Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN AND ALLEN ISAACMAN
Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.
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Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
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Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku
Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei
Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya in Senegal, 1853–1913
Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times
Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948
Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa
Moses Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977
Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule
Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children
David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History
Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century
Matthew M. Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry
Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa
Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Nation of Outlaws,
State of Violence
Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Meredith Terretta
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Terretta, Meredith, author.
Nation of outlaws, state of violence : nationalism, Grassfields tradition, and state building in Cameroon / Meredith Terretta.
pages cm — (New African histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-2069-0 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4472-6 (electronic)
1. Cameroon—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 2. Cameroon—History—To 1960. 3. Cameroon—History—1960–1982. 4. Union des populations du Cameroun—History. 5. Bamileke (African people)—History—20th century. 6. Nationalism—Cameroon—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: New African histories.
DT574.T47 2013
967.1103—dc23
2013030968
TO ELI AND ALI-YOUN
Contents
Introduction Layering Nationalism from Local to Global
PART ONE GRASSFIELDS POLITICAL TRADITION AND BAMILEKE IDENTITY
Chapter 1 God, Land, Justice, and Political Sovereignty in Grassfields Governance
Chapter 2 “Bamileke Strangers” Make the Mungo River Valley Their Home
PART TWO BAMILEKE NATIONALISTS CLAIM INDEPENDENCE (LEPUE) FOR THE NATION (GUNG)
Chapter 3 Troublesome, Rebellious, Outlawed
International Politics and UPC Nationalism in the Bamileke and Mungo Regions
Chapter 4 Nationalists or Traitors?
Bamileke Chiefs and Electoral Politics in the Year of Loi-Cadre