1 - Introduction: Marriage at the Nexus of Faith, Power, and Family

Summary

On April 29, 1927, the African catechist Jean Bell whipped a local Catholic man, Matthias Bakatal, after he discovered through rumors in the village of Mangen Mandyok that Bakatal had secretly married a second wife, despite marrying his first wife according to the sacrament several years prior. Bell confronted Bakatal, saying to him, “You live like a pagan. You must come to confess.” Bakatal then confessed to the French priests in the nearby Nlong Mission and received the sacrament of reconciliation, after which Bell assumed responsibility for deciding Bakatal's penance, which included divorcing his second wife, saying two rosaries per day for two weeks, and corporal punishment. Bell declared to Bakatal, “You must do public penitence because you were the subject of public scandal. I will beat you at the door of the chapel. Better to receive punishment now than in hell.” And so Jean Bell meted out twenty lashes to Matthais Bakatal before God and the missionaries in the Nlong chapel doorway, a liminal space that perhaps symbolically reminded the malefactor that he occupied a precarious position in the Catholic community.

African Christian men in French-administered Cameroon were both architects and targets of the strident religious rhetoric and intensive activism that characterized Christian evangelism in the southern regions of the territory between World War I and II. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christianity became a global religion and many African societies assumed a tenacious hold on the faith, using its tenets and institutions to reflect and adapt their existing worldviews. French Cameroon during the interwar decades provides a unique example of a diverse and competitive set of populations who became familiarized with Christianity through correspondingly competitive and diverse cadres of indigenous and foreign evangelists, and crafted a particularly assertive religion that provoked profound responses from those both inside and outside of African faith communities.