were forced to sell their farms at prices well below official cost.
Administrative land policies failed to prevent European settlers from encroaching on the “native reserves” the French administration had set apart to protect the land rights of indigenous populations. In 1925, regional administrators created a reserve for Mbo populations at the Plain of the Mbo, a “swampy, uninhabitable land” between the northern Mungo Region and Dschang, the administrative capital of the Bamileke Region, just to the east of the Anglo-French boundary. In subsequent years, the administration granted a number of large concessions in the region to French commercial agricultural enterprises, which gradually overtook reserved land. In 1928 the Niabang Company received a grant of 1,027 hectares, which diminished the reserve,53 and the Nkongsamba-based Pastoral Company was granted 1,500 hectares of fertile land, and used additional pasture lands in the reserve on the slopes of Mount Manenguba for which it did not have a grant.54
In 1933, Chief Fritz Pandong of Mboroko formally protested the request of a French settler named Chollier for a plot of land in the Plain of the Mbo. Administrators were obliged to investigate. Marchand’s successor, High Commissioner Paul Bonnecarrère, found that “today the reserve has become insufficient,” due to the number of large concessions given out over the last few years.55 Chollier’s request was denied, but administrators nevertheless continued to dole out reserved land to European plantation owners. Faced with the limitations on settlement imposed by “native reserves,” European planters in the northern Mungo solicited administrators’ accommodation. To overcome legal restrictions on indigenous reserves such as the Plain of the Mbo, administrators had only to demonstrate occupants’ apparent neglect or disuse.
French land distribution policies led to increased economic stratification throughout the 1920s. While most African planters cultivated less lucrative cacao on the more affordable, inferior plots, Europeans acquired the richest soils, and were well situated to profit from the coffee boom that began in the 1930s.56 The size of European plantations increased dramatically by 1930, as white settlers used conscripted laborers to maintain the levels of productivity necessary to ensure the renewal of their deeds. While Europeans’ plantations in 1922 totaled only 269 hectares, their holdings had increased to eighteen thousand hectares by 1930.57 Only three Cameroonian planters—Isaac Tchoua and Isaac Bondja, immigrants from the Bamileke Region, and Martin Moulendé from the Douala area—met a sufficient number of the contingencies in place to be able to acquire ownership of European-style plantations.58 But their plantations were comparatively much smaller than those of European settlers, measuring less than one hundred hectares, as compared to European farms of 325, 350 and 964 hectares. Most Cameroonian planters held small, unregistered plots on lands of inferior quality throughout the region and grew both cash crops and food crops.
From 1929 to 1934 an economic crisis linked to the Great Depression swept the Mungo Region, causing a drastic fall in the price of cacao and wiping out most of the African cacao planters in the region. Planters indigenous to the Mungo Region or from the coastal region of Douala, previously the dominant African cash-crop planters in the Mungo valley, were the hardest hit by the economic upheaval. But Bamileke migrants, who had the very economic and social networks necessary to succeed despite administrative policies that disadvantaged African land ownership, were able to increase their landholdings during the economic crisis.59 Throughout the 1920s, autochthonous and Duala cacao farmers employed Grassfields sharecroppers as laborers, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots of land. When the price of cacao plummeted in 1929, autochthonous landowners who could no longer afford to pay their laborers offered portions of their land, or sometimes wives, to migrants, to make good on their debts. Planters of Bamileke origin drew on family and patronage networks in their chieftaincies of origin to attract dependants to work in their fields for social rather than monetary compensation.60 These unpaid workers provided Bamileke planters with a labor force unavailable to indigenous landowners, who had smaller families and a lower rate of demographic reproduction, as well as fewer social restrictions that juniors had to overcome before being allowed by their elders to marry. Furthermore, the relative abundance of land in the less densely populated Mungo Region meant that land inheritance was not restricted to one sole heir—who had worked hard to prove himself worthy of succeeding his father—as it was in the Grassfields. With fewer numbers and fewer incentives to distinguish themselves through the acquisition of wealth or winning favor with elder notables, autochthonous social cadets were less motivated to work for their elders than were their Bamileke peers.61 By the end of the crisis, in 1934, nearly all autochthonous and Duala plantation owners had been dispossessed of their plantations, while a number of migrants from the Bamileke Region had acquired land and had set about taking the necessary steps to register it as private property.62 In so doing, they often met with legislative obstacles, however.
On 21 July 1932, when discussions of “customary law” were in vogue in French colonies across the globe, a decree was passed to protect the rights of African landowners, but it specified that the legislation be applied to “autochthonous” collectivities, according to the terms of “local customary law.”63 Increasingly conscious of their portrayal as strangers in the Mungo after the 1930s land reforms, Bamileke migrants were the first to register deeds, buy up the remaining cheap A-grade parcels of land, and try their hands at growing coffee, bananas, and cacao as cash crops. But when Bamileke landowners applied for registered deeds, French administrators often refused to recognize customary contracts negotiated between the migrants and their autochthonous hosts64 and throughout the 1930s rendered them invalid on the grounds that immigrant settlers were “strangers.”65 At Sadrack Kamtche’s request for the recognition of ownership, the district chief of the small town of Loum-Chantiers skeptically declared that, “being a stranger to the country,” Kamtche could not have acquired the land according to local customary law. Before validating his claims to ownership of the parcel in question, Kamtche would have to produce a copy of the “deed establishing his right to the parcel he is claiming.”66
THE ETHNICIZATION OF LAND OWNERSHIP IN THE MUNGO RIVER VALLEY
Although land ownership policies had been designed in theory to protect African landholdings, in practice they often opened up additional opportunities for European settlers to acquire land. A further result, most significantly for the Mungo Region, was that administrators’ refusal to recognize customary agreements fostered tensions between Bamileke immigrants and “autochthonous” populations by overriding agreements in place and assigning immutable labels and qualities—based on ethnic identity—to African inhabitants of the Mungo River valley. In the 1930s administrators, enthused by colonial policymakers’ new interest in “tribal customs and law,” replaced the ambiguous term indigène (native) with the terms allogène and autochtone, which categorized Bamileke in the Mungo as strangers while underscoring Mbo populations’ traditional rights to the land.67 These terms could be read as reflecting French administrators’ desire to minimize the dislocation of autochthonous populations in the Mungo Region, and certainly they were intended to communicate that desire to the League of Nations in the required annual reports. However, articulations of administrative policies that appear in official records of French dealings with traditional authorities in the Mungo Region reveal the mise en valeur of the fertile region’s land as administrators’ primary objective, as well as their pervasive and enduring notion that allowing Bamileke settlers to acquire land was the best way to increase the region’s overall agricultural productivity.Over the years, French administrative terminology and ambivalent policies in the Mungo Region glossed over the heterogeneity of both Mungo and Bamileke populations and established them as polarized, homogenous categories in competition with one another.68
Concerned with the dwindling land resources, administrators used the newly reified ethnic categories to justify the denial of numerous Bamileke settlers’ requests for registered deeds to the land they had occupied, in some cases, for decades. The 1932 decree, which specified that lands should ideally be held “by inhabitants indigenous to the territory, following the rules of local customary law,”
