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Оглавление2 “Bamileke Strangers” Make the Mungo River Valley Their Home
Initially recruited to the Mungo River valley as laborers to build the railroad under German rule, Grassfielders began to arrive as early as the turn of the twentieth century. After the completion of the railroad, they continued to migrate to work as field hands in Duala-owned plantations around Mbanga.1 From the 1930s, with the introduction of bananas and coffee as cash crops, Bamileke immigration to the Mungo River valley increased significantly.2 French administrators applied the term Bamileke to Grassfielders who came from the chieftaincies of the Bamileke Region, the portion of the Grassfields that fell under French rule after the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary, in 1919. A “Bamileke identity,” entirely absent before French rule, emerged during the interwar period, primarily in the Mungo Region, as a result of a fluid interplay between the administration’s classification of “races” and the African populations’ agency when it came to defining ethnic identity.3 As French administrators in the Mungo Region used the term Bamileke more frequently from the 1930s onward, Bamileke populations gradually assumed this identity and began to assert themselves as belonging to a larger Bamileke collectivity when it suited them.
Language used to describe the settlement and transformation of the Mungo Region during the colonial and mandate periods must necessarily reflect the plurality and changeability of identities. Accordingly, this chapter makes use of the term Grassfielders to identify migrants to the Mungo Region before the 1930s, when the term Bamileke began to be used to designate newcomers from the Grassfields under French rule. It should be noted, however, that when speaking indigenous languages, Bamileke inhabitants of the Mungo Region today most often employ the term Grafi, derived from pidgin English, the lingua franca of the region, to refer to the ensemble of Bamileke populations. The decentralized host populations indigenous to the Mungo Region include multiple groups: Balondo, Bakaka, Mouamenam, Baneka, Miamilo, Bakossi, Abo, Elong, and others. The word autochthonous is used here to designate the indigenous populations of the Mungo Region, while the term Mbo is used occasionally to refer to the autochthonous populations in the area around Nkongsamba (the region’s capital).4
By 1947, Bamileke newcomers made up roughly 33 percent of the Mungo’s overall population, and by 1955, some 54 percent of Mungo inhabitants were of Grassfields origin, the majority of whom were from the Bamileke Region.5 Their settlement of the Mungo coincided with that of European farmers during the interwar period. With one hundred and ten European-owned plantations extending over nearly twenty-three hundred square kilometers out of a total surface area of thirty-seven hundred square kilometers at the high-water mark of the white-settler presence in the reason (during and just after World War II), the Mungo Region hosted the largest number of European agricultural settlers in the territory.6 Conflicts over the most fertile lands arose between Europeans and Africans—both those indigenous to the region and those arriving from elsewhere. During the mandate and trusteeship periods, Mungo-based planters, regardless of origin, competed over resources, and the resulting tensions were exacerbated by administrative policies that established ethnic identity as a factor determining access to land as well as by discriminatory regulations of cash-crop agriculture that favored European planters.7 Yet by the 1950s, Richard Joseph argues that “a class of Bamileke capitalist farmers had clearly emerged,” in the Mungo Region, and Bamileke planters were producing a greater amount of coffee for export than their white-settler counterparts.8 In contrast, the landholdings and agricultural productivity of the region’s autochthonous populations as well as those of the Duala, who had been first among the region’s African planters in the German and early French mandate periods, had shrunk to negligible quantities.9
Because landholdings in the region were in constant flux throughout the twentieth century, and since much of the land in the Mungo Region—particularly portions owned or occupied by autochthonous or Bamileke planters—went unregistered, it is difficult to provide a systematically inventoried account of the gross dimensions of land commercialization, of large-scale numbers of holdings, or of the total numbers of white settlers, African landowners, and migrants in the Mungo Region throughout the years. Studies of these matters do exist but are often focused on a particular portion of the heterogeneous Mungo Region,10 or chart a short period rather than offering a chronological overview. Although precise figures are unavailable, it is possible to piece together a general overview of the evolution of land ownership and exploitation in the Mungo Region during French rule. The holdings of white, mostly French, settlers steadily climbed during the first fifteen years of the mandate period (beginning in 1922), but peaked in 1936. A third of the European-owned plantations in the region were owned by joint-stock companies that averaged two hundred hectares, although there were several between five hundred and one thousand hectares or even larger.11 The Company of Plantations in Njombé-Penja reached thirteen hundred hectares,12 where the Niabang plantation, northwest of Nkongsamba, eventually reached twenty-two hundred hectares.
In 1937, Governor Pierre Boisson, newly arrived, was faced with a labor shortage that would have required intensified conscription of laborers—in violation of the terms of the mandate system—at the very time that an increasing number of Cameroonian planters were becoming involved in cash-crop agriculture.13 Worried too about German propaganda to retake the Cameroons, voiced in the form of critiques of French exploitation, Boisson stopped granting concessions to white settlers in the Mungo Region.14 Accordingly, the number of agricultural workers declined by 25 percent in the Mungo Region, dropping from about ten thousand in 1935 to seventy-four hundred within two years, and white settlers found the expansion of commercial agriculture enterprise in the region severely curtailed, if not halted.15 From the late 1930s until the outbreak of World War II, Bamileke planters, who had increased their holdings in the Mungo Region during the economic crisis that swept the territory at the turn of the decade, achieved a tenuous equilibrium vis-à-vis their European counterparts in the region; but the war, which led to an intensification of forced labor justified in the name of the “war effort,” again tipped the balance in favor of white settlers.16
In the Mungo Region, where large numbers of Africans, especially settlers of Bamileke origin, acquired landholdings and became cash-crop farmers during the mandate period, restrictive land policies and commercial agriculture regulations, together with one of the highest proportions of agricultural workers—ten thousand out of a total of twenty-one thousand in French Cameroon were employed in the Mungo Region in 1935—promoted an interest in political organization and participation in labor unions and planters’ cooperatives.17 By 1946, when the postwar age of territorial politics dawned, the Mungo Region had become a forum for political, economic, and social activism. By 1952 the Mungo River valley was home to fifty African planters’ cooperatives—more than twice the number in the Nyong and Sanaga Region, around Yaoundé, the territory’s capital,18 and had the highest rate of participation in local and territorial elections of any area outside Douala, French Cameroon’s port city and largest urban settlement.19
At the end of the trusteeship period, the Mungo Region was a diverse and potentially explosive melting pot, and, via immigrants from the Bamileke Region, the channel through which UPC nationalist ideology merged with Grassfields political culture. This chapter recounts the Mungo Region’s gradual transformation into a political catalyst in independence-era Cameroon. After first discussing French administrative policies and their effects on Bamileke populations’ settlement of the Mungo Region, I demonstrate how, in the early mandate period, migrants and autochthons negotiated terms of land use and occupancy largely outside the French administration’s control. The second part of the chapter examines migrants’ organizational strategies and their consensus that family chiefs be selected to link their Mungo settlements to their home chieftaincies in the Bamileke Region. The third section reveals how Bamileke migrants, buoyed by their semiautonomous sociopolitical organization and financial independence, familiarized themselves thoroughly with administrative policies. That knowledge allowed them to gain an edge over Mungo autochthons as the French administration imposed stricter regulations on land distribution and agricultural methods in the region, and as administrators discursively pitted “autochthonous” populations against “strangers,” or “Mbo” against “Bamileke.” The chapter ends with an assessment of the postwar political and economic organization that began to spread throughout Mungo Region cities and towns.
GRASSFIELDERS IN THE MUNGO RIVER VALLEY
The entire Mungo valley region, nestled between the volcanic mountains of Nlonako, Kupé, and Manenguba and extending southward to the port city of Douala, provided an ideal settlement area for white, mostly French, colonists seeking small farms and plantations after the First World War.20 European commercial planters exploited the region’s fertile land and forests along the railroad to cultivate coffee, cocoa, bananas, palm oil, and rubber for export. In desperate need of laborers to work their plantations, French administrators, like their German predecessors, rounded up laborers from the Bamileke Region and put them to work in the fields.21 Forced labor violated the terms of the mandate system, but nevertheless it regularly occurred throughout the interwar period in French Cameroon and increased during World War II.22
Although laborers were required to work on European plantations for only three months of the year before being allowed to return to their home chieftaincies,23 the fertility of the black volcanic earth encouraged many of them to make arrangements with the indigenous population in order to stay by negotiating the terms of customary arrangements regarding land use and allotment.24 The agreements the settlers reached with their autochthonous hosts specified terms for usufruct and occupancy, not for permanent ownership. Autochthonous populations who granted use of land to newcomers assumed, according to local understandings of land use, that land could only be loaned, not permanently sold or transferred, to strangers, as they called settlers from beyond the Mungo River valley.25 Newcomers traded fish, cloth, salt, and palm or raffia wine for plots and also offered a portion of the harvest to their host.26 Autochthonous landowners gave Grassfielders permission to use land as a form of remuneration for labor. In the early twentieth century, African owners of small plantations throughout the Mungo Region—many of whom were ethnic Duala from the coastal region around the port city of Douala—cultivated cacao as a cash crop for export, and employed laborers from the Grassfields, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots of land on which they grew food.27 This practice was reinforced on 1 April 1927, when French administrators passed a decree making it mandatory for planters to feed their laborers.28
Early contracts between Grassfielders and Mbo or Duala landowners were drawn up for a limited period, usually ten to thirty years. These contracts resembled a lease, with a specified departure date. The migrant sharecroppers agreed to provide their hosts with as much as 40 percent of the revenue from cash crops grown on the land.29 Before the 1930s the French administration did not regulate Grassfielders’ settlement in the area, and agreements between autochthons and immigrants were negotiated case by case. French administrators later sought to legislate these customary arrangements, as discussed below.
Food crops grew well in the Mungo River valley, making it easy for sharecroppers to practice subsistence farming. The climate and fertile earth allowed for two planting seasons a year for certain crops such as corn (harvested in December and in June). The earth yielded tubers easily—yellow and white yams, several varieties of potatoes, cassava, macabo, and taro (types of yams), as well as vegetable greens, hot peppers, and the tree from which nkwi, the Grassfields dish prepared especially for women after childbirth, was made. In many ways, the Mungo Region represented a promised land for immigrants from the Grassfields, who came from a place where the best lands were already occupied and the remaining impoverished lands were not suitable for farming.
As in the Grassfields, invisible inhabitants of the Mungo Region oversaw the land, but the newcomers had no knowledge of the autochthonous populations’ cosmologies.30 Since only the region’s indigenous inhabitants could mediate on their behalf in an unknown spiritual landscape, immigrants required the permission of Mungo populations before settling. For Grassfielders, the use of land rested on a conceptual worldview in which the invisible inhabitants (gods, spirits, and ancestors) played a more significant role than living, breathing human beings when it came to the accessibility and distribution of land.31 Migrants from the Grassfields could not found new chieftaincies in the Mungo Region under French rule; nor could they plant chuep’si in their Mungo compounds, for to do so, they would have had to rely on chieftaincy nobility and spiritualists who had not accompanied them into the new territory. Grassfields spiritual technology was mostly stationary because of its material attachment to the landscape, and that fixity ensured emigrants’ continued connection with their chieftaincies of origin. Migrants needed to maintain their access to ancestral compounds and chuep’si, the essential facets of Grassfields spirituality, political culture, and identity. Since customary land contracts in the Mungo Region denoted, not permanent ownership, but the right to occupancy or usufruct, newcomers from Grassfields chieftaincies lacked the sense of permanence that came with spiritual land markers, graves, chuep’si, and trees linking them to their fathers’ compounds in gung. Instead, land plots in the Mungo provided the means to financial self-sufficiency and wealth and were thus primarily of economic significance.32
Until the 1930s this system of land use and exchange was flexible and mutually beneficial, with landholders, planters, and merchants reaching agreements that met the specific financial needs of either party as they arose. The railway, the road, and the border with British territory all served to transform the Mungo River valley into a commercial system benefiting Africans, whose trading systems were only gradually and partially integrated into a colonial capitalist economy. The railway from Douala established Nkongsamba as an essential transit point for goods and merchants traveling to and from the Bamileke Region.33 By the late 1920s, the completion of the road from Nkongsamba to Bafang facilitated access to Douala from the Bamileke Region. The city of Nkongsamba attracted merchants and producers of the essential staples that the African inhabitants of the northern Mungo consumed, including palm oil, kola, dried fish, and food crops. Nkongsamba became an entrepôt for a flourishing regional commerce independent of economic links to European settlement. Between 1947 and 1957, the town grew from some 13,500 inhabitants to a population of nearly 30,000 (nearly 19,000 of whom were of Bamileke origin).34
In the late 1920s, French and British administrators began to regulate commerce and the traffic of people and goods across the Anglo-French border that ran along the Mungo River, the western border of the region. Administrators required permission tickets for the purchase of imported goods like matches, soap, and cigarettes35 and introduced customs points along the boundary between French and British territory. In the Mungo Region, French administrators turned their attention to controlling access to land, further limiting African economic autonomy.
Although French administrators turned a blind eye to negotiations between African planters and field hands during the 1920s, they passed a number of laws favoring European settlement, both in the plantations and in burgeoning town centers. In the early 1920s High Commissioner Théodore Marchand, anxious to win the approval of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), initially avoided granting immense plantations to European settlers. Instead, he approved parcels of one hundred to four hundred hectares for the development of “small-scale European colonization.”36 The number of individually owned plantations granted increased steadily during the first ten years of the mandate (1922–32), peaking at twenty-nine in 1929, and bringing the total number of hectares allotted to Europeans to 21,730, or about 3 percent of arable land.37
Marchand also encouraged settlement in regions other than the fertile Mungo valley: “Most planters are hypnotized by the Douala suburbs or crowd into the land along the railroad. They request only the parcels that have already been cleared by the indigenous population or even those that are already planted.”38 Marchand recognized that this trend reflected the settlers’ desire to cut installation, labor, and transport costs, but, keeping League of Nations mandate terms in mind, he reserved the right to refuse settlers’ requests for land that would constitute “a revocation of the rights of the original occupants and would justify their discontent.”39
The French report to the PMC in 1926 cited the administration’s decision not to increase the number of rural plantations larger than one thousand hectares in Cameroon. The commission lauded the decision, remarking that French land policy in the Mungo reflected the spirit of the mandate.40 Throughout the 1920s, French administrators appeared to encourage African land ownership and cultivation as a way of developing the land commercially and providing a solution to the regional labor shortage through “an ever greater intensification of individual plantations that enables an efficient use of family labor.”41 By 1928 an administrator reported, “In two years, the land bordering the railway and the road will be entirely occupied and cultivated.”42 Remarking on “the liking Europeans have taken to agriculture,” the report added, “the ‘native’ is not far behind. He follows the same trend, as much to keep the rights to his land—he is afraid that we will grant it to Europeans if he does not cultivate it—as to become a colon in his own right, to make money.”43 Cash-crop agriculture in the Mungo River valley attracted white settlers and African farmers alike.
Marchand’s posturing for the PMC concealed the administrative policies and practices that privileged French planters and ensured their economic advantage over African planters in the Mungo. Complex zoning laws and a variable classification system restricted African access to the best agricultural lands and grazing lands. The first land decrees, passed in 1920 and 1921, defined the private and public domains of the state. The private domain, which included vast areas that administrators described as “vacant lands without owners,” was classified as either urban or rural. A zoning plan established the size and spatial arrangement of lots for public service buildings, roads, avenues, and public squares, as well as district and subdivision headquarters, and divided the urban centers into segregated European and African quarters.44
Urban lots were made available to settlers on a provisional basis and were divided into three graded categories: premium A lots, greater than 2,000 square meters, which sold for 10 francs per square meter; intermediate B lots, from 100–200 m2, which sold for 5 fr/m2; and C lots, less than 20 m2, which cost 5 fr/m2.45 As Nkongsamba became an official urban center on 16 May 1923 and subdivision capital on 30 September 1923, twenty of the thirty A lots went to Europeans. Africans obtained a greater number of the 120 B lots available; Bamileke migrants held half of them, while only three were assigned to the autochthonous population.46 Rural lands outside urban perimeters were also divided into three categories: pasturage lands, used also for the cultivation of food crops, sold for 10 fr/ha; mid-level lands, used for the cultivation of cash crops for export, sold for 20 fr/ha; and premium lands, for the cultivation of cash crops for export (cacao, oil palms, coffee, and vanilla), sold for 30 fr/ha in 1921.47
Problems with land distribution and classification surfaced right away. Inhabitants of the Mungo Region had historically used many of the expropriated “vacant lands” for communal purposes, such as grazing livestock or gathering wood. Furthermore, European settlers in and near Nkongsamba circumvented administrative land policies as a matter of course. In 1930, High Commissioner Marchand wrote: “The creation of the Nkongsamba center, without any compensation for the natives, and the granting of new rural concessions side by side within the borders of the village, have reduced to a bare minimum the lands available to the autochthonous collectivity.”48 Admitting the administration’s failure to adhere to its own policies, Marchand warned that in future prudence was called for in “attributing lands believed, erroneously, to be dominial, from within the boundaries of the indigenous collectivity of Nkongsamba.”49 No effort was made, however, to reverse the illegal settlement patterns in place or to compensate African landowners whose property had already been expropriated.
The administration granted provisional titles for both urban and rural lots, ensuring that ownership was conditional upon compliance with the mise en valeur (economic development) policy that characterized French colonialism throughout the 1920s.50 In urban areas, this entailed an obligation to build, while in rural areas, provisional permits required landholders to use the land for its stated purpose as recorded in an official deed registry. If the parcel’s temporary owner did not meet the administration’s terms of development, which included productivity quotas and adherence to specific agricultural procedures for cash crops, the land could be revoked.
The productivity quotas set by the clerk of agricultural works and provisional land titles worked to the advantage of French settlers, by serving to justify French expropriation of African inhabitants’ land. If an African planter failed to reach established quotas, he was forced to cede his land for minimal compensation. In a 1930 decision establishing the terms for purchase of land belonging to Essoa Ewane, an African plantation owner in the northern Mungo, Marchand described Ewane’s cacao trees as poorly maintained, abandoned, and almost without value. Following the recommendation of the agricultural clerk, Marchand suggested that Ewane be paid twenty francs per tree rather than the legal standard of fifty francs,51 adding, “If he refuses [the terms], Ewane will have to appear in civil court at his own risk and expense.”52 French planters had a greater familiarity with the agricultural standards required for exported crops. They also benefited from access to conscripted labor and from the administration’s provision of financial grants or loans for the purchase of industrial farming equipment. Lacking these advantages, African planters often fell short of productivity quotas and, like Ewane, were forced to sell their farms at prices well below official cost.
Administrative land policies failed to prevent European settlers from encroaching on the “native reserves” the French administration had set apart to protect the land rights of indigenous populations. In 1925, regional administrators created a reserve for Mbo populations at the Plain of the Mbo, a “swampy, uninhabitable land” between the northern Mungo Region and Dschang, the administrative capital of the Bamileke Region, just to the east of the Anglo-French boundary. In subsequent years, the administration granted a number of large concessions in the region to French commercial agricultural enterprises, which gradually overtook reserved land. In 1928 the Niabang Company received a grant of 1,027 hectares, which diminished the reserve,53 and the Nkongsamba-based Pastoral Company was granted 1,500 hectares of fertile land, and used additional pasture lands in the reserve on the slopes of Mount Manenguba for which it did not have a grant.54
In 1933, Chief Fritz Pandong of Mboroko formally protested the request of a French settler named Chollier for a plot of land in the Plain of the Mbo. Administrators were obliged to investigate. Marchand’s successor, High Commissioner Paul Bonnecarrère, found that “today the reserve has become insufficient,” due to the number of large concessions given out over the last few years.55 Chollier’s request was denied, but administrators nevertheless continued to dole out reserved land to European plantation owners. Faced with the limitations on settlement imposed by “native reserves,” European planters in the northern Mungo solicited administrators’ accommodation. To overcome legal restrictions on indigenous reserves such as the Plain of the Mbo, administrators had only to demonstrate occupants’ apparent neglect or disuse.
French land distribution policies led to increased economic stratification throughout the 1920s. While most African planters cultivated less lucrative cacao on the more affordable, inferior plots, Europeans acquired the richest soils, and were well situated to profit from the coffee boom that began in the 1930s.56 The size of European plantations increased dramatically by 1930, as white settlers used conscripted laborers to maintain the levels of productivity necessary to ensure the renewal of their deeds. While Europeans’ plantations in 1922 totaled only 269 hectares, their holdings had increased to eighteen thousand hectares by 1930.57 Only three Cameroonian planters—Isaac Tchoua and Isaac Bondja, immigrants from the Bamileke Region, and Martin Moulendé from the Douala area—met a sufficient number of the contingencies in place to be able to acquire ownership of European-style plantations.58 But their plantations were comparatively much smaller than those of European settlers, measuring less than one hundred hectares, as compared to European farms of 325, 350 and 964 hectares. Most Cameroonian planters held small, unregistered plots on lands of inferior quality throughout the region and grew both cash crops and food crops.
From 1929 to 1934 an economic crisis linked to the Great Depression swept the Mungo Region, causing a drastic fall in the price of cacao and wiping out most of the African cacao planters in the region. Planters indigenous to the Mungo Region or from the coastal region of Douala, previously the dominant African cash-crop planters in the Mungo valley, were the hardest hit by the economic upheaval. But Bamileke migrants, who had the very economic and social networks necessary to succeed despite administrative policies that disadvantaged African land ownership, were able to increase their landholdings during the economic crisis.59 Throughout the 1920s, autochthonous and Duala cacao farmers employed Grassfields sharecroppers as laborers, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots of land. When the price of cacao plummeted in 1929, autochthonous landowners who could no longer afford to pay their laborers offered portions of their land, or sometimes wives, to migrants, to make good on their debts. Planters of Bamileke origin drew on family and patronage networks in their chieftaincies of origin to attract dependants to work in their fields for social rather than monetary compensation.60 These unpaid workers provided Bamileke planters with a labor force unavailable to indigenous landowners, who had smaller families and a lower rate of demographic reproduction, as well as fewer social restrictions that juniors had to overcome before being allowed by their elders to marry. Furthermore, the relative abundance of land in the less densely populated Mungo Region meant that land inheritance was not restricted to one sole heir—who had worked hard to prove himself worthy of succeeding his father—as it was in the Grassfields. With fewer numbers and fewer incentives to distinguish themselves through the acquisition of wealth or winning favor with elder notables, autochthonous social cadets were less motivated to work for their elders than were their Bamileke peers.61 By the end of the crisis, in 1934, nearly all autochthonous and Duala plantation owners had been dispossessed of their plantations, while a number of migrants from the Bamileke Region had acquired land and had set about taking the necessary steps to register it as private property.62 In so doing, they often met with legislative obstacles, however.
On 21 July 1932, when discussions of “customary law” were in vogue in French colonies across the globe, a decree was passed to protect the rights of African landowners, but it specified that the legislation be applied to “autochthonous” collectivities, according to the terms of “local customary law.”63 Increasingly conscious of their portrayal as strangers in the Mungo after the 1930s land reforms, Bamileke migrants were the first to register deeds, buy up the remaining cheap A-grade parcels of land, and try their hands at growing coffee, bananas, and cacao as cash crops. But when Bamileke landowners applied for registered deeds, French administrators often refused to recognize customary contracts negotiated between the migrants and their autochthonous hosts64 and throughout the 1930s rendered them invalid on the grounds that immigrant settlers were “strangers.”65 At Sadrack Kamtche’s request for the recognition of ownership, the district chief of the small town of Loum-Chantiers skeptically declared that, “being a stranger to the country,” Kamtche could not have acquired the land according to local customary law. Before validating his claims to ownership of the parcel in question, Kamtche would have to produce a copy of the “deed establishing his right to the parcel he is claiming.”66
THE ETHNICIZATION OF LAND OWNERSHIP IN THE MUNGO RIVER VALLEY
Although land ownership policies had been designed in theory to protect African landholdings, in practice they often opened up additional opportunities for European settlers to acquire land. A further result, most significantly for the Mungo Region, was that administrators’ refusal to recognize customary agreements fostered tensions between Bamileke immigrants and “autochthonous” populations by overriding agreements in place and assigning immutable labels and qualities—based on ethnic identity—to African inhabitants of the Mungo River valley. In the 1930s administrators, enthused by colonial policymakers’ new interest in “tribal customs and law,” replaced the ambiguous term indigène (native) with the terms allogène and autochtone, which categorized Bamileke in the Mungo as strangers while underscoring Mbo populations’ traditional rights to the land.67 These terms could be read as reflecting French administrators’ desire to minimize the dislocation of autochthonous populations in the Mungo Region, and certainly they were intended to communicate that desire to the League of Nations in the required annual reports. However, articulations of administrative policies that appear in official records of French dealings with traditional authorities in the Mungo Region reveal the mise en valeur of the fertile region’s land as administrators’ primary objective, as well as their pervasive and enduring notion that allowing Bamileke settlers to acquire land was the best way to increase the region’s overall agricultural productivity.Over the years, French administrative terminology and ambivalent policies in the Mungo Region glossed over the heterogeneity of both Mungo and Bamileke populations and established them as polarized, homogenous categories in competition with one another.68
Concerned with the dwindling land resources, administrators used the newly reified ethnic categories to justify the denial of numerous Bamileke settlers’ requests for registered deeds to the land they had occupied, in some cases, for decades. The 1932 decree, which specified that lands should ideally be held “by inhabitants indigenous to the territory, following the rules of local customary law,” allowed administrators to dismiss Bamileke requests as having no legal or judiciary basis.69 However, when it suited their purpose, administrators argued for Bamileke settlement by insisting that autochthonous populations failed to exploit the land to its full potential and by depicting “the Bamileke” as a “race of workers”70 who fulfilled the economic objectives of mise en valeur: “The Bamileke presence compensates for the persistent inertia of the autochthonous population that, in many towns, leaves the land to which it holds or pretends to hold the rights of ownership completely uncultivated. The mise en valeur of those lands is due only to the work of the stranger population.”71
In sum, by applying classification grades, productivity quotas, and ethnic categorizations, and by counting on Africans’ lack of familiarity with ever-changing land laws, French administrators exercised three strategies to destabilize African land ownership in the 1930s. They could expropriate land for European settlers by “proving” that African planters had failed to meet the mise en valeur standards consistent with the parcel’s classification. If it suited them, they could refuse Bamileke requests for titles and deeds to their land by claiming that they were strangers and had no valid right to land in terms of the Mungo Region’s customary law. And yet, if the situation required it, they could reject autochthonous claims to land ownership by characterizing Bamileke settlers as workers who achieved higher levels of agricultural productivity.
To say that these ambiguous and paradoxical land policies worked to the advantage of European settlers would be an understatement. Despite their occasional nods to the “spirit of the mandate,” by the 1930s French land policy clearly favored European acquisition of permanent land titles. The refusal to recognize the validity of African land contracts, the lack of enforcement of land reserve boundaries, the contingencies of the lands’ classification, and the arbitrary undercompensation of indigenous landholders provided European settlers with first dibs on prime land and facilitated their acquisition of permanent titles. In 1936, Europeans held 94 out of 128 rural concessions in the Mungo, 26 of them with permanent deeds. By 1953, all European landholders had acquired permanent titles for their land and property.72 Furthermore, despite Marchand’s initial conservatism regarding the amount of land and the size of plantations granted to Europeans, the number of hectares attributed to individual European planters continued to rise throughout the mandate and trusteeship periods, peaking at 230,000 hectares at the end of World War II, and settling at 204,090 hectares by the time of official independence—the majority of the region’s arable land.73
Ever-stricter regulations on planting methods for commercial crops enabled Europeans to maintain a production edge over African planters as well. By 1930, as robusta coffee began to boom as a cash crop, Europeans were well placed to capitalize on coffee as cacao’s replacement. A regulatory provision circulated by the chief of the district required all coffee plantation owners to register and required all those who wanted to grow coffee to obtain a special permit if they were not on land for which they had a provisional or permanent deed.74 In 1938 the regulations of coffee growing became even stricter, demanding that the owner prove he had access to the necessary number of laborers. The chief of the region declared that any plantation lacking the authorization permit would have its trees uprooted, thereby suggesting that coffee growing required care and attention that African planters were unable to provide.75 Yet, in spite of the various advantages the administration offered to white farmers throughout the mandate period, by the 1950s, Bamileke migrants to the region had begun to outproduce European planters in coffee for commercial export, largely because of their ability to acquire laborers when their counterparts could not.76
BAMILEKE-NESS, SETTLEMENT, AND POLITICAL (MIS)REPRESENTATION IN THE MUNGO REGION
Despite the strict land regulations on them and their categorization as strangers, Bamileke settlers found ways to use French legislation and ethnic classifications to their advantage, while strategizing their own sociopolitical organization in the Mungo region. Arriving in the Mungo on a shoestring, Bamileke migrants relied on mutual aid networks they put in place. The fact that they maintained strong connections to their chieftaincies of origin enabled them to recruit additional laborers from their home chieftaincies. As hired laborers themselves, Bamileke planters rubbed elbows with European settlers, acquiring language skills and perhaps some familiarity with the complicated and elusive land policies publicized in the Journal officiel du Cameroun. As European plantations became larger, white settlers experienced more acute labor shortages and encouraged Bamileke workers to remain in the Mungo by sharing information about land acquisition and planting techniques. As migrants from the Bamileke Region began to cultivate their own land, they used the labor shortage to negotiate wage increases or fewer working hours.77 Finally, Bamileke settlers gradually assumed the collective “Bamileke” identity through which French administrators portrayed them as hard-working, in contrast to the “laziness” of indigenous Mungo inhabitants.
Early in their mandate, the French recognized the Mungo River valley’s artificiality as an administrative region. The chief of the Bureau of Economic Affairs remarked that the Mungo Region was, in essence, an economic unit with an elevated sense of independence, characterized by a lack of native command due to the high percentage of immigrants from elsewhere. The autochthonous populations were socially organized as acephalous segmentary lineages governed by a counsel of elders rather than as centralized polities under chiefly rule.78 The lack of a functional “native command” in the region necessitated “unity in command and uniformity in the decisions to be made.”79 In the 1920s, the decade during which French colonial policies established traditional rulers as administrative auxiliaries, administrators attempted to fabricate a “native command” in the Mungo by naming traditional chiefs for autochthonous populations and settlement chiefs for immigrant populations in the Mungo.80
In 1924, seeking to establish a “traditional” government in the increasingly cosmopolitan town of Nkongsamba, French administrators in the Mungo officially recognized Adam Arab, of mixed Moroccan and Chadian parentage, as superior chief of [African] strangers for the region from Nkongsamba to Nlohé, on the banks of the Nkam River.81 In collaboration with the French administration, Arab eventually selected three assistants: a chief of Bamileke populations, Jean Saah (from Bangangte); a chief of Hausa and Fulbé populations, Mama Issoufou; and a chief of Bamun populations, Arouna Njoya.82 The autochthonous superior chief of Baneka, on whose terrain the urban center of Nkongsamba was built, resented the “stranger” chiefs’ apparent challenge to his rule, especially as the number of immigrants began to surpass the number of autochthonous inhabitants under his command.
On 9 October 1925, the French administration created the Council of Notables to serve as a liaison with the population. Convening for the first time on 16 February 1926 in Yaoundé, council members discussed taxes and conscripted labor, the construction of the railroads, roads, and commercial centers, and the maintenance of indigenous “customs.” On 29 July 1933, the administration modified the makeup of the council to achieve an ethnic balance of power that suited their objectives. The council was to consist of “representatives of diverse ethnic settlements [groupements ethniques] within the district’s territory, chosen among superior chiefs and [lesser chiefs], as well as among the most influential notables. The selection should be proportionate to the population of each ethnic settlement.”83
In the Mungo, the council was to be made up of ten to thirty members, “natives, indigenous to the territory, well-established in the district, and possessing agricultural, industrial, or commercial interests.”84 The Nkongsamba council was made up of twenty-four “autochthons” of the Mungo Region, and one representative each for “Bamileke,” “stranger,” and “Yaoundé” populations.85 But the makeup of the Nkongsamba council was anything but proportional to “the population of each ethnic settlement.” It privileged autochthonous populations and dramatically underrepresented Bamileke inhabitants of the Mungo Region. By 1936, Bamileke immigrants made up 10,727 of the 21,876 inhabitants of the Nkongsamba subdivision.86 Furthermore, Bamileke migrants did not necessarily respect or recognize the representative that administrators named as their spokesperson, nor did they allow the chief of the Bamileke to govern their daily affairs. Selected by the French, the “superior chief of the Bamileke” had a foreign administration as the source of his authority, and French-appointed chiefs were not the ones who mattered to Bamileke populations in the Mungo Region.87
When it became clear that administrative policies barred them from equitable political representation, Bamileke migrants took matters into their own hands by following their own criteria to construct the sort of “traditional” government that better represented their interests in the Mungo Region. In 1935 a report from Loum highlighted French administrators’ inability to select and impose a “native command” on Bamileke migrants who preferred to follow their own chosen leaders. The greater Loum area in the Mbanga Subdivision, south of Nkongsamba (made up of Njombé, Penja, Loum, and Babong settlements) hosted the highest proportion of Bamileke immigrants in the Mungo Region. In 1932, a Mr. Raynaud, French chief of the Mbanga subdivision, named one settlement chief, Njiké Lakondji of Loum, to preside over all “Bamileke” populations in Njombé, Penja, Loum-Chantiers, and Loum. Raynaud no longer recognized the Bamileke leaders who had previously been responsible for their communities in the towns of Njombé, Penja, and Loum-Chantiers, although he encouraged Njiké Lakondji to rely on them as headmen to facilitate tax collection.
Within three years, tax revenue plummeted and it became obvious that Njiké Lakondji did not even know how many taxable Bamileke inhabitants lived in the region, much less how to get his “headmen” to respect his authority. Mr. Henry, assistant to Raynaud, made the decision to reinstate those who had originally been popularly recognized as community leaders in the various settlements, assigning each the title of village chief,88 and allowed Njiké Lakondji to preside over Loum alone. Henry remarked, “the proposed chiefs, even if they do not bear the title, are considered as such by the inhabitants.”89 He added that it was necessary to have a village chief in each town to facilitate the collection of taxes, to fill conscripted labor demands, to maintain order, to keep track of arrivals and departures, and to deal with any other “village-related incident.” Henry then placed all village chiefs in the subdivision under the official surveillance of a superior chief of Bamileke in the Mbanga subdivision, “Feinboy” Nkette, who earned a bonus on the taxes collected in the area. But Chief Nkette had been the Bamileke settlers’ leader of choice several years before the French recognized him as such.
Nkette had acted as a Grassfields community chief in Nkappa (Mbanga subdivision) since the 1929 economic crisis. He had managed to acquire a significant amount of land, which he distributed to destitute sharecroppers and laborers of Grassfields origin after the onset of the Depression. Although the lands surrounding Nkappa had been classified as low-grade pasturage lands, undesirable to European settlers who sought the prime lands for planting, the newcomer planters found the lands around Nkappa profitable for cacao growing and thus found their niche in the cash-crop economy after 1930. Gradually, an increasing number of Grassfields migrants settled on the periphery of Nkette’s land and recognized him as their leader. The settlers themselves bestowed Nkappa’s position on him, and it was only several years later, after the French-named settlement chief’s failure to bring in taxes, that French functionaries in the Mungo recognized him as an official part of regional “native command.”90 The Loum-Mbanga situation demonstrates the way Bamileke settlers selected their leaders according to their own criteria, leaving French administrators little choice but to work with those who had achieved prominence and wielded influence in their communities.91
Although the administration was concerned primarily with tax collection and conscripted labor, Bamileke settlers had other motives for choosing their own leaders in their new world. They largely ignored the French administrators’ handpicked representatives for the artificial native command. Instead, they prioritized their ties to gung and organized themselves by chieftaincy of origin. For example, in 1950s Nkongsamba the administration required the Baham community to submit to Jean Saah, chief of the Bamileke settlement, in matters of taxation and conscripted labor. But the community relied on their own “family chief,” Emil Tchuenkam, to regulate their relations with the Baham chieftaincy and their economic investment strategy, or mutual-aid, associations. In Nkongsamba, Douala, and Yaoundé, Baham “family chiefs” governed external Baham communities in much the same way that mfonte and wabo did within the chieftaincy borders, by serving as intermediaries between the fo and his population.92 By the 1930s in Mungo towns like Nkongsamba, Mbanga, and Loum, Bamileke communities had the political and economic power to set their own terms of political representation.93 At the same time, emigrants carved out their role in governance in the Bamileke chieftaincies they had moved away from but refused to leave behind, thus reifying the mode of identification that remained important to them—that of belonging to a particular chieftaincy.
During the interwar period, Bamileke emigrants began to gain purchase in chieftaincy governance in their villages of origin. Family chiefs were not mentioned in French records until the late 1950s, but they had largely preceded that period. Each “family” of emigrants assembled to unanimously agree on their leader.94 In short, Grassfields migrants in the Mungo recreated structures of governance similar to those they had left behind. Nothing demonstrated more clearly the continued importance of Grassfields political culture to Bamileke communities residing outside the chieftaincies, in the Mungo Region and other urban areas of French Cameroon.
BECOMING BAMILEKE BEYOND CHIEFTAINCY BORDERS
The existing scholarship has often depicted young emigrants from the Bamileke Region as breaking free of the restrictive controls of their hierarchically structured home chieftaincies and revolting against the status quo.95 Nicolas Argenti posits a “century of youth” for Grassfields males beginning with German colonialism and the arrival of missionaries, in the late 1890s. He describes the mission-educated “interpreters”—tapenta in pidgin English—as a generation of youth who appropriated literacy and European-language training from the colonial administration, and used their newly acquired skills to profit from economic opportunities, “severing their kinship and hierarchical ties to their kingdom of origin.”96 These subversive social cadets were succeeded by a generation of “free boys,” who learned trades, moved to coastal regions and urban areas in the early 1900s and became independent of their chiefs.97 They held “no accountability” to chieftaincy governments, and, “pledging allegiance to no chiefdom,” they “threatened authority structures.”98 According to Argenti, who draws heavily on Jean-Pierre Warnier on this point, throughout the twentieth century, the chief’s palace and nobility circles lost their monopoly on power and their control over labor, and their dominance of disenfranchised cadets was thus breeched.
It was true that by the 1930s—when Bamileke planters emerged as dominant players in the Mungo Region’s plantation economy—nobility and chiefs did not hold the same sway over young emigrants, who had not inherited land or titles from their fathers. But the new planters, shopkeepers, and traders in the Mungo Region certainly did not sever ties with their chieftaincies of origin, nor can they be accurately described as social rebels. Successful emigrants who excelled in their new circumstances and managed, at the same time, to penetrate the echelons of wealth, status, and nobility in their home chieftaincies might better be understood as social innovators. They conserved, rather than overturned, the chieftaincy norms and protocols that rendered their achievements meaningful in Grassfields sociopolitical terms—but found ways to leverage their own inclusion in traditional chieftaincy structures, thus increasing their flexibility and engendering their redefinition.
Like Warnier and Argenti, Andreas Eckert describes Bamileke migration to the Mungo as a “migration away from a highly centralized and unequal system of disinherited groups” that was present in Grassfields chieftaincies.99 Indeed, young migrants sought opportunities for economic advancement, wanting to escape the rigorous labor demands that elders and notables placed on them. But it was the “highly centralized and unequal system” of chieftaincy governance that continued to give their social status meaning. Mfo’s eventual bestowal of nobility titles to successful emigrants may have clinched the deal, but even those who did not achieve titles remained bound by their cosmology to sacred sites of the chieftaincy, and depended on the approval of their elders, ancestors, and mfo to ensure their success in their new world. An investment in their chieftaincy of origin was necessary in order for them to carry out sacrifices to ancestors and spirits, fulfill their duties as good children, increase their social status, and ensure their own honorable entry into the ancestral world upon their death. Emigrants returned regularly to benefit from the fixed attributes of gung: the sacred sites (cheup’si), the fo, their fathers’ compound, and ancestral skulls. In this way, emigrants continued to uphold the spiritual alliance between the visible world of the living and the unseen world of ancestors, spirits, and gods that underwrote governance in their chieftaincies of origin.100
In a time before European rule, emigrants to the Mungo River valley might have established their own chieftaincies with ties to home echoing only in remnant oral histories. Historically, ambitious Grassfielders had broken away from their chieftaincies of origin and founded new polities.101 But under colonial rule, when boundaries between polities and populations were no longer in flux, and battles over territory could no longer be fought, the French administration’s reification of territorialized ethnic categories prevented Mungo autochthons from being co-opted into the migrants’ sociopolitical structure—or vice versa. Bamileke immigrants to the Mungo Region had little choice but to continue to turn to their specific chieftaincies in instances where traditional governance and spirituality remained important, submitting—albeit from a distance—to the authority of the mfo they had left behind in ways they expected would increase their social standing and enhance their success. Somewhat paradoxically, it was their choice to leave their home chieftaincies that opened up avenues to the economic successes that enabled them to symbolically return having attained a level of recognition and status that would have remained out of reach for most had they never left. Migration and exile thus became a cornerstone of a twentieth-century Bamileke moral economy and identity.
While the fertility of the land in the Mungo River valley was undeniably attractive to Bamileke farmers used to working the hard, sometimes rocky, red soil of the eastern Grassfields, it was not this alone that caused them to settle.102 The promise of greater commercial opportunities and wage labor—whether in fields, factories, slaughterhouses, or homes—and the simultaneous growth of European settlement were factors in providing a financial safety net for immigrants. But it was the Bamileke migrants’ demographic makeup—mostly young men and foster children during the mandate and early trusteeship periods—that accounted for their level of activity and economic success. In 1935 an administrator at Mbanga remarked in exasperation that only a third of Bamileke men in his subdivision were married, and that they brought boys and girls from their villages to cook and clean for them.103 These young men sought to surpass the expectations of the families they left behind in their home chieftaincies.
Young Bamileke men in the Mungo Region used their access to cash to gain social and political standing back home as well as to gain recognition for their new pursuits in their chieftaincies of origin. European settlers and administrators mostly viewed Bamileke as second-class citizens, and autochthonous populations increasingly resented their intrusion and appropriation of lands. As Bamileke migrants fell through the administrative cracks or faced restrictions due to their categorization as strangers in their new land, they began to organize themselves in self-government associations based on chieftaincy of origin and which followed the principles of Grassfields governance. They also established elaborate networks of cultural associations and mutual financial-aid and credit societies. As a result they gained the security of social networks in the Mungo Region, while at the same time preserving and even increasing their influence and importance in their home chieftaincies. Since their successes in the Mungo Region had little social significance in their new surroundings, bringing economic resources back to the chieftaincy increased their status in the eyes of their elders.
The mfo in the Bamileke Region, in turn, recognized the importance of preserving connections with their emigrant communities and soon realized that the chieftaincy’s emigrant communities represented a source of revenue for the palace treasury. As rewards, successful emigrants were sometimes “given” plots of land, or wives—gifts that incurred allegiance and obligations to the fo. Most important, beginning in the 1950s if not before, the most successful emigrants could obtain a nobility title. In bestowing traditional nobility titles to youths who had moved away, mfo acknowledged the achievements of cadets, while continuing to benefit indirectly from their labor and keeping them an integral part of the polity. The inclusion of emigrants in the ranks of chieftaincy nobility ushered in an era of young urban Bamileke working with—rather than against—traditional palace elite.104
As the connection between home chieftaincies and emigrant communities evolved, it became clear that, by the late 1930s, the chieftaincy was no longer the hegemonic seat of power it had been at the turn of the twentieth century. The mfo had no say in the selection of the family chiefs, who essentially served as their representatives in emigrant communities throughout Cameroon’s urban areas. Instead, they relied increasingly on their emigrant intermediaries to keep them informed of territorial affairs, economic trends, and, after World War II, political processes. The Mungo River valley—and other sites of Bamileke settlement throughout the territory—became the locations in which the ranks of modern Bamileke nobility could expand despite a finite supply of land within the bounds of home chieftaincies.
Although a majority of Bamileke migrants to the Mungo maintained active links to their chieftaincies of origin, a few who achieved a degree of financial success so complete that they felt no need for the social or spiritual currency provided by the chieftaincy did sever ties, opting for a more permanent emigration. Isaac Bondja, for instance, originally from the area of Bangangte in the Nde Subdivision of Bamileke country, had by 1927 acquired European-style plantations of eighty hectares near Melong, at the northernmost edge of the Mungo Region.105 Bondja was one of three Africans claiming the desirable A lots within the urban perimeter of Nkongsamba in 1923.106 Agar Ndenmen, one of Bondja’s eight children from his monogamous marriage, explains that her father believed his arrival in Nkongsamba to be sanctioned by a Christian God. Bondja modeled his resettlement in northern Mungo territory on the biblical story of Abraham and told his children that when he arrived, “there was no one.” He and his wife created the village surrounding his plantation, and he believed “it was his country that God had given him.” In 1983, Bondja was buried on his plantation, followed by his wife in 1988. During his lifetime, he had expressed his wish that his wife and all his sons be buried on the plantation as well.107
Bondja was one of the first converts to Protestantism from the Bamileke Region under French rule. He founded the Protestant church at Melong and served as the earliest catechist in the region. Bondja expressed a Bamileke convert’s perspective on the Grassfields spiritual alliance. He taught his children to respect their elders and give them everything they could during their lifetime, such that after death they would have no complaints.108 He told his children that a guilty conscience was what inspired sacrifices to the dead, and that if one treated others well, such sacrifices were unnecessary. Bondja’s proximity to the administration, his conversion, and his wealth enabled him to finalize a separation from his chieftaincy of origin, but such a rupture was exceptional among Bamileke settlers in the Mungo Region at the time.
