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1 God, Land, Justice, and Political Sovereignty in Grassfields Governance

Two words and the history of their use encapsulate the genealogy of Cameroonian nationalism, as practiced and spoken of by Bamileke populations in the late-trusteeship period of the 1950s: gung, which translated as nation, and lepue, the word for independence. The word gung, in present-day Mifi, Menoua, Haut-Nkam, and Nde Departments of the West Province (formerly the Bamileke Region, under French rule), designates the entirety of a population or chieftaincy, its government (composed of a fo, or chief, and his notables), and the land they occupy.¹ Gung can be contrasted with la’a, which refers to a district² within a chieftaincy or to the family compound, the birthplace of one’s forefathers. One might use a singular possessive pronoun to describe one’s own home—as in la’a tcha, my home or compound—but in speaking of gung, only plural possessives are used, suggesting that this larger polity could only belong to a community, not to an individual. Since Cameroon’s independence, these words together, la’a gung (lit., village-country), have been used to designate Grassfields chieftaincies such as Baham in order to differentiate them from gung, the nation-state. When referring to their native chieftaincy, Grassfielders have almost completely omitted gung from their common speech, effectively reducing their gung of origin to the lesser status of la’a, or village.

The discursive belittling of Grassfields chieftaincies began in the colonial period, when administrators referred to them as villages. But during the fight for independence, Grassfielders recalled the historical sovereignty of powerful chieftaincies through the words and events they selected to frame their nationalist narrative. The two key words recurred in independence songs from that era: gung, then commonly used as equivalent to nation, and lepue, which translated as independence in everyday Grassfields parlance. Historically, the ideal of lepue denoted the status of absolute autonomy acquired by the dominant chieftaincies in the Grassfields. During the nationalist period, the image of a politically independent, powerful chieftaincy grew in the collective imaginary and overlapped with concepts of self-determination and national sovereignty, only to fall away again under the postcolonial regime.

Using language as an archive, this chapter explores the semantic bedrock of Bamileke communal memory of political and spiritual practices that predated foreign rule, particularly the elements that later guided the diffusion of UPC nationalism. It provides the historical context for understanding what Bamileke nationalists hoped to regain through their involvement in the UPC, and what cultural and historical materials they worked with as they undertook the decolonization of the imaginary. In other words, this chapter is not a history of the Grassfields under European rule but rather seeks to provide a foundation for the interpretations of Grassfields political culture that anticolonial nationalists found most useful as they sought to popularize the movement to cast off the colonial yoke. Insofar as the anticolonial period entailed a reconfiguration of traditional power in the Bamileke Region, as discussed in chapter 4, it is necessary to understand the tenuous balance of power within and among chieftaincies, as well as the factors that could shift that balance of power within the boundaries of what political scientist Michael Schatzberg terms a “moral matrix of legitimate governance.”³ The present chapter’s purpose is thus to provide the reader with a vantage point from which to perceive and understand the articulation between UPC nationalism and Grassfields political culture that became widespread throughout the Bamileke Region and among Bamileke emigrant communities throughout the Cameroons in the 1950s.

THE FORMATION OF GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES

Orally transmitted myths of origin, emphasizing the role of the founder who often figures as a wandering hunter, abound throughout the Grassfields. The founding myths serve as centralizing narratives—the official version of the past as propagated by the chief’s palace with the political intent of legitimating the chieftaincy.⁴ These stories of origin reveal a great deal about the Grassfields political philosophy that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in tandem with the region’s increasing centralization and settlement density.

The conventional scholarship has posited the settlement of the Grassfields into chieftaincies as coinciding with the growth of the region’s involvement in international commerce as Atlantic and Sahelian trading networks infiltrated from the west and the north.⁵ However, in an article published in 2012, anthropologist and specialist of the Grassfields region, Jean-Pierre Warnier—fleshing out his own previous argument about Grassfields settlement and chieftaincy formation—suggests the emergence of kingship lineages and chieftaincies much earlier, perhaps even one or two millennia ago, and stipulates that for at least twenty-five hundred years the region has been characterized by the incorporation of newcomers due to the mobility of regional and long-distance traders and exogenous marriage.⁶ Regardless of when political centralization of the Grassfields chieftaincies began, the eighteenth century ushered in significant regional changes: Fulani traders north of the region began frequent slave raids throughout the area, while traders from the coast based at Old Calabar and Douala tapped the region for slaves. Because of its inland location, historians have little statistical data on the precise number of slaves originating from the Grassfields region; however, recent scholarship suggests that the combined figures for slaves exported per year at the peak of the trade, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may have reached as high as sixteen to eighteen thousand.⁷ During the period of intensive slaving, the Grassfields served as a melting pot of populations and lineages from many different origins. The nineteenth century—within reach of remembered tradition and political history for Grassfielders—was characterized by skirmishes over territory and succession, wars over boundaries between polities, and shifting rivalries and alliances between chieftaincies.⁸

Against this backdrop of violence, massive displacements, and rampant insecurity, small, autonomous chieftaincies expanded and vied for positions of strength in the region. Internally, founders of new chieftaincies used centralizing narratives to construct a common identity for a diverse population.⁹ Externally, Grassfields chieftaincies engaged in a complex diplomacy of shifting alliances and competition over territory. While oral founding myths bespeak each polity’s assertion of an origin and history distinct from those of its neighbors, they also emphasize their interrelatedness. Baham’s founding myth, for example, features a skilled hunter who left an established chieftaincy in the Grassfields region with his twin and their younger brother and each of their families.¹⁰ They founded the chieftaincies Baham, Bahouan, and Bayangam, respectively, across the Noun River to the west of the Islamic kingdom of Bamum, and bordering the strong chieftaincy of Bandjoun.

Despite the importance to them of their political autonomy, the hundred or so Grassfields chieftaincies were linked by shared cultural, spiritual, and political practices, which appeared similar in content but contained particularities and historical references specific to each chieftaincy.¹¹ Nevertheless, Grassfields settlers identified themselves more with particular chieftaincies than with any named group with a common language or common ancestor. As such, Grassfielders demonstrated none of the usual criteria for defining an ethnic identity.¹² Self-differentiation from their neighboring chieftaincies was more important to them than differentiation from groups beyond the Grassfields who had different cultural practices. By the nineteenth century, the Grassfields connection to transregional trading networks was well established, and polities in the region exported kola, cloth, ironwork, and other artisanal goods in addition to slaves. This was the situation in the region that the Germans designated Bamileke as they began its occupation in the early twentieth century.¹³

Oral accounts of the founding of chieftaincies bespeak the prevalence of internal competition among founding patriarchs of equivalent social status. A young man with his sights set on power might, for instance, employ ruse, oratory skills, mystical technologies,¹⁴ or wealth (particularly in the form of people, in other words, wives or dependents) to achieve social prominence. Several versions of Baham’s origin story recount a years-long rivalry for the position of fo among the chieftaincy’s founders. During this period, Zuguiebou, a contender for the chief’s three-legged stool, was tricked into being trapped in a house without doors. He could escape only after relinquishing his copper bracelet, or kwepe, a symbol of a fo’s right to reign, to Bussu, who thus became the first fo of Baham.¹⁵ This account suggests that ruse and magic were important ways of negotiating power and social mobility. It also hints that, although oral tradition portrays the chief’s power as central and absolute, rivals and competitors were never far away. Historically throughout the Grassfields, ruse, magic, oratory skills, or wealth—the wild-card variables that enable cunning competitors to acquire positions of nobility—surfaced in times of crisis when socially disenfranchised groups tried to reshape the chieftaincy’s balance of power in their favor. While internal crises coincided with succession disputes or secessions, external factors such as the imposition of foreign rule, or wide-scale political transitions could also destabilize the status quo.

LEPUE AND GUNG: POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY, AUTONOMY, AND INDEPENDENCE IN GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES

Grassfields rulers achieved political centralization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through wars designed to expand territory, create or dissolve alliances, and kidnap women or slaves. During the political reshaping of the Grassfields that accompanied the region’s settlement and engagement in transregional trade, the concepts of gung and lepue became essential components of Grassfields political culture. Lepue meant to submit to no one or, as many Grassfielders put it today, to not have to submit to another.¹⁶ Lepue could refer to the status of an individual, denoting a person’s relative dependency or autonomy, or to the relative status of a polity such as gung. By the nineteenth century, lepue had become crucial to defining a chieftaincy’s position and strength in a region plumbed for slaves and plagued by wars and migrations, where boundaries were in constant flux.

Lepue was a standing to be achieved and maintained at whatever cost—certainly it was worth fighting a war and spilling blood. Many of the smaller Grassfields chieftaincies preferred to pay tribute to Bamun or Bali and gain their protection, perhaps because, with such alliances they could maintain their autonomy vis-à-vis other Grassfields polities while paying tribute to a foreign king.¹⁷ Submission to a Grassfields neighbor usually resulted in absorption into or annexation by the stronger chieftaincy. Smaller chieftaincies could try to achieve lepue status by waging war, first on smaller neighbors in order to expand their territory and increase their strength, and then by confronting other powerful chieftaincies in the region.¹⁸

The strongest autonomous chieftaincies were often the ones to resist German colonization. For example, only after German soldiers had set fire to the chief’s palace during the rule of Kamdem III, in 1905 did Baham submit to German rule. After the fire Kamdem III, who had successfully extended the territory of Baham to the north, west, and south during his reign through three well-waged wars, paid a per capita tribute to the Germans and supplied them with laborers to build a road to the coast. Other Grassfields chieftaincies fought to preserve their lepue status in the face of foreign domination. Bafoussam, Baleng, Batie, Bamougoum, Fodjomekwet, and Batcha, chieftaincies that had refused to recognize German authority, were burned by the German military, while Bameka, Bansoa, and Bamougoum formed an unsuccessful alliance of resistance against the invaders.

It took some time for the Germans to completely occupy the Grassfields; not until 1910 did they penetrate to Bana in the present-day Nde Department, where they established a military post.¹⁹ Yet not every chieftaincy resisted foreign rule. During the German occupation of the Grassfields, in the early twentieth century, some chieftaincies allied with the European invaders in a strategy to maintain or regain their dominance in the region. Baham’s rival, Bandjoun, submitted willingly to German rule and became a supporter of European rule, reaping the benefits of allegiance to the state throughout the colonial period and beyond. Whether with the Fulani in the eighteenth century, Bamun and Bali in the nineteenth, the Germans in 1905, or the French and British in 1915, Grassfields chiefs were historically skilled at leveraging greater regional standing by either resisting or negotiating with powerful foreign invaders.

By the twentieth century and into the colonial period, dealing with external challenges to political autonomy was part and parcel of Grassfields politics. Certainly, the three or four decades of European rule in the Grassfields region were insufficient to erase the concept of lepue from the collective memory. There had been a long precedent of acquiring lepue status through violent conflict and great sacrifice. And so it is not surprising that this ideal figured in the slogans and songs of Bamileke nationalists in the era of the quest for independence from European administration. By this time, gung appeared in nationalist discourse in another form, mfingung, usually to denote traitors as “sellers of the country.” While the meaning of lepue and gung had shifted by the 1950s to speak for contemporary political concerns and define the place of chieftaincy in the independent nation-to-be, remnant memories of nineteenth-century meanings conjured independence and nationhood in the imaginary of Grassfielders fighting for freedom from colonial rule.

That lepue survived as an ideal until the nationalist era shows that it remained important during the half century of European rule. A historical analysis of Grassfields political power and governance will help to contextualize the strategies devised by Bamileke chieftaincies to maintain as much autonomy as possible during the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods in Cameroon. Because this chapter examines traditional political power and practice for the purpose of understanding how UPC nationalists later vernacularized the movement’s political platform, rendering it legible in terms of Grassfields political culture, the focus here remains on the structure, philosophy, and practice of governance itself, more than on the ways in which shifts in traditional power prompted by European rule acted on ordinary Grassfielders during the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods.

The fo was the figurehead of the Grassfields chieftaincy, but his power was more symbolic than absolute. Certainly, he made no decisions alone. The fo governed in concert and in consultation with ancestors: his “cabinet” of wala (Bamileke scholars today most often translate this term as ministers); his governing council (kamveu); secret regulatory associations, such as the powerful and dangerous kungang; and notables, district heads, and spiritualists. Although the figurehead, and thus the most visible representative of power in gung, the fo was not the most powerful component of chieftaincy governance. At the moment of a young fo’s succession, the elder notables of gung shaped him into a respected and authoritative ruler.²⁰ Officeholders in his father’s government were essential to the rite of succession and remained influential throughout his reign.

The balance of power at the highest echelons of government was revealed to a new fo during his period of initiation, during which he was secluded in a provisional shelter, the la’akam, for nine months.²¹ During this period, members of the kamveu, the government council, offered extensive counsel to the neophyte, while members of the kungang secret society officiated over religious rites. During the la’akam, notables challenged the fo emotionally and physically, questioning his ability to rule, subjecting him to severe beatings, and threatening to kill him should he try to escape. In this transitional phase, the fo’s strength, courage, and commitment to rule were tested. It is probable that the fo-to-be developed resentments toward the elders who stripped him of his subjectivity and sought to convince him that he was merely an instrument of their power. But surely one of the reasons for the ordeal was to teach the neophyte the self-control necessary to master his resentment and demonstrate deference and submission to elder, more powerful notables. Upon leaving the la’akam, the fo took up the challenge of establishing his authority—vis-à-vis that of his notables—as supreme governor of the polity. It was a task that took a lifetime, and certainly not every fo succeeded. The uneasy balance of power between notables and fo explains, in part, the tense political atmosphere surrounding a fo’s succession, and the historical frequency with which districts of a given chieftaincy seceded or attempted to do so.

During his isolation in the la’akam, the fo learned that he depended on associations of his elders to rule. The most powerful were kamveu and kungang. Oral accounts describe the members of kamveu as descendants of the nine cofounders of the chieftaincy.²² The reigning fo selected his successor with the help of the kamveu council, and upon the ruler’s death, it was kamveu who placed the legitimate successor in the chief’s palace. Although inhabitants knew who belonged to the kamveu council, the identities of the members of the kungang—the secret association of diviners, healers, and guardians of chieftaincy protocol—were concealed from everyone except the most powerful notables of the chieftaincy.²³ Kungang assisted in the installation of the fo in power by carrying out the initiation rites, ensuring his spiritual protection, and bestowing on him the mystical powers necessary to govern.

Governing institutions such as kamveu and kungang ensured the fo’s dependence on his elders and minimized the likelihood that the figurehead would govern as a despot by counterbalancing the fo’s power. They could accuse the fo or other notables of crimes or treachery, oppose the fo mystically or physically (leading to his displacement), and in the event of his death without a successor, select the new fo.²⁴ If kungang questioned a successor’s legitimacy, they could simply omit essential parts of the secret rituals necessary to complete the initiation, leaving the new fo unprotected against unseen, mystical forces threatening to an imposter.²⁵ Without the support of kamveu and kungang—the powerful associations through which he was imbued with political and spiritual legitimacy—the successor could not be “made” a fo.

A fo succeeded his predecessor under the yoke of the chieftaincy’s past history, since the power structure in place rested on the notables, each with his or her own title, rank, role, and particular relationship with the chief’s palace. A fo had to be well versed in chieftaincy history in order to know which members of the nobility had remained loyal to the palace for generations and which might be prone to plotting its overthrow. Nobility positions were hereditary, but the number of nobility titles increased as each successive fo granted new titles during his reign. Titles were both earned and purchased; one had first to earn the title and then to express gratitude for the entitlement with a gift to the fo. The entitlement process was a primary source of revenue for the chief’s palace, before, during, and after colonization.²⁶

Spatially, Grassfields chieftaincies were made up of the core, which comprised the palace of the fo and its designated spaces, and the periphery, consisting of the roads dividing the polity into sections, the remaining districts, the sacred sites, and the border zones or no-man’s-lands.²⁷ Nobility not directly associated with the core presided over the peripheral areas—the roads, the districts, and the sacred sites, but still had an important influence on chieftaincy politics.

The wala (sing., mwala), or, as Bamileke French-speakers say, ministres, in a chieftaincy made up the fo’s cabinet. In local languages, a mwala was described as ta djie, or father of the road,²⁸ and like the roads radiating outward from the palace, their role in governance cut across all districts in the chieftaincy. The fo counted on the wala to uphold the legitimacy of his right to rule even in the face of plots to overthrow him. In the 1950s the Baham chieftaincy had four wala, each specialized in a particular area of governance—justice, diplomacy, commerce, and the maintenance of fertility and fecundity.

Notables who governed the districts of a chieftaincy, often called quarter-heads in colonial nomenclature (and hence, in much of the scholarly literature), were divided into two groups: the wabo,²⁹ who had been named by a past or current governing fo; and the mfonte, whose forefathers had in the past submitted to a conquering fo, relinquishing their lepue status and pledging loyalty upon the annexation of their territory.³⁰ A mwabo’s personal history with the fo distinguished him from a fonte, a distinction made more pronounced by the latter’s placement in districts bordering the chieftaincy’s most hostile enemies. The positions of wabo and mfonte recalled the chieftaincy’s past as each district preserved the memory of pacts, alliances, or enmities between their governor and the fo. In the Ngougoua District of Baham, for example, elders still sing of a past fo’s violation of his promise to exempt Ngougoua from paying tribute to the chief’s palace in return for the wabo’s peaceful surrender.³¹ Stories and songs like this one indicate that lepue was as important to internal politics within a chieftaincy as to external relations with neighbors.

Almost any powerful notable within a Grassfields chieftaincy could, under certain circumstances, undermine the power of the fo: as a member of kamveu or kungang, he might omit the requisite rites at the fo’s inauguration; as a mwala, fail to uphold the fo’s claim to the throne; or as a fonte in a border region, lead a secessionist movement or pledge allegiance to another powerful fo. Transgressions of this nature were, broadly speaking, unthinkable and thus were not a part of “the moral matrix of legitimate governance,”³² but they did occasionally occur, especially when the chieftaincy passed through the liminal phase of its fo’s succession. Furthermore, while colonial administrators promoted the notion that they had pacified the Grassfields by imposing stability in a region once plagued by warfare and rivalries, the administration they implemented often exacerbated tensions among members of the nobility. Many notables viewed colonial rule as an opportunity to change their political standing in the chieftaincy, to break away from a fo’s rule, or to gain power by forming an alliance with foreign administrators.

MAGIC AND MYSTICISM: THE SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNANCE

The undeniable political influence of the notables on the chief is often underestimated in the literature, as it was by European colonizers, including the French, who sought to make “traditional chiefs” their administrative auxiliaries. But the leadership of a Grassfields chief was also tempered in crucial ways by the forces of an unseen world—spirits, ancestors, and a mystical energy called ké (a term often glossed as magic or power).³³

The fo depended on kungang for knowledge of the invisible, metaphysical world of spirits, ancestors, and people who shape-shifted into animals—the world of things ordinary people could only imagine, but a world nonetheless crucial to governance. The duty of kungang was to regulate and domesticate this invisible sphere and to harness it within the chief’s field of power. It was a role that required constant vigilance and an intimate, sophisticated knowledge of both the chieftaincy and the mystical dangers beyond its boundaries. Members of kungang were responsible for protecting the chieftaincy from mystical attacks—whether from within or from without. Once they discovered the mystical causes of misfortunes affecting a chieftaincy or the communities within it, they took measures to repair the spiritual disequilibrium through purification rituals or sacrifices carried out at sacred sites.³⁴

To perform these spiritual duties, members of kungang needed a knowledge of ké, the potent, vital force present in the transformation of one thing to another—ore into iron, seeds into plants, and people into animals.³⁵ Iron smelting depended on the proper management of ké by ironworkers, who had to refrain from violence of any kind, both during the smelting process and during wars with enemies. Because of the danger associated with metal, feuds within a given Grassfields polity or with its allies could not be fought using iron weapons.³⁶ Ké saturated the sacred sites and forests of the chieftaincy’s landscape and was essential to reproductive and agricultural fertility, childbirthing, rainmaking, and spider divination.³⁷ Grassfielders believed this force or energy to be indigenous to the region, in other words, to have preceded the arrival of the founders and settlers of the chieftaincies. Chieftaincy founders had had to rely on spiritualists among their adversaries to make the land habitable and to protect the new settlers from the potentially harmful effects of ké. In many chieftaincies, this initial negotiation is memorialized in periodic masquerades to recognize ké, during which the descendants of the autochthonous populations dance before the fo and the notables.³⁸

Grassfields political philosophy was and is bound up in a belief in ké. In 2002 the late fo Marcel Ngandjong Feze of Bandenkop explained the role of mysticism and magic in chieftaincy governance by saying, “It’s not that I must be the greatest magician in the region. It’s that people must think that I am the most powerful magician in the region.”³⁹ In the instability and insecurity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early rulers had to remain vigilant against plotted rebellions from within or beyond chieftaincy bounds. The presence of an invisible, tenuously controlled energy in the land must have made the founders of Grassfields chieftaincies uneasy, and they took every possible measure to harness ké to their advantage. The management of ké was a primary purpose of Grassfields secret societies, and a significant part of Grassfields governance was devoted to its regulation for the health of the community. Notables and spiritualists did not have a monopoly on ké, however. Others both within and outside the chieftaincy could access ké and put it to malefic use. These unregulated uses of ké, beyond the control of the leaders and protectors of the chieftaincy, were the most threatening to collective and individual well-being.

GOD, LAND, AND SACRED SITES (CHUEP’SI): THE SPIRITUAL ALLIANCE

Given the continuous mobility and competition among Grassfielders and their often antagonistic relationship with the autochthonous dwellers as they settled the region, claiming the right to occupy lands and legitimizing the chieftaincy’s presence constituted another essential part of Grassfields political philosophy. That Grassfielders believed the landscape hosted God is evidenced in the term Si, which means both god and land in the language groups Medumba, Fe-Fe, and Ghomala (spoken in the Nde, Haut-Nkam, and Mifi Departments, respectively).⁴⁰ The connection between land, religious practice, and Grassfields moral economy was physically embodied in sacred places (chuep’si) that served as sites of protection, justice, reconciliation, and familial or community identity. Grassfields sacred sites were the visible manifestations of a spiritual alliance between the living humans and the spirits, ancestors, and gods inhabiting the chieftaincy. The chuep’si also served as historical markers inscribed into the landscape of gung, designating the rightful occupants of a plot of land and legitimizing the presence of Grassfields settlers on the territory. As sites where justice was meted out by notables and chiefs, wills were read aloud before witnesses, and conflicts were resolved, chuep’si were places of mediation where people negotiated legal contracts and relationships with each other.

In each chieftaincy, these sacred sites marked the interstices between the material and the spiritual worlds. The Grassfields are situated in a volcanic, mountainous region that straddles the margin between forest and savannah, five degrees north of the equator. Massive rounded boulders are balanced on hilltops, resembling giant pebbles tossed about by a child at play. Grassfielders offered sacrifices to the gods at these sites embedded in the landscape of gung. Larger sacred sites that served the spiritual needs of the entire chieftaincy were situated at or near extraordinary natural phenomena in the landscape, such as rock formations or caves often adjacent to a source of water, such as a stream, a waterfall, or a spring. In Baham, the chieftaincy sacred site is called feuveuck and is located near Chiala, the chiefly district at the center of the polity.

At feuveuck in Baham, the flow of water appears to come from the face of the rock itself. As one walks down into its depths, entering the vast, cavelike crevices between the rocks, the air suddenly becomes cooler and more humid. Sounds echo off the rock, amplified by the acoustic space. The boulders form alcoves and partitions, and the spatial arrangement inside the site recalls a human dwelling; present-day inhabitants describe one area as the kitchen, another as the parlor of the gods. The stones inside feuveuck bear signs of sacrifice: orange remnants of palm oil splashed against the rock, white grains of salt collecting in crevices, scattered djem djem (pods full of seeds, associated with twins), and small chicks, strutting along the ground beneath the rocks as they peep.

Like other Grassfields community sacred sites, feuveuck marks the gathering place of the forefathers of Baham at the time of gung’s foundation. At these sites, the founding fathers are said to have planned the settlement of the chieftaincy, selected its leader, and thanked the gods for their guidance and protection.⁴¹ Whether for the site’s history or its natural characteristics, the community believed that divine benedictions for the chieftaincy were first channeled through feuveuck. To ensure the continued benevolence of the gods, the living had to carry out sacrifices, which served too as a reminder of the presence of the divine in this sacred site and the need to adhere to the moral norms of justice upheld by the forefathers. Sacrificers, guardians of the site, and kamsi (lit., nobleman of God) officiated at community sacrifices to express gratitude to Si, to purify the chieftaincy of mystical attacks, to promote harmony among the residents, both living and dead, and to ensure reproductive and agricultural fertility. For inhabitants of Grassfields chieftaincies, acts of sacrifice at cheup’si carried collective identity and memory, and thanksgiving: they were acknowledgments of the spirits in their lives, who could bless or curse them.

Chuep’si also served as loci for the administration of justice at different levels. The administration of justice reflected the involvement of spirits and gods in the mediation of human conflict, crime, and punishment.⁴² Major community sacred sites such as feuveuck were the locale for public confessions or truth-telling ceremonies undertaken after times of conflict or misfortune.⁴³ Public confessions or declarations of innocence occurred most often at district-level chuep’si, presided over by district chiefs (wabo or mfonte) and the site guardian, and attended by all inhabitants. On rare occasions, if truth-seeking or public confessions involved an entire chieftaincy and its inhabitants, they were held at the chieftaincy’s communal sacred site. In 1967, after the long period of independence-era war and violence in Baham, a public confession meant to restore peace was held at the chieftaincy’s central sacred site, or feuveuck.⁴⁴

Serious matters of justice were brought before the fo, and smaller conflicts were dealt with at the district or compound level. The fo’s jurisdiction included cases of criminal acts and transgressions of the chieftaincy laws, including murder, rape, flagrant adultery, theft of precious objects, insulting the fo, or repeat offenses. The fo also intervened in smaller cases when an agreement could not be reached. The fo’s court resembled a trial and was carried out not on the sacred site but in the fo’s palace. In serious matters brought before the fo, guilt or innocence could be a life or death matter. In the fo’s court, the defendant, the accuser, the witnesses, and those presiding carried out the trial in an elaborate performance including investigation and witness testimony during which the accused and sometimes the accuser underwent various truth-telling trials.⁴⁵ The ultimate symbol of justice and honesty in the Grassfields was the tortoise. Only the fo could use the tortoise in rendering judgment, and the verdict could not be appealed.⁴⁶ While the accuser and the accused declared their respective version of events, a tortoise was released. If it crawled to the feet of the fo, the defendant was declared innocent. If it crawled toward the defendant, he was considered guilty. Depending on the gravity of the crime, the punishments entailed hanging, live burial, sale into slavery, banishment from the chieftaincy, or bodily mutilation, such as particular tattoos, or amputation of fingers or ears. Each bodily marking referred to a specific crime, thus warning the rest of the community of the wrongdoer’s past behavior.

Truth telling and oathing were common features of justice in the fo’s palace, just as they were at sacred sites. In both cases, individuals either declared their innocence aloud, by asking the gods to punish them promptly if they had committed a crime, or confessed their guilt and begged for leniency.⁴⁷ These declarations reminded participants of the presence of divine administrators of justice and established the credibility of those performing the truth-telling ceremonies. If the accusations were unfounded, the accuser faced severe spiritual repercussions.⁴⁸

When truth-telling ceremonies did not require the fo’s presence, they took place on sacred sites in the chieftaincy’s districts and family compounds. Matters such as disputes between families over property boundaries, payment or reimbursement of bridewealth, divorce, thefts, vandalism, or difficult marriage arrangements were treated at the district level. Notables and any elders available to serve as counselors and mediators presided over the “trial.” Matters judged at the district level were usually settled by reconciliation of the parties and fines or corporal punishment.

Family conflicts were resolved at the lineage chuep’si put in place at the time of each new compound’s establishment. According to Grassfields oral histories, after a founding fo conquered or annexed autochthonous populations, he distributed large sections of the territory to the nine cofounders of the village (members of the kamveu council), his mwala, and the lesser mfonte, or the leaders of the la’a, or districts. These privileged notables distributed the land within their own districts, in the fo’s name, dividing the land among lineage heads, who in turn redistributed it among wives (for cultivation) or sons (to establish their own compounds and become heads of dynasties).⁴⁹ The new occupant of a plot of land provided the fonte or the fo with gifts, both when making the initial request for a parcel of land (a goat and palm oil) and after having settled it (salt).⁵⁰

After being granted the plot of land, the founder (or lineage head) of the compound arranged a ceremony to “plant” a small sacred site, chuep’si mbem, in the presence of witnesses from the surrounding compounds.⁵¹ A ritual specialist planted a yam tree (Ficus aganophila Hutch.) and trees of peace, pfeukang (Dracaena deistelina), and placed a stone at their roots.⁵² The yam marked a family’s right to occupy and use the plot of land. The uprooting or destruction of the yam, especially by burning, desecrated the cheup’si and constituted an assault on the gods and on the fo’s authority as land distributor. The deliberate destruction of a yam was a crime dealt with at the chief’s palace, and a finding of guilt carried a sentence of forced labor in the service of the fo.⁵³ The creation of a chuep’si within a compound legitimized the founding patriarch as the lineage head—the site’s primary sacrificer—and secured his offspring’s right to reside on the land.

The spirit protectors (mbem) of a lineage dwelt in the site around the altar. The chuep’si mbem ensured everyday access to spirit guardians who protected a particular lineage and interceded between them and a more distant being. The chuep’si mbem in family compounds personalized Si and established a permanent contact with the sacred through the land. The site was a visual, inviolable symbol of a lineage’s connection with the sacred. At the level of the lineage compound, the chuep’si was the place where family members settled their disputes.

In case of family conflict, the lineage head called a family gathering at the chuep’si, where each person involved had a chance to speak before the spirits of the site. This event represented a dramatic deviation from the daily norm, since each wife and her children usually led a semiautonomous existence centered around the maternal kitchen/hut.⁵⁴ Each family member made his or her declaration of truth at the chuep’si and asked for divine punishment in case of falsehood within seven to nine days—by death, accident, or insanity.⁵⁵ The sacred altar in the compound also served as a site for the reading of an elder lineage head’s final will and testament in the presence of witnesses and descendants from the compound. Those presiding over these ceremonies poured raffia wine on the sacred ground to seal the alliance between those speaking their truths and the living human and the unseen witnesses present.

The French administration introduced radical changes in the justice system for Grassfielders, but only in matters the French sought to legislate (see below). Throughout the period of foreign administration, truth-telling practices and conflict resolution continued on the sacred sites in chieftaincies throughout the Bamileke region. The presence of unseen witnesses was crucial to the administration of justice, and in the 1950s, Bamileke upécistes employed truth-telling ceremonies and oathing practices on sacred sites to ensure the loyalty of their members.⁵⁶

The chieftaincy government could not monopolize the spiritual powers dwelling in the chuep’si. Sacred sites were accessible to anyone, rich or poor, titled notable or commoner. Even individuals accompanied by a spiritualist authorized to officiate at a given site could approach the chuep’si to offer a sacrifice to Si, make a confession or supplication, ask for protection from harm, or declare his or her own innocence in personal matters that for some reason could not be brought before family or community authorities. One could also take a vow before the sacred altar, establishing an alliance with Si. The spiritual punishments for lying at a sacred site were so severe—infertility, illness, or death—as to ensure that only those who knew themselves to be innocent spoke before the gods at the sacred sites. To Grassfielders a just man was one who could stand and affirm his truth before a chuep’si, one who walked a straight path (djie dandan).⁵⁷

No one addressing the gods at a chuep’si came empty handed, although the quality of the gift depended on the supplicant’s material wealth. In the official chieftaincy ceremonies, officiates offered a domestic animal or fowl. People of lesser means brought palm oil, kola, salt, djem djem, or raffia wine—staples indigenous to the Grassfields region. Wild game or plants could not be offered, but only plants and animals dependent on humans for their care. Offerings were thus symbolic of the link between the world of the living cultivated and tamed by humans, and the wild, unregulated domain of nature, presided by spirits. These same elements—goats, hens, kola, raffia wine, and salt—also were used in legal and commercial transactions throughout the Grassfields, for any negotiated contract or alliance: pledges of loyalty to a fo, matters of trade, marriage, and justice.

In sum, the chuep’si symbolized a standard of justice, whether on an individual, family, or community level. They symbolized the community’s historic juridical norms, resolved conflict, and protected the group spiritually.⁵⁸ They legitimized living settlers’ occupancy of the land, signified chieftaincy law, and were the locus of the negotiation of legal contracts.

They also served external purposes. As the material and spiritual location of the continuity of gung, in times of political crisis or war, community sacred sites preserved and protected a chieftaincy without a fo. For example, Kamdem Guemdjo, the eighth fo of Baham (whose rule began around 1890), went into exile for nine years to escape a plot arranged by members of his own family who reproached him for not having produced an heir since his enthronement. During his absence, guardians of sacred sites made sacrifices to implore the gods to bring back their fo.⁵⁹ Also, during the period of mourning following the death of a reigning fo, the population prayed to the si la’a or si gung dwelling in the chuep’si to be with the successor, the new incarnation of power and authority.⁶⁰ During the fight for independence from French rule, chuep’si became sites of supplication for the gods’ benevolence in the struggle for liberation from foreign rule, protection for freedom fighters evading arrest, and, after the violence, reconciliation.⁶¹

Certainly, the uses of major sacred sites, their role in Grassfields religious practice and political philosophy, and their significance to ordinary Grassfielders changed between the time of the chieftaincies’ founding and the time of Cameroon’s independence, as the inner workings of Grassfields governance adapted to European rule.⁶² Colonial rule complicated Grassfields governance, widening the gap between the visible aspects of the chieftaincy’s governmental institutions (such as the fo and his palace) and the secret dimensions of Grassfields political and spiritual power (chuep’si, spiritualists, and sacrificers), which were concealed from view and misunderstood, neglected, or ignored by Europeans, the region’s most recent newcomers.

The Germans had only begun to occupy the Grassfields when the First World War broke out. Their rule in the Grassfields was characterized by chaos and upheaval as German administrators tried to establish regional paramount chiefdoms, such as Bali-Nyonga, that overturned the network of rivalries and alliances in place in the area.⁶³ Germans allied with the chiefs they deemed “paramount” to recruit laborers en masse to build roads and railways and to work on vast concessionary plantations in the Mungo River valley.⁶⁴ After the war, German Cameroon (Kamerun) became League of Nations mandate territories to be administered by the French and British, and the Grassfields were divided by the Anglo-French boundary delineated in 1919 at the Conference of Versailles.⁶⁵

The French did not begin to administer their League of Nations mandate in the Bamileke region (as they called the eastern Grassfields) until the early 1920s. Dazzled by the royal accouterments of the fo, administrators failed to fully understand the political influence of gung’s secret associations, or the balance of power among the fo, the notables, and spiritualists. They failed, too, to take into account the political significance of the landscape’s spiritual potency and its importance in the administration of justice. The section that follows explores the clash of understandings between Bamileke populations and French administrators hastily erecting a stopgap government in the region.

THE FRENCH ADMINISTRATION’S ASSIMILATIVE PULL IN THE BAMILEKE REGION

Perhaps nowhere was colonial law more haphazardly applied than in Cameroon. The French arrived in French Cameroon and French Togo late, decades after colonization of their other territories in Africa. From 1919, with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary, French administrators in French Cameroon began trying to catch up with their counterparts in other parts of Africa. The high commissioner in Cameroon relied on directives, briefs, and reports from French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa to cobble together policy in the newly acquired territory. In 1917 a landmark circular written by Governor General Joost Van Vollenhoven of Dahomey suggested the necessity of incorporating traditional chiefs into French “direct administration,”⁶⁶ and encouraged the renovation of “native command” to shape it into an instrument of collaborative rule for the French government in African territories.

Having almost no information from the German administration to aid in establishing their rule over Bamileke populations, French administrators had to begin their negotiations with Bamileke chiefs and their codification of Bamileke laws from scratch. The basis for their perceptions of Bamileke chiefs as absolute rulers was a single fragmentary ethnographic report from 1914.⁶⁷ According to the report, Grassfields society was “based on the absolute authority of the chief, master of subjects and land. Each territory is divided into quarters of unequal importance, governed by noblemen. If the chief meets with these noblemen, it is to hear their account of the execution of his orders. Each decision belongs exclusively to him.”⁶⁸ The French administration’s mission was clear. If they were to follow the tone implied by Van Vollenhoven’s 1917 directive, they would have to shape traditional chiefs into dependable auxiliaries in a French administration. In so doing, not only would they conform to an overarching, rational French colonial policy but they would also fulfill the terms of their League of Nations mandate, demonstrating that as administering authorities they were more just than their German predecessors. They could also show up their British counterparts, who were severely understaffed and did not begin to establish an administration in the western Grassfields until 1924, and thus were unable to put a stop to slave trading in the region.⁶⁹

In 1920, the year after the Treaty of Versailles defined the boundary between the British Cameroons and French Cameroon, French administrators began to add their own ethnographic descriptions of ritual customs and practices to the sparse information on the Grassfields. Of course these preliminary reports, based on scant observation and hearsay, conveyed little accurate understanding of Grassfields political philosophy, spirituality, or administration of power and justice. But boasting of their achievements, French administrators reported their successful liberation of the population from the “ferocious exigencies” of the “feared and cruel” chiefs. Having banished corporal punishment, they described a transformation in the attitude of the chiefs: “They are no longer the kind of feudal lords that they were, invested with absolute power, but rather they are often valuable auxiliaries of our administration, and soon they will have no other prestige than that derived from the position of functionary.”⁷⁰ By 1927 the annual report to the League of Nations indicated that the French administration had, “at the request of the oppressed populations, managed to change a feudal regime into a well-controlled system of indirect administration and to transform tyrannical dynastic heirs into” delegates whose power was derived solely from the French administration.⁷¹ But the 1927 report overstated the reality as tensions over the traditional chiefs’ legitimacy and power continued to unfold, particularly in the Bamileke Region, for the duration of the period of French rule.

As French administrators “civilized” the chiefs beginning in the 1920s—primarily by eliminating their capacity to make war, changing the system of justice and punishment of crime, shifting the balance of power among notables, and reinventing the institution of marriage—they slowly began to assimilate them into the French administration as functionaries, in keeping with French policy toward chiefs who wielded a significant amount of power and authority over their subjects.⁷² Throughout the 1920s the role of traditional chiefs according to French colonial policy was to assist administrators with labor recruitment, taxation, census taking, and control of settlement patterns. In the Bamileke Region, where traditional chiefs historically had wielded a great influence in these realms, the French began to depose mfo who did not conform to administrative policy.

Soon after the military conquest of the eastern Grassfields in the First World War, Pouokam I became fo of Baham. He succeeded the formidable fo Kamdem II, who had upheld the lepue ideal by waging three wars, thereby extending his territory to the north, west, and south, and had initially refused to submit to German rule. After his predecessor’s military exploits, Pouokam I’s prohibition from making war underscored the diminution of his power under foreign rule. During the first few years of mandate rule, the chief was liable to being tried in court, further diminishing his stature. As an agent of the administration, Pouokam I was required to collect taxes—ten francs per woman and fifteen francs per man—and to supply labor for European plantations in the Mungo Region.

In 1925, Pouokam I asked the French administration to intervene in Baham’s favor in a land dispute with neighboring Bandjoun. The French upheld what they believed to be the status quo and did not support Pouokam I’s claims. In 1927, perhaps to regain prestige in the eyes of his people, Pouokam I attacked Fo Komguem III of Bayangam,⁷³ and for that transgression was sentenced by the French in 1928 to three years in prison and twenty years of exile from the chieftaincy.⁷⁴ He never reigned as fo again. The same year, after negotiations between the French administration and kamveu, with Pouokam I still in prison, his son Max Kamwa began to serve as fo. Kamwa remained fo until his death in 1954.⁷⁵ Many inhabitants of Baham believe that Kamwa “sold” his father to French administrators to ensure his own succession, suggesting either that Pouokam I had not yet named his heir, or that Kamwa and his French supporters disregarded the legitimate successor.

Soon after the arrest and imprisonment of Pouokam I of Baham, the French deposed another fo, Nono Tchoutouo of Bangwa, in the Nde. Suspicious of Tchoutouo’s earlier loyalty to the Germans, the French administration charged him with failing to transfer the taxes he collected to the proper authorities, and misappropriating land from its rightful occupants for his wives’ fields. Tchoutouo also found it increasingly difficult to stand up to his brothers, formerly soldiers under the German regime, who sought a portion of his wealth.⁷⁶ In 1931 a young literate Christian, Jean Nana, former student of the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris, “succeeded in having the old Nono exiled and having himself named chief in his place by the administration. He is thus legally the chief, but in reality he is not [the chief].”⁷⁷

Nana had served the administration as scribe and interpreter for four years before overthrowing Fo Nono by using the administration as his leverage. However, according to medical missionary Dr. Josette Débarge, despite Nana’s baptism, he “did not dare” to live in the empty chief’s palace, knowing that the fo’s ancestral skulls were housed there and that “the power of the totems belong[ed] to the legitimate chief Nono.”⁷⁸ Furthermore, Nana was not initiated as fo with the usual ritual ceremonies since Fo Nono was still living and succession rites could take place only after his death. The inhabitants of Bangwa called the real Fo Nono “our father,” and called Nana simply Jean. Villagers obeyed Jean out of fear, Débarge continued, for “behind him he has the power of the whites. But the true devotion and notion of belonging go to the old exiled chief.”⁷⁹ Débarge concluded that villagers were sad and disoriented, and that the incident proved that the chief’s authority came from mystical powers derived from the spirit of the land and of ancestral chiefs: “He is chief by divine right.”⁸⁰

The depositions of mfo and the irregular successions left residual conflicts that smoldered beneath the surface long after the event, and French administrators overlooked the spiritual repercussions that Débarge alluded to. A successor enstooled while the legitimate ruler was still alive lacked the political and popular support required to govern the chieftaincy effectively. By disconnecting the fo from the governmental institutions that ensured his right to rule and from the notables and ritual specialists who “made” him, the French sought to replace those legitimizing institutions with their own administration. In so doing, they fostered the fo’s dependence on a foreign government. While this may have increased the fo’s administrative authority within the context of colonial rule, it also effectively increased the importance of the secret spiritual and magical institutions that formed a part of Grassfields governance.

French administrators became aware of mystical secret associations early in the mandate period but misunderstood their relationship to the institution of the fo and therefore underestimated their role in chieftaincy governance. A French administrative report from around 1920, entitled simply “Ritual Customs,” described secret societies of “fetishists and free spirits, thirsting for riches and dominance,”⁸¹ who had to commit a “ritual murder against someone close to [them] in order to be let in on the secret of the fetish medicine,” and who would rather face death than reveal their secrets.⁸² Despite its cursory knowledge of the existence of secret associations, the French administration deliberately excluded them from the system of indirect administration they were building,⁸³ in part because they misunderstood the logic of constitutional restraint imbued in these institutions. French administrators oversimplified the secret associations by equating secret and mystical with evil. While malefic associations did exist, the majority of secret associations served as regulatory societies whose purpose was to adjust and maintain the balance of power in gung. The associations’ secret activity protected them from a potentially despotic fo—if he did not know who challenged him, he could not punish or penalize. At the same time, the members of the associations, unknown to the population at large, could not use their position to challenge or usurp power from the fo. The structure of the regulatory associations helped to relegate confrontation between powerful community leaders to the realm of secrecy, hidden from public view. The result was to preserve a public façade of strong, unified governance, while maintaining a system of checks and balances within the chieftaincy’s institutions of rule.

In the early 1930s overall French colonial policy toward “native command” shifted when the governor general of French West Africa, Jules Brévié, issued a circular opposing the assimilation of chiefs into the administration and stressing the importance of the “traditional character of the institution [of the chieftaincy]” and of the chief as “representative of the population.”⁸⁴ However, in French Cameroon, the administration’s intent to position itself as the source of the traditional chiefs’ legitimacy continued throughout the 1930s, evolving into one of consolidation and homogenization of the category they viewed as an essential administrative class. Administrators sought to reorder rural life by adjusting structures of traditional governance, namely by limiting some chiefly powers while strengthening others, by reducing or augmenting a chief’s power vis-à-vis his notables in Bamileke chieftaincies, and by establishing schools for chiefs’ sons with an eye to assimilating future traditional chiefs through education. Administrators in Cameroon justified the deviation from French colonial policy in the annual report to the League of Nations in 1933 by presenting “native command” in equatorial central Africa as almost nonexistent, since “in Central Africa” there was “no history of empires,” but only the “law of small tribal chiefs supported by witchcraft practices.”⁸⁵

In 1933, French administrators classified indigenous chiefs of French Cameroon hierarchically as superior chiefs (chefs supérieurs), settlement chiefs (chefs de groupement), or village chiefs (chefs de village), contradicting Brévié’s philosophy.⁸⁶ By imposing an administrative hierarchy on chiefs in the Bamileke Region, the French implied that superior chiefs were more powerful than village chiefs. The administration used the census of the fo’s subjects as a quantifying factor, but in Grassfields politics, a polity’s degree of sovereignty (lepue), not the size of its population, defined a chieftaincy’s power and influence within the region. The 1933 decree also gave French administrators the right to name chiefs, although “whenever possible, tradition should be respected.” Nevertheless, the decree made official the administration’s right to intrude on successions in Bamileke chieftaincies.⁸⁷ Also in 1933, schools for the sons of chiefs were established by administrative decree at Yaoundé, Dschang (the capital of the Bamileke Region), Domé, Edea (in the Sanaga-Maritime), and Garoua (in the north of French Cameroon).⁸⁸ The creation of special elementary schools for the sons of chiefs reflected administrators’ desire to standardize the educational level of the traditional authorities, who would “become, in the future, our collaborators.”⁸⁹

Despite Brévié’s stated shift in French colonial policy, which emphasized custom and tradition as the legitimate sources of traditional chiefs’ authority to rule, in the Bamileke Region of French Cameroon, the administration’s primary objectives remained taxation, labor recruitment, and the resettlement of populations from the Bafoussam area (Mifi) to the left bank of the Noun River (Nde). From the viewpoint of French administrators, a chief’s quality as a ruler was determined by his ability to raise the requisite tax. Because of the balance of power between the mfo and the district heads in Bamileke chieftaincies, French local administrators dissatisfied with the tax revenue found that they could bypass the fo and rely directly on his mfonte and mwabo.⁹⁰ If the fo was uncooperative, the French supported a new district head of their own choosing to replace the one named by the fo. Yet their interventions did not always achieve the desired outcome.

In 1934, Fo Nganjong of Bandrefam replaced a wabo, Ouambo Nzezip, with an eight-year-old boy and his regent, and began to send his armed guards (tchindas) to notables’ compounds to collect taxes. The fo’s coercive tax collection methods caused a number of inhabitants, including titled notables, to emigrate to neighboring chieftaincies in protest. Concerned by the exodus, the administration categorized Bandrefam as a problem chieftaincy. While on tour of the subregion, French subdivision chief Robert Gentil attempted to reconcile the fo and his notables in order to encourage emigrants to return to their village. Gentil reinstated the wabo, whom he described as not quite a model leader but one capable of keeping the inhabitants of his district from leaving to other chieftaincies. Two months later, when interviewing notables about the reconciliation process, Gentil discovered that twenty-three people had returned because the fo no longer sent tchindas to their homes to collect taxes. With a touch of sarcasm, Gentil remarked in his report, “Everything runs smoothly as long as our chief does not govern,” clearly articulating the relationship between “native command” and tax collection in French administrative policy.⁹¹

Reading between the lines of Gentil’s annual report, the notables’ emigration can be seen as resistance to a fo who had overstepped what they perceived as an acceptable level of taxation in that district. It could be that the “problem district” was governed by a wabo who had historically been exempt from paying tribute to the chief’s palace, as was the case with the Ngougoua District in Baham.⁹² However, with the increasing taxation imposed under French rule, Fo Nganjong had gambled that the administration would support his position and seized an opportunity to bring Wabo Nzezip’s district firmly under his command by forcibly collecting taxes. By leaving the chieftaincy, the notables in the problem district of Bandrefam communicated their refusal to submit (lepue) to the fo’s exploitative taxation methods, leaving Fo Nganjong unable to meet the required tax quota.

Subdivision chief Gentil did not take the time to evaluate the reasons for the fo’s deposition of the wabo or to learn the identity of his eight-year-old successor (which would have told us a great deal about the breakdown in power and the fo’s strategies for its reconstruction). Instead, Gentil simply “reinstated” the leader he believed best suited to the regime’s objectives at the time—curtailing unauthorized emigration and collecting revenue. He thereby reinforced the notion that the fo was not capable of governing his chieftaincy, and increased the notables’ power in relation to the fo’s. Gentil’s decision also displaced the source of the notables’ legitimacy from the fo to the French administration. But, the French, like Fo Nganjong, overplayed their hand: restoring the wabo to his position may have stemmed the emigration from Bandrefam, but taxes remained uncollected.

In contrast to Bandrefam, Bandjoun, one of the first chieftaincies in the area to submit to European rule, was a model of successful tax collection. The cooperation of Fo Kamga of Bandjoun allowed administrators to congratulate themselves for following the French colonial policy du jour in the matter of native command. Citing his “close relationship” with Fo Kamga, Gentil reported that the fo accepted that his mfonte collect taxes for 1935. Gentil expected that that would increase Kamga’s authority, since he would find himself “in the simple roles of arbitrator and guardian of customs in the chieftaincy, and no longer in that of tax collector.”⁹³ Fo Kamga was left to govern the internal affairs of his chieftaincy unhindered by French intrusion, thus preserving the polity’s autonomy to a degree.

The French administration’s inability to manipulate the workings of traditional governance to their advantage was best illustrated by the failure of the resettlement project on the left bank of the Noun River. French regional chief Ripert launched the project in 1925 in Dschang to address overpopulation in the Bamileke Region, to encourage the commercial production of coffee, raffia palm and kola nut, and to channel migration toward unsettled land in the Bamileke Region, rather than toward the Mungo Region connecting the area to the port city of Douala. The administration’s pet project in the Bafoussam subdivision for over a decade, resettlement proceeded slowly, and only three mfo appeared to cooperate: Fo Kamga of Bandjoun, Fo Kamwa of Baham (who owed his position to French intervention as mentioned above), and Fo Komguem of Bayangam.⁹⁴ As part of the strategy, administrators selected notables to serve as chiefs of the new settlements, arranged by chieftaincy of origin: Baham II, Bandjoun II, Bamendjou II, and so on.⁹⁵

The new “villages” were settled by district, each with its district chief. The local French administrator soon dismissed and replaced these satellite district chiefs for being “incapable of governing,” for having coffee plantations that did not conform to agricultural standards, or for being unable to maintain a minimum number of families in the new settlement.⁹⁶ The Noun project eventually fizzled out, mostly for lack of enthusiasm among the mfo.⁹⁷ Gentil remarked in his report that, should chiefs prove hostile to the project, “we should bypass them and rely on their notables in the left bank,” and entice a nobility leadership to collaborate by offering them free coffee seedlings.⁹⁸ But by 1935 it became clear that the district chiefs selected to govern the new settlements had no authority over their populations.

French administrators had been certain that by building a replicate model of “traditional” structures of Bamileke governance, complete with a reigning fo and his mfonte, they could ensure the success of the settlement project. But the project’s failure demonstrated French ignorance of the essential ingredients the governance of gung. For example, nothing had been done to domesticate the spiritual landscape and render it habitable. By 1935 an unusually high mortality rate due to high infection by malaria appeared to be evidence of a lack of divine benevolence in the area, and the resettled population lacked spiritual advocates or the sites on which to offer sacrifices. A massive emigration from the Noun area began after 1935. Inhabitants of Baham II actually preferred to seek refuge in chieftaincies bordering Baham rather than risk being sent back to Baham II by Fo Kamwa, a French protégé, and, not coincidentally, one of the project’s most loyal supporters.⁹⁹

The French administration played on what they perceived as a dialectic of power in gung between the fo and the notables. But it is too simple to suggest that they reinforced the fo’s power to the detriment of the nobility and spiritualists in gung.¹⁰⁰ In many cases, they minimized the power of the fo in favor of a district head who conformed to taxation policies or who could curb unauthorized migration. At the same time, French policies opened up new political opportunities for notables and chiefs, who saw in the French administration a new variable that could affect the precarious balance of power in their chieftaincy. As French policies toward native command shifted, the malleability of chieftaincy governance afforded new political platforms on which an ambitious notable could reinvent himself and reposition his lineage vis-à-vis the chief’s palace.

In 1941, French Equatorial Africa governor general Félix Eboué’s circular announced a new shift in administrative policy, which amounted to an effort to restore traditional chiefs to the prestigious position they held before European occupation. Eboué wrote, “The chief is not a functionary, he is an aristocrat. The best functionary with the highest rank is not comparable to the chief.”¹⁰¹ Eboué’s study recognized the chief’s supporting religious and traditional institutions as the foundation of his authority: “No council should be omitted, no guardian overlooked, no religious taboo neglected.”¹⁰² Eboué had come to understand, as many colonial administrators did not, that French attempts to make their own administration the source of the chief’s legitimacy constituted a flawed policy. In fact, there is some evidence that he had understood this for at least two decades, but had had to await his promotion to governor general before articulating his understanding as policy.¹⁰³ However, Eboué’s study appeared in the twilight of colonialism, after the chieftaincy’s supporting institutions had been reconfigured during decades of foreign administration. In the Bamileke Region, where French administrators had focused primarily on the fo as the figurehead of power and government in the chieftaincy, it was too late for them to retrieve and integrate his supporting religious institutions into the “traditional chieftaincy” they had conceived. The French administration had, mostly unwittingly, already separated the visible symbols of rule and its concealed, religious, or mystical forms.

The Second World War interrupted Governor General Eboué’s proposed change in attitude toward “native command” before it came to fruition. In 1946, French Cameroon and the British Cameroons became United Nations trust territories, to be administered according to the UN Charter and the UN trusteeship agreements. Article 76 of the charter, the most crucial to Cameroonian nationalists, placed an expiry date on European rule by stating that the administering authorities’ must lead their territories on a path of “progressive development towards self-government or independence.” In 1947 the French administration in Cameroon released a decree designating chiefs as members of the public function.¹⁰⁴ In late 1948 the high commissioner stated that, as intermediaries, traditional chiefs were to be representatives of both their populations and the French administration. This assertion cast aside Eboué’s contention that the chief’s legitimacy before his people came, not from his association with colonial power, but rather from sacred institutions, relatively unknown to European administrators.

CUSTOMARY LAWS AND FRENCH LEGAL CODES

In the 1920s and 1930s the French administration wielded little influence on the justice system within Bamileke chieftaincies because most civil matters continued to be resolved at the level of chieftaincy, district, or compound. Beginning in 1921 French officials worked to integrate local justice into the newly created tribunaux des races, an “African” court system under French surveillance. By 1935 the “African” justice system in Cameroon was to apply “local” law in civil matters and to replace a “barbaric” penal code that allowed corporal punishment, torture, and execution with a “civilized” French penal code of prison sentences and forced labor. In the Bamileke Region in the early 1930s, local French administrators compiled a “customary penal code” describing “customary sanctions” and “customary punishments in criminal matters.” The code included a list of seventy-three articles, with a second column designating the suggested equivalent “civilized” punishment.¹⁰⁵ The document, which became the basis for the codification of laws in administrative courts, made no mention of the truth-telling ceremony, the chuep’si, or the spiritual aspects of justice in the region. Still, whenever possible, justice continued to be administered locally within the chieftaincy. In the 1930s, Reverend R. P. Albert, a French missionary in Bandjoun, wrote that sentences were frequently “rendered at the chieftaincy, or in secret in the villages, that the administration can only suspect, and that consist of peculiar practices and unexpected punishments.”¹⁰⁶

After the Second World War, the French administration sought to codify “customary law” as a precursor to creating a uniform legislative structure that could be applied across the entire territory of Cameroon. A law passed on April 30, 1946 brought all penal matters into French courts. The changes imposed by the French administration removed justice from the context provided by gung’s particular landscape and history and brought it into a regional judiciary space shared by the people of Bandjoun, Bamendjou, Bayangam, Bangou, and Bafoussam. The artificial separation of civil and penal affairs made little sense, since Bamileke inhabitants did not differentiate between the two, and the financial means and the identity of the accused and the accuser were no longer taken into consideration when considering the case or sentencing. The accused no longer had to fear the spiritual power of the fo, those officiating the trial, or the unseen witnesses present, but found himself free of mystical repercussions. In short, in Grassfields moral and ethical terms, it became spiritually, politically, and socially acceptable to lie at one’s trial. The most dangerous of crimes, those performed in secret or at night, such as vampirism or other sorts of mystical wrongdoing, fell outside the scope of the administration’s penal system.¹⁰⁷

French policies in matters of administration, taxation, and justice affected the practice of traditional Grassfields power as well as the way it acted on ordinary inhabitants of the Grassfields chieftaincies. Throughout much of the colonial and mandate periods, juniors and untitled men who historically had to work hard and wait long periods before being granted a nobility title or even being allowed to establish a compound and marry, were increasingly cut off from channels to social mobility.¹⁰⁸ The social hierarchy throughout the region became increasingly top heavy under foreign rule as cooperative chiefs—to whom European administrators turned to impose taxes and recruit laborers—benefited most from a proximity to territorial administration.

By the 1920s, the beginning of the official mandate period of French rule, the gap between “big” notables at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy and “small,” lesser notables or untitled commoners who were excluded from access to wealth and privilege was larger than it had ever been.¹⁰⁹ Previous scholarship has emphasized the reaction of young men or youths to the obstacles that an ever more dominant nobility system placed in the way of their path to adulthood.¹¹⁰ Certainly, a few young, untitled men did use new opportunities provided through mission or French schooling, becoming part of a Christian mission community, the implementation of a plantation economy, and urbanization—all modernizing elements of the colonial order—to resist the chiefs’ appropriation of their labor and access financial and social success directly.¹¹¹ But in the interwar period, with only 1,290 students enrolled in French regional schools in 1922 and 2,074 in 1932 (out of a total population of 2,223,000), access to social mobility via education was extremely limited.¹¹² A series of church and mission closures swept the Bamileke chieftaincies of French Cameroon during the mid-1920s, reducing still further alternative opportunities to social advancement in the region.¹¹³

While social juniors’ and commoners’ tentative embrace of the modern institutions introduced under European rule did little to curtail the mfo’s growing power, the front line of resistance against the rise in chiefly excesses during the colonial and mandate periods—especially in those chieftaincies, such as Bandjoun, where the fo had willingly allied with colonial administrators—came from the ranks of the nobility. The first wave of depositions to sweep Bamileke chieftaincies came in the 1920s as French administrators set aside newly chosen heirs that notables’ associations kamveu and kungang had selected and enstooled and replaced them with mfo more suitable to their liking. In Bandjoun in 1925, for example, the notables’ choice of a legitimate heir, Bopda, was removed, exiled, and replaced with Joseph Kamga, who spoke German and French, had served as interpreter to the Bamileke Region’s French commanders from 1919 to 1925, and who had converted to Christianity against the will of his father, Fotso Massudom, the fo who had first resisted, then allied with the Germans.¹¹⁴ The selections of the notables overseeing succession suggested a resistance to the notion of fo as colonial ally. Even more telling was the regulatory associations’ barely concealed, sometimes overt confrontation of Christian missions throughout the region in the 1920s. In 1923 in Bandjoun, for instance, members of a powerful regulatory association known as Nyeleng demanded that the fo close the church built near the northern entrance of the chief’s compound.¹¹⁵

French administrators’ attitudes toward traditional authorities in French Cameroon necessarily differed from region to region as political institutions ranged from the lamidats, such as Bornu and Baghermi in the Islamized north, characterized by centralized, even bureaucratized hierarchical governments, to the decentralized or “stateless” segmentary lineage societies of the southern forest regions.¹¹⁶ Grassfields chieftaincies figured in the mid-range of this spectrum but throughout the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods, traditional authorities mostly preserved their power over their subjects. In a general way, French administrators relied on traditional political systems to govern the territory, particularly its rural areas. But given the varying strength of traditional governance from region to region, indirect administration through the chiefs was tailor made to each locale. Where traditional authority had been weakened or undermined by foreign rule, as among Duala populations, the French administration sought to shore it up, and where it was strong, administrative policy was to assimilate it.¹¹⁷ Accordingly, because Bamileke mfo maintained authority over their populations only insofar as a tenuous balance of power vis-à-vis the nobility allowed them to do so, French administrators’ policy toward traditional chiefs in the Bamileke Region was necessarily ambivalent. French administrators readily assimilated those mfo, such as Fo Kamga of Bandjoun, who dominated and controlled the institutions of chieftaincy government, while they were obliged to limit their assimilation of mfo who were less effectively dominant in matters of taxation, labor recruitment, and resettlement.

In the interstice between chiefly power and that of the nobility, a wedge grew between the visible workings of traditional governance and its invisible aspects. The material, physical representations of power included the person of the fo and his manner of dress, the spatial arrangement of his dwelling, the assembly hall, his wives’ kitchens, and notables’ meeting houses in the palace compound, and symbols of royalty such as the leopard skin, the copper bracelet, and the three-legged stool. The invisible, metaphysical workings of traditional power were made up of the secret associations of notables, the world of ké, animal totems and sacred sites mediated by spiritualists and sacrificers, and the hidden but remembered histories of some districts’ or lineages’ incomplete submission to the central palace. The unseen workings of power remained concealed beneath the surface and mostly unknown to outsiders, but they nevertheless formed a part of religious and political practice, history, cultural memory, and identity for Grassfielders. Although French administrators sought to govern through the seen, material symbols of the person of the chief, the unseen formed as much a part of the collective political imaginary for those residing in Bamileke chieftaincies, whether notable or commoner.

Struggles over the chieftaincy’s balance of power were not new to Grassfields traditional governance. What was new was the French administration’s assimilative pull toward the visible, material, bureaucratic institutions of state rationality including taxation, penal code, remuneration, census taking, and other record keeping. The emphasis on these administrative functions of government in turn led to compliant mfo’s gradual alienation from the metaphysical, invisible forms of power that became even more the preserve of various notables, regulatory associations, and spiritualists. Many noncompliant mfo whom the French deposed were also cut off from the chieftaincy’s spiritual realm of governance, leaving other institutions of the chieftaincy to repair the damage. The spiritual realm and the ability to mediate between the invisible and visible worlds became ever more crucial to sustaining the lepue ideal. Faced with these changes to traditional governance imposed by foreign rulers, for truly important matters of governance, Bamileke populations began to turn toward the less visible facets of power, that is, to institutions outside the realm of the chief’s palace—chuep’si, mkamsi (diviners or healers), regulatory societies, or district heads. These peripheral institutions maintained distance from the foreign occupying power that forced the fo to submit and to wield his executive power to impose taxes and draft laborers.

Ordinary inhabitants of Bamileke chieftaincies could access the spiritual realm as well, and could thus draw directly on various spiritual technologies to attempt to temper the growing inequalities that characterized their relationship to their mfo. Versatile and accessible, the politicospiritual realm provided an essential lubricant for the articulation between UPC nationalism and Grassfields political culture in the 1950s. As shown in the next chapter, the metaphysical aspects of Grassfields power were those that proved most essential to emigrants as they departed their home chieftaincies. Most emigrants, even those seeking to escape the restrictive social controls that allegiance to their home chieftaincies imposed on them, took care to ensure their continued access to the sacred sites and ancestral graves they had left behind. At the same time, migration to the Mungo River valley to labor in commercial agriculture or take up commerce offered more opportunities than ever before for social cadets to benefit from new pathways to wealth and social mobility generated by participation in the tangible, material reality of a colonial plantation economy.