the 1920s and 1930s the French administration wielded little influence on the justice system within Bamileke chieftaincies because most civil matters continued to be resolved at the level of chieftaincy, district, or compound. Beginning in 1921 French officials worked to integrate local justice into the newly created tribunaux des races, an “African” court system under French surveillance. By 1935 the “African” justice system in Cameroon was to apply “local” law in civil matters and to replace a “barbaric” penal code that allowed corporal punishment, torture, and execution with a “civilized” French penal code of prison sentences and forced labor. In the Bamileke Region in the early 1930s, local French administrators compiled a “customary penal code” describing “customary sanctions” and “customary punishments in criminal matters.” The code included a list of seventy-three articles, with a second column designating the suggested equivalent “civilized” punishment.105 The document, which became the basis for the codification of laws in administrative courts, made no mention of the truth-telling ceremony, the chuep’si, or the spiritual aspects of justice in the region. Still, whenever possible, justice continued to be administered locally within the chieftaincy. In the 1930s, Reverend R. P. Albert, a French missionary in Bandjoun, wrote that sentences were frequently “rendered at the chieftaincy, or in secret in the villages, that the administration can only suspect, and that consist of peculiar practices and unexpected punishments.”106
After the Second World War, the French administration sought to codify “customary law” as a precursor to creating a uniform legislative structure that could be applied across the entire territory of Cameroon. A law passed on April 30, 1946 brought all penal matters into French courts. The changes imposed by the French administration removed justice from the context provided by gung’s particular landscape and history and brought it into a regional judiciary space shared by the people of Bandjoun, Bamendjou, Bayangam, Bangou, and Bafoussam. The artificial separation of civil and penal affairs made little sense, since Bamileke inhabitants did not differentiate between the two, and the financial means and the identity of the accused and the accuser were no longer taken into consideration when considering the case or sentencing. The accused no longer had to fear the spiritual power of the fo, those officiating the trial, or the unseen witnesses present, but found himself free of mystical repercussions. In short, in Grassfields moral and ethical terms, it became spiritually, politically, and socially acceptable to lie at one’s trial. The most dangerous of crimes, those performed in secret or at night, such as vampirism or other sorts of mystical wrongdoing, fell outside the scope of the administration’s penal system.107
French policies in matters of administration, taxation, and justice affected the practice of traditional Grassfields power as well as the way it acted on ordinary inhabitants of the Grassfields chieftaincies. Throughout much of the colonial and mandate periods, juniors and untitled men who historically had to work hard and wait long periods before being granted a nobility title or even being allowed to establish a compound and marry, were increasingly cut off from channels to social mobility.108 The social hierarchy throughout the region became increasingly top heavy under foreign rule as cooperative chiefs—to whom European administrators turned to impose taxes and recruit laborers—benefited most from a proximity to territorial administration.
By the 1920s, the beginning of the official mandate period of French rule, the gap between “big” notables at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy and “small,” lesser notables or untitled commoners who were excluded from access to wealth and privilege was larger than it had ever been.109 Previous scholarship has emphasized the reaction of young men or youths to the obstacles that an ever more dominant nobility system placed in the way of their path to adulthood.110 Certainly, a few young, untitled men did use new opportunities provided through mission or French schooling, becoming part of a Christian mission community, the implementation of a plantation economy, and urbanization—all modernizing elements of the colonial order—to resist the chiefs’ appropriation of their labor and access financial and social success directly.111 But in the interwar period, with only 1,290 students enrolled in French regional schools in 1922 and 2,074 in 1932 (out of a total population of 2,223,000), access to social mobility via education was extremely limited.112 A series of church and mission closures swept the Bamileke chieftaincies of French Cameroon during the mid-1920s, reducing still further alternative opportunities to social advancement in the region.113
While social juniors’ and commoners’ tentative embrace of the modern institutions introduced under European rule did little to curtail the mfo’s growing power, the front line of resistance against the rise in chiefly excesses during the colonial and mandate periods—especially in those chieftaincies, such as Bandjoun, where the fo had willingly allied with colonial administrators—came from the ranks of the nobility. The first wave of depositions to sweep Bamileke chieftaincies came in the 1920s as French administrators set aside newly chosen heirs that notables’ associations kamveu and kungang had selected and enstooled and replaced them with mfo more suitable to their liking. In Bandjoun in 1925, for example, the notables’ choice of a legitimate heir, Bopda, was removed, exiled, and replaced with Joseph Kamga, who spoke German and French, had served as interpreter to the Bamileke Region’s French commanders from 1919 to 1925, and who had converted to Christianity against the will of his father, Fotso Massudom, the fo who had first resisted, then allied with the Germans.114 The selections of the notables overseeing succession suggested a resistance to the notion of fo as colonial ally. Even more telling was the regulatory associations’ barely concealed, sometimes overt confrontation of Christian missions throughout the region in the 1920s. In 1923 in Bandjoun, for instance, members of a powerful regulatory association known as Nyeleng demanded that the fo close the church built near the northern entrance of the chief’s compound.115
French administrators’ attitudes toward traditional authorities in French Cameroon necessarily differed from region to region as political institutions ranged from the lamidats, such as Bornu and Baghermi in the Islamized north, characterized by centralized, even bureaucratized hierarchical governments, to the decentralized or “stateless” segmentary lineage societies of the southern forest regions.116 Grassfields chieftaincies figured in the mid-range of this spectrum but throughout the colonial, mandate, and trusteeship periods, traditional authorities mostly preserved their power over their subjects. In a general way, French administrators relied on traditional political systems to govern the territory, particularly its rural areas. But given the varying strength of traditional governance from region to region, indirect administration through the chiefs was tailor made to each locale. Where traditional authority had been weakened or undermined by foreign rule, as among Duala populations, the French administration sought to shore it up, and where it was strong, administrative policy was to assimilate it.117 Accordingly, because Bamileke mfo maintained authority over their populations only insofar as a tenuous balance of power vis-à-vis the nobility allowed them to do so, French administrators’ policy toward traditional chiefs in the Bamileke Region was necessarily ambivalent. French administrators readily assimilated those mfo, such as Fo Kamga of Bandjoun, who dominated and controlled the institutions of chieftaincy government, while they were obliged to limit their assimilation of mfo who were less effectively dominant in matters of taxation, labor recruitment, and resettlement.
In the interstice between chiefly power and that of the nobility, a wedge grew between the visible workings of traditional governance and its invisible aspects. The material, physical representations of power included the person of the fo and his manner of dress, the spatial arrangement of his dwelling, the assembly hall, his wives’ kitchens, and notables’ meeting houses in the palace compound, and symbols of royalty such as the leopard skin, the copper bracelet, and the three-legged stool. The invisible, metaphysical workings of traditional power were made up of the secret associations of notables, the world of ké, animal totems and sacred sites mediated by spiritualists and sacrificers, and the hidden but remembered histories of some districts’ or lineages’ incomplete submission to the central palace. The unseen workings of power remained
