The Mixed Fortunes and Power Dynamics of the Grass Fields Folk in the Plantation and Cash Cropping Economy in Cameroon 1884- 2000

Abstract

The economy borne out of Cash crops and plantations with all its dynamics is wholly a colonial adjunct to the African way of life and approaches to the concept of power and wellbeing. Central to the colonial adulteration of the traditional system of power tenure was the introduction of an economic cycle whose essence was not justified by complete submissions to the dictates of tradition but rather to  new sorts of order where money or wealth was accorded supreme eminence. This kind of new economy had underlying varied and complex foundations but could aggregately be held to have emerged from the premises of money, power and prestige that owed its entire origin to trade, plantation  and cash cropping life as well as, the ostentatious consumption pattern that were the pillars of the colonial enterprise as from 1884 and  anytime thereafter. The African traditional economy prior to colonization depended largely on hunting, gathering fishing and other forms of farming and primary activities whose fate lay squarely in the bosom of nature. This was again conditioned by a firm belief in African traditional religion which burdened the native folk with a morass of responsibilities to ancestral spirits and gods. The idea of trade had faint representation in the African psyche but scarcity among tribal and ethnic units negotiated horizons of exchange which essentially went by batter system. The plantation and cash crop economy which became a sort of a king pin in the advancement of the colonial enterprise registered differential apprehensions and complexities by/in African locales but had enormous unity in the fact that; it greatly altered the patterns of power, prestige and dependence on the central traditional authorities prior to the colonial encroachment. The introduction of plantations and cash crops economies in Cameroon by the Germans brought about new agents and psyches of change to the traditional landscape. This new trend ignited enormous mixed passions among the Cameroon Grass fields native folk and essentially tilted the direction of command to a different side. Such new grounds of connectivity and dependence grew with astonishing tonic during and even after the colonial period. Aggregately, these new forces of change whose obedience and submission did not squarely fall within the ambits of traditional philosophy negated anything related to power  and incidentally lodged it within the prescient of the new order why money and other symbols of the modern system of administration prevailed. In all these paradigmatic changes, a symbiotic order where duality was bound to prevail came to fore and dictated the traditional order even in most remote social fabric. This is the mission of this paper. It attempts to provide answers or refreshing insights to the new order figured in by the rise and development of plantation and cash crop culture generally but with a special focus on the agents of this culture in the Cameroon grass fields. It does this by making a solid recourse to the primary and secondary sources, complementing them with the available oral sources. It argues that the plantation and cash crop economy more than anything else helped to registered alternating fortunes both to the agents of this change and the traditional polities involved. Secondly, it also occasioned an implosion in the tenure of power and direction of control in almost all traditional fiefs where this culture incidentally became a norm.

Keywords: Plantation, Economy, Grass fields, Power dynamics Fortunes, Cameroon.