were also divided into three categories: pasturage lands, used also for the cultivation of food crops, sold for 10 fr/ha; mid-level lands, used for the cultivation of cash crops for export, sold for 20 fr/ha; and premium lands, for the cultivation of cash crops for export (cacao, oil palms, coffee, and vanilla), sold for 30 fr/ha in 1921.47
Problems with land distribution and classification surfaced right away. Inhabitants of the Mungo Region had historically used many of the expropriated “vacant lands” for communal purposes, such as grazing livestock or gathering wood. Furthermore, European settlers in and near Nkongsamba circumvented administrative land policies as a matter of course. In 1930, High Commissioner Marchand wrote: “The creation of the Nkongsamba center, without any compensation for the natives, and the granting of new rural concessions side by side within the borders of the village, have reduced to a bare minimum the lands available to the autochthonous collectivity.”48 Admitting the administration’s failure to adhere to its own policies, Marchand warned that in future prudence was called for in “attributing lands believed, erroneously, to be dominial, from within the boundaries of the indigenous collectivity of Nkongsamba.”49 No effort was made, however, to reverse the illegal settlement patterns in place or to compensate African landowners whose property had already been expropriated.
The administration granted provisional titles for both urban and rural lots, ensuring that ownership was conditional upon compliance with the mise en valeur (economic development) policy that characterized French colonialism throughout the 1920s.50 In urban areas, this entailed an obligation to build, while in rural areas, provisional permits required landholders to use the land for its stated purpose as recorded in an official deed registry. If the parcel’s temporary owner did not meet the administration’s terms of development, which included productivity quotas and adherence to specific agricultural procedures for cash crops, the land could be revoked.
The productivity quotas set by the clerk of agricultural works and provisional land titles worked to the advantage of French settlers, by serving to justify French expropriation of African inhabitants’ land. If an African planter failed to reach established quotas, he was forced to cede his land for minimal compensation. In a 1930 decision establishing the terms for purchase of land belonging to Essoa Ewane, an African plantation owner in the northern Mungo, Marchand described Ewane’s cacao trees as poorly maintained, abandoned, and almost without value. Following the recommendation of the agricultural clerk, Marchand suggested that Ewane be paid twenty francs per tree rather than the legal standard of fifty francs,51 adding, “If he refuses [the terms], Ewane will have to appear in civil court at his own risk and expense.”52 French planters had a greater familiarity with the agricultural standards required for exported crops. They also benefited from access to conscripted labor and from the administration’s provision of financial grants or loans for the purchase of industrial farming equipment. Lacking these advantages, African planters often fell short of productivity quotas and, like Ewane, were forced to sell their farms at prices well below official cost.
Administrative land policies failed to prevent European settlers from encroaching on the “native reserves” the French administration had set apart to protect the land rights of indigenous populations. In 1925, regional administrators created a reserve for Mbo populations at the Plain of the Mbo, a “swampy, uninhabitable land” between the northern Mungo Region and Dschang, the administrative capital of the Bamileke Region, just to the east of the Anglo-French boundary. In subsequent years, the administration granted a number of large concessions in the region to French commercial agricultural enterprises, which gradually overtook reserved land. In 1928 the Niabang Company received a grant of 1,027 hectares, which diminished the reserve,53 and the Nkongsamba-based Pastoral Company was granted 1,500 hectares of fertile land, and used additional pasture lands in the reserve on the slopes of Mount Manenguba for which it did not have a grant.54
In 1933, Chief Fritz Pandong of Mboroko formally protested the request of a French settler named Chollier for a plot of land in the Plain of the Mbo. Administrators were obliged to investigate. Marchand’s successor, High Commissioner Paul Bonnecarrère, found that “today the reserve has become insufficient,” due to the number of large concessions given out over the last few years.55 Chollier’s request was denied, but administrators nevertheless continued to dole out reserved land to European plantation owners. Faced with the limitations on settlement imposed by “native reserves,” European planters in the northern Mungo solicited administrators’ accommodation. To overcome legal restrictions on indigenous reserves such as the Plain of the Mbo, administrators had only to demonstrate occupants’ apparent neglect or disuse.
French land distribution policies led to increased economic stratification throughout the 1920s. While most African planters cultivated less lucrative cacao on the more affordable, inferior plots, Europeans acquired the richest soils, and were well situated to profit from the coffee boom that began in the 1930s.56 The size of European plantations increased dramatically by 1930, as white settlers used conscripted laborers to maintain the levels of productivity necessary to ensure the renewal of their deeds. While Europeans’ plantations in 1922 totaled only 269 hectares, their holdings had increased to eighteen thousand hectares by 1930.57 Only three Cameroonian planters—Isaac Tchoua and Isaac Bondja, immigrants from the Bamileke Region, and Martin Moulendé from the Douala area—met a sufficient number of the contingencies in place to be able to acquire ownership of European-style plantations.58 But their plantations were comparatively much smaller than those of European settlers, measuring less than one hundred hectares, as compared to European farms of 325, 350 and 964 hectares. Most Cameroonian planters held small, unregistered plots on lands of inferior quality throughout the region and grew both cash crops and food crops.
From 1929 to 1934 an economic crisis linked to the Great Depression swept the Mungo Region, causing a drastic fall in the price of cacao and wiping out most of the African cacao planters in the region. Planters indigenous to the Mungo Region or from the coastal region of Douala, previously the dominant African cash-crop planters in the Mungo valley, were the hardest hit by the economic upheaval. But Bamileke migrants, who had the very economic and social networks necessary to succeed despite administrative policies that disadvantaged African land ownership, were able to increase their landholdings during the economic crisis.59 Throughout the 1920s, autochthonous and Duala cacao farmers employed Grassfields sharecroppers as laborers, paying them with a percentage of the crop sales and allowing them to work their own plots of land. When the price of cacao plummeted in 1929, autochthonous landowners who could no longer afford to pay their laborers offered portions of their land, or sometimes wives, to migrants, to make good on their debts. Planters of Bamileke origin drew on family and patronage networks in their chieftaincies of origin to attract dependants to work in their fields for social rather than monetary compensation.60 These unpaid workers provided Bamileke planters with a labor force unavailable to indigenous landowners, who had smaller families and a lower rate of demographic reproduction, as well as fewer social restrictions that juniors had to overcome before being allowed by their elders to marry. Furthermore, the relative abundance of land in the less densely populated Mungo Region meant that land inheritance was not restricted to one sole heir—who had worked hard to prove himself worthy of succeeding his father—as it was in the Grassfields. With fewer numbers and fewer incentives to distinguish themselves through the acquisition of wealth or winning favor with elder notables, autochthonous social cadets were less motivated to work for their elders than were their Bamileke peers.61 By the end of the crisis, in 1934, nearly all autochthonous and Duala plantation owners had been dispossessed of their plantations, while a number of migrants from the Bamileke Region had acquired land and had set about taking the necessary steps to register it as private property.62 In so doing, they often met with legislative obstacles, however.
On 21 July 1932, when discussions of “customary law” were in vogue in French colonies across the globe, a decree was passed to protect the rights of African landowners, but it specified that the legislation be applied to “autochthonous” collectivities, according to the terms of “local customary law.”63 Increasingly conscious of their portrayal as strangers in the Mungo after the 1930s land reforms, Bamileke migrants were the first to register deeds, buy up the remaining cheap A-grade parcels of land,