In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

153 7 Native Administration In The West Central Cameroons 1902-1954 E.M. CHILVER This is an account of the work of European political officers, viewed through their spectacles, in a small part of west Central Africa between 1902, when a German imperial military station was built in Bamenda, and 1954, when the Southern Cameroons obtained its first instalment of local political autonomy. The area lies between the Fulani emirates of Adamawa and the northern edge of the equatorial forest, on the fluctuating boundary of two administrative philosophies. Since this was written, David E. Gardinier has provided an account of British policy in the mandatory period in the whole territory, with many useful references—see ‘The British in Cameroons, 1919-1939’ in Gifford and Louis (eds.), Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven, 1967). This has been followed by Emmanuel Chiabi’s overview, ‘British Administration and Nationalism in Southern Cameroons 1914-1954’ in Martin Njeuma (ed.) Introduction to the History of Cameroon in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1989).  This essay was largely based on the scrutiny of some papers in the Buea archives and the divisional and Native Authority registries in the former Bamenda Province in 1958 and 1960. In the former, correspondence between German military station and the Imperial Government in Buea between 1908 and 1914, and some Assessment and Intelligence reports and associated correspondence were consulted. Copies of the latter had recently been transferred from the Secretariat, Lagos, to the Federal Nigerian archives. In Bamenda annual and quarterly reports, and files relating to Native Administration and chieftaincy matters were consulted. In 1960 the most important provincial and divisional files no longer in current use were being transferred to Buea, recorded and card-indexed, and the bulk of the surviving German papers had been salvaged and were being listed under the supervision of Mr E.W. Ardener. I was grateful to the Committee for Commonwealth Studies in the University of Oxford for study-leave, and to the authorities and missions of the former Southern Cameroons, in the course of two study visits in 1958 and 1960 in the company-of Dr P.M. Kaberry, for their kind hospitality. Dr Kaberry’s studies of the sociology of the Bamenda area date back to 1945, and she generously allowed me the use of her files and notebooks. I was greatly indebted to Dr M.D.W. Jeffreys (then SDO, Special Duties) for help in the collection of material 154 The politics of an area the size of Wales, with a population of less than half a million in the ‘fifties’, will appear rather parochial. The larger issues of policy studied by Margery Perham in Native Administration in Nigeria (1937) and Lugard: the Years of Authority (1960), and the influence of the Permanent Mandates Commission and the Trusteeship Council will emerge rather more shadowily than they would if the scene had been viewed from the Resident’s desk in Buea rather than from the Divisional Officer’s trestle table in the old German fort at Bamenda. For most of the period of British colonial rule the bulk of political life in Bamenda which can be retrieved from records consisted of the dialogue between a handful of alien officers and those spokesmen of the ruled they chose to listen to. This dialogue was transmitted upwards to the Resident, the Secretary for Native Affairs, the Lieutenant Governor or Chief Commissioner, the Governor, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and to international agencies, losing its particularity and the momentum of shared experience along its route. The directives and circulars which flowed down to the Divisional Officer had to be translated by him into the local idiom of the compromise between administrative policy and chiefdom or village politics whenever they involved the ruled directly. The Divisional Officer was the node of this system of political communication which persisted unchanged until 1949. German Foundations, 1902-15 ‘The little bit I have got to take over,’ wrote Lugard to his wife in March 1916, ‘will give me as much work as a much larger area.1 The ‘little bit’ of Kamerun allotted to the united Kingdom by the Allies fell into three zones: a strip of coast with a high, fertile, volcanic hinterland, a narrow belt of rugged forest, and the western part of the montane grassfields that continued into the French sphere. Each had presented their German conquerors with rather different problems of military occupation, economic exploitation and district...

Share