border with British territory all served to transform the Mungo River valley into a commercial system benefiting Africans, whose trading systems were only gradually and partially integrated into a colonial capitalist economy. The railway from Douala established Nkongsamba as an essential transit point for goods and merchants traveling to and from the Bamileke Region.33 By the late 1920s, the completion of the road from Nkongsamba to Bafang facilitated access to Douala from the Bamileke Region. The city of Nkongsamba attracted merchants and producers of the essential staples that the African inhabitants of the northern Mungo consumed, including palm oil, kola, dried fish, and food crops. Nkongsamba became an entrepôt for a flourishing regional commerce independent of economic links to European settlement. Between 1947 and 1957, the town grew from some 13,500 inhabitants to a population of nearly 30,000 (nearly 19,000 of whom were of Bamileke origin).34
In the late 1920s, French and British administrators began to regulate commerce and the traffic of people and goods across the Anglo-French border that ran along the Mungo River, the western border of the region. Administrators required permission tickets for the purchase of imported goods like matches, soap, and cigarettes35 and introduced customs points along the boundary between French and British territory. In the Mungo Region, French administrators turned their attention to controlling access to land, further limiting African economic autonomy.
Although French administrators turned a blind eye to negotiations between African planters and field hands during the 1920s, they passed a number of laws favoring European settlement, both in the plantations and in burgeoning town centers. In the early 1920s High Commissioner Théodore Marchand, anxious to win the approval of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), initially avoided granting immense plantations to European settlers. Instead, he approved parcels of one hundred to four hundred hectares for the development of “small-scale European colonization.”36 The number of individually owned plantations granted increased steadily during the first ten years of the mandate (1922–32), peaking at twenty-nine in 1929, and bringing the total number of hectares allotted to Europeans to 21,730, or about 3 percent of arable land.37
Marchand also encouraged settlement in regions other than the fertile Mungo valley: “Most planters are hypnotized by the Douala suburbs or crowd into the land along the railroad. They request only the parcels that have already been cleared by the indigenous population or even those that are already planted.”38 Marchand recognized that this trend reflected the settlers’ desire to cut installation, labor, and transport costs, but, keeping League of Nations mandate terms in mind, he reserved the right to refuse settlers’ requests for land that would constitute “a revocation of the rights of the original occupants and would justify their discontent.”39
The French report to the PMC in 1926 cited the administration’s decision not to increase the number of rural plantations larger than one thousand hectares in Cameroon. The commission lauded the decision, remarking that French land policy in the Mungo reflected the spirit of the mandate.40 Throughout the 1920s, French administrators appeared to encourage African land ownership and cultivation as a way of developing the land commercially and providing a solution to the regional labor shortage through “an ever greater intensification of individual plantations that enables an efficient use of family labor.”41 By 1928 an administrator reported, “In two years, the land bordering the railway and the road will be entirely occupied and cultivated.”42 Remarking on “the liking Europeans have taken to agriculture,” the report added, “the ‘native’ is not far behind. He follows the same trend, as much to keep the rights to his land—he is afraid that we will grant it to Europeans if he does not cultivate it—as to become a colon in his own right, to make money.”43 Cash-crop agriculture in the Mungo River valley attracted white settlers and African farmers alike.
Marchand’s posturing for the PMC concealed the administrative policies and practices that privileged French planters and ensured their economic advantage over African planters in the Mungo. Complex zoning laws and a variable classification system restricted African access to the best agricultural lands and grazing lands. The first land decrees, passed in 1920 and 1921, defined the private and public domains of the state. The private domain, which included vast areas that administrators described as “vacant lands without owners,” was classified as either urban or rural. A zoning plan established the size and spatial arrangement of lots for public service buildings, roads, avenues, and public squares, as well as district and subdivision headquarters, and divided the urban centers into segregated European and African quarters.44
Urban lots were made available to settlers on a provisional basis and were divided into three graded categories: premium A lots, greater than 2,000 square meters, which sold for 10 francs per square meter; intermediate B lots, from 100–200 m2, which sold for 5 fr/m2; and C lots, less than 20 m2, which cost 5 fr/m2.45 As Nkongsamba became an official urban center on 16 May 1923 and subdivision capital on 30 September 1923, twenty of the thirty A lots went to Europeans. Africans obtained a greater number of the 120 B lots available; Bamileke migrants held half of them, while only three were assigned to the autochthonous population.46 Rural lands outside urban perimeters were also divided into three categories: pasturage lands, used also for the cultivation of food crops, sold for 10 fr/ha; mid-level lands, used for the cultivation of cash crops for export, sold for 20 fr/ha; and premium lands, for the cultivation of cash crops for export (cacao, oil palms, coffee, and vanilla), sold for 30 fr/ha in 1921.47
Problems with land distribution and classification surfaced right away. Inhabitants of the Mungo Region had historically used many of the expropriated “vacant lands” for communal purposes, such as grazing livestock or gathering wood. Furthermore, European settlers in and near Nkongsamba circumvented administrative land policies as a matter of course. In 1930, High Commissioner Marchand wrote: “The creation of the Nkongsamba center, without any compensation for the natives, and the granting of new rural concessions side by side within the borders of the village, have reduced to a bare minimum the lands available to the autochthonous collectivity.”48 Admitting the administration’s failure to adhere to its own policies, Marchand warned that in future prudence was called for in “attributing lands believed, erroneously, to be dominial, from within the boundaries of the indigenous collectivity of Nkongsamba.”49 No effort was made, however, to reverse the illegal settlement patterns in place or to compensate African landowners whose property had already been expropriated.
The administration granted provisional titles for both urban and rural lots, ensuring that ownership was conditional upon compliance with the mise en valeur (economic development) policy that characterized French colonialism throughout the 1920s.50 In urban areas, this entailed an obligation to build, while in rural areas, provisional permits required landholders to use the land for its stated purpose as recorded in an official deed registry. If the parcel’s temporary owner did not meet the administration’s terms of development, which included productivity quotas and adherence to specific agricultural procedures for cash crops, the land could be revoked.
The productivity quotas set by the clerk of agricultural works and provisional land titles worked to the advantage of French settlers, by serving to justify French expropriation of African inhabitants’ land. If an African planter failed to reach established quotas, he was forced to cede his land for minimal compensation. In a 1930 decision establishing the terms for purchase of land belonging to Essoa Ewane, an African plantation owner in the northern Mungo, Marchand described Ewane’s cacao trees as poorly maintained, abandoned, and almost without value. Following the recommendation of the agricultural clerk, Marchand suggested that Ewane be paid twenty francs per tree rather than the legal standard of fifty francs,51 adding, “If he refuses [the terms], Ewane will have to appear in civil court at his own risk and expense.”52 French planters had a greater familiarity with the agricultural standards required for exported crops. They also benefited from access to conscripted labor and from the administration’s provision of financial grants or loans for the purchase of industrial farming equipment. Lacking
