. FEA and Cameroon were no exception. Thus, in the midst of the Phony War, on March 18, 1940, Corporal Charles Priem who served in a motorized unit in Mbalmayo, Cameroon, wrote back to his family in Mérignac near Bordeaux:

Indeed, this war, or rather the Battle of France that took place within months of this verdict, would be lost so quickly and calamitously that it would shake France's very foundations. The “colonial fog” evoked here was obviously not its cause, although Priem's testimony seems symptomatic of the kind of disarray described by Marc Bloch in his famous Strange Defeat. A few months later, as Free France established a foothold in FEA and Cameroon, de Gaulle's representatives inherited these deep and ancient fissures. They would try to bridge them as best they could. To further complicate matters, new disagreements emerged from within and without, some of them intractable.