Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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 financial needs of either party as they arose. The railway, the road, and the 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