Sons and Daughters of the Soil: Land and Boundary Conflicts in North West Cameroon, 1955-2005

A) Dancing the Plot and Riding the Past into the Present

1 Chapter One Introduction A) Dancing the Plot and Riding the Past into the Present The Berlin West African Conference (1884-1885), apparently signalled the creeping European economic and political dominance in Africa and accelerated its shift from informal to formal involvement in African affairs. This led to the drawing up of artificial boundaries, which more or less authenticated various territorial claims by European powers, but, which also divided historically homogenous, contiguous and closely related, sometimes kinship communities. Since the attainment of political independence by most African countries in the 1960s, few, if any country, have not had cause to worry about the position of its boundaries in relation to its neighbours. Most boundaries resulting from the separation of ethnic groups which hitherto then were considered as one single entity have posed problems to policy makers of African states. For example, Somalia whose essentially continuous cultural area was severed into the separate colonies of British Somaliland, French Somaliland, Italian Somaliland, the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, and the Ogaaden province of imperial Ethiopia; the Maasai cut nearly in half by the Kenya-Tanzania border; the Bokongo separated by the Gabon-Congo (Democratic Republic of the CongoDRC ) and DRC-Angola boundaries; Lunda astride and DRC-Angola and DRC-Zambia frontiers; the Zande or the Azande cut by boundaries into different parts in the Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic and DRC (Asiwaju, 1985:176; Goldsmith, 1994:57). The European powers embarked on the separation of these ethnic groups because of greed, egoism and more. What was upper most in their minds was to get spheres of influence, and this was motivated chiefly by economic, social and political considerations in what became popularly known in the second half of the nineteenth century as colonialism. According to McMichael (1996:17), Colonialism is the subjugation by physical and psychological force of one culture by another - a colonizing power - through military conquest of territory. It predates the era 2 Sons and Daughters of the Soil of European expansion (fifteen to twentieth century), extending, for example, to Japanese colonialism in the twentieth century and, more recently, Chinese colonization of Tibet. Colonialism has two forms: colonies of settlement, which often eliminate indigenous people (such as the Spanish destruction of the Aztec and Inca civilizations in the Americas), and policies of colonial rule, where colonial administrators reorganize existing cultures to facilitate their exploitation (such as the British use of local zamindars to rule the Indian Subcontinent). The outcomes are first, the cultural genocide or marginalization of indigenous people; second, the extraction of labour, cultural treasures, and resources to enrich the colonial power, its private interests, and public museums; and third, the elaboration of ideologies justifying colonial rule, including notions of racism and modernity. Apart from the separation of ethnic groups in Africa, almost all African countries have boundary conflicts with their neighbours which, at times, have resulted in wars. For instance, Morocco resorted to war with Algeria to maintain the integrity of its boundaries over Western Sahara; Somalia claims land from Ethiopia; and Kenya over Ogaaden; while Cameroon has not been in the best terms with Nigeria over the Bakassi Peninsular (Ghali and Asfahany, 1973; Prescott, 1971; Oduntan, 2006; Adepoju, 2007). It was because of the arbitrary lumping of people and complete ignorance of ethnic composition of people by the Europeans, which differences have occurred in boundary understandings of most of African states with some leading to inter-village or ethnic crisis, as well as crisis between states after attaining political independence. A case in point of inter-ethnic boundaries is the North West Region of Cameroon popularly known in colonial historiography as the Bamenda Grassfields. Since the beginning of the first decade of the twentieth century, inter-ethnic conflicts have become a common currency. For instance, the Bali-Nyonga has been disputing over boundary issues with the Baforchu and Chomba; the Balikumbat have contested with the Bafanji over their common border; the Oku have fought the Mbesa; the Bambui have clashed with the Bambili and Funge (CO 554/1239, Disturbances in the Bamenda Division, 1954-1956, Public Records Office henceforth cited as PRO, Kew, London). One of the key conflict areas would however appear to 3 Chapter One: Introduction be the Bambili and Babanki-Tugoh boundary conflict which has pre-occupied the last decade of the twentieth century. Yet, in spite of this creeping malaise, little, if any scholarly attention has been focused on this...