and market towns. The rest of the region consisted of a mosaic of chieftaincies (gung), each governed by a chief and a network of notables, associations, and spiritualists.
Before colonization, the Grassfields region was composed of approximately one hundred chieftaincies, some autonomous and regionally dominant, others in a state of subordination to more powerful neighbors.46 Alliances between chieftaincies were made and sometimes broken, and boundaries between polities shifted as a result of interchieftaincy battles, diplomatic negotiations, and intrachieftaincy independence movements.47 Although by the nineteenth century Grassfields chieftaincies together made up a coherent cultural system distinct from neighboring regions, Grassfielders had no “shared consciousness of belonging to a named group.”48 On the eve of colonial rule, Grassfields polities had certain political and spiritual practices in common and manifested these in similar material cultures. Yet linguistic diversity49 and the chieftaincy-specific content of political histories (narrating each polity’s foundation and diplomacy), spiritual technologies (particular sacred sites and commemoration of lineage ancestors), and material culture (masquerade performances, architectural style) meant that the identification of Grassfields inhabitants with a particular chieftaincy of origin was far stronger than their sense of belonging to a “Grassfields” collectivity.
Even after the French had labeled the administrative region “Bamileke”—the word a combination of erroneous translation and a mispronunciation first uttered by a German soldier around 190550—inhabitants continued to identify themselves by chieftaincy of origin. Only as they emigrated from their chieftaincies and settled in towns such as Nkongsamba or Douala (the port city) in the territory’s other regions did they begin to apply the term Bamileke to themselves. During the interwar period, a Bamileke identity began to coalesce in places such as the Mungo Region, where host populations and European administrators viewed Bamileke migrants as “strangers.” In the 1950s the meaning of “being Bamileke” continued to evolve concurrently with Cameroonian nationalism as it spread both through emigrant Bamileke communities and through home chieftaincies.
To help understand the engagement of Bamileke actors with UPC nationalism, this book situates the region’s (de)colonization in a Grassfields’ “long time-span”51 and plumbs the ways in which upécistes engaged Grassfields political tradition to express and define the UPC platform for Bamileke communities.52 Chapter 1 focuses on the nineteenth-century traits of Grassfields governance and spirituality that nationalists recycled in the 1950s to “translate the message” of UPC nationalism.53 Bamileke nationalists accented two political concepts indigenous to the Grassfields region—lepue and gung—as the terms used to translate “independence” and “nation,” respectively. In the 1950s, Bamileke nationalists redefined the meanings of these terms through the UPC, in order to restore autonomy and legitimacy to chiefs, and to separate “traitors” (mfingung) from “patriots” (mpouogung). Chapter 1 also presents Grassfields political power and spirituality as inscribed in the communal and familial sacred sites (chuep’si) of each chieftaincy. These sacred sites dotting the landscape were the geographical locus of a spiritual alliance between an invisible, metaphysical world governed by a supreme being, Si, and the visible, material world inhabited by human beings. Throughout the region, this spiritual alliance shaped Grassfields governance and constituted an essential part of the political culture, underwriting power, land distribution and usufruct, and justice within each chieftaincy. During the war for independence, Bamileke nationalists reified the politicospiritual importance of these sites when they risked arrest to travel from the maquis to make sacrifices to deities inhabiting lineage or community chuep’si.54
Through the nationalist movement, and the cultural and linguistic translation it necessitated, Bamileke upécistes reshaped understandings of their past.55 In this, they were doing nothing new. As elsewhere in equatorial Africa,56 in Bamileke communities, identity and political tradition have been “constantly reworked.”57 But independence-era constructions of Bamileke identity and reconstructions of political tradition were “nonetheless ‘fixed’ in narratives of the past.”58 My intention is to show how “narratives of the past” underwrote the politics of anticolonial nationalism in Bamileke communities. But, as Grassfields political culture shaped nationalism, so, too, territorial political processes reframed the views of Bamileke populations on the political legitimacy of their chiefs, the sovereignty of their chieftaincies, and the political and cultural importance of Grassfields spiritual practice. The Mungo Region and its capital, Nkongsamba, became the channel through which reciprocal influences flowed between Grassfields political culture and territorial politics.
Chapter 2 recounts the ways in which Bamileke migrants kept Mungo towns connected to their chieftaincies of origin in the Bamileke Region and to the city of Douala. By the 1950s, the fertile Mungo River valley, site of European-owned plantations and a flourishing cash-crop economy, had become home to tens of thousands of migrants from other parts of the Cameroon territories.59 Drawn by opportunities offered by waged labor and commercial agriculture during the interwar period, migrants from throughout French Cameroon transformed the Mungo River valley into the most ethnically and culturally heterogeneous region in the territory. The majority of immigrants hailed from the adjacent Bamileke Region, located just to the northeast. By the late trusteeship period, Bamileke immigrants made up a significant portion of the Mungo Region’s population, as high as 80 percent in some towns, including Nkongsamba, the regional capital, the third-largest town in French Cameroon and the northern terminus of the railroad from Douala. Situated as it was along the Anglo-French boundary, the Mungo Region became a microcosm of the political, economic, and social tensions that emerged in the Cameroon territories under foreign rule.
Conflicts over land ownership in the Mungo Region encouraged African planters to become familiar with laws, the processes of obtaining titles and deeds, petitioning, and filing grievances and appeals. The relatively high percentage of waged laborers working on the railroad and in plantations ensured that French Communist organizers prioritized the Mungo Region as they organized Marxist study circles and trade unions after the Second World War. The white settler population, the Cameroons’ highest outside Douala, made constant demands on administrators and formed their own defensive political lobbies. In short, the Mungo Region provided fertile ground for UPC nationalism, and Bamileke populations served as conduits for political ideas flowing back and forth from home chieftaincies, via the Mungo River valley, to the largest city, Douala.
Independence (Lepue) and Nation (Gung): Contested Meanings
Part Two shows how the UPC, which formed as a political party in 1948, evolved into a nationalist movement, and examines the ways in which local and territorial politics became articulated in the Mungo and Bamileke Regions. Chapter 3 explains how party leaders “translated” the UPC’s international message throughout the Mungo, Bamileke, and other regions with such success that, by early 1955, upécistes numbered close to 100,000 out of a total electorate of 747,000. French administrators, alarmed by its popularity, remarked that the UPC’s influence was “large relative to [that of] other political movements in the territory,”60 and officially banned the UPC and its affiliate youth, women’s, and trade unionist wings on 13 July 1955.
In 1956, just after the UPC’s proscription in French Cameroon, French administrators deposed, imprisoned, and sometimes forced a number of young Bamileke chiefs who had recently inherited power to flee into exile. As chapter 4 recounts, this younger generation of chiefs became spokespersons for UPC nationalism throughout the Bamileke Region and in their emigrant communities. The first one to be deposed, the chief of Baham, Pierre Kamdem Ninyim, was preparing to run for a seat in the territorial assembly in the December 1956 elections.
