True Nature Of Fako (Bakweri) Land Crisis (I)

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 the Cameroon Development Corporation, 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) 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 emphasises “doctrinal” history that favors the selective teaching of history and strives to obliterate a people’s past for one sole purpose – 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, DRC, 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 dynamici, 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, 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”.