on which to offer sacrifices. A massive emigration from the Noun area began after 1935. Inhabitants of Baham II actually preferred to seek refuge in chieftaincies bordering Baham rather than risk being sent back to Baham II by Fo Kamwa, a French protégé, and, not coincidentally, one of the project’s most loyal supporters.99
The French administration played on what they perceived as a dialectic of power in gung between the fo and the notables. But it is too simple to suggest that they reinforced the fo’s power to the detriment of the nobility and spiritualists in gung.100 In many cases, they minimized the power of the fo in favor of a district head who conformed to taxation policies or who could curb unauthorized migration. At the same time, French policies opened up new political opportunities for notables and chiefs, who saw in the French administration a new variable that could affect the precarious balance of power in their chieftaincy. As French policies toward native command shifted, the malleability of chieftaincy governance afforded new political platforms on which an ambitious notable could reinvent himself and reposition his lineage vis-à-vis the chief’s palace.
In 1941, French Equatorial Africa governor general Félix Eboué’s circular announced a new shift in administrative policy, which amounted to an effort to restore traditional chiefs to the prestigious position they held before European occupation. Eboué wrote, “The chief is not a functionary, he is an aristocrat. The best functionary with the highest rank is not comparable to the chief.”101 Eboué’s study recognized the chief’s supporting religious and traditional institutions as the foundation of his authority: “No council should be omitted, no guardian overlooked, no religious taboo neglected.”102 Eboué had come to understand, as many colonial administrators did not, that French attempts to make their own administration the source of the chief’s legitimacy constituted a flawed policy. In fact, there is some evidence that he had understood this for at least two decades, but had had to await his promotion to governor general before articulating his understanding as policy.103 However, Eboué’s study appeared in the twilight of colonialism, after the chieftaincy’s supporting institutions had been reconfigured during decades of foreign administration. In the Bamileke Region, where French administrators had focused primarily on the fo as the figurehead of power and government in the chieftaincy, it was too late for them to retrieve and integrate his supporting religious institutions into the “traditional chieftaincy” they had conceived. The French administration had, mostly unwittingly, already separated the visible symbols of rule and its concealed, religious, or mystical forms.
The Second World War interrupted Governor General Eboué’s proposed change in attitude toward “native command” before it came to fruition. In 1946, French Cameroon and the British Cameroons became United Nations trust territories, to be administered according to the UN Charter and the UN trusteeship agreements. Article 76 of the charter, the most crucial to Cameroonian nationalists, placed an expiry date on European rule by stating that the administering authorities’ must lead their territories on a path of “progressive development towards self-government or independence.” In 1947 the French administration in Cameroon released a decree designating chiefs as members of the public function.104 In late 1948 the high commissioner stated that, as intermediaries, traditional chiefs were to be representatives of both their populations and the French administration. This assertion cast aside Eboué’s contention that the chief’s legitimacy before his people came, not from his association with colonial power, but rather from sacred institutions, relatively unknown to European administrators.
CUSTOMARY LAWS AND FRENCH LEGAL CODES
In the 1920s and 1930s the French administration wielded little influence on the justice system within Bamileke chieftaincies because most civil matters continued to be resolved at the level of chieftaincy, district, or compound. Beginning in 1921 French officials worked to integrate local justice into the newly created tribunaux des races, an “African” court system under French surveillance. By 1935 the “African” justice system in Cameroon was to apply “local” law in civil matters and to replace a “barbaric” penal code that allowed corporal punishment, torture, and execution with a “civilized” French penal code of prison sentences and forced labor. In the Bamileke Region in the early 1930s, local French administrators compiled a “customary penal code” describing “customary sanctions” and “customary punishments in criminal matters.” The code included a list of seventy-three articles, with a second column designating the suggested equivalent “civilized” punishment.105 The document, which became the basis for the codification of laws in administrative courts, made no mention of the truth-telling ceremony, the chuep’si, or the spiritual aspects of justice in the region. Still, whenever possible, justice continued to be administered locally within the chieftaincy. In the 1930s, Reverend R. P. Albert, a French missionary in Bandjoun, wrote that sentences were frequently “rendered at the chieftaincy, or in secret in the villages, that the administration can only suspect, and that consist of peculiar practices and unexpected punishments.”106
After the Second World War, the French administration sought to codify “customary law” as a precursor to creating a uniform legislative structure that could be applied across the entire territory of Cameroon. A law passed on April 30, 1946 brought all penal matters into French courts. The changes imposed by the French administration removed justice from the context provided by gung’s particular landscape and history and brought it into a regional judiciary space shared by the people of Bandjoun, Bamendjou, Bayangam, Bangou, and Bafoussam. The artificial separation of civil and penal affairs made little sense, since Bamileke inhabitants did not differentiate between the two, and the financial means and the identity of the accused and the accuser were no longer taken into consideration when considering the case or sentencing. The accused no longer had to fear the spiritual power of the fo, those officiating the trial, or the unseen witnesses present, but found himself free of mystical repercussions. In short, in Grassfields moral and ethical terms, it became spiritually, politically, and socially acceptable to lie at one’s trial. The most dangerous of crimes, those performed in secret or at night, such as vampirism or other sorts of mystical wrongdoing, fell outside the scope of the administration’s penal system.107
French policies in matters of administration, taxation, and justice affected the practice of traditional Grassfields power as well as the way it acted on ordinary inhabitants of the Grassfields chieftaincies. Throughout much of the colonial and mandate periods, juniors and untitled men who historically had to work hard and wait long periods before being granted a nobility title or even being allowed to establish a compound and marry, were increasingly cut off from channels to social mobility.108 The social hierarchy throughout the region became increasingly top heavy under foreign rule as cooperative chiefs—to whom European administrators turned to impose taxes and recruit laborers—benefited most from a proximity to territorial administration.
By the 1920s, the beginning of the official mandate period of French rule, the gap between “big” notables at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy and “small,” lesser notables or untitled commoners who were excluded from access to wealth and privilege was larger than it had ever been.109 Previous scholarship has emphasized the reaction of young men or youths to the obstacles that an ever more dominant nobility system placed in the way of their path to adulthood.110 Certainly, a few young, untitled men did use new opportunities provided through mission or French schooling, becoming part of a Christian mission community, the implementation of a plantation economy, and urbanization—all modernizing elements of the colonial order—to resist the chiefs’ appropriation of their labor and access financial and social success directly.111 But in the interwar period, with only 1,290 students enrolled in French regional schools in 1922 and 2,074 in 1932 (out of a total population of 2,223,000), access to social mobility via education was extremely limited.112 A series of church and mission closures swept the Bamileke chieftaincies of French Cameroon during the mid-1920s, reducing still further alternative opportunities to social advancement in the region.113
While social juniors’ and commoners’ tentative embrace of the modern institutions introduced under European rule did little to curtail the mfo’s growing