Uncanny Autochthons: The Bamileke Facing Ethnic Territorialization in Cameroon Anschaire Aveved Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirement for the degree Of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Anschaire Aveved All rights reserved ABSTRACT Uncanny Autochthons: The Bamileke Facing Ethnic Territorialization in Cameroon Anschaire Aveved The Bamileke in contemporary Cameroon are known by the services of the General Delegation for National Security as one of the approximately 200 ethnic groups that have been assigned a registration number, and they must like all citizens formally identify their ethnic group at the time of national identification. Unlike most Cameroonians who identify with a primary language, the Bamileke usually identify with a chieftaincy or a village of origin, which may not always correspond with a distinctive language. This situation has led the police to hold a map of chieftaincies during registration in order to assist the self-identification of those whose declared place of origin is located in the former Bamileke Region. While this operation reveals the extent to which the Bamileke ethnonym corresponds to a linguistic umbrella term and sets apart the Bamileke as an ethnic group in state records, it also highlights the general assumption that one can match every registered ethnic group with a discrete region of the country’s territory. The structure that grounds this assumption is referred to as ethnic territorialization in this dissertation and is critically examined from the vantage point of ethnographic exhibition, identification with homelands, political competition, and colonial history. The legibility and traceability of both ethnic identity and putative home villages that come with national identification in Cameroon contrast distinctly with the generally repressed character of ethnicity in national politics and state institutions that have the representation of the nation as one of their main objectives. This was the case in the early 1990s when the newly created National Museum of Yaoundé had to confront the imbalances and contradictions that would result from an effort to put the “synthesis of Cameroonian cultures” on display. It was also the case in 1996 when the newly amended constitution included a provision for the rights of indigenous populations and limited candidacy for each of its ten regional council presidencies to “an indigenous person”. In both cases, the Bamileke have been described in the literature as the major concern for lawmakers. In the first case, the predominance of ethnographic materials from the West Region was perceived as a threat to both the visibility of other ethnic groups and the cherished principle of regional balance which ensures the enrollment of state representatives on the basis of ethnic quotas. In the second case, the protection of indigenous people was understood as a means developed by the ruling party, identified as the Beti, to undermine Bamileke interests in regions other than their own. Given the ambiguous character of ethnicity in Cameroon, this dissertation resists the temptation to reduce the apparently recent institutionalization of indigenous rights in Cameroon to a matter of the current international increase in claims to “belonging” or autochthony, or to a strategy developed by the ruling party in order to fragment the current political opposition. Rather, this dissertation draws lessons from an ethnography of the failure of the government in Yaoundé to give an ethnic description of the nation at the National Museum and the relative success of a non-governmental institution, known as The Road to Chiefdoms, that created a museum in the former Bamileke Region with the same goal. Accordingly, this dissertation suggests that the apparently contradictory outcome of these two initiatives both results from a political fiction that territorializes identity ethnically and makes use of chieftainship and land tenure as its cornerstone. More importantly, this dissertation examines the ways in which the Bamileke actively engage, partake in, and question state politics as both indigenous people or autochthons and gradual opponents of the principle of autochthony. It further highlights the reasons why any debate on either regional balance or autochthony in Cameroon must include the matters of chieftainship and land tenure as institutions whereby the Cameroonian state seeks to portray itself as a supra-ethnic political entity that incarnates a non-ethnic Nation to come and avoids being reduced to only one of the many ethnic groups officially assumed to be at its foundation. Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii CHAPTER ONE: UNCANNY AUTOCHTHONS 1 CHAPTER TWO: BELONGING AND ETHNOGRAPHIC DISAFFECTION 31 CHAPTER THREE: LAMBERTON’S CURSE 59 CHAPTER FOUR: THE ROAD TO CHIEFDOMS 90 CHAPTER FIVE: ON RITUALS OF BELONGING 120 CHAPTER SIX: POLITICS PAST, POLITICS PRESENT 154 CHAPTER SEVEN: A NATION OF SQUATTERS AND FENCERS 188 CHAPTER EIGHT: RELUCTANTLY STRUCTURALIST? 223 BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE 259 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This dissertation is the outcome of a long series of encounters, experiences, conversations and inquiries beginning in 2007. It would be impossible to list all the people who provided support or participated in some way. I would like them all to find an expression of my gratitude in the various stories that I tell in this dissertation; especially those whose opinions, doubts and aspirations constitute its primary material. My special thanks to Rosalind Morris, my sponsor, who has shown an unparalleled interest in my early research on artists and museums in Cameroon well before I embarked for New York. She welcomed me with warmth and kindness to Columbia University in September 2007 and has guided my hesitant and slow steps ever since; even in the most trying moments of my scholarly investigation of the troubling and sensitive ethnic issues of my home country. I am also tremendously indebted to the faculty members of the Department of Anthropology who spared no effort to listen to my concerns and give special consideration to my atypical academic background. I have benefitted greatly from their teachings and intellectual support over the past seven years. I would like them all to find in this dissertation the fruit of their relentless effort to share their rich experiences and perspectives. I would like to give special thanks to Mahmood Mamdani and Brian Larkin. Their broad and steady outlook on contemporary African states familiarized me with the ii traceability and materiality of political institutions in everyday life. Additionally, I would like Claudio Lomnitz, Marilyn Ivy, Nan Rothshild, Elizabeth Povinelli, Susan Vogel, Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga and Ernest Mbonda to find in this dissertation a token of my gratitude. I also would like to show appreciation to my family and friends for their invaluable support. I dare not imagine what would have happened if they had not been by my side all along these past years of devoted solitude. In this regard, I offer my deepest gratitude to my mother Marie Pascale Mounagai, my sister Madeleine Vadzaya and her life partner Gabriel Ngoulbetei, and my friends Yuusuf Caruso, Flaubert Taboue Nouaye, Rodney William Collins, Elizabeth Gelber, Kevin Etienne-Cummings, Félicité Djoukouo, Veronica Koo, Marc Van Eenoo, Jan Tilleman, Samson Akombi, Vivian Keith-Morris, Caroline and Arnaud Blanchard. Finally, I address my thanks to Jeremy Kassen who has taken a great interest in my exploration of political issues in Cameroon, where he used to train Peace Corps volunteers. He has graciously taken his precious time to review the language quality of this dissertation and make it more readable for the general audience. iii In memory of my sister Geneviève Aiyée iv CHAPTER ONE: UNCANNY AUTOCHTHONS I came across Francesco Pompeo’s 1999 article on the National Museum of Yaoundé in 2006 when I was studying the development of community museums in Mankon and Bandjoun. In those days, a great deal of my research involved probing the meanings and the scope of the notion of community, and assessing how the idea of community could be located within the broader project that gave birth to the museumization of chiefly treasures housed in the chiefly compounds of various chieftaincies in the West and North-West regions of Cameroon. Eventually my interest in the idea of community grew more important than my thoughts about African art, which itself gradually took the form of a category of art rather than an index of art made in Africa; especially when I realized that Francesco Pompeo brought to light a tremendous contextual paradox; in fact two interlocking paradoxes. The first paradox was explicitly identified, and impressively discussed by the article: How was one to represent the nation without projecting it as a set of discreet and comparable ethnic groups. The second paradox projects the first onto Pompeo’s own intellectual gesture of researching and writing on an ethnic group in the context of urgent and repressed ethnic competition. Any attempt at representing the “synthesis of Cameroonian cultures,” in Pompeo’s words, “had to face the artistic primacy of the Grassfields and the hostility of groups from the center regions” (Pompeo, 1999, p.820). In this manner, the idea of synthesis is not only forcibly based on a number of identifiable groups, but also implies a certain ethnic cartography of the country. The Grassfields, alternatively called the 1 Grassland of Cameroon, comprise the two regions in which I were studying community museums. These are the West Region and the North-West Region. The two regions taken together were formerly part of the German Kamerun Grasland, which did not refer to a single administrative block, but to the basic topography of the area. While it cannot be denied that the term ultimately took on an ethnic connotation, it did so gradually and so toward the end of German colonization. This ethnic connotation has been reemphasized sporadically ever since at various stages of Cameroon’s recent political history, and has become the most prominent feature of the Grassland or Grassfields.