Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
Grassfields parlance. Historically, the ideal of lepue denoted the status of absolute autonomy acquired by the dominant chieftaincies in the Grassfields. During the nationalist period, the image of a politically independent, powerful chieftaincy grew in the collective imaginary and overlapped with concepts of self-determination and national sovereignty, only to fall away again under the postcolonial regime.
Using language as an archive, this chapter explores the semantic bedrock of Bamileke communal memory of political and spiritual practices that predated foreign rule, particularly the elements that later guided the diffusion of UPC nationalism. It provides the historical context for understanding what Bamileke nationalists hoped to regain through their involvement in the UPC, and what cultural and historical materials they worked with as they undertook the decolonization of the imaginary. In other words, this chapter is not a history of the Grassfields under European rule but rather seeks to provide a foundation for the interpretations of Grassfields political culture that anticolonial nationalists found most useful as they sought to popularize the movement to cast off the colonial yoke. Insofar as the anticolonial period entailed a reconfiguration of traditional power in the Bamileke Region, as discussed in chapter 4, it is necessary to understand the tenuous balance of power within and among chieftaincies, as well as the factors that could shift that balance of power within the boundaries of what political scientist Michael Schatzberg terms a “moral matrix of legitimate governance.”3 The present chapter’s purpose is thus to provide the reader with a vantage point from which to perceive and understand the articulation between UPC nationalism and Grassfields political culture that became widespread throughout the Bamileke Region and among Bamileke emigrant communities throughout the Cameroons in the 1950s.
THE FORMATION OF GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES
Orally transmitted myths of origin, emphasizing the role of the founder who often figures as a wandering hunter, abound throughout the Grassfields. The founding myths serve as centralizing narratives—the official version of the past as propagated by the chief’s palace with the political intent of legitimating the chieftaincy.4 These stories of origin reveal a great deal about the Grassfields political philosophy that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in tandem with the region’s increasing centralization and settlement density.
The conventional scholarship has posited the settlement of the Grassfields into chieftaincies as coinciding with the growth of the region’s involvement in international commerce as Atlantic and Sahelian trading networks infiltrated from the west and the north.5 However, in an article published in 2012, anthropologist and specialist of the Grassfields region, Jean-Pierre Warnier—fleshing out his own previous argument about Grassfields settlement and chieftaincy formation—suggests the emergence of kingship lineages and chieftaincies much earlier, perhaps even one or two millennia ago, and stipulates that for at least twenty-five hundred years the region has been characterized by the incorporation of newcomers due to the mobility of regional and long-distance traders and exogenous marriage.6 Regardless of when political centralization of the Grassfields chieftaincies began, the eighteenth century ushered in significant regional changes: Fulani traders north of the region began frequent slave raids throughout the area, while traders from the coast based at Old Calabar and Douala tapped the region for slaves. Because of its inland location, historians have little statistical data on the precise number of slaves originating from the Grassfields region; however, recent scholarship suggests that the combined figures for slaves exported per year at the peak of the trade, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may have reached as high as sixteen to eighteen thousand.7 During the period of intensive slaving, the Grassfields served as a melting pot of populations and lineages from many different origins. The nineteenth century—within reach of remembered tradition and political history for Grassfielders—was characterized by skirmishes over territory and succession, wars over boundaries between polities, and shifting rivalries and alliances between chieftaincies.8
Against this backdrop of violence, massive displacements, and rampant insecurity, small, autonomous chieftaincies expanded and vied for positions of strength in the region. Internally, founders of new chieftaincies used centralizing narratives to construct a common identity for a diverse population.9 Externally, Grassfields chieftaincies engaged in a complex diplomacy of shifting alliances and competition over territory. While oral founding myths bespeak each polity’s assertion of an origin and history distinct from those of its neighbors, they also emphasize their interrelatedness. Baham’s founding myth, for example, features a skilled hunter who left an established chieftaincy in the Grassfields region with his twin and their younger brother and each of their families.10 They founded the chieftaincies Baham, Bahouan, and Bayangam, respectively, across the Noun River to the west of the Islamic kingdom of Bamum, and bordering the strong chieftaincy of Bandjoun.
Despite the importance to them of their political autonomy, the hundred or so Grassfields chieftaincies were linked by shared cultural, spiritual, and political practices, which appeared similar in content but contained particularities and historical references specific to each chieftaincy.11 Nevertheless, Grassfields settlers identified themselves more with particular chieftaincies than with any named group with a common language or common ancestor. As such, Grassfielders demonstrated none of the usual criteria for defining an ethnic identity.12 Self-differentiation from their neighboring chieftaincies was more important to them than differentiation from groups beyond the Grassfields who had different cultural practices. By the nineteenth century, the Grassfields connection to transregional trading networks was well established, and polities in the region exported kola, cloth, ironwork, and other artisanal goods in addition to slaves. This was the situation in the region that the Germans designated Bamileke as they began its occupation in the early twentieth century.13
Oral accounts of the founding of chieftaincies bespeak the prevalence of internal competition among founding patriarchs of equivalent social status. A young man with his sights set on power might, for instance, employ ruse, oratory skills, mystical technologies,14 or wealth (particularly in the form of people, in other words, wives or dependents) to achieve social prominence. Several versions of Baham’s origin story recount a years-long rivalry for the position of fo among the chieftaincy’s founders. During this period, Zuguiebou, a contender for the chief’s three-legged stool, was tricked into being trapped in a house without doors. He could escape only after relinquishing his copper bracelet, or kwepe, a symbol of a fo’s right to reign, to Bussu, who thus became the first fo of Baham.15 This account suggests that ruse and magic were important ways of negotiating power and social mobility. It also hints that, although oral tradition portrays the chief’s power as central and absolute, rivals and competitors were never far away. Historically throughout the Grassfields, ruse, magic, oratory skills, or wealth—the wild-card variables that enable cunning competitors to acquire positions of nobility—surfaced in times of crisis when socially disenfranchised groups tried to reshape the chieftaincy’s balance of power in their favor. While internal crises coincided with succession disputes or secessions, external factors such as the imposition of foreign rule, or wide-scale political transitions could also destabilize the status quo.
LEPUE AND GUNG: POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY, AUTONOMY, AND INDEPENDENCE IN GRASSFIELDS CHIEFTAINCIES
Grassfields rulers achieved political centralization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through wars designed to expand territory, create or dissolve alliances, and kidnap women or slaves. During the political reshaping of the Grassfields that accompanied the region’s settlement and engagement in transregional trade, the concepts of gung and lepue became essential components of Grassfields political culture. Lepue meant to submit to no one or, as many Grassfielders put it today, to not have to submit to another.16 Lepue could refer to the status of an individual, denoting a person’s relative dependency or autonomy, or to the relative status of a polity such as gung. By the nineteenth century, lepue had become crucial to defining a chieftaincy’s position and strength in a region plumbed for slaves and plagued by wars and migrations, where boundaries were in constant flux.
Lepue was a standing to be achieved and maintained at whatever cost—certainly it was worth fighting a war and spilling blood. Many of the