Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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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.
2
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