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405 16 The Nso’ Area Cooperative Union1 BONGFEN CHEM-LANGHEE Introduction In 1978, the members of the Nso’ Area cooperative union (NACU) expressed general dissatisfaction with the management and financial problems of their Union. The next year, the Nso’ students blamed their parents’ difficulties in financing their education on the mismanagement and financial problems of the Union. Soon after that, the Manager of the Union, Isaiah Tum Tafon, who held office from 1976 to 1981, blamed the financial problems of the Union on both the North West cooperative Association (NWCA) and the National Produce Marketing Board (NPMB), and threatened to take legal action for libel against the students. In 1981, government auditors discovered that the financial and managerial chaos of the Nso’ Union was shared by the other unions in the region and their apex organization, the NWCA. This led to the dissolution of the Boards of Directors of the NWCA and the Nso’ Union, whose Manager was also dismissed from office and sued for mismanagement. These events enlisted my interest in the Nso’ Union and prompted this study. Its aim is to record the history of the Union and suggest solutions to some of its problems. Origin The NACU was a product of the involvement of men in the cultivation of a new, mass cash-crop in the Bamenda Grassfields. Before then, the traditional economy of the Bamenda Grassfields as a whole was dominated by peasant, subsistence agriculture in which women played a dominant role and almost exclusively tilled the soil.2 The most important cash-crops were kolanuts and tobacco. Although they were largely in the hands of men, they were not cultivated on a mass basis, and their modes of production and processing, quantity, and marketing systems did not necessitate the creation 406 of any modern mode of cooperation. During the colonial period, the British tried to involve men in the cultivation of exotic vegetables for sale in the urban areas and nearby French plantations.3 But this, too, failed to induce the creation of a cooperative organization. What finally produced such an organization was the successful introduction of Arabica coffee to the region in the early 1930s, and its mass cultivation by both men and women.4 Initially, the cultivation of coffee was mainly in the hands of Catholic Christian nuclear families because of the early and widespread involvement of the Catholic clergy in its propagation. During these early years, coffee plots were located near the compounds where hearth-ashes and sweepings had fertilized the soil and tree crops provided shade for coffee trees. Later, as more and more people took to the cultivation of coffee, fallow food lands which required little clearing and were near settlements and feeder roads came under coffee culture, although a few people planted the crop on lineage lands which were located away from settlements and had not been in recent cultivation. It was at this time that casual, paid labour entered the scene. Thereafter, more and more virgin lands, located away from the main settlements, were brought under coffee culture. These were relatively large farms owned by traditional authorities who controlled well-situated lands and had access to free labour, and by large entrepreneurs, political leaders, and salaried officials who had the resources to hire seasonal labour and transportation.5 As more and more land and people became involved in coffee cultivation, coffee production increased so much that the need arose for an organization to handle coffee-related problems such as processing, grading, transporting, and marketing. This urge grew stronger when some of the coffee growers became aware that such mutual self-help Arabica coffee organizations were already existing in Dschang and Bafusam. Thus, in 1950, the first Arabica coffee cooperative society emerged at Bafreng to process, grade, transport, and market its members’ produce. Soon after that, it was discovered that this single society did not have the capacity to handle the region’s produce alone, and that it entailed transport difficulties for some of its members. The outcome was the decision to create more societies in the region. Thus emerged the Bamenda, Nso’, Bafut, Santa, and Bali Cooperative Societies which jointly formed the Bamenda Provincial cooperative Produce Marketing Union (BPCPMU) on 21 August 1953. Its main aim was to market its members’ produce.6 Thereafter, the production of coffee in the region increased further and outstripped the capacity of the existing cooperatives to handle the produce and thus created the need for more cooperatives. By 1958, there were already...

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