chief in his place by the administration. He is thus legally the chief, but in reality he is not [the chief].”77
Nana had served the administration as scribe and interpreter for four years before overthrowing Fo Nono by using the administration as his leverage. However, according to medical missionary Dr. Josette Débarge, despite Nana’s baptism, he “did not dare” to live in the empty chief’s palace, knowing that the fo’s ancestral skulls were housed there and that “the power of the totems belong[ed] to the legitimate chief Nono.”78 Furthermore, Nana was not initiated as fo with the usual ritual ceremonies since Fo Nono was still living and succession rites could take place only after his death. The inhabitants of Bangwa called the real Fo Nono “our father,” and called Nana simply Jean. Villagers obeyed Jean out of fear, Débarge continued, for “behind him he has the power of the whites. But the true devotion and notion of belonging go to the old exiled chief.”79 Débarge concluded that villagers were sad and disoriented, and that the incident proved that the chief’s authority came from mystical powers derived from the spirit of the land and of ancestral chiefs: “He is chief by divine right.”80
The depositions of mfo and the irregular successions left residual conflicts that smoldered beneath the surface long after the event, and French administrators overlooked the spiritual repercussions that Débarge alluded to. A successor enstooled while the legitimate ruler was still alive lacked the political and popular support required to govern the chieftaincy effectively. By disconnecting the fo from the governmental institutions that ensured his right to rule and from the notables and ritual specialists who “made” him, the French sought to replace those legitimizing institutions with their own administration. In so doing, they fostered the fo’s dependence on a foreign government. While this may have increased the fo’s administrative authority within the context of colonial rule, it also effectively increased the importance of the secret spiritual and magical institutions that formed a part of Grassfields governance.
French administrators became aware of mystical secret associations early in the mandate period but misunderstood their relationship to the institution of the fo and therefore underestimated their role in chieftaincy governance. A French administrative report from around 1920, entitled simply “Ritual Customs,” described secret societies of “fetishists and free spirits, thirsting for riches and dominance,”81 who had to commit a “ritual murder against someone close to [them] in order to be let in on the secret of the fetish medicine,” and who would rather face death than reveal their secrets.82 Despite its cursory knowledge of the existence of secret associations, the French administration deliberately excluded them from the system of indirect administration they were building,83 in part because they misunderstood the logic of constitutional restraint imbued in these institutions. French administrators oversimplified the secret associations by equating secret and mystical with evil. While malefic associations did exist, the majority of secret associations served as regulatory societies whose purpose was to adjust and maintain the balance of power in gung. The associations’ secret activity protected them from a potentially despotic fo—if he did not know who challenged him, he could not punish or penalize. At the same time, the members of the associations, unknown to the population at large, could not use their position to challenge or usurp power from the fo. The structure of the regulatory associations helped to relegate confrontation between powerful community leaders to the realm of secrecy, hidden from public view. The result was to preserve a public façade of strong, unified governance, while maintaining a system of checks and balances within the chieftaincy’s institutions of rule.
In the early 1930s overall French colonial policy toward “native command” shifted when the governor general of French West Africa, Jules Brévié, issued a circular opposing the assimilation of chiefs into the administration and stressing the importance of the “traditional character of the institution [of the chieftaincy]” and of the chief as “representative of the population.”84 However, in French Cameroon, the administration’s intent to position itself as the source of the traditional chiefs’ legitimacy continued throughout the 1930s, evolving into one of consolidation and homogenization of the category they viewed as an essential administrative class. Administrators sought to reorder rural life by adjusting structures of traditional governance, namely by limiting some chiefly powers while strengthening others, by reducing or augmenting a chief’s power vis-à-vis his notables in Bamileke chieftaincies, and by establishing schools for chiefs’ sons with an eye to assimilating future traditional chiefs through education. Administrators in Cameroon justified the deviation from French colonial policy in the annual report to the League of Nations in 1933 by presenting “native command” in equatorial central Africa as almost nonexistent, since “in Central Africa” there was “no history of empires,” but only the “law of small tribal chiefs supported by witchcraft practices.”85
In 1933, French administrators classified indigenous chiefs of French Cameroon hierarchically as superior chiefs (chefs supérieurs), settlement chiefs (chefs de groupement), or village chiefs (chefs de village), contradicting Brévié’s philosophy.86 By imposing an administrative hierarchy on chiefs in the Bamileke Region, the French implied that superior chiefs were more powerful than village chiefs. The administration used the census of the fo’s subjects as a quantifying factor, but in Grassfields politics, a polity’s degree of sovereignty (lepue), not the size of its population, defined a chieftaincy’s power and influence within the region. The 1933 decree also gave French administrators the right to name chiefs, although “whenever possible, tradition should be respected.” Nevertheless, the decree made official the administration’s right to intrude on successions in Bamileke chieftaincies.87 Also in 1933, schools for the sons of chiefs were established by administrative decree at Yaoundé, Dschang (the capital of the Bamileke Region), Domé, Edea (in the Sanaga-Maritime), and Garoua (in the north of French Cameroon).88 The creation of special elementary schools for the sons of chiefs reflected administrators’ desire to standardize the educational level of the traditional authorities, who would “become, in the future, our collaborators.”89
Despite Brévié’s stated shift in French colonial policy, which emphasized custom and tradition as the legitimate sources of traditional chiefs’ authority to rule, in the Bamileke Region of French Cameroon, the administration’s primary objectives remained taxation, labor recruitment, and the resettlement of populations from the Bafoussam area (Mifi) to the left bank of the Noun River (Nde). From the viewpoint of French administrators, a chief’s quality as a ruler was determined by his ability to raise the requisite tax. Because of the balance of power between the mfo and the district heads in Bamileke chieftaincies, French local administrators dissatisfied with the tax revenue found that they could bypass the fo and rely directly on his mfonte and mwabo.90 If the fo was uncooperative, the French supported a new district head of their own choosing to replace the one named by the fo. Yet their interventions did not always achieve the desired outcome.
In 1934, Fo Nganjong of Bandrefam replaced a wabo, Ouambo Nzezip, with an eight-year-old boy and his regent, and began to send his armed guards (tchindas) to notables’ compounds to collect taxes. The fo’s coercive tax collection methods caused a number of inhabitants, including titled notables, to emigrate to neighboring chieftaincies in protest. Concerned by the exodus, the administration categorized Bandrefam as a problem chieftaincy. While on tour of the subregion, French subdivision chief Robert Gentil attempted to reconcile the fo and his notables in order to encourage emigrants to return to their village. Gentil reinstated the wabo, whom he described as not quite a model leader but one capable of keeping the inhabitants of his district from leaving to other chieftaincies. Two months later, when interviewing notables about the reconciliation process, Gentil discovered that twenty-three people had returned because the fo no longer sent tchindas to their homes to collect taxes. With a touch of sarcasm, Gentil remarked in his report, “Everything runs smoothly as long as our chief does not govern,” clearly articulating the relationship between “native command”
