an important role in the UPC’s armed struggle, and there is evidence that regions as far away as the extreme northern and eastern provinces witnessed far more nationalistic activity than is reflected in the scholarship to date. Finally, the paths of exiled nationalists, as this book shows to some extent, were varied and far-flung. The influence of these exiles on the postindependence phase of UPC nationalism—or on political processes in the states that hosted them, including Ghana, Guinea, and Algeria—has yet to be analyzed in depth. The FLN’s GPRA files may contain a wealth of information on the activities of UPC exiles and their Pan-African connections. Undoubtedly, fresh new leads will be opened up with the release of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Predecessors Records of Former Colonial Administrations, also known as the Migrated Archives. The Cameroons’ files, which unfortunately had not been released at the time of the completion of this book, have since been made available to the public.
PART ONE
Grassfields Political Tradition and Bamileke Identity
1
Two words and the history of their use encapsulate the genealogy of Cameroonian nationalism, as practiced and spoken of by Bamileke populations in the late-trusteeship period of the 1950s: gung, which translated as nation, and lepue, the word for independence. The word gung, in present-day Mifi, Menoua, Haut-Nkam, and Nde Departments of the West Province (formerly the Bamileke Region, under French rule), designates the entirety of a population or chieftaincy, its government (composed of a fo, or chief, and his notables), and the land they occupy.1 Gung can be contrasted with la’a, which refers to a district2 within a chieftaincy or to the family compound, the birthplace of one’s forefathers. One might use a singular possessive pronoun to describe one’s own home—as in la’a tcha, my home or compound—but in speaking of gung, only plural possessives are used, suggesting that this larger polity could only belong to a community, not to an individual. Since Cameroon’s independence, these words together, la’a gung (lit., village-country), have been used to designate Grassfields chieftaincies such as Baham in order to differentiate them from gung, the nation-state. When referring to their native chieftaincy, Grassfielders have almost completely omitted gung from their common speech, effectively reducing their gung of origin to the lesser status of la’a, or village.
The discursive belittling of Grassfields chieftaincies began in the colonial period, when administrators referred to them as villages. But during the fight for independence, Grassfielders recalled the historical sovereignty of powerful chieftaincies through the words and events they selected to frame their nationalist narrative. The two key words recurred in independence songs from that era: gung, then commonly used as equivalent to nation, and lepue, which translated as independence in everyday Grassfields parlance. Historically, the ideal of lepue denoted the status of absolute autonomy acquired by the dominant chieftaincies in the Grassfields. During the nationalist period, the image of a politically independent, powerful chieftaincy grew in the collective imaginary and overlapped with concepts of self-determination and national sovereignty, only to fall away again under the postcolonial regime.
Using language as an archive, this chapter explores the semantic bedrock of Bamileke communal memory of political and spiritual practices that predated foreign rule, particularly the elements that later guided the diffusion of UPC nationalism. It provides the historical context for understanding what Bamileke nationalists hoped to regain through their involvement in the UPC, and what cultural and historical materials they worked with as they undertook the decolonization of the imaginary. In other words, this chapter is not a history of the Grassfields under European rule but rather seeks to provide a foundation for the interpretations of Grassfields political culture that anticolonial nationalists found most useful as they sought to popularize the movement to cast off the colonial yoke. Insofar as the anticolonial period entailed a reconfiguration of traditional power in the Bamileke Region, as discussed in chapter 4, it is necessary to understand the tenuous balance of power within and among chieftaincies, as well as the factors that could shift that balance of power within the boundaries of what political scientist Michael Schatzberg terms a “moral matrix of legitimate governance.”3 The present chapter’s purpose is thus to provide the reader with a vantage point from which to perceive and understand the articulation between UPC nationalism and Grassfields political culture that became widespread throughout the Bamileke Region and among Bamileke emigrant communities throughout the Cameroons in the 1950s.
THE FORMATION OF GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES
Orally transmitted myths of origin, emphasizing the role of the founder who often figures as a wandering hunter, abound throughout the Grassfields. The founding myths serve as centralizing narratives—the official version of the past as propagated by the chief’s palace with the political intent of legitimating the chieftaincy.4 These stories of origin reveal a great deal about the Grassfields political philosophy that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in tandem with the region’s increasing centralization and settlement density.
The conventional scholarship has posited the settlement of the Grassfields into chieftaincies as coinciding with the growth of the region’s involvement in international commerce as Atlantic and Sahelian trading networks infiltrated from the west and the north.5 However, in an article published in 2012, anthropologist and specialist of the Grassfields region, Jean-Pierre Warnier—fleshing out his own previous argument about Grassfields settlement and chieftaincy formation—suggests the emergence of kingship lineages and chieftaincies much earlier, perhaps even one or two millennia ago, and stipulates that for at least twenty-five hundred years the region has been characterized by the incorporation of newcomers due to the mobility of regional and long-distance traders and exogenous marriage.6 Regardless of when political centralization of the Grassfields chieftaincies began, the eighteenth century ushered in significant regional changes: Fulani traders north of the region began frequent slave raids throughout the area, while traders from the coast based at Old Calabar and Douala tapped the region for slaves. Because of its inland location, historians have little statistical data on the precise number of slaves originating from the Grassfields region; however, recent scholarship suggests that the combined figures for slaves exported per year at the peak of the trade, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may have reached as high as sixteen to eighteen thousand.7 During the period of intensive slaving, the Grassfields served as a melting pot of populations and lineages from many different origins. The nineteenth century—within reach of remembered tradition and political history for Grassfielders—was characterized by skirmishes over territory and succession, wars over boundaries between polities, and shifting rivalries and alliances between chieftaincies.8
Against this backdrop of violence, massive displacements, and rampant insecurity, small, autonomous chieftaincies expanded and vied for positions of strength in the region. Internally, founders of new chieftaincies used centralizing narratives to construct a common identity for a diverse population.9 Externally, Grassfields chieftaincies engaged in a complex diplomacy of shifting alliances and competition over territory. While oral founding myths bespeak each polity’s assertion of an origin and history distinct from those of its neighbors, they also emphasize their interrelatedness. Baham’s founding myth, for example, features a skilled hunter who left an established chieftaincy in the Grassfields region with his twin and their younger brother and each of their families.10 They founded the chieftaincies Baham, Bahouan, and Bayangam, respectively, across the Noun River to the west of the Islamic kingdom of Bamum, and bordering the strong chieftaincy of Bandjoun.
Despite
