for nine months.21 During this period, members of the kamveu, the government council, offered extensive counsel to the neophyte, while members of the kungang secret society officiated over religious rites. During the la’akam, notables challenged the fo emotionally and physically, questioning his ability to rule, subjecting him to severe beatings, and threatening to kill him should he try to escape. In this transitional phase, the fo’s strength, courage, and commitment to rule were tested. It is probable that the fo-to-be developed resentments toward the elders who stripped him of his subjectivity and sought to convince him that he was merely an instrument of their power. But surely one of the reasons for the ordeal was to teach the neophyte the self-control necessary to master his resentment and demonstrate deference and submission to elder, more powerful notables. Upon leaving the la’akam, the fo took up the challenge of establishing his authority—vis-à-vis that of his notables—as supreme governor of the polity. It was a task that took a lifetime, and certainly not every fo succeeded. The uneasy balance of power between notables and fo explains, in part, the tense political atmosphere surrounding a fo’s succession, and the historical frequency with which districts of a given chieftaincy seceded or attempted to do so.
During his isolation in the la’akam, the fo learned that he depended on associations of his elders to rule. The most powerful were kamveu and kungang. Oral accounts describe the members of kamveu as descendants of the nine cofounders of the chieftaincy.22 The reigning fo selected his successor with the help of the kamveu council, and upon the ruler’s death, it was kamveu who placed the legitimate successor in the chief’s palace. Although inhabitants knew who belonged to the kamveu council, the identities of the members of the kungang—the secret association of diviners, healers, and guardians of chieftaincy protocol—were concealed from everyone except the most powerful notables of the chieftaincy.23 Kungang assisted in the installation of the fo in power by carrying out the initiation rites, ensuring his spiritual protection, and bestowing on him the mystical powers necessary to govern.
Governing institutions such as kamveu and kungang ensured the fo’s dependence on his elders and minimized the likelihood that the figurehead would govern as a despot by counterbalancing the fo’s power. They could accuse the fo or other notables of crimes or treachery, oppose the fo mystically or physically (leading to his displacement), and in the event of his death without a successor, select the new fo.24 If kungang questioned a successor’s legitimacy, they could simply omit essential parts of the secret rituals necessary to complete the initiation, leaving the new fo unprotected against unseen, mystical forces threatening to an imposter.25 Without the support of kamveu and kungang—the powerful associations through which he was imbued with political and spiritual legitimacy—the successor could not be “made” a fo.
A fo succeeded his predecessor under the yoke of the chieftaincy’s past history, since the power structure in place rested on the notables, each with his or her own title, rank, role, and particular relationship with the chief’s palace. A fo had to be well versed in chieftaincy history in order to know which members of the nobility had remained loyal to the palace for generations and which might be prone to plotting its overthrow. Nobility positions were hereditary, but the number of nobility titles increased as each successive fo granted new titles during his reign. Titles were both earned and purchased; one had first to earn the title and then to express gratitude for the entitlement with a gift to the fo. The entitlement process was a primary source of revenue for the chief’s palace, before, during, and after colonization.26
Spatially, Grassfields chieftaincies were made up of the core, which comprised the palace of the fo and its designated spaces, and the periphery, consisting of the roads dividing the polity into sections, the remaining districts, the sacred sites, and the border zones or no-man’s-lands.27 Nobility not directly associated with the core presided over the peripheral areas—the roads, the districts, and the sacred sites, but still had an important influence on chieftaincy politics.
The wala (sing., mwala), or, as Bamileke French-speakers say, ministres, in a chieftaincy made up the fo’s cabinet. In local languages, a mwala was described as ta djie, or father of the road,28 and like the roads radiating outward from the palace, their role in governance cut across all districts in the chieftaincy. The fo counted on the wala to uphold the legitimacy of his right to rule even in the face of plots to overthrow him. In the 1950s the Baham chieftaincy had four wala, each specialized in a particular area of governance—justice, diplomacy, commerce, and the maintenance of fertility and fecundity.
Notables who governed the districts of a chieftaincy, often called quarter-heads in colonial nomenclature (and hence, in much of the scholarly literature), were divided into two groups: the wabo,29 who had been named by a past or current governing fo; and the mfonte, whose forefathers had in the past submitted to a conquering fo, relinquishing their lepue status and pledging loyalty upon the annexation of their territory.30 A mwabo’s personal history with the fo distinguished him from a fonte, a distinction made more pronounced by the latter’s placement in districts bordering the chieftaincy’s most hostile enemies. The positions of wabo and mfonte recalled the chieftaincy’s past as each district preserved the memory of pacts, alliances, or enmities between their governor and the fo. In the Ngougoua District of Baham, for example, elders still sing of a past fo’s violation of his promise to exempt Ngougoua from paying tribute to the chief’s palace in return for the wabo’s peaceful surrender.31 Stories and songs like this one indicate that lepue was as important to internal politics within a chieftaincy as to external relations with neighbors.
Almost any powerful notable within a Grassfields chieftaincy could, under certain circumstances, undermine the power of the fo: as a member of kamveu or kungang, he might omit the requisite rites at the fo’s inauguration; as a mwala, fail to uphold the fo’s claim to the throne; or as a fonte in a border region, lead a secessionist movement or pledge allegiance to another powerful fo. Transgressions of this nature were, broadly speaking, unthinkable and thus were not a part of “the moral matrix of legitimate governance,”32 but they did occasionally occur, especially when the chieftaincy passed through the liminal phase of its fo’s succession. Furthermore, while colonial administrators promoted the notion that they had pacified the Grassfields by imposing stability in a region once plagued by warfare and rivalries, the administration they implemented often exacerbated tensions among members of the nobility. Many notables viewed colonial rule as an opportunity to change their political standing in the chieftaincy, to break away from a fo’s rule, or to gain power by forming an alliance with foreign administrators.
MAGIC AND MYSTICISM: THE SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNANCE
The undeniable political influence of the notables on the chief is often underestimated in the literature, as it was by European colonizers, including the French, who sought to make “traditional chiefs” their administrative auxiliaries. But the leadership of a Grassfields chief was also tempered in crucial ways by the forces of an unseen world—spirits, ancestors, and a mystical energy called ké (a term often glossed as magic or power).33
The fo depended on kungang for knowledge of the invisible, metaphysical world of spirits, ancestors, and people who shape-shifted into animals—the world of things ordinary people could only imagine, but a world nonetheless crucial to governance. The duty of kungang was to regulate and domesticate this invisible sphere and to harness it within the chief’s field of power. It was a role that required constant vigilance and an intimate, sophisticated knowledge of both the chieftaincy and the mystical dangers beyond its boundaries. Members of kungang were responsible for protecting the chieftaincy from mystical attacks—whether from within or from without. Once they discovered the mystical causes of misfortunes affecting a chieftaincy or the communities within it, they took measures to repair the spiritual disequilibrium through purification rituals or sacrifices carried out at sacred sites.34
To perform these spiritual duties, members of kungang needed a knowledge of ké, the potent, vital force present in
