PDF A Brief History of the Bakweri Land Problem - Bakweri Digital Archives 42 This led the reborn Bakweri Land Claims Committee (BLCC) to start a case at the African Commission of Human and People's Rights in Banjul (The Gambia). Each household was given three plots of land. In November 5, 1891 a German expeditionary force led by Karl Freiher Gravenreuth (who had brutally crushed a revolt of the Abo people (Douala) in February of that same year) and Lieutenant Von Stetten, was dispatched to tame the mountain people by what the acting German Governor described as ". Baldur's Gate 3 draws on decades of D&D lore to assemble a wide selection of magical weapons for you to choose from. Please check for further notifications by email. A key political effect of the land surrender process has been to delegitimize the BLCCs land claim by creating confusion over land and undermining Bakweri institutions and solidarity. This whole process can take several years. This has opened numerous possibilities for criminality, some of which have come to court. Prostate cancer threatens the health of men over sixty years old, and its incidence ranks first among all urinary tumors among men. Fako Division is far from the centre of Cameroonian power in Yaound.5 It is an ethnically cosmopolitan area with the Bakweri people (who identify as the indigenes) significantly outnumbered by many generations of immigrants (both English and French speakers).6 The landscape that makes up the case study area (2,093km2) is a mosaic of growing mid-sized urban settlements (Buea, Limbe, Muyuka, and Tiko), villages, designated conservation areas, industrial areas (such as the oil refinery), and the extensive plantations of the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC). The horizontal and vertical dimensions of the political settlement are not autonomous but are closely connected binding individual Chiefs into the central hierarchy simultaneously weakens the authority of those outside the leaders bloc. The scope for bureaucrats, some Bakweri Chiefs, and some businessmen to access significant personal benefits is extensive and the sums of money involved are not trivial. Stability has been the defining ambition of the Cameroonian political system over this time. Yet, the demand for land in Fako has increased significantly during the crisis particularly in areas known as Green Zones, perceived to be at less risk of either rebel attacks or Government reprisals. Numerical parametric assessment of the effects of stern wedges on the Even in the presence of the formal justice system, some of the traditional laws have continued to survive. Those who do invest in the land (by becoming landlords for example) are commended. Assessing how much CDC land has been surrendered over time is not straightforward. 670694; Tim Kelsall, Towards a universal political settlement concept: A response to Mushtaq Khan, African Affairs 117, 469 (2018), pp. Over several decades, neopatrimonialism has provided a series of key insights to explain political stability in Cameroon. There are four main reasons for the success of the process in Bwiteva. LncRNA SNHG4 promotes prostate cancer cell survival and resistance to Ultimately an alternative solution to save the Chiefs from jail was found: 339hectares of CDC land in the Musaka banana plantation, near Ekona, were surveyed for land surrender in August 2017. For example, if all the 200 plots in Bwiteva were sold, they would have a market value of more than 1 million pounds. For example, our findings about how power works inside the leaders bloc often rehearse well-known accounts of: the Cameroonian policy of regional balance; elite straddling of the centre and periphery; co-opting elites to ensure loyalty; and tactics of intra-elite competition.97 Ultimately both approaches analyse the distribution of patronage via clientelism in order to ensure loyalty within the bounds of the nation-state. The Chief himself was a retired senior police officer who had served in the diplomatic service so was already relatively well off and well educated. However, as the violent conflict in Anglophone Cameroon now shows, for many people the threat of state violence and the promise of some financial reward for accepting the status quo can no longer generate consent. The land restitution scheme predates the recent conflict, but their dynamics have become interwoven. The village registered the land using one community land certificate to ensure security of tenure. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. CONAC Cameroons 2018 anti-corruption status report (CONAC, Yaound, December 2019) pp. These Chiefs are not high-ranking members of the central elite, but they can persuade those who are to continue to supply them with land. 656669. As Paul Biya (president since 1982) said in 2015: The one who stays in power is the one who can, not the one who wants to.2. Accounts of well-managed land surrenders were rare. 508525. 241265. Ardener, Plantation and village in the Cameroons; Simon Epale, Plantations and development in Western Cameroon (Vantage Press, New York NY, 1985). Moki Mondo, Buea D.O Installs New Chief to Revive Ewili Village Amidst Opposition from a Small Group of People, Fako News Centre, 20 April 2012, (8 June 2022). We argue that land in Fako becomes incorporated into financing the national political settlement, and we use the horizontal and vertical variables as a way to understand the political effects of the land restitution scheme. She died in 2021. What were the consequences of bacon's rebellion? - Answers Contrary to the wider government position on land ownership, the 2018 CONAC report on land grabbing in Fako states Most of the land owned by the natives (the Bakweri) is managed by the CDC, Government of Cameroon CONAC Cameroons 2018 anti-corruption status report, p. 26. However, the ugly stereotype of The Resistance Bakery, Maastricht, Netherlands. However, we argue that PS does bring a new way of first explaining the prevalence of clientelism and second exploring a politics beyond clientelism that relates to ideas and ideology.9 These innovations acknowledge the broader complaint of residual affinities between some Africanist political theory and colonial racial stereotypes, and they create a space where we can discuss empirical material that does not fit within a purely clientelist account of Cameroonian politics.10, The article is based on the authors long-term engagement with everyday life in Buea in which the dramas of the land surrender are staples of conversation alongside debates about Anglophone identity and ethnic competition.11 Evidence is also drawn from fifteen interviews (undertaken in English or Pidgin) with Bakweri activists, Bakweri traditional rulers, state bureaucrats, CDC officials, and those buying plots of land. Causes, Manifestations and Nature of Indigenous Wars in Upper Bakweri However, we would also recognize that from the perspective of an analyst more familiar with a neopatrimonial approach, it is hard to see that much that is new here. 3359; Rogers Orock, Manyu youths, belonging and the antinomies of patrimonial elite politics in contemporary Cameroon, Cultural Dynamics 25, 3 (2013), pp. Gray, Understanding and deploying the political settlement framework in Africa. And, how do the horizontal and vertical variables change over time? The story of Bakweri military resistance against the Germans is also the story of Chief KUV'A LIKENYE of Buea, whose epic clashes with German troops remain one of the most glorious (but largely unknown) chapters in Cameroonian history. Southern Cameroon History, The Bakweri Resistance Documentary - YouTube For example, the Paramount Chief of Buea told us: neither I nor my predecessors have ever requested for land for BueaIt is a matter of principle. Fako indigenes recommend severe sanctions against land grabbing Chiefs, Ministerial Decision 001059-001073/MINDCAF/A020 of 18 September 2017 allocated 135hectares of land (potentially 2700 building plots, then worth around 7 million). Resistance to doxycycline in particular would be a major blow, in particular, because it . The land market is driven by strong demand for building plots, especially on the urban peripheries.44, The CDC is a now a wholly government-owned entity producing rubber, oil palm, and bananas. In the petition, the Chiefs claimed to have spent an average of 1015 million CFA in the application process(Table1). 01763, 03 October 2016, p. 12; Tirlarious Atia Azohnwi, Fako Chiefs letter to Biya: plea or blackmail?, The Sun Newspaper, No. Compared to drug interventions, probiotic interventions may have a more enduring effect without producing any side effects. This was the moment when the state responded quickly with a more short-term vision by instituting the 2003 land restitution scheme. A Simple Biomechanical Analysis of the Ankle Tim Kelsall, Nicolai Schulz, William D. Ferguson, Matthias vom Hau, Sam Hickey, and Brian Levy, Political settlements and development: theory, evidence, implications (online edition, Oxford Academic, 23 June 2022), (5 September 2022) p. 77. These relate to villages that had been erased by the plantations and were considered extinct with no living descendants, but which are now being revitalized because people claimed an ancestral link to those sites.72 The DO for Buea claimed to have revived 2030 such villages, but, he emphasized, only where there was sufficient evidence from the archives or oral history for a chieftaincy claim to be legitimated.73 In contrast, critics of the surrender process claim that administrative officials collude with individuals in such cases. In contrast, most interviewees outlined nearly two decades of rampant mismanagement of the land surrender process.63 In August 2014, at the prompting of BLCC activists, the Minister of State Property (Jacqueline Koung Bessike) tried to re-assert the 2003 process, issued an order that suspended all further land surrender in Fako, and demanded an inventory of all land surrendered so far.64 The effect of this intervention was limited. Ghost Town Monday In the Bakweri and Bayang societies traditional justice was also used to achieve social justice and inclusion particularly given that there were no formal institutions charged with this responsibility. The regional conflict in Anglophone Cameroon illustrates the pressures that Cameroons aged national settlement is currently under. Ardener, Plantation and Village. The National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC) was established in March 2006. Nicolai Schulz and Tim Kelsall, The Political Settlements dataset: an introduction with illustrative applications (Working Paper No. It is not a response to BLCC demands. Chiefs are unwilling to raise this money within the community since the contributors might subsequently expect accountability. To bridge this gap, we explore cultural narratives of the Bakweri residing in the Mount (Mt) Cameroon region of sub-Saharan West Africa. Redirecting to /core/journals/weed-science/article/abs/physiological-consequences-of-mutation-for-alsinhibitor-resistance Although the land was allocated in 1977, the formal process of securing a legal title began in 1993. For example, there are public debates about how best to compensate Bakweri families for colonial injustices, whether land should be used for farming or houses, how beneficiaries should best use windfall assets, and how corruption can be reversed.31 An overly tight focus on clientelism leaves little space to acknowledge these other debates. Land in Fako is a fungible commodity absorbed into funding national politics, but it is also linked to political and social ideas that cannot be reduced to clientelism. Despite the relative clarity of the formal land surrender process as written in government memoranda, the reality in Fako is disorderly and opaque. Excerpts of a film on the heroic exploits of Kuva Likenye, the Bakweri chief who took up arms against German exploitation of the Bakweri people of Cameroon w. 3584; Jean-Franois Mdard, The Underdeveloped state in Tropical Africa: Political clientelism or neo-patrimonialism?, in Christopher Clapham (ed. ), Elections without choice (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1978), pp. Elements of this Cameroonian example are aligned to a neopatrimonial perspective, whilst others are revealed by using the PS approach and many points overlap. Bakweri communities can only proceed with the surrender process with the assistance of different members of the administration, all of whom therefore have leverage to extract benefits from those communities. Bakweri Armed Resistance to German Colonialism, 1891 - 1894 The return of parcels of CDC plantation land to Bakweri is known locally as land surrender. His forces dissolved without his charismatic leadership, and the General Assembly quickly repealed most of the liberal laws it . ), The dynamics of power and the rule of law: Essays on Africa and beyond (Lit Verlag, Munster, 2003), pp. All interviewees gave informed consent and participated voluntarily. This scheme was advocated as a compromise resolution to the legal dispute by Peter Mafany Musonge. Daniel Bach, Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism: comparative trajectories and readings, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 49, 3 (2011), pp. 3958. The confidential petition to the president was leaked and published in full (The Post, Fako Chiefs beg Biya to rescue them from imprisonment, No. It has set Bakweri communities who receive land against those who do not. Cameroon: State Policy as Grounds for Indigenous Rebellion. The Bakweri For example, in the village of Ewili, a man named Ndzie Thomas Ekinde was recognized as the Bakweri Chief and installed in 2012 even though critics claimed his father was from the Bakossi ethnic group.86 Ewili was a very small revitalized village where there had been no Chief for 46years.87 However, in 2015 he was convicted for taking money from a sponsor by using false documents from a land surrender to a different village.88 After the trial his critics, who included a rival claimant to the Chiefs title, accused him of conniving with the administration to be made Chief in order to apply for a land surrender.89 Although they demanded that he should be dethroned he was not, indeed after he was kidnapped (and later released) by Ambazonians in August 2018, he was received by the Minister of Territorial Administration in Yaound as one of a group of honoured loyal Chiefs.90 Such accounts show not only how the land surrender process connects to the national division of spoils, but how by rewarding some Chiefs and making them followers of the government, divisions amongst the Bakweri are fostered. PS require funding, and the sources of funding change over time. By treating Anglophone elites (especially traditional rulers) who have benefitted from the land scheme as accomplices of the national government, the rebels have driven many of them to flee, effectively bringing a halt to further land transfers. The land surrender process has brought confusion; chieftaincy disputes have become common and land is often passing swiftly, and legally, into the hands of non-indigenes after it is sold. The Germans, on arriving Africa and forcefully appropriating lands that were never and would never be theirs, were quick to identify the natural wealth of Fako. So, the supply of new building land from land surrenders has stopped, but demand for such land in Fako has increased. 154164. Sometimes these benefits come from owning the land, but often they are generated through the way the surrender process works. He died in May 2020. ), Social im/mobilities in Africa (Berghahn, Oxford, 2019), pp.178198. In addition, having discovered that they could raise money in this way, Chiefs often engaged multiple sponsors raising much more money than they need to pursue the land claim. Prime Minister Musonge might have wished to disempower the BLCC when they were making progress in the international courts, but he was also being pragmatic. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. That is the claim that Fako is all indigenous land as recognized by the colonial CDC lease, which should all be returned to the Bakweri people.91 On the one hand, the government can use the surrenders to claim to be giving Bakweri citizens the land that they have been demanding. deprived the Bakweri "of all incentives" and that they had "relapsed into what is still an indolent state of mind." Even the birth rate among the Bakweri reduced at an alarming rate, with observers predicting an early extinction of the Bakweri group. Villagers who feel their Chief has abused the land restitution scheme are also using the instability to try to settle scores. Learning tools, flashcards, and textbook solutions | Quizlet By conceiving of the national political economy as a dynamic, interdependent combination of a structure of power and institutions, it shows how this geographically peripheral site is connected to the political centre and how it contributes to sustaining the existing system. Interview, Wokam Paul, DO, Buea, 29 March 2018. ), Private patronage and public power: Political clientelism in the modern state (Frances Pinter, London, 1982); Nicolas Van de Walle, Neopatrimonialism and democracy in Africa, with an Illustration from Cameroon, in Jennifer Widner (ed. This is useful as it reveals an account of the land restitution in Fako in which clientelism and corruption are not the only dimensions of the story. 01553, 11 August 2014, cover page and p. 5. Discovery of its fractional counterpart in the presence of strong electron correlations, i.e., the fractional quantum anomalous Hall (FQAH) effect 4-7, would open a new chapter in condensed matter . The Bakweri led by chief Kuva Likinye cut off the head of The Cameroons Development Corporation Ordinance, No. These Site Board Commissions combine representatives from the village, the CDC, and various services of the government (the SDOs office, the relevant DOs office, MINDCAF, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and local government).56 The CDC often want to retain productive land, but as a state entity they defer to the governments agenda: We can reject applications, but if the SDO requires us we have to oblige.57 If CDC reject a specific site, they are usually asked to find an alternative piece of land for the community instead. As a result, most Chiefs have abandoned their villages and sought refuge as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) elsewhere in the country.68 Without the Chiefs, the formal land surrender process cannot proceed. The Government of Southern Cameroons then re-leased the lands to the CDC for a period of 99years starting from 1 January 1960, shifting the date when the land would be returned to the Bakweri from 2007 to 2059.40 This arrangement persisted through the postcolonial federal period from 1960/61 to 1972. The Chiefs were from: Bokwai, Bonakanda, Wonjia, Lysoka-Wombaki, Wokeka, Woteva, Bova I, Bova II, Ewili, Likoko Membea, Bokwango, Wonyanga, and Upper Bokova. My predecessor, HRM SML Endeley never applied for land return in Buea, even though he had always argued for the return of the land to the natives.75. Behuria, Studying political settlements in Africa p. 512; Lavers, Taking ideas seriously. Bakweri Resistance To Germans | PDF | Germany | World Politics - Scribd In contrast to earlier iterations of PS, more recent accounts have drawn attention to an ideological dimension of politics beyond clientelism.27 Initial PS theorizations took the idea that politics in African countries is organized through clientelist networks for granted, but argued that significant differences exist between countries in the way that these networks function, and these differences then shape development outcomes.28 Furthermore, unlike some earlier approaches, PS understood the emergence of clientelism not as a consequence of African culture or individual greed but by locating these practices within the context of specific colonial histories and economic structures.29 More recent elaborations of PS propose going further and suggest that non-clientelist politics informed by ideas, political commitments, and ideologies are also relevant to sustaining a political settlement.30 This dimension matters because marshalling these normative discussions can contribute to a groups capacity to organize, mobilize support, and gain legitimacy either within or against the settlement. land that was appropriated during the colonial era is only rarely returned to its African claimants. 12556; Zubairu Wai, Neopatrimonialism and the discourse of state failure in Africa, Review of African Political Economy 39, 131 (2012), pp. The benefits of land surrender are therefore being shared very unevenly amongst indigenes. This research was supported by UCL Global Engagement. Kwe people - Wikipedia Between 1947 and 2003, several portions of CDC land were surrendered for public purposes.49 For example, the University of Buea is built on 354hectares of land originally surrendered in 1977.50 However, after the new process was introduced in 2003, the scale of surrenders increased dramatically. Raufu Mustapha, State, Predation and Violence: Reconceptualizing Political Action and Political Community in Africa, paper presented at the 10th General Assembly of CODESRIA, Kampala, Uganda, December 812, (2002). These political ideas about land and territory may not amount to a coherent ideological political programme, but they are not irrelevant to sustaining the settlement either. See also Francis Tim Mbom, Biya urged to punish Chiefs scheming to grab University of Buea land, The Post Newspaper, No. The Bakweri institution of chieftaincy has been undermined by the land surrender scheme. Its managerial autonomy has declined since 2016, when it was brought fully under the remit of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.45 The Board of Directors is made up almost entirely of Government appointees, including two from the Presidency. Neopatrimonialism has become common sense in thinking about Cameroon and it has proved hard to think outside it. Such funds are distributed within the leaders bloc in order to ensure that the followers judge the existing arrangements to be preferable to change. Materials from the Cameroonian press and official documents from the Ministry of State Property, Surveys and Land Tenure (MINDCAF) support our primary data.12. Drawing largely on interviews from 2018, this article examines a process of surrendering parcels of state-managed plantation land to Bakweri communities in the South-West Region of Cameroon, which has been operating since 2003. Bakweri people - Bakweri Language and Cultural Center The administration claims it is giving state-owned land to Cameroonian citizens who need space for their children to farm and build homes. Bouddih Adams, University of Buea Land-grabbers in Police Dragnet, The Post Newspaper, No. Charles Meek, Land tenure and administration in Nigeria and the Cameroons (HMSO, London, 1957), p. 407. An investment of 5 million Communaut Financire Africaine franc (CFA) could easily lead to an allocation of five plots and a profit of eight million CFA (10,000) once land is sold. There is more to the land surrender story than just self-serving elites being allowed to corruptly appropriate assets on the condition that they return the favour by supporting existing political arrangements. The Bakweri likely migrated to their present home east of the mountain in the mid-18th century. Land surrender follows a bureaucratic process set in place by a Ministerial Order in 2003.55 First, the Chief of the relevant village (or potentially an NGO or church) contacts one of the Divisional Officers (DOs) in Fako. However, any subsequent failure to honour their obligations often led to lawsuits with the sponsors. 279288. Please stay tuned! To identify those factors that has led to the survival of Christianity. In any society it is possible to distinguish between those who accept the agreement (the leaders bloc) and those who do not (the opposition bloc).26 This is known as the horizontal variable. PS is interested in the way that these other political debates can contribute to the capacity of some groups within the settlement to organize, mobilize support, and gain legitimacy.100 The Ambazonian conflict will continue because the civilian population, despite its suffering, remains broadly convinced of the legitimacy of the insurgents key idea.
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