Nso and Its Neighbours. Readings in the Social History of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon: Readings in the Social History of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon

1. The History Of The Peopling Of Western Cameroon And The Genesis Of Its Landscapes

3 1 The History Of The Peopling Of Western Cameroon And The Genesis Of Its Landscapes1 JEAN-PIERRE WARNIER Not so long ago the generally accepted opinion, summarized by Ghomsi,2 was that the high plateaux or Grassfields of Western Cameroon had been peopled, in succession, by a very ancient stock whose presence was evidenced by archaeological finds, then by a less ancient stock, composed of more or less scattered populations speaking languages akin to those spoken nowadays and finally by a recent stock (dated to about the seventeenth century) of migrants, arriving in successive waves from the north-east (‘Ndobo-Tikari’ country), the West (‘Widekum’ country), or, for the Aghem, from the north-west (‘Munshi’ country). The largest group of these supposed migrants, that is the so-called ‘Tikar’, were said to be the founders of the Bamileke, Bamum, Nso’, Kom and Bafut chiefdoms. In the absence of certain evidence about the history of the peopling of the region, there were various conjectures current about the creation of its landscapes, concerning which it was agreed that they were derived from the original forest cover by clearance at a period difficult to put a date to. At that time archaeological data hardly existed, but were not wholly absent. Jeffreys, following Migeod, had collected numerous basalt stone implements in the Bamenda region and suspected the existence of an ancient ‘Neolithic agricultural’ population which he mentioned in several publications,3 following which the British archaeologist Hartle made a reconnaissance4 which confirmed Jeffreys’ opinion; it was confirmed anew by Marliac5 and David.6 Linguistic data, and in particular the genetic classification of languages, which can supply population historians with valuable clues, were also barely in existence, though not entirely absent. Richardson had published some in 1957, to which Voorhoeve7 and Williamson8 had added further information. The view summarized by  Reprinted from the Journal of African History 25 (1984), pp.395-410, by kind permission of Professor Warnier and the Cambridge University Press, whose copyright it remains. 4 Ghomsi was a considerable advance over those presented in earlier publications – principally in works by colonial administrators such as Delaroziere – which one can find graphically condensed in Champaud’s Atlas,9 in which successive ‘waves’ of migrants are depicted as moving to the assault of the mountains - then supposedly sparsely peopled or not peopled at all –in about the seventeenth century. The synthesis proposed by Tardits in 1973,10 on the occasion of a conference on the history of Cameroon civilisations, gave an account of the uncertainties that marred current opinions on the history of population groups. These rested on weak sources, namely oral traditions, and not any or all of them at that. Those in question had been almost exclusively collected from royal lineages and not from all sections of the population, commoner lineages in particular. Moreover these traditions had not been compared, either, with the data of archaeology or those of historical linguistics, sparse as these then were. Tardits, supported by the opinions expressed by Kaberry and Chilver and by phytogeographical, archaeological and linguistic data, stressed the contribution of ancient settlement and relativized the historical value of oral traditions of migration in favour of the political meanings they conveyed. By 1984 the situation had become quite different; one can now state categorically that the Grassfields have been peopled for several millennia, very probably continuously, and that the beginnings of the humanized landscapes familiar to us today are very ancient. These conclusions are the necessary consequence of the linguistic and archaeological data accumulated over the last five years. Do Languages Bear Witness to Ancient and Continuous Human Settlement? In 1973 some fifteen linguists of different nationalities formed themselves into a Working Group in Grassfields Bantu (the GBWG) under the direction of L. Hyman and J. Voorhoeve. A strong impetus was give to their work in 1977 by a conference, financed by the CNRS and conducted by the GBWG, which took the expansion of the Bantu as its theme and which published its proceedings, edited by L. Hyman, J. Voorhoeve and L. Bouquiaux, in 1980.11 In the following years the work of the group concentrated upon about fifty Grassfields dialects, selected from the plateau area as a Whole, with the aim of proposing genetic classification for them, reconstructing the ‘proto-languages’ of the groups they fell into and establishing their degree of relationship to common Bantu. For what follows 5 I rely on...