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,
