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 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
