had a foreign administration as the source of his authority, and French-appointed chiefs were not the ones who mattered to Bamileke populations in the Mungo Region.87
When it became clear that administrative policies barred them from equitable political representation, Bamileke migrants took matters into their own hands by following their own criteria to construct the sort of “traditional” government that better represented their interests in the Mungo Region. In 1935 a report from Loum highlighted French administrators’ inability to select and impose a “native command” on Bamileke migrants who preferred to follow their own chosen leaders. The greater Loum area in the Mbanga Subdivision, south of Nkongsamba (made up of Njombé, Penja, Loum, and Babong settlements) hosted the highest proportion of Bamileke immigrants in the Mungo Region. In 1932, a Mr. Raynaud, French chief of the Mbanga subdivision, named one settlement chief, Njiké Lakondji of Loum, to preside over all “Bamileke” populations in Njombé, Penja, Loum-Chantiers, and Loum. Raynaud no longer recognized the Bamileke leaders who had previously been responsible for their communities in the towns of Njombé, Penja, and Loum-Chantiers, although he encouraged Njiké Lakondji to rely on them as headmen to facilitate tax collection.
Within three years, tax revenue plummeted and it became obvious that Njiké Lakondji did not even know how many taxable Bamileke inhabitants lived in the region, much less how to get his “headmen” to respect his authority. Mr. Henry, assistant to Raynaud, made the decision to reinstate those who had originally been popularly recognized as community leaders in the various settlements, assigning each the title of village chief,88 and allowed Njiké Lakondji to preside over Loum alone. Henry remarked, “the proposed chiefs, even if they do not bear the title, are considered as such by the inhabitants.”89 He added that it was necessary to have a village chief in each town to facilitate the collection of taxes, to fill conscripted labor demands, to maintain order, to keep track of arrivals and departures, and to deal with any other “village-related incident.” Henry then placed all village chiefs in the subdivision under the official surveillance of a superior chief of Bamileke in the Mbanga subdivision, “Feinboy” Nkette, who earned a bonus on the taxes collected in the area. But Chief Nkette had been the Bamileke settlers’ leader of choice several years before the French recognized him as such.
Nkette had acted as a Grassfields community chief in Nkappa (Mbanga subdivision) since the 1929 economic crisis. He had managed to acquire a significant amount of land, which he distributed to destitute sharecroppers and laborers of Grassfields origin after the onset of the Depression. Although the lands surrounding Nkappa had been classified as low-grade pasturage lands, undesirable to European settlers who sought the prime lands for planting, the newcomer planters found the lands around Nkappa profitable for cacao growing and thus found their niche in the cash-crop economy after 1930. Gradually, an increasing number of Grassfields migrants settled on the periphery of Nkette’s land and recognized him as their leader. The settlers themselves bestowed Nkappa’s position on him, and it was only several years later, after the French-named settlement chief’s failure to bring in taxes, that French functionaries in the Mungo recognized him as an official part of regional “native command.”90 The Loum-Mbanga situation demonstrates the way Bamileke settlers selected their leaders according to their own criteria, leaving French administrators little choice but to work with those who had achieved prominence and wielded influence in their communities.91
Although the administration was concerned primarily with tax collection and conscripted labor, Bamileke settlers had other motives for choosing their own leaders in their new world. They largely ignored the French administrators’ handpicked representatives for the artificial native command. Instead, they prioritized their ties to gung and organized themselves by chieftaincy of origin. For example, in 1950s Nkongsamba the administration required the Baham community to submit to Jean Saah, chief of the Bamileke settlement, in matters of taxation and conscripted labor. But the community relied on their own “family chief,” Emil Tchuenkam, to regulate their relations with the Baham chieftaincy and their economic investment strategy, or mutual-aid, associations. In Nkongsamba, Douala, and Yaoundé, Baham “family chiefs” governed external Baham communities in much the same way that mfonte and wabo did within the chieftaincy borders, by serving as intermediaries between the fo and his population.92 By the 1930s in Mungo towns like Nkongsamba, Mbanga, and Loum, Bamileke communities had the political and economic power to set their own terms of political representation.93 At the same time, emigrants carved out their role in governance in the Bamileke chieftaincies they had moved away from but refused to leave behind, thus reifying the mode of identification that remained important to them—that of belonging to a particular chieftaincy.
During the interwar period, Bamileke emigrants began to gain purchase in chieftaincy governance in their villages of origin. Family chiefs were not mentioned in French records until the late 1950s, but they had largely preceded that period. Each “family” of emigrants assembled to unanimously agree on their leader.94 In short, Grassfields migrants in the Mungo recreated structures of governance similar to those they had left behind. Nothing demonstrated more clearly the continued importance of Grassfields political culture to Bamileke communities residing outside the chieftaincies, in the Mungo Region and other urban areas of French Cameroon.
BECOMING BAMILEKE BEYOND CHIEFTAINCY BORDERS
The existing scholarship has often depicted young emigrants from the Bamileke Region as breaking free of the restrictive controls of their hierarchically structured home chieftaincies and revolting against the status quo.95 Nicolas Argenti posits a “century of youth” for Grassfields males beginning with German colonialism and the arrival of missionaries, in the late 1890s. He describes the mission-educated “interpreters”—tapenta in pidgin English—as a generation of youth who appropriated literacy and European-language training from the colonial administration, and used their newly acquired skills to profit from economic opportunities, “severing their kinship and hierarchical ties to their kingdom of origin.”96 These subversive social cadets were succeeded by a generation of “free boys,” who learned trades, moved to coastal regions and urban areas in the early 1900s and became independent of their chiefs.97 They held “no accountability” to chieftaincy governments, and, “pledging allegiance to no chiefdom,” they “threatened authority structures.”98 According to Argenti, who draws heavily on Jean-Pierre Warnier on this point, throughout the twentieth century, the chief’s palace and nobility circles lost their monopoly on power and their control over labor, and their dominance of disenfranchised cadets was thus breeched.
It was true that by the 1930s—when Bamileke planters emerged as dominant players in the Mungo Region’s plantation economy—nobility and chiefs did not hold the same sway over young emigrants, who had not inherited land or titles from their fathers. But the new planters, shopkeepers, and traders in the Mungo Region certainly did not sever ties with their chieftaincies of origin, nor can they be accurately described as social rebels. Successful emigrants who excelled in their new circumstances and managed, at the same time, to penetrate the echelons of wealth, status, and nobility in their home chieftaincies might better be understood as social innovators. They conserved, rather than overturned, the chieftaincy norms and protocols that rendered their achievements meaningful in Grassfields sociopolitical terms—but found ways to leverage their own inclusion in traditional chieftaincy structures, thus increasing their flexibility and engendering their redefinition.
Like Warnier and Argenti, Andreas Eckert describes Bamileke migration to the Mungo as a “migration away from a highly centralized and unequal system of disinherited groups” that was present in Grassfields chieftaincies.99 Indeed, young migrants sought opportunities for economic advancement, wanting to escape the rigorous labor demands that elders and notables placed on them. But it was the “highly centralized and unequal system” of chieftaincy governance that continued to give their social status meaning. Mfo’s eventual bestowal of nobility titles to successful emigrants may have clinched the deal, but even those who did not achieve titles remained bound by their cosmology to sacred sites of the chieftaincy, and depended
