How African Christian Leaders Advanced the Conversion of their own People in Colonial French Cameroon

A Review Essay of Charlotte Walker-Said’s Faith, Power and Family: Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon

In recent times, Africa’s cities and towns have experienced an explosion of Pentecostal fervour as more and more “men of God” invest in the business of saving souls or peddling the shibboleth that divine favour is best measured by the size of one’s material endowments. While ethnographers may be preoccupied documenting and analysing these trends, a few decades from now, historians will piece together this era by mining documentary and oral sources. Such is what Charlotte Walker-Said has accomplished for a different era in French Cameroon historiography – it’s Christianization during the interwar years (1914 – 1939). In Faith, Power and Family, she details Christianity’s role in reconfiguring African marriage and family-building among French Cameroonians in the southern forest and coastal zones and to a limited extent, the western Grassfields.

As I see it, this volume is animated by several questions; how did French Cameroonians become Christian? Besides European and American missionaries, what role did Africans play in localizing the Christian church and faith? How did colonialism alter the social, economic and political structures and how did these forces shape attitudes towards the Christian religion? Specifically, how did Christianity reform African worldviews about marriage, the family, and patriarchy? These questions, far from being exhaustive, are complemented by two central objectives, the first of which is to “uncover the spiritual and the secular forces in conversation with one another – how individuals’ and groups’ beliefs about the world of the spirit – the invisible world – influenced and engaged with their choices in the world of lived experience” (41). Secondly, to paint a portrait of the localization of Christianity through a critical analysis of the choices individuals and groups made concerning marital and familial relationships (41). To address these questions and objectives, Walker-Said relies on archival sources and oral sources.

Walker-Said contends along with other historians that the reconfiguration of African marriage lay at the heart of the evangelizing mission – this, because the monogamous family was believed by missionaries to be an exemplar and principal vector of propagating the Christian worldview (8). To this end, she submits that “Christian marriage and family-building are explored as both individual acts and subjects of collective religious and social mobilization that contained expressions of rebellion and resistance, as well as devotion and obedience” (12). While missionaries played a leading role in reforming African marriages, Walker-Said argues, such evangelizing wouldn’t have made rapid gains without the important role of African Christian leaders –especially catechists in both Catholic and Protestant missions. It “…was African Christian leaders’ refinement and reformation of matrimony” she contends, “and family alliance-building, and the process of crafting and circulating the vehement criticisms and enthusiastic devotional practices that allowed this to occur…” (9) – namely the popularization of Christian marriage as the “essential rite through which to receive God’s grace” (9). Overall, these Christian leaders – catechists, priests and pastors “acted as buffers against radical change, but also intentionally propelled it” (27), thereby contributing to the emergency of what Walker-Said calls Christian publics – cross-cultural confessional units – that “led their members toward new forms of personal piety, collective worship, and cultural expression” (27). These points, I believe, constitute the central thrust of Walker-Said’s arguments – one which accords agency to the role of African converts in telling the African story of conversion. The principal actors herein are the colonial administrators, French and American missionaries, African Christian leaders (catechists in particular), colonially-appointed African chiefs, and of course, women and men.

In chapters three through five, Walker-Said weaves a detailed account about the role catechists played in the creation of Christian publics at the inception of French rule. By 1923 for example, registered Catholic Christians in Beti territory had grown to about 79,000 despite the presence of only 12 French priests. It was, Mgr. Vogt asserted, thanks to the 1227 catechists operating in the Beti area that Africans’ conversion had been largely accomplished (81). I find this number quite staggering. It wasn’t only the Catholic church that relied on catechists; Protestant missions including the Evangelical, Baptist and American Presbyterian missions all relied on hundreds of catechists. Given the exponential growth in the number of catechists, the question may be rightly asked – what attracted people to become catechist? The clues lie in the deep structures of indigenous society.

In precolonial Beti and Bulu societies, Walker-Said suggests, status and prestige were marked by the ability to outperform one’s peers through speech – understood to be the “substance of life” (83). In Beti society, men who wielded authority often had command of mystical and charismatic power but what legitimized their authority was their “command of language” (82). Such men – orators and village heads were by all accounts the leaders in their communities (given the absence of institutionalized centralized chieftaincy).  In colonial Beti and Bulu societies, another layer of power was added to pre-existing regimes of authority – Christianity provided the surest pathway to literacy – “the power of the book” (85). Thus, conversion and becoming a catechist meant that these new class of men could read the scripture aloud, attract a following in local society and command prestige, thereby contributing to the emergence of a redefined masculinity of “real men” or “full men” (87). In many of the Catholic and Protestant communities, catechists heard confessions (88), scrutinized Christians’ behaviours, maintained records of “good standing” and supervised the reintroduction of repentant Christians back into the mission. Christian missions thus provided ample opportunities for men in Beti society to fulfil customary expectations of manhood: oratory and the power to possess women. Mission communities provided catechists with the opportunities to express and consolidate these two forms of power by attracting a large following, including women fleeing polygamous or forced marriages (98).

A significant issue addressed in the book relates to the effects of the expansion of the cash crop economy, the outright violence employed by the colonial administration through their appointed chiefs and the disruptions these brought on family-building efforts. This conundrum is summed up in chapter four where Walker-Said focuses on the growing inequality between older men and their younger peers and how each party responded to these disruptions. Backed by the French administration, many chiefs invested heavily in the cash crop economy, expanding their land holdings as their fortunes increased. Chief Zogo Fouda Ngono of the Manguissa people for example is believed to have owned nearly four hundred acres of cocoa plantations and allegedly had over 800 wives near the end of his life (116). An Eton chief, Tsanga Manga owned over 23,000 square foot of cocoa where most of his wives and other clients laboured (117). What emerges from this chapter is that colonialism and the market economy bolstered the status of chiefs – who became despots over their own people. Their financial resource in turn “bolstered their ability to make large bridewealth payments and enlarge their land holdings, and precluded lower-status men from engaging in these pursuits” (102). These developments eventually perverted the African meanings originally attached to bridewealth as it gradually became “a source of revenue for families and a routine expenditure for wealthy men” (106).

By paying larger than usual bridewealth to fathers, the cost of bridewealth grew exponentially in Beti society (115), making it harder for younger men to find suitable brides. Young catechists relayed their disgust to the missionaries, finger-pointing chiefs’ “bride avarice” and their own poverty as the principal factors that prevented them from marriage (108). It is within this context that catechists and Christian missions mounted a crusade against polygamous marriages. Mgr. Vogt stated: “One polygamous man with 50 wives is preventing 50 families from being founded” (106).

For the missionaries, promoting monogamy held the surest pathway to localizing Christianity in the forest zone. To this end, polygamous men and chiefs would only be accepted as catechumens on the condition that they renounced polygamy (128). African clergy enthusiastically furthered this goal as they stood to gain from chiefs divorcing their multiple wives. This trend also popularized the growth of sixas – a sanctuary for widows, women fleeing undesirable marriages or released from polygamous marriages. At sixas, the women were sheltered, educated and prepared for baptism. In chapter five, Walk-Said deepens our understanding of the reformation of African marriages by exploring how African converts embraced the ideology of love and the nuclear family. Walker-Said cautions that the proselytizing and adoption of these new ideologies need to be understood against the backdrop of changing economic and political conditions – some of which explicitly promoted the idea of authority over women as morally and spiritually exigent (143). Missionaries not only opposed marriages that emphasized lineage connections but also spoke out against the rising cost of bridewealth. However, it is Africans who, she argues, upon embracing the mission ideology of love and the nuclear family, became the principal promoters of the missions’ effort to convert, instruct and discipline new converts.  Economic growth also provided increased opportunities for economic cooperation among Christians which eventually resulted in the birth of Christian networks. These associations provided a platform for new marriages to be negotiated as well as develop programs of mutual aid (175). Both Protestant and Catholic missions created their own networks aimed at the advancement of their fellow converts. Some of the popular associations that emerged during this period include the Confrérie de l’Adoration Réparatrice, Confrérie des Cinq Plaies de Jésus – whose principal mandate was to raise funds towards “bride redemption” – namely making payments to polygamous men and husbands of child brides to redeem their wives (195), and the Croix Bleue which ran a sustained campaign against alcoholism, visibly on the rise on account of the increased felling of palm trees for the export of palm oil (203).

Catechists’ activism predictably placed them at loggerheads not only with colonial authorities but also with the appointed chiefs. This resulted in the increased arrests of catechists on trumped-up charges. Between 1930 and 1935, “more catechists were arrested by chiefs’ police for crimes including insubordination, fraud, kidnapping, drunkenness, theft….” (225). Chiefs saw catechists as their archrivals because the latter had escalated their campaign against forceful and polygamous marriages as well as the exorbitant price of bridewealth etc. Chiefs on their part angered the catechists even more as the demand for labour for road construction grew and chiefs resorted to the forceful recruitment of labourers even on Sundays (225).

An issue that could be developed further rests on one of the central claims Walker-Said makes about the status of women during the interwar years. According to her, reforms in marriage and the family ultimately limited women’s autonomy in the southern forest of French Cameroon (20). What does autonomy mean in a society structured by sociocentric ideas of interdependence? If indeed a critical analysis of women’s autonomy is to be achieved, one would have to consider the twin forces of colonialism and capitalism, as well as how Christian missions with their varying ideologies all played different roles to undermine women’s social standing. Such an analysis would also warrant more data from the western Grassfields of French Cameroon, given the significant differences in their cultural traditions and worldviews, compared to the forest zones.

This notwithstanding, Walker-Said has provided us with a thorough description and analysis of how French colonialism and successive Christian missions targeted and sought to reform African marriages and family systems – not only as essential to the mission civilisatrice, but also as essential to raising future generations of Christians. While European missionaries played a pioneering role by sowing the seeds of these reforms, Walker-Said argues that it was indeed African evangelists who took over and managed the pace at which everyday life was reconfigured (276). Ultimately, this book is a thoroughly-researched and detailed testimony and celebration of the role African catechists, priests and pastors played in reconfiguring marriage and the African family during the interwar periods in the southern forest zone of French Cameroon.