Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon w Meredith Terretta OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS w ATHENS, OHIO Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction Layering Nationalism from Local to Global 1 PART ONE GRASSFIELDS POLITICAL TRADITION AND BAMILEKE IDENTITY Chapter 1 God, Land, Justice, and Political Sovereignty in Grassfields Governance 29 Chapter 2 “Bamileke Strangers” Make the Mungo River Valley Their Home 61 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 97 Chapter 4 Nationalists or Traitors? Bamileke Chiefs and Electoral Politics in the Year of Loi-Cadre 134 PART THREE UPC NATIONALISTS GO GLOBAL Chapter 5 The Maquis at Home, Exile Abroad Grassfields Warfare Meets Revolutionary Pan-Africanism 177 Chapter 6 “Here, God Does Not Exist” Emergency Law and the Violence of State Building 217 vii Conclusion “After the War, We Stop Counting the Dead” Reconciliation and Public Confession 250 Notes 265 Glossary 337 Bibliography 341 Index 359 viii w Contents introduction Layering Nationalism from Local to Global In Douala in 2003, I was speaking in French with a Cameroonian woman in her sixties about George W. Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq. She was from the West Province, or the Bamileke Region, the portion of the Grassfields that fell under French administration from 1919 to 1960.1 She was unschooled but spoke fluent French, pid- gin English, and her mother tongue, Medumba. She was against the US invasion and, referring to the United Nations Security Council’s vote against military intervention in Iraq, she said, “But all the other villages did not want to go to war.” Her grandchildren laughed at her use of the term village, but her word choice and the youngsters’ reac- tion to it revealed a generational, linguistic memory gap.
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