Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence. Meredith Terretta
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,” allowed administrators to dismiss Bamileke requests as having no legal or judiciary basis.69 However, when it suited their purpose, administrators argued for Bamileke settlement by insisting that autochthonous populations failed to exploit the land to its full potential and by depicting “the Bamileke” as a “race of workers”70 who fulfilled the economic objectives of mise en valeur: “The Bamileke presence compensates for the persistent inertia of the autochthonous population that, in many towns, leaves the land to which it holds or pretends to hold the rights of ownership completely uncultivated. The mise en valeur of those lands is due only to the work of the stranger population.”71
In sum, by applying classification grades, productivity quotas, and ethnic categorizations, and by counting on Africans’ lack of familiarity with ever-changing land laws, French administrators exercised three strategies to destabilize African land ownership in the 1930s. They could expropriate land for European settlers by “proving” that African planters had failed to meet the mise en valeur standards consistent with the parcel’s classification. If it suited them, they could refuse Bamileke requests for titles and deeds to their land by claiming that they were strangers and had no valid right to land in terms of the Mungo Region’s customary law. And yet, if the situation required it, they could reject autochthonous claims to land ownership by characterizing Bamileke settlers as workers who achieved higher levels of agricultural productivity.
To say that these ambiguous and paradoxical land policies worked to the advantage of European settlers would be an understatement. Despite their occasional nods to the “spirit of the mandate,” by the 1930s French land policy clearly favored European acquisition of permanent land titles. The refusal to recognize the validity of African land contracts, the lack of enforcement of land reserve boundaries, the contingencies of the lands’ classification, and the arbitrary undercompensation of indigenous landholders provided European settlers with first dibs on prime land and facilitated their acquisition of permanent titles. In 1936, Europeans held 94 out of 128 rural concessions in the Mungo, 26 of them with permanent deeds. By 1953, all European landholders had acquired permanent titles for their land and property.72 Furthermore, despite Marchand’s initial conservatism regarding the amount of land and the size of plantations granted to Europeans, the number of hectares attributed to individual European planters continued to rise throughout the mandate and trusteeship periods, peaking at 230,000 hectares at the end of World War II, and settling at 204,090 hectares by the time of official independence—the majority of the region’s arable land.73
Ever-stricter regulations on planting methods for commercial crops enabled Europeans to maintain a production edge over African planters as well. By 1930, as robusta coffee began to boom as a cash crop, Europeans were well placed to capitalize on coffee as cacao’s replacement. A regulatory provision circulated by the chief of the district required all coffee plantation owners to register and required all those who wanted to grow coffee to obtain a special permit if they were not on land for which they had a provisional or permanent deed.74 In 1938 the regulations of coffee growing became even stricter, demanding that the owner prove he had access to the necessary number of laborers. The chief of the region declared that any plantation lacking the authorization permit would have its trees uprooted, thereby suggesting that coffee growing required care and attention that African planters were unable to provide.75 Yet, in spite of the various advantages the administration offered to white farmers throughout the mandate period, by the 1950s, Bamileke migrants to the region had begun to outproduce European planters in coffee for commercial export, largely because of their ability to acquire laborers when their counterparts could not.76
BAMILEKE-NESS, SETTLEMENT, AND POLITICAL (MIS)REPRESENTATION IN THE MUNGO REGION
Despite the strict land regulations on them and their categorization as strangers, Bamileke settlers found ways to use French legislation and ethnic classifications to their advantage, while strategizing their own sociopolitical organization in the Mungo region. Arriving in the Mungo on a shoestring, Bamileke migrants relied on mutual aid networks they put in place. The fact that they maintained strong connections to their chieftaincies of origin enabled them to recruit additional laborers from their home chieftaincies. As hired laborers themselves, Bamileke planters rubbed elbows with European settlers, acquiring language skills and perhaps some familiarity with the complicated and elusive land policies publicized in the Journal officiel du Cameroun. As European plantations became larger, white settlers experienced more acute labor shortages and encouraged Bamileke workers to remain in the Mungo by sharing information about land acquisition and planting techniques. As migrants from the Bamileke Region began to cultivate their own land, they used the labor shortage to negotiate wage increases or fewer working hours.77 Finally, Bamileke settlers gradually assumed the collective “Bamileke” identity through which French administrators portrayed them as hard-working, in contrast to the “laziness” of indigenous Mungo inhabitants.
Early in their mandate, the French recognized the Mungo River valley’s artificiality as an administrative region. The chief of the Bureau of Economic Affairs remarked that the Mungo Region was, in essence, an economic unit with an elevated sense of independence, characterized by a lack of native command due to the high percentage of immigrants from elsewhere. The autochthonous populations were socially organized as acephalous segmentary lineages governed by a counsel of elders rather than as centralized polities under chiefly rule.78 The lack of a functional “native command” in the region necessitated “unity in command and uniformity in the decisions to be made.”79 In the 1920s, the decade during which French