boasting of their achievements, French administrators reported their successful liberation of the population from the “ferocious exigencies” of the “feared and cruel” chiefs. Having banished corporal punishment, they described a transformation in the attitude of the chiefs: “They are no longer the kind of feudal lords that they were, invested with absolute power, but rather they are often valuable auxiliaries of our administration, and soon they will have no other prestige than that derived from the position of functionary.”70 By 1927 the annual report to the League of Nations indicated that the French administration had, “at the request of the oppressed populations, managed to change a feudal regime into a well-controlled system of indirect administration and to transform tyrannical dynastic heirs into” delegates whose power was derived solely from the French administration.71 But the 1927 report overstated the reality as tensions over the traditional chiefs’ legitimacy and power continued to unfold, particularly in the Bamileke Region, for the duration of the period of French rule.
As French administrators “civilized” the chiefs beginning in the 1920s—primarily by eliminating their capacity to make war, changing the system of justice and punishment of crime, shifting the balance of power among notables, and reinventing the institution of marriage—they slowly began to assimilate them into the French administration as functionaries, in keeping with French policy toward chiefs who wielded a significant amount of power and authority over their subjects.72 Throughout the 1920s the role of traditional chiefs according to French colonial policy was to assist administrators with labor recruitment, taxation, census taking, and control of settlement patterns. In the Bamileke Region, where traditional chiefs historically had wielded a great influence in these realms, the French began to depose mfo who did not conform to administrative policy.
Soon after the military conquest of the eastern Grassfields in the First World War, Pouokam I became fo of Baham. He succeeded the formidable fo Kamdem II, who had upheld the lepue ideal by waging three wars, thereby extending his territory to the north, west, and south, and had initially refused to submit to German rule. After his predecessor’s military exploits, Pouokam I’s prohibition from making war underscored the diminution of his power under foreign rule. During the first few years of mandate rule, the chief was liable to being tried in court, further diminishing his stature. As an agent of the administration, Pouokam I was required to collect taxes—ten francs per woman and fifteen francs per man—and to supply labor for European plantations in the Mungo Region.
In 1925, Pouokam I asked the French administration to intervene in Baham’s favor in a land dispute with neighboring Bandjoun. The French upheld what they believed to be the status quo and did not support Pouokam I’s claims. In 1927, perhaps to regain prestige in the eyes of his people, Pouokam I attacked Fo Komguem III of Bayangam,73 and for that transgression was sentenced by the French in 1928 to three years in prison and twenty years of exile from the chieftaincy.74 He never reigned as fo again. The same year, after negotiations between the French administration and kamveu, with Pouokam I still in prison, his son Max Kamwa began to serve as fo. Kamwa remained fo until his death in 1954.75 Many inhabitants of Baham believe that Kamwa “sold” his father to French administrators to ensure his own succession, suggesting either that Pouokam I had not yet named his heir, or that Kamwa and his French supporters disregarded the legitimate successor.
Soon after the arrest and imprisonment of Pouokam I of Baham, the French deposed another fo, Nono Tchoutouo of Bangwa, in the Nde. Suspicious of Tchoutouo’s earlier loyalty to the Germans, the French administration charged him with failing to transfer the taxes he collected to the proper authorities, and misappropriating land from its rightful occupants for his wives’ fields. Tchoutouo also found it increasingly difficult to stand up to his brothers, formerly soldiers under the German regime, who sought a portion of his wealth.76 In 1931 a young literate Christian, Jean Nana, former student of the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris, “succeeded in having the old Nono exiled and having himself named chief in his place by the administration. He is thus legally the chief, but in reality he is not [the chief].”77
Nana had served the administration as scribe and interpreter for four years before overthrowing Fo Nono by using the administration as his leverage. However, according to medical missionary Dr. Josette Débarge, despite Nana’s baptism, he “did not dare” to live in the empty chief’s palace, knowing that the fo’s ancestral skulls were housed there and that “the power of the totems belong[ed] to the legitimate chief Nono.”78 Furthermore, Nana was not initiated as fo with the usual ritual ceremonies since Fo Nono was still living and succession rites could take place only after his death. The inhabitants of Bangwa called the real Fo Nono “our father,” and called Nana simply Jean. Villagers obeyed Jean out of fear, Débarge continued, for “behind him he has the power of the whites. But the true devotion and notion of belonging go to the old exiled chief.”79 Débarge concluded that villagers were sad and disoriented, and that the incident proved that the chief’s authority came from mystical powers derived from the spirit of the land and of ancestral chiefs: “He is chief by divine right.”80
The depositions of mfo and the irregular successions left residual conflicts that smoldered beneath the surface long after the event, and French administrators overlooked the spiritual repercussions that Débarge alluded to. A successor enstooled while the legitimate ruler was still alive lacked the political and popular support required to govern the chieftaincy effectively. By disconnecting the fo from the governmental institutions that ensured his right to rule and from the notables and ritual specialists who “made” him, the French sought to replace those legitimizing institutions with their own administration. In so doing, they fostered the fo’s dependence on a foreign government. While this may have increased the fo’s administrative authority within the context of colonial rule, it also effectively increased the importance of the secret spiritual and magical institutions that formed a part of Grassfields governance.
French administrators became aware of mystical secret associations early in the mandate period but misunderstood their relationship to the institution of the fo and therefore underestimated their role in chieftaincy governance. A French administrative report from around 1920, entitled simply “Ritual Customs,” described secret societies of “fetishists and free spirits, thirsting for riches and dominance,”81 who had to commit a “ritual murder against someone close to [them] in order to be let in on the secret of the fetish medicine,” and who would rather face death than reveal their secrets.82 Despite its cursory knowledge of the existence of secret associations, the French administration deliberately excluded them from the system of indirect administration they were building,83 in part because they misunderstood the logic of constitutional restraint imbued in these institutions. French administrators oversimplified the secret associations by equating secret and mystical with evil. While malefic associations did exist, the majority of secret associations served as regulatory societies whose purpose was to adjust and maintain the balance of power in gung. The associations’ secret activity protected them from a potentially despotic fo—if he did not know who challenged him, he could not punish or penalize. At the same time, the members of the associations, unknown to the population at large, could not use their position to challenge or usurp power from the fo. The structure of the regulatory associations helped to relegate confrontation between powerful community leaders to the realm of secrecy, hidden from public view. The result was to preserve a public façade of strong, unified governance, while maintaining a system of checks and balances within the chieftaincy’s institutions of rule.
In the early 1930s overall French colonial policy toward “native command” shifted when the governor general of French West Africa, Jules Brévié, issued a circular opposing the assimilation of chiefs into the administration and stressing the importance of the “traditional character of the institution [of the chieftaincy]” and of the chief as “representative of the population.”84 However, in French Cameroon, the administration’s intent to position itself as the source of the traditional chiefs’ legitimacy continued throughout the 1930s, evolving into one of consolidation and homogenization of the category they viewed as an essential