The French administration introduced radical changes in the justice system for Grassfielders, but only in matters the French sought to legislate (see below). Throughout the period of foreign administration, truth-telling practices and conflict resolution continued on the sacred sites in chieftaincies throughout the Bamileke region. The presence of unseen witnesses was crucial to the administration of justice, and in the 1950s, Bamileke upécistes employed truth-telling ceremonies and oathing practices on sacred sites to ensure the loyalty of their members.56
The chieftaincy government could not monopolize the spiritual powers dwelling in the chuep’si. Sacred sites were accessible to anyone, rich or poor, titled notable or commoner. Even individuals accompanied by a spiritualist authorized to officiate at a given site could approach the chuep’si to offer a sacrifice to Si, make a confession or supplication, ask for protection from harm, or declare his or her own innocence in personal matters that for some reason could not be brought before family or community authorities. One could also take a vow before the sacred altar, establishing an alliance with Si. The spiritual punishments for lying at a sacred site were so severe—infertility, illness, or death—as to ensure that only those who knew themselves to be innocent spoke before the gods at the sacred sites. To Grassfielders a just man was one who could stand and affirm his truth before a chuep’si, one who walked a straight path (djie dandan).57
No one addressing the gods at a chuep’si came empty handed, although the quality of the gift depended on the supplicant’s material wealth. In the official chieftaincy ceremonies, officiates offered a domestic animal or fowl. People of lesser means brought palm oil, kola, salt, djem djem, or raffia wine—staples indigenous to the Grassfields region. Wild game or plants could not be offered, but only plants and animals dependent on humans for their care. Offerings were thus symbolic of the link between the world of the living cultivated and tamed by humans, and the wild, unregulated domain of nature, presided by spirits. These same elements—goats, hens, kola, raffia wine, and salt—also were used in legal and commercial transactions throughout the Grassfields, for any negotiated contract or alliance: pledges of loyalty to a fo, matters of trade, marriage, and justice.
In sum, the chuep’si symbolized a standard of justice, whether on an individual, family, or community level. They symbolized the community’s historic juridical norms, resolved conflict, and protected the group spiritually.58 They legitimized living settlers’ occupancy of the land, signified chieftaincy law, and were the locus of the negotiation of legal contracts.
They also served external purposes. As the material and spiritual location of the continuity of gung, in times of political crisis or war, community sacred sites preserved and protected a chieftaincy without a fo. For example, Kamdem Guemdjo, the eighth fo of Baham (whose rule began around 1890), went into exile for nine years to escape a plot arranged by members of his own family who reproached him for not having produced an heir since his enthronement. During his absence, guardians of sacred sites made sacrifices to implore the gods to bring back their fo.59 Also, during the period of mourning following the death of a reigning fo, the population prayed to the si la’a or si gung dwelling in the chuep’si to be with the successor, the new incarnation of power and authority.60 During the fight for independence from French rule, chuep’si became sites of supplication for the gods’ benevolence in the struggle for liberation from foreign rule, protection for freedom fighters evading arrest, and, after the violence, reconciliation.61
Certainly, the uses of major sacred sites, their role in Grassfields religious practice and political philosophy, and their significance to ordinary Grassfielders changed between the time of the chieftaincies’ founding and the time of Cameroon’s independence, as the inner workings of Grassfields governance adapted to European rule.62 Colonial rule complicated Grassfields governance, widening the gap between the visible aspects of the chieftaincy’s governmental institutions (such as the fo and his palace) and the secret dimensions of Grassfields political and spiritual power (chuep’si, spiritualists, and sacrificers), which were concealed from view and misunderstood, neglected, or ignored by Europeans, the region’s most recent newcomers.
The Germans had only begun to occupy the Grassfields when the First World War broke out. Their rule in the Grassfields was characterized by chaos and upheaval as German administrators tried to establish regional paramount chiefdoms, such as Bali-Nyonga, that overturned the network of rivalries and alliances in place in the area.63 Germans allied with the chiefs they deemed “paramount” to recruit laborers en masse to build roads and railways and to work on vast concessionary plantations in the Mungo River valley.64 After the war, German Cameroon (Kamerun) became League of Nations mandate territories to be administered by the French and British, and the Grassfields were divided by the Anglo-French boundary delineated in 1919 at the Conference of Versailles.65
The French did not begin to administer their League of Nations mandate in the Bamileke region (as they called the eastern Grassfields) until the early 1920s. Dazzled by the royal accouterments of the fo, administrators failed to fully understand the political influence of gung’s secret associations, or the balance of power among the fo, the notables, and spiritualists. They failed, too, to take into account the political significance of the landscape’s spiritual potency and its importance in the administration of justice. The section that follows explores the clash of understandings between Bamileke populations and French administrators hastily erecting a stopgap government in the region.
THE FRENCH ADMINISTRATION’S ASSIMILATIVE PULL IN THE BAMILEKE REGION
Perhaps nowhere was colonial law more haphazardly applied than in Cameroon. The French arrived in French Cameroon and French Togo late, decades after colonization of their other territories in Africa. From 1919, with the delineation of the Anglo-French boundary, French administrators in French Cameroon began trying to catch up with their counterparts in other parts of Africa. The high commissioner in Cameroon relied on directives, briefs, and reports from French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa to cobble together policy in the newly acquired territory. In 1917 a landmark circular written by Governor General Joost Van Vollenhoven of Dahomey suggested the necessity of incorporating traditional chiefs into French “direct administration,”66 and encouraged the renovation of “native command” to shape it into an instrument of collaborative rule for the French government in African territories.
Having almost no information from the German administration to aid in establishing their rule over Bamileke populations, French administrators had to begin their negotiations with Bamileke chiefs and their codification of Bamileke laws from scratch. The basis for their perceptions of Bamileke chiefs as absolute rulers was a single fragmentary ethnographic report from 1914.67 According to the report, Grassfields society was “based on the absolute authority of the chief, master of subjects and land. Each territory is divided into quarters of unequal importance, governed by noblemen. If the chief meets with these noblemen, it is to hear their account of the execution of his orders. Each decision belongs exclusively to him.”68 The French administration’s mission was clear. If they were to follow the tone implied by Van Vollenhoven’s 1917 directive, they would have to shape traditional chiefs into dependable auxiliaries in a French administration. In so doing, not only would they conform to an overarching, rational French colonial policy but they would also fulfill the terms of their League of Nations mandate, demonstrating that as administering authorities they were more just than their German predecessors. They could also show up their British counterparts, who were severely understaffed and did not begin to establish an administration in the western Grassfields until 1924, and thus were unable to put a stop to slave trading in the region.69
In 1920, the year after the Treaty of Versailles defined the boundary between the British Cameroons and French Cameroon, French administrators began to add their own ethnographic descriptions of ritual customs and practices to the sparse information on the Grassfields. Of course these preliminary reports, based on scant observation and hearsay, conveyed