The Fako Land Crisis did not begin today. It began 130 years ago. It is not a one-aspect issue that only concerns the illegal dispossession of Fako citizens’ lands occupied by CDC since January 1947, and which are being grabbed, stolen, by so-called agents (e.g. Administrators such as SDO’s and DO’s and some others in privileged government and private positions) of the government in connivance with some sons and daughters of the soil. It is multi-faceted, simple and complex at the same time.
Many Cameroonians, including, sadly, indigenous Fako citizens, both young and old, do NOT understand or quite appreciate the depth and breadth of the problem. This is because they do not know their own history-our history. Unfortunately, this ignorance of our history, both in Fako and the rest of the country, is perpetrated by our country’s dysfunctional educational system, which emphasizes “doctrinal” history that favors the selective teaching of history and strives to obliterate a people’s past for one sole purpose – power and control - power and control that benefits a handful of corrupt elites and power traffickers.
The Fako land crisis as we know it today, reared its ugly head in 1884 when, in the town of Berlin in Germany, a few arrogant, greedy, power hungry, European leaders met and decided to arbitrarily “carve out and divide” Africa and allocate to themselves vast inhabited territories on the continent as their personal or state’s property. Probably the most egregious manifestation of this arrogance of power can still be seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo today, where the then King Leopold of the miniscule country called Belgium, ascribed to himself the “ownership” of a territory more than 100 times the size of his own country - a territory the size of a sub- continent, endowed with immeasurable natural wealth and resources.
Cameroon is not as big geographically as the DRC but it has its own fair share of God’s generous endowment in mineral wealth and other natural resources. Amongst the territories within Cameroon with the greatest quantity and quality of such natural endowment, Fako probably stands out as Number ONE. 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. They decided to make it theirs – peacefully or by force. This is when the Fako land crisis began: 1884.
In 1884, per force of the Berlin Treaty, Cameroon became a German Protectorate. After scouting the different parts of the territory, the Germans discovered that the area around Mount Fako, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, home of the indigenous peoples of Fako, the Bakweris and all their related sub-groups like the Mungo, Bimbia, Balong and a few others, who settled in later, was an “agricultural paradise”. They quickly established a harsh, inhuman policy of indiscriminate, wholesale, confiscation, appropriation, seizure of indigenous native, ancestral lands for the establishment of large-scale agricultural plantations to feed their insatiable industrial growth at home. They used brute force, coercion, and a long list of repressive “laws” to force the local indigenes, the Fako citizens, to give up their vast expanses of native, ancestral lands WITHOUT COMPENSATION.
To ensure that the Bakweris were thoroughly dispossessed of their lands, the German Colonial government established a notorious and barbaric policy of “packing and driving the Bakweris into inaccessible, disease infested and inhospitable “Native Reserves” similar to the kind that the white European settlers in the Americas and Australia put the natives, the indigenes of those territories, the American Indians and Australian Aborigines, into. As a result of this policy, thousands and thousands of Bakweri people were forcefully and forcibly herded into strange, unfriendly patches of land that had no water, no streams; had dense, uninhabitable forests and very rocky and accidental terrain. Thousands died! The result? One writer of the British colonial Administration puts it this way:
In one swoop, the Bakweri, who, prior to the arrival of the Germans, were described as aggressive, independent and dynamic [i], were transformed into a dejected, despondent, lethargic, and dependent people. Ripped from familiar surroundings on which their entire traditional culture derived its strength, the Bakweri began an alarming downward spiral that would continue for over half a century - a fate no different from that of Native Americans [and the Aborigines of Australia].
My late Grandfather, the Right Honorable Venerated Reverend Daniel Ewung’a Mbua Efokoa Lyonga, one of the pioneers of the Basel, now Presbyterian, Mission in Cameroon, in one of the many history lessons he gave me when I was much younger, recounted his eye- witness experiences of German atrocities committed during their presence in our territory. He told me of how the Germans carried out genocidal, or near genocidal, acts in Fako after they had been valiantly resisted and thoroughly beaten in several battles by the proud, independent, assertive, aggressive, noble Bakweri people. He told me how, in their determination to break the Bakweri people’s collective spirit, they subjected them to untold inhuman and degrading treatment. One of such series of acts he described thus: The Germans would round up all the men of the tribe within site, line them up from the Government Station (that is where we now have many of the government office buildings and structures) to the newly created reserves fences (the Kott’a Mboa- the artificially fenced off village areas}, make them take off their clothes and lie down on the dirt, face down, but, sometimes, face up. Then they would WALK ON THEM, with their hard German military boots on, using them like human carpets. Another one of such recurrent inhumane acts was the merciless, hateful, thrashings they gave the Bakweri men-the njum’a phonji: They would have a Bakweri man manhandled by several men, mostly German soldiers. They would tie him down and place his body between two empty and hollow wine barrels whose top and bottom had been removed for that purpose. In one barrel they would place over his upper torso, lying face down. In the second barrel they would place his lower extremities, leaving just a little opening that exposed his uncovered buttocks. In that little space that exposed his unprotected buttocks, they would flog him mercilessly, over and over until he bled, sore and wounded - his skin peeling and sticking on the whip, most often a leather belt with buckles on it. What made this punishment so particularly cruel is that, enclosed in these hollow barrels, the victim of this abuse was stuck inside, immobile and totally incapable of any movement whatsoever. His arms, body were bound and all he could do was screaming in pain until he passed out, fainted, or died.
The women were spared this hateful physical abuse but they were treated no less worse. They were raped and abused; allegedly infected with what was then known as the “white man’s disease” - syphilis.
The Germans achieved their objective. They succeeded in breaking the spirits and moral of our people – the Mokpe’s. It is even claimed, and this is still subject to verification and validation, that the Germans, when they saw that they could not get the Bakweri to do their will, embarked on a mission to exterminate them by introducing syphilis in their population. This, it is alleged, resulted in very low birth rates amongst the Bakweris, as we can witness today. I am shocked to note that, to this day, these Germans have NOT yet been indicted for crimes against humanity and held to make heavy reparations to the people of Fako for all these abuses they poured on our ancestors and from which we still suffer till this day, with scars so fresh and raw! In the 1922 Annual Report by the British Government to the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, this is what is said of the Bakweri people: Uprooted from the homes of their forebears, settled willy nilly on strange soil, deprived of their old hunting grounds and fishing rights, the Bakweri-[Fako People]-have retained but a small sense of tribal unity and cohesion.
This is the measure of the collective psychological, cultural, social, economic and political damage the Germans wrought on my people – The People of Fako- a people who, before the fateful arrival of the Germans, had been known for their cohesion, nobility, aggressiveness, pride, assertiveness, independence and self-sufficiency, a people who jealously and courageously defended this same territory we are writing about and are now fighting for; a people who readily, unhesitantly, spilled and sacrificed their own blood to protect this land from the German invaders and intruders. Sadly and ironically, here we are today, a hundred and more years later, facing similar mistreatment from our own so-called “brothers” and “sisters” in privileged administrative and other positions in Fako. They treat us as if they have conquered our territory like the Germans did. They bully us and steal our lands from us. They are in such a hurry to take as much of our lands as can, one would easily believe the devil was, literally, chasing them. And so, here we are, again, 100 years later, fighting to hold on to the same land our ancestors spilled their blood for and for which they suffered all kinds of degrading, horrible humiliation. We are simply witnessing the substitution of one colonial master from Europe with another, this time, from Africa, of Cameroonian descent, called SDO’s and DO’s (Prefets and sous prefets) working with some civil servants in privileged positions, who make claims, spurious, bogus, claims, of being our brothers and sisters because Cameroon has now “become” “one and indivisible”.
The Beginning – The First Facet of the Fako Land Crisis - the “Stranger Problem”: Now, after having seized our lands, the Germans set out to make vast plantations on them. They then tried to force the Bakweris to work on these plantations as slaves, or laborers - terms which cannot be differentiated because the salaries offered to laborers in those plantations to this day are only meant for slaves in the true sense of the word. Of course, the proud, noble Bakweri people would not be subjected to such further humiliation. Many of them preferred to commit suicide, die, rather than be enslaved as laborers on their own ancestral land by their wicked conquerors. And so began the importation of labor, slave labor, from other parts of the vast expanse of this African territory now called Cameroon. The Germans went up north, now, north-west to be precise. They found and brought in abundant, cheap, willing labor for their ill-gotten plantations. And this is where another facet of the Bakweri – Fako - Land Crisis emerged: “The Stranger Problem” as it was identified and called by Messrs W.M. Bridges, Victoria District Officer in 1935 and D.A.F. Shute, Victoria District officer in 1938, both working under the British Colonial Government in Southern Cameroons, in their “Intelligence Report on the Bakweri” [ii], prepared for the British Colonial Authority in London. In that Report, and long before the Cameroon Development Corporation was established in January, 1947 by the same British Government to address the Bakweri Land crisis, this is what they wrote of the Bakweri, or Fako, land problem, in paragraph 41, on pages 11 to 12: The stranger problem now requires attention [iii]. Since the inception of plantation work, an increasing number of native strangers have found their way to this country [Fako]. Some remain continually at work on the plantations and do not affect the local native organization at all. Many others, however, give up their plantation work and settle down in the various villages. The local natives are indolent to inform them of their customs and the strangers do not bother to enquire about them. Friction thereby ensues and the locals term the strangers “strong-headed” while the strangers consider that the Bakweris are trying to take advantage of their being foreigners. LAND AND WOMEN CONSTITUTE THE MOST CONSTANT SOURCE OF TROUBLE [iv]. For example, a stranger is allowed by a Sango Mbua [v] to farm on some land. He does so and then later decides to return to his country, but before leaving, he sells [vi] the farmland, which he has used to another stranger, generally one unknown to the local villagers. The second stranger is indignant when THE VILLAGERS CLAIM THEIR RIGHTS ACCORDING TO THE LOCAL NATIVE CUSTOM, BY WHICH THEIR LAND CANNOT BE PARTED OR SOLD; while THE VILLAGERS ARE ANNOYED BECAUSE A STRANGER HAS PRESUMED TO THINK THAT HE CAN OWN A PORTION OF THEIR LAND [vii]. These problems described above, and the practice of illegally selling off land that does not belong to them, by these “strangers” continues to this day here in Fako. Now it is done not only by private settlers or strangers but by government officials, agents of our Government, misusing and abusing their privileged positions as administrators, civil servants, lands surveyors, ministers, etc., to GRAB, steal, Fako native, ancestral lands. After the primary, major land crisis created by the Germans, three sub-sets of crises have since emerged in Fako. The first facet was “the Stranger Problem”, which I have just been described in the 1935 British Government Intelligence Report on the Bakweri quoted above.
The Second Facet: The “New Layout” Problem: The Second facet of the crisis emerged after the political “independence” of the then West Cameroon or Southern Cameroons. Successive directors of the Lands and Survey Department, in an effort to obfuscate, disguise or cover up “the Stranger Problem” described above, started an illegal program of creating so-called “New Layouts”. I do not yet have records or evidence of the actions of the first Director of Lands and Surveys of West Cameroon, the late Mr. Njikam, of blessed memory. But we know what his successor, Mr.Anyangwe, a.k.a. the Duke, also of blessed memory, did. He created a New Layout in Great Soppo, Buea, right under our eyes and noses, and proceeded to populate it, almost exclusively, with his tribe’s people from Ngie Ngwo or Oshie. The evidence is here to see today. Most of the land in Great Soppo is “owned” or, rather, occupied by families such as the Ozimba’s and others. Overtly, “New Layouts” were claimed to be created for public purposes, to provide land needed to carry out government, or other public purpose developments for the benefit of the local community. But this was not, and has never been, the case in Fako. Since then the “new culture” of fabricating “New Layouts” has become a popular practice of subsequent administrators to enable them to illegally GRAB land in Fako. This practice, in its many ramifications, continues to this day with impunity!
The Third Facet: Destruction and “Privatization” of Government Residential Areas (GRA’s’), Federal Quarters and Clerk’s Quarters: The third facet of the Fako Land Crisis constitutes the illegal carving out of PRIVATE property from Government Residential Areas (GRA’s). Again, this practice is rife only in Fako. In Victoria, now Limbe, The GRA we knew when growing up as children, has been decimated, totally destroyed. It is no longer the low density residential area designated for Government workers by the previous colonial administration. Through the instrumentation of creative, crooked officers of the Lands and Surveys Department, with the connivance and support and/or encouragement of successive administrators (SDO’s and DO’s, amongst others) working in cahoots with some government ministers, directors and other officers in Yaounde, parcels of land are carved out from otherwise beautifully manicured government residential compounds and made into private property for which land certificates are illegally and hastily awarded overnight. The same is true of Buea, where the Federal Quarters, Clerks’ Quarters and GRA have become the property of private individuals. In Buea, we see buildings going up every day next to the “boys’ quarters” of GRA houses in Buea. Some of the most conspicuous of such buildings – incomplete and complete - can be seen today opposite the Buea Mountain Hotel and next to the Military Station opposite the Nigerian Consulate in GRA. More new ones are emerging opposite the Mountain Village Guest House next to the residence of the Director of the Buea Regional (General) Hospital. Some more new, private, buildings are seen interspersed between several such government residences all around GRA and Federal Quarters and Clerk’s Quarters in Buea.
Again, this phenomenon seems to flourish ONLY in Fako. Not in the Center Province or Mefou Division; not in the Littoral Province or Duala; not in the North-West Province or in Bamenda; not in the Northern Provinces or in Garoua, Ngaoundere or Maroua; not in the Eastern Province or in Bertoua; not anywhere else – ONLY IN FAKO! What do these people take us for? Fools or idiots? These we certainly are NOT! We have just been quiet for far too long, hoping that justice will one day prevail and these wrongs and abuses will be righted. Alas! It has all been but a matter of wishful thinking and illusory expectations on the part of the peace loving, accommodating, friendly but traumatized and indecently abused and insulted citizens of Fako.
The Fourth Facet of the Fako Land Crisis: CDC Land Surrender. While the previous instances of land abuse in Fako seem sufficiently egregious and blatant, here comes the real bombshell: The CDC Land Surrender. The previously discussed abuses can be traced to corrupt individuals both in and out of government but the CDC Land Surrender, one of the largest and most shameful and disgusting abuses of a peoples ancestral land rights, emanates, or seems to emanate, directly, apparently, officially, from our own Government’s appointed agents – Divisional and Regional Administrators. Following the defeat of the Germans by the Allies in the two World Wars, the land they had illegally and forcibly seized from the people of Fako was re-purchased from the Custodian of Enemy Property by the Colonial British Administration, then under the Governor of Nigeria. The sum of 850,000 (eight hundred and fifty thousand) pounds sterling was paid for this restoration.
In the meantime, a movement of young, brave Fako nationalists was set up in 1943 to advocate for the recovery the lands stolen from the Fako indigenes by the Germans. This resulted in the creation of the Bakweri Lands Committee (BLC) (later known as the Bakweri Lands Claims Committee). This Committee comprised many enlightened sons and daughters, elites of Fako. members, personally known to the author and with whom I was privileged to hold long, educative discussions about this problem, this crisis, included such notables as the late Pa Effange of Small Soppo village, the late Chief Ewusi, of Mokunda village, to name a few. In 1946, David Mafany Endeley, the Secretary General of BLC, addressed a written complaint to the newly created United Nations Organization, in which, on behalf of the Bakweri Lands Committee (BLC) and the Fako (Bakweri) people, he demanded the restoration of Fako lands that were illegally seized, occupied, used and transformed into more than 23 (twenty-three) plantations by the Germans for over 50 years. This land constitutes the most fertile and strategically-positioned, resource-endowed, ancestral lands that belong to the people of Fako. In response to this justified demand, the United Nations ordered the British Government, under which the then Southern Cameroons (in which Victoria Division, now Fako Division, is found) was being administered together with Nigeria as a Trust Territory, to perform the following acts in law:
1. This land, this “ex-enemy property” that was illegally occupied by the Germans for over half a century, covering an area of approximately between 400 and 600 square miles of prime Fako land that comprised about 23 vast German plantations and some, was mapped out and declared Bakweri Private Native Lands by Ordinance (Law). (See Lands and Native Rights Ordinance (1958) Cap 96 # 3, Nigeria). 2. The Governor then borrowed money from the Government and paid the sum of 850,000 Pounds Sterling to the Custodian of Enemy Property as compensation for the plantations that existed on this land. He promised to have this money repaid by a new Statutory Corporation to be created for the benefit of the Bakweri people whose lands these plantations occupied. 3. This land was then placed under the custody of the then Governor of Nigeria to HOLD IN TRUST for the Bakweri people, who were deemed, at that time, not to have enough trained and qualified manpower to manage these vast estates without outside technical and managerial assistance. 4. In January 1947, after ensuring that the legal ownership of these lands had been transferred to their rightful owners, the Bakweri people, by an Ordinance, the CDC Ordinance No. 39 (1946), the Cameroon Development Corporation was created as a Statutory Corporation. Under this Statute, a sixty (60) year lease was granted to CDC by the trustee (The Governor of Nigeria) of Bakweri lands, on behalf of and for the benefit of the Bakweri people. CDC was then to be managed by an expatriate staff from the Commonwealth Development Corporation (also CDC) with HQ at Hill Street, London, U.K. 5. Cameroon Development Corporation would be managed for the Bakweri people for a sixty year period, during which it was expected that the Bakweris themselves would have developed enough manpower – managerial and technical- capacity to manage their own corporation, the CDC, without outside help. 6. Cameroon Development Corporation, CDC, would pay the Bakweri People land rents for ALL the lands occupied and being used as plantations for the duration of the 60 year lease. These rents would be paid to the Central Bakweri Local Council. 7. CDC, responsible for repaying the 850,000 pounds loan taken out by the Governor of Nigeria to repay the Custodian of Enemy Property, was able to effect such repayment within three years of its operation. The plantations, and CDC, now debt free, remained the unencumbered property of the Bakweris-the indigenes of FAKO. The management of CDC continued under the “assistance” of the British Commonwealth Development Corporation until 1973, when, after the alleged 1972 “referendum” which “resulted in the creation of a “unitary state”, CDC was arbitrarily and illegally appropriated by the Government of Cameroon and made into a State Corporation, WITHOUT COMPENSATION TO THE BAKWERI PEOPLE. It is worthy of note that CDC has never paid any rents or royalties to the Bakweri people during the life of the 60 year lease and since the expiration of the same lease in 2007. This state of affairs persisted until 1994 when the people of Fako, led by the Bakweri Lands Claim Committee, strongly supported by Fako Chiefs (as they then were), elites and other indigenous citizens of Fako, challenged the Government of Cameroon for trying to sell off parts of CDC – the Tole Tea Estates- without the permission and/or authority of its rightful owners - the people of Fako.
After a long spell of Government reticence and/or refusal to address the legitimate concerns of the people of Fako over this issue, in an unprecedented, bold and commendable move, the BLCC, led by its Secretary-General, the avuncular, venerable, no-nonsense Mola Njoh Litumbe, hitherto subjected to various forms of Government agents’ intimidation and harassment, sued the Government of Cameroon at the African Human Rights Commission Court in Banjul - The Banjul Court. The matter is still pending before that tribunal, which has now recognized the legitimacy of the Bakweri people’s claim against the Government of Cameroon and has re-instated the matter, which under the Commission’s Communication No 260/2002 had been put on hold awaiting attempts at an amicable resolution of the matter between the parties – the BLCC, the People of Fako and the Government of Cameroon.
In the meantime, while this matter is still pending before the African Commission of Human Rights, the Government, by the mechanism of some of its crooked, corrupt agents, began a process, a surreptitious, obscure and most questionable system, of “handing back” Bakweri People’s land occupied by the CDC to some Fako Chiefs and some Fako indigenes of very questionable origins and/or character. This is what is now called the “CDC Land Surrender” Problem. In a Memorandum dated Thursday, June 06th, 2013, addressed to the Senior Divisional Officer for Fako, Mr. Zang III, the President’s administrative representative, his AGENT, in the Fako Division, who has arrogated upon himself the ecstatic duty of dispossessing the Fako people of their ancestral lands through this “CDC Land Surrender”, I raised my concerns about the questionable nature of this surrender that results in alienating the lands in questions from their rightful owners. I demanded that a freeze, a stop, be put on this “surrender” until the Fako people themselves were properly constituted to strategically manage their own property, their own lands. For more than nine (9) months, I waited futilely for the SDO’s response. Nothing. Rather, we all have witnessed, and continue to witness, a frenetic acceleration of the “surrender” of Fako lands, which we now all know as a fact end up in the hands of the same SDO and his cronies. As of December 2012, I am reliably informed, about 2,800 hectares of prime Fako lands have been “surrendered” through the instrumentality of successive SDO’s and DO’s in Fako, who, ironically, are NOT Fako indigenes.
Much of these “surrendered” lands have been and are still being converted, as we write, into the private property of these SDO’s and DO’s and many of their cronies, including, unfortunately, some Fako Chiefs, so-called elites and other similar land traffickers, of Fako and non-Fako origin, who are registering these lands and obtaining land certificates for them as private personal landed property. In an interview on CRTV Buea Press Club Program a couple of weeks ago, (Saturday, April, 06, 2014) an alleged spokesman of the Fako Chiefs Conference told us, members of the panel of discussants: “We the chiefs sell land so that we can live a good life. We can buy luxurious, beautiful cars; build big houses so that we can BE RESPECTED”. There was no regret in the tone and attitude of this young (about thirty years or so), arrogant, naive, covetous, self-centered, uncouth, uncaring person who passes, or wishes to pass, for a chief of our beleaguered Fako people! Little wonder that their other colleagues from other Divisions and Regions in Cameroon treated some of them (the likes of the alleged spokesman) with such disdain and disrespect during the 50th Anniversary occasion, right in front of President Paul Biya, right here in Fako on “their own former territory”, “their own former land”, which now “belongs” to and is “controlled” by, “strangers” (thanks to the reckless and illegal land-selling extravaganza of some). This, my dear and honored Ancestors of Fakoland, my Mothers and Fathers of Fako, the True Chiefs and Custodians of Fako land, elites and citizens of Fako, opinion leaders, politicians, lawyers, historians, students, Youths of Fako, our President of Cameroon, our Prime Minister of Cameroon, Presidents of the National Assembly and Senate of Cameroon, Parliamentarians, Senators, Civil Society leaders, readers, fellow Cameroonians, is the nature, the makeup, the true and unadulterated picture of the FAKO LAND CRISIS. I have seen my own share of conflict, truly bloody conflict, in this world. Having participated, in various professional and leadership capacities in several conflict-ridden countries and regions of this world, I know, and I have the honest conviction, that Prevention of Conflict, timely prevention of conflict, is more useful and welcome that futile attempts at restoring peace in already damaged, wounded, traumatized and fragmented communities and countries. In my experience and knowledge, most of the conflicts in this world are provoked by injustices, especially injustices deriving from the dispossession of a people’s ancestral land rights. I witnessed the conflict in Burundi, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name a few. They all have one common denominator: LAND. The Fako land crisis has the making of a time bomb, waiting, seething, silent, but deadly. It is a symptom of a larger problem in our country: The arrogance of power and the abuse and misuse of the privileges of the dominant ruling section of the population in this country. It is also a symptom of the “The Stranger Problem” that the British so succinctly analyzed in their Intelligence Report of 1935-1938, which I quoted above. These problems must be addressed and resolved quickly. The status quo ante must be restored and the lost harmony and justice of our society regained.
It is now long overdue for us to have a truly INTERNATIONAL INDEPENDENT COMMISSION OF IQUIRY comprising members from the African Commission, the United Nations, The Commonwealth, Experts and Elites of Fako origin, duly constituted to carry out an in-depth and exhaustive investigation of this Fako Land Crisis dating back from 1946 when the Bakweri Native Lands Ordinance was promulgated in recognition of the ancestral land rights of the Fako people, by the Trustee Administration of the British Government. Our Cameroon Government has the obligation, the duty, under International law and under our Constitution, to honor, defend, protect, project, enforce and respect these ancestral land rights and to protect the people of Fako from some of its corrupt agents in Fako, who are acting, with impunity, outside of their authority, outside of mandate and outside of the law. If this is not done, and done quickly, this Government of Cameroon in its present administration will be held responsible for the INEVITABLE EXPLOSION of CONFLICT that will result, in due course, in Fako and in all other Regions and/or Divisions or Communities in this country where similar injustices are being perpetrated by Government Administrators, SDO’s. DO’s, Agents and other dominant individuals or groups, against other minority peoples like the peoples of Fako. I Rest!!!
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