By 1947, Bamileke newcomers made up roughly 33 percent of the Mungo’s overall population, and by 1955, some 54 percent of Mungo inhabitants were of Grassfields origin, the majority of whom were from the Bamileke Region.5 Their settlement of the Mungo coincided with that of European farmers during the interwar period. With one hundred and ten European-owned plantations extending over nearly twenty-three hundred square kilometers out of a total surface area of thirty-seven hundred square kilometers at the high-water mark of the white-settler presence in the reason (during and just after World War II), the Mungo Region hosted the largest number of European agricultural settlers in the territory.6 Conflicts over the most fertile lands arose between Europeans and Africans—both those indigenous to the region and those arriving from elsewhere. During the mandate and trusteeship periods, Mungo-based planters, regardless of origin, competed over resources, and the resulting tensions were exacerbated by administrative policies that established ethnic identity as a factor determining access to land as well as by discriminatory regulations of cash-crop agriculture that favored European planters.7 Yet by the 1950s, Richard Joseph argues that “a class of Bamileke capitalist farmers had clearly emerged,” in the Mungo Region, and Bamileke planters were producing a greater amount of coffee for export than their white-settler counterparts.8 In contrast, the landholdings and agricultural productivity of the region’s autochthonous populations as well as those of the Duala, who had been first among the region’s African planters in the German and early French mandate periods, had shrunk to negligible quantities.9
Because landholdings in the region were in constant flux throughout the twentieth century, and since much of the land in the Mungo Region—particularly portions owned or occupied by autochthonous or Bamileke planters—went unregistered, it is difficult to provide a systematically inventoried account of the gross dimensions of land commercialization, of large-scale numbers of holdings, or of the total numbers of white settlers, African landowners, and migrants in the Mungo Region throughout the years. Studies of these matters do exist but are often focused on a particular portion of the heterogeneous Mungo Region,10 or chart a short period rather than offering a chronological overview. Although precise figures are unavailable, it is possible to piece together a general overview of the evolution of land ownership and exploitation in the Mungo Region during French rule. The holdings of white, mostly French, settlers steadily climbed during the first fifteen years of the mandate period (beginning in 1922), but peaked in 1936. A third of the European-owned plantations in the region were owned by joint-stock companies that averaged two hundred hectares, although there were several between five hundred and one thousand hectares or even larger.11 The Company of Plantations in Njombé-Penja reached thirteen hundred hectares,12 where the Niabang plantation, northwest of Nkongsamba, eventually reached twenty-two hundred hectares.
In 1937, Governor Pierre Boisson, newly arrived, was faced with a labor shortage that would have required intensified conscription of laborers—in violation of the terms of the mandate system—at the very time that an increasing number of Cameroonian planters were becoming involved in cash-crop agriculture.13 Worried too about German propaganda to retake the Cameroons, voiced in the form of critiques of French exploitation, Boisson stopped granting concessions to white settlers in the Mungo Region.14 Accordingly, the number of agricultural workers declined by 25 percent in the Mungo Region, dropping from about ten thousand in 1935 to seventy-four hundred within two years, and white settlers found the expansion of commercial agriculture enterprise in the region severely curtailed, if not halted.15 From the late 1930s until the outbreak of World War II, Bamileke planters, who had increased their holdings in the Mungo Region during the economic crisis that swept the territory at the turn of the decade, achieved a tenuous equilibrium vis-à-vis their European counterparts in the region; but the war, which led to an intensification of forced labor justified in the name of the “war effort,” again tipped the balance in favor of white settlers.16
In the Mungo Region, where large numbers of Africans, especially settlers of Bamileke origin, acquired landholdings and became cash-crop farmers during the mandate period, restrictive land policies and commercial agriculture regulations, together with one of the highest proportions of agricultural workers—ten thousand out of a total of twenty-one thousand in French Cameroon were employed in the Mungo Region in 1935—promoted an interest in political organization and participation in labor unions and planters’ cooperatives.17 By 1946, when the postwar age of territorial politics dawned, the Mungo Region had become a forum for political, economic, and social activism. By 1952 the Mungo River valley was home to fifty African planters’ cooperatives—more than twice the number in the Nyong and Sanaga Region, around Yaoundé, the territory’s capital,18 and had the highest rate of participation in local and territorial elections of any area outside Douala, French Cameroon’s port city and largest urban settlement.19
At the end of the trusteeship period, the Mungo Region was a diverse and potentially explosive melting pot, and, via immigrants from the Bamileke Region, the channel through which UPC nationalist ideology merged with Grassfields political culture. This chapter recounts the Mungo Region’s gradual transformation into a political catalyst in independence-era Cameroon. After first discussing French administrative policies and their effects on Bamileke populations’ settlement of the Mungo Region, I demonstrate how, in the early mandate period, migrants and autochthons negotiated terms of land use and occupancy largely outside the French administration’s control. The second part of the chapter examines migrants’ organizational strategies and their consensus that family chiefs be selected to link their Mungo settlements to their home chieftaincies in the Bamileke Region. The third section reveals how Bamileke migrants, buoyed by their semiautonomous sociopolitical organization and financial independence, familiarized themselves thoroughly with administrative policies. That knowledge allowed them to gain an edge over Mungo autochthons as the French administration imposed stricter regulations on land distribution and agricultural methods in the region, and as administrators discursively pitted “autochthonous” populations against “strangers,” or “Mbo” against “Bamileke.” The chapter ends with an assessment of the postwar political and economic organization that began to spread throughout Mungo Region cities and towns.
GRASSFIELDERS IN THE MUNGO RIVER VALLEY
The entire Mungo valley region, nestled between the volcanic mountains of Nlonako, Kupé, and Manenguba and extending southward to the port city of Douala, provided an ideal settlement area for white, mostly French, colonists seeking small farms and plantations after the First World War.20 European commercial planters exploited the region’s fertile land and forests along the railroad to cultivate coffee, cocoa, bananas, palm oil, and rubber for export. In desperate need of laborers to work their plantations, French administrators, like their German predecessors, rounded up laborers from the Bamileke Region and put them to work in the fields.21 Forced labor violated the terms of the mandate system, but nevertheless it regularly occurred throughout the interwar period in French Cameroon and increased during World War II.22
Although laborers were required to work on European plantations for only three months of the year before being allowed to return to their home chieftaincies,23 the fertility of the black volcanic earth encouraged many of them to make arrangements with the indigenous population in order to stay by negotiating the terms of customary arrangements regarding land use and allotment.24 The agreements the settlers reached with their autochthonous hosts specified terms for usufruct and occupancy, not for permanent ownership. Autochthonous populations who granted use of land to newcomers assumed, according to local understandings of land use, that land could only be loaned, not permanently sold or transferred, to strangers, as they called settlers from beyond the Mungo River valley.25 Newcomers traded fish, cloth, salt, and palm or raffia wine for plots and also offered a portion of the harvest to their host.26 Autochthonous landowners gave Grassfielders permission to use land as a form of remuneration for labor. In the early twentieth century, African owners of small plantations throughout the Mungo Region—many of whom were ethnic Duala from the coastal region around the port city of Douala—cultivated cacao as a cash crop for export, and employed laborers from the Grassfields, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots