7 - African Agents of the Church and State: Male Violence and Productivity

Summary

Confrontation and Command

In spring and summer 1930, chiefs and police recruiting laborers for the Mbalmayo–Ngulmekong and Abong Mbang–Doumé roads became increasingly desperate. As men fled to cities or ventured deep into forests with confraternal brothers, recruiters rounded up the remaining women and girls – often with babies tied to their backs – and forced them to march thirty or forty kilometers to worksites to remove earth and rock. Père François Pichon witnessed Chief Tsama Okoa whipping his recruits mercilessly, and heard accounts from villagers that Chief Frédéric Foe, along with his police, raided villages in the middle of the night where he stripped his female captives naked and chained them together at the neck and wrist to drag them to construction zones. When villagers returned home after several weeks – which they were only permitted to do in order to collect food – they shared accounts of their experiences with their spiritual leaders and warned their neighbors to hide themselves or find money for the rachat. In April 1930, Père Pichon personally saw chiefs gather work gangs comprised exclusively of women and children for work on the Adjap–Bénébalot road. With help from the local priest, the women of the Minlaba Mission, who were often recruited to work in the nearby Adjap worksites, wrote to Bishop Vogt to complain they were starved on the road under the pretext that as they were women, they could forage or harvest food wherever they were. They also related that they were beaten for refusing rotten food, denied Sunday rest, and that Angba, a catechist's wife, was beaten by a chief for opposing a small girl's recruitment. The women of Minlaba also protested abuses they saw of other workers: wardens and police knocking out an elderly man's teeth with matraques, workers coughing up blood, and demands to fetch palm wine for guards.

Governor Marchand was the most resolute in his denial of such incidents. In 1930, he responded to Mgr. Vogt's criticisms regarding forced labor: “My administration does not have to justify itself to certain unqualified observers.” In another letter, Marchand responded that missionaries’ testimonies of women's prestation were “flagrant inexactitudes.”