Accordingly, the number of agricultural workers declined by 25 percent in the Mungo Region, dropping from about ten thousand in 1935 to seventy-four hundred within two years, and white settlers found the expansion of commercial agriculture enterprise in the region severely curtailed, if not halted.15 From the late 1930s until the outbreak of World War II, Bamileke planters, who had increased their holdings in the Mungo Region during the economic crisis that swept the territory at the turn of the decade, achieved a tenuous equilibrium vis-à-vis their European counterparts in the region; but the war, which led to an intensification of forced labor justified in the name of the “war effort,” again tipped the balance in favor of white settlers.16
In the Mungo Region, where large numbers of Africans, especially settlers of Bamileke origin, acquired landholdings and became cash-crop farmers during the mandate period, restrictive land policies and commercial agriculture regulations, together with one of the highest proportions of agricultural workers—ten thousand out of a total of twenty-one thousand in French Cameroon were employed in the Mungo Region in 1935—promoted an interest in political organization and participation in labor unions and planters’ cooperatives.17 By 1946, when the postwar age of territorial politics dawned, the Mungo Region had become a forum for political, economic, and social activism. By 1952 the Mungo River valley was home to fifty African planters’ cooperatives—more than twice the number in the Nyong and Sanaga Region, around Yaoundé, the territory’s capital,18 and had the highest rate of participation in local and territorial elections of any area outside Douala, French Cameroon’s port city and largest urban settlement.19
At the end of the trusteeship period, the Mungo Region was a diverse and potentially explosive melting pot, and, via immigrants from the Bamileke Region, the channel through which UPC nationalist ideology merged with Grassfields political culture. This chapter recounts the Mungo Region’s gradual transformation into a political catalyst in independence-era Cameroon. After first discussing French administrative policies and their effects on Bamileke populations’ settlement of the Mungo Region, I demonstrate how, in the early mandate period, migrants and autochthons negotiated terms of land use and occupancy largely outside the French administration’s control. The second part of the chapter examines migrants’ organizational strategies and their consensus that family chiefs be selected to link their Mungo settlements to their home chieftaincies in the Bamileke Region. The third section reveals how Bamileke migrants, buoyed by their semiautonomous sociopolitical organization and financial independence, familiarized themselves thoroughly with administrative policies. That knowledge allowed them to gain an edge over Mungo autochthons as the French administration imposed stricter regulations on land distribution and agricultural methods in the region, and as administrators discursively pitted “autochthonous” populations against “strangers,” or “Mbo” against “Bamileke.” The chapter ends with an assessment of the postwar political and economic organization that began to spread throughout Mungo Region cities and towns.
GRASSFIELDERS IN THE MUNGO RIVER VALLEY
The entire Mungo valley region, nestled between the volcanic mountains of Nlonako, Kupé, and Manenguba and extending southward to the port city of Douala, provided an ideal settlement area for white, mostly French, colonists seeking small farms and plantations after the First World War.20 European commercial planters exploited the region’s fertile land and forests along the railroad to cultivate coffee, cocoa, bananas, palm oil, and rubber for export. In desperate need of laborers to work their plantations, French administrators, like their German predecessors, rounded up laborers from the Bamileke Region and put them to work in the fields.21 Forced labor violated the terms of the mandate system, but nevertheless it regularly occurred throughout the interwar period in French Cameroon and increased during World War II.22
Although laborers were required to work on European plantations for only three months of the year before being allowed to return to their home chieftaincies,23 the fertility of the black volcanic earth encouraged many of them to make arrangements with the indigenous population in order to stay by negotiating the terms of customary arrangements regarding land use and allotment.24 The agreements the settlers reached with their autochthonous hosts specified terms for usufruct and occupancy, not for permanent ownership. Autochthonous populations who granted use of land to newcomers assumed, according to local understandings of land use, that land could only be loaned, not permanently sold or transferred, to strangers, as they called settlers from beyond the Mungo River valley.25 Newcomers traded fish, cloth, salt, and palm or raffia wine for plots and also offered a portion of the harvest to their host.26 Autochthonous landowners gave Grassfielders permission to use land as a form of remuneration for labor. In the early twentieth century, African owners of small plantations throughout the Mungo Region—many of whom were ethnic Duala from the coastal region around the port city of Douala—cultivated cacao as a cash crop for export, and employed laborers from the Grassfields, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots of land on which they grew food.27 This practice was reinforced on 1 April 1927, when French administrators passed a decree making it mandatory for planters to feed their laborers.28
Early contracts between Grassfielders and Mbo or Duala landowners were drawn up for a limited period, usually ten to thirty years. These contracts resembled a lease, with a specified departure date. The migrant sharecroppers agreed to provide their hosts with as much as 40 percent of the revenue from cash crops grown on the land.29 Before the 1930s the French administration did not regulate Grassfielders’ settlement in the area, and agreements between autochthons and immigrants were negotiated case by case. French administrators later sought to legislate these customary arrangements, as discussed below.
Food crops grew well in the Mungo River valley, making it easy for sharecroppers to practice subsistence farming. The climate and fertile earth allowed for two planting seasons a year for certain crops such as corn (harvested in December and in June). The earth yielded tubers easily—yellow and white yams, several varieties of potatoes, cassava, macabo, and taro (types of yams), as well as vegetable greens, hot peppers, and the tree from which nkwi, the Grassfields dish prepared especially for women after childbirth, was made. In many ways, the Mungo Region represented a promised land for immigrants from the Grassfields, who came from a place where the best lands were already occupied and the remaining impoverished lands were not suitable for farming.
As in the Grassfields, invisible inhabitants of the Mungo Region oversaw the land, but the newcomers had no knowledge of the autochthonous populations’ cosmologies.30 Since only the region’s indigenous inhabitants could mediate on their behalf in an unknown spiritual landscape, immigrants required the permission of Mungo populations before settling. For Grassfielders, the use of land rested on a conceptual worldview in which the invisible inhabitants (gods, spirits, and ancestors) played a more significant role than living, breathing human beings when it came to the accessibility and distribution of land.31 Migrants from the Grassfields could not found new chieftaincies in the Mungo Region under French rule; nor could they plant chuep’si in their Mungo compounds, for to do so, they would have had to rely on chieftaincy nobility and spiritualists who had not accompanied them into the new territory. Grassfields spiritual technology was mostly stationary because of its material attachment to the landscape, and that fixity ensured emigrants’ continued connection with their chieftaincies of origin. Migrants needed to maintain their access to ancestral compounds and chuep’si, the essential facets of Grassfields spirituality, political culture, and identity. Since customary land contracts in the Mungo Region denoted, not permanent ownership, but the right to occupancy or usufruct, newcomers from Grassfields chieftaincies lacked the sense of permanence that came with spiritual land markers, graves, chuep’si, and trees linking them to their fathers’ compounds in gung. Instead, land plots in the Mungo provided the means to financial self-sufficiency and wealth and were thus primarily of economic significance.32
Until the 1930s this system of land use and exchange was flexible and mutually beneficial, with landholders, planters, and merchants reaching agreements that met the specific
