autonomy, the hundred or so Grassfields chieftaincies were linked by shared cultural, spiritual, and political practices, which appeared similar in content but contained particularities and historical references specific to each chieftaincy.11 Nevertheless, Grassfields settlers identified themselves more with particular chieftaincies than with any named group with a common language or common ancestor. As such, Grassfielders demonstrated none of the usual criteria for defining an ethnic identity.12 Self-differentiation from their neighboring chieftaincies was more important to them than differentiation from groups beyond the Grassfields who had different cultural practices. By the nineteenth century, the Grassfields connection to transregional trading networks was well established, and polities in the region exported kola, cloth, ironwork, and other artisanal goods in addition to slaves. This was the situation in the region that the Germans designated Bamileke as they began its occupation in the early twentieth century.13
Oral accounts of the founding of chieftaincies bespeak the prevalence of internal competition among founding patriarchs of equivalent social status. A young man with his sights set on power might, for instance, employ ruse, oratory skills, mystical technologies,14 or wealth (particularly in the form of people, in other words, wives or dependents) to achieve social prominence. Several versions of Baham’s origin story recount a years-long rivalry for the position of fo among the chieftaincy’s founders. During this period, Zuguiebou, a contender for the chief’s three-legged stool, was tricked into being trapped in a house without doors. He could escape only after relinquishing his copper bracelet, or kwepe, a symbol of a fo’s right to reign, to Bussu, who thus became the first fo of Baham.15 This account suggests that ruse and magic were important ways of negotiating power and social mobility. It also hints that, although oral tradition portrays the chief’s power as central and absolute, rivals and competitors were never far away. Historically throughout the Grassfields, ruse, magic, oratory skills, or wealth—the wild-card variables that enable cunning competitors to acquire positions of nobility—surfaced in times of crisis when socially disenfranchised groups tried to reshape the chieftaincy’s balance of power in their favor. While internal crises coincided with succession disputes or secessions, external factors such as the imposition of foreign rule, or wide-scale political transitions could also destabilize the status quo.
LEPUE AND GUNG: POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY, AUTONOMY, AND INDEPENDENCE IN GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES
Grassfields rulers achieved political centralization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through wars designed to expand territory, create or dissolve alliances, and kidnap women or slaves. During the political reshaping of the Grassfields that accompanied the region’s settlement and engagement in transregional trade, the concepts of gung and lepue became essential components of Grassfields political culture. Lepue meant to submit to no one or, as many Grassfielders put it today, to not have to submit to another.16 Lepue could refer to the status of an individual, denoting a person’s relative dependency or autonomy, or to the relative status of a polity such as gung. By the nineteenth century, lepue had become crucial to defining a chieftaincy’s position and strength in a region plumbed for slaves and plagued by wars and migrations, where boundaries were in constant flux.
Lepue was a standing to be achieved and maintained at whatever cost—certainly it was worth fighting a war and spilling blood. Many of the smaller Grassfields chieftaincies preferred to pay tribute to Bamun or Bali and gain their protection, perhaps because, with such alliances they could maintain their autonomy vis-à-vis other Grassfields polities while paying tribute to a foreign king.17 Submission to a Grassfields neighbor usually resulted in absorption into or annexation by the stronger chieftaincy. Smaller chieftaincies could try to achieve lepue status by waging war, first on smaller neighbors in order to expand their territory and increase their strength, and then by confronting other powerful chieftaincies in the region.18
The strongest autonomous chieftaincies were often the ones to resist German colonization. For example, only after German soldiers had set fire to the chief’s palace during the rule of Kamdem III, in 1905 did Baham submit to German rule. After the fire Kamdem III, who had successfully extended the territory of Baham to the north, west, and south during his reign through three well-waged wars, paid a per capita tribute to the Germans and supplied them with laborers to build a road to the coast. Other Grassfields chieftaincies fought to preserve their lepue status in the face of foreign domination. Bafoussam, Baleng, Batie, Bamougoum, Fodjomekwet, and Batcha, chieftaincies that had refused to recognize German authority, were burned by the German military, while Bameka, Bansoa, and Bamougoum formed an unsuccessful alliance of resistance against the invaders.
It took some time for the Germans to completely occupy the Grassfields; not until 1910 did they penetrate to Bana in the present-day Nde Department, where they established a military post.19 Yet not every chieftaincy resisted foreign rule. During the German occupation of the Grassfields, in the early twentieth century, some chieftaincies allied with the European invaders in a strategy to maintain or regain their dominance in the region. Baham’s rival, Bandjoun, submitted willingly to German rule and became a supporter of European rule, reaping the benefits of allegiance to the state throughout the colonial period and beyond. Whether with the Fulani in the eighteenth century, Bamun and Bali in the nineteenth, the Germans in 1905, or the French and British in 1915, Grassfields chiefs were historically skilled at leveraging greater regional standing by either resisting or negotiating with powerful foreign invaders.
By the twentieth century and into the colonial period, dealing with external challenges to political autonomy was part and parcel of Grassfields politics. Certainly, the three or four decades of European rule in the Grassfields region were insufficient to erase the concept of lepue from the collective memory. There had been a long precedent of acquiring lepue status through violent conflict and great sacrifice. And so it is not surprising that this ideal figured in the slogans and songs of Bamileke nationalists in the era of the quest for independence from European administration. By this time, gung appeared in nationalist discourse in another form, mfingung, usually to denote traitors as “sellers of the country.” While the meaning of lepue and gung had shifted by the 1950s to speak for contemporary political concerns and define the place of chieftaincy in the independent nation-to-be, remnant memories of nineteenth-century meanings conjured independence and nationhood in the imaginary of Grassfielders fighting for freedom from colonial rule.
That lepue survived as an ideal until the nationalist era shows that it remained important during the half century of European rule. A historical analysis of Grassfields political power and governance will help to contextualize the strategies devised by Bamileke chieftaincies to maintain as much autonomy as possible during the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods in Cameroon. Because this chapter examines traditional political power and practice for the purpose of understanding how UPC nationalists later vernacularized the movement’s political platform, rendering it legible in terms of Grassfields political culture, the focus here remains on the structure, philosophy, and practice of governance itself, more than on the ways in which shifts in traditional power prompted by European rule acted on ordinary Grassfielders during the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods.
The fo was the figurehead of the Grassfields chieftaincy, but his power was more symbolic than absolute. Certainly, he made no decisions alone. The fo governed in concert and in consultation with ancestors: his “cabinet” of wala (Bamileke scholars today most often translate this term as ministers); his governing council (kamveu); secret regulatory associations, such as the powerful and dangerous kungang; and notables, district heads, and spiritualists. Although the figurehead, and thus the most visible representative of power in gung, the fo was not the most powerful component of chieftaincy governance. At the moment of a young fo’s succession, the elder notables of gung shaped him into a respected and authoritative ruler.20 Officeholders in his father’s government were essential to the rite of succession and remained influential throughout his reign.
The balance of power at the highest echelons of government was revealed to a new fo during his period
