Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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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