Communication and Conversion in Northern Cameroon: The Dii People and Norwegian Missionaries, 1934-1960 900417754X, 9789004177543

Table of contents :
CONTENTS......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 10
List of Maps......Page 12
List of Illustrations......Page 14
Maps......Page 16
Illustrations from the Dii-Mission Encounter......Page 18
I. Communicating Freedom or Colonial Evangelism?......Page 30
Anthropological History......Page 31
The Encounter between Dii and the Mission......Page 32
Regional Studies......Page 34
Colonial Evangelism?......Page 36
Communication, Discourse, Translatability and Worldview......Page 38
Understanding the Process of Communication......Page 39
The Octopus Concept of Discourse......Page 41
Translatability......Page 44
Mission as Worldview Encounter......Page 45
Norwegian Archival Material......Page 47
French Archival Material......Page 49
Fieldwork Experiences......Page 51
Fieldwork and Situatedness......Page 54
Delimitation of the Study......Page 56
II. Our Ancestors Used to Live on this Mountain......Page 59
The Dii......Page 60
The Arrival of Islam......Page 63
The Religious Content of the Jihad......Page 67
Islam and the Dii......Page 72
The European Colonial Race for Cameroon......Page 74
The French Colonial Administration and the Dii......Page 79
The French Colonial Administration and Christian Missionaries......Page 82
The Arrival of Christianity......Page 88
The "Crisis in Duru" – a Fight for Colonial Goodwill......Page 93
The Dii-Rey-Bouba Controversy; a Social Reorganisation of the Dii......Page 97
III. Like a Labyrinth is his Life – a Missionary Discourse on Conversion......Page 100
Conversion as a Process of Growth and Liberation......Page 101
Conversion as Liberation from Spiritual Oppression......Page 105
Conversion as Freedom from Social Oppression......Page 108
Conversion as Liberation from Ignorance......Page 110
Conversion as Liberation from Sickness......Page 113
Conversion as Liberation from Destructive Behaviour......Page 115
IV. And it is Really Thanks to You that We are Saved – a Dii Discourse on Conversion......Page 119
Methodological Considerations......Page 120
The First Encounter......Page 121
The Attraction of the Message and the Media......Page 124
Towards Social Change......Page 128
Liberation from Forced Labour......Page 131
The Missionaries Came with Tenderness......Page 133
The Creation of a Modern Myth......Page 137
Studying African Traditional Religion......Page 144
Dii Traditional Religious Rites......Page 150
Dii Cosmology: God, Ancestors and Myths of Origin......Page 158
Crisis and Change......Page 163
VI. Establishing a Church on the Dii-Plain......Page 167
Phase 1: Establishment, Progress, and Setback (1934–1939)......Page 168
Phase 2: Status Quo (1940–1947)......Page 173
Phase 3: Reconstruction (1948–1952)......Page 179
Phase 4: Consolidation and Growth (1953–1960)......Page 188
A New Dii Christian Identity......Page 194
Dii Traditions and Translatability......Page 196
New Elements in Dii Christianity......Page 201
Towards a Dii Christian Worldview......Page 206
Cognitive Worldview Assumptions......Page 209
Aff ective Worldview Assumptions......Page 210
Evaluative Worldview Assumptions......Page 212
Communication as Cultural Encounter......Page 214
Communication as Negotiation of Meaning......Page 216
Conversion – Colonisation of African Consciousness?......Page 219
Conversion – Change in Dii Plausibility Structure?......Page 223
The Dii Path towards Conversion......Page 227
Crisis......Page 228
Context......Page 229
Translatability......Page 230
Attitude......Page 231
Conservation – African Mental Maps of the Universe......Page 232
Concluding Remarks......Page 236
The First Pastors......Page 240
Students......Page 241
Appendix C: Norwegian Missionaries on the Dii-Plain (1934–1960)......Page 242
Appendix D: Statistics, Mission Work on the Dii-Plain (1934–1960)......Page 243
Bibliography......Page 246
Index......Page 254

Citation preview

Communication and Conversion in Northern Cameroon

Studies in Christian Mission General Editors Marc R. Spindler, Leiden University Heleen L. Murre-van den Berg, Leiden University Editorial Board Peggy Brock, Edith Cowan University James Grayson, University of Sheffield David Maxwell, Keele University

VOLUME 37

Communication and Conversion in Northern Cameroon The Dii People and Norwegian Missionaries, 1934–1960

By

Tomas Sundnes Drønen

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover illustration: The geuk mask worn by the chief of the mask, bangmen, during the rite of circumcision in Sakjé, probably in the early 1950s. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/ NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981-040. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drønen, Tomas Sundnes. Communication and conversion in northern Cameroon : the Dii people and Norwegian missionaries, 1934–1960 / by Tomas Sundnes Drønen. p. cm. — (Studies in Christian mission, ISSN 0924-9389 ; v. 37) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17754-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Dii (African people)— Missions. 2. Dii (African People)—Religion. 3. Missions, Norwegian—Cameroon. 4. Christianity and culture—Cameroon. I. Title. BV3630.D55D76 2009 266’.0234810671108996361—dc22 2009020916

ISSN 0924-9389 ISBN 978 90 04 17754 3 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................ List of Maps ........................................................................................ List of Illustrations ............................................................................ Maps ..................................................................................................... Illustrations from the Dii-Mission Encounter ..............................

ix xi xiii xv xvii

I. Communicating Freedom or Colonial Evangelism? ............. Anthropological History ............................................................ The Encounter between Dii and the Mission ......................... Regional Studies .......................................................................... Colonial Evangelism? .................................................................. Communication, Discourse, Translatability and Worldview ........................................................................ Understanding the Process of Communication ................ The Octopus Concept of Discourse ..................................... Translatability .......................................................................... Mission as Worldview Encounter ........................................ Norwegian Archival Material .................................................... French Archival Material ........................................................... Fieldwork Experiences ................................................................ Fieldwork and Situatedness ....................................................... Delimitation of the Study ..........................................................

1 2 3 5 7

II. Our Ancestors Used to Live on this Mountain . . . ................ The Dii ........................................................................................... The Arrival of Islam .................................................................... The Religious Content of the Jihad .......................................... Islam and the Dii ......................................................................... The European Colonial Race for Cameroon .......................... The French Colonial Administration and the Dii ................. The French Colonial Administration and Christian Missionaries ............................................................................. The Arrival of Christianity ........................................................ The “Crisis in Duru” – a Fight for Colonial Goodwill ......... The Dii-Rey-Bouba Controversy; a Social Reorganisation of the Dii ..................................................................................

9 10 12 15 16 18 20 22 25 27 30 31 34 38 43 45 50 53 59 64 68

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III. Like a Labyrinth is his Life – a Missionary Discourse on Conversion ................................................................................ Conversion as a Process of Growth and Liberation .......... Conversion as Liberation from Spiritual Oppression ........ Conversion as Freedom from Social Oppression ............... Conversion as Liberation from Ignorance ........................... Conversion as Liberation from Sickness .............................. Conversion as Liberation from Destructive Behaviour .....

71 72 76 79 81 84 86

IV. And it is Really Thanks to You that We are Saved – a Dii Discourse on Conversion ........................................................ Methodological Considerations ............................................. The First Encounter ................................................................. The Attraction of the Message and the Media .................... Towards Social Change ........................................................... Liberation from Forced Labour ............................................. The Missionaries Came with Tenderness . . . ........................ The Creation of a Modern Myth ...........................................

90 91 92 95 99 102 104 108

V. The Crisis of Dii Traditional Religion .................................. Studying African Traditional Religion .................................. Dii Traditional Religious Rites ............................................... Dii Cosmology: God, Ancestors and Myths of Origin ...... Crisis and Change ..................................................................

115 115 121 129 134

VI. Establishing a Church on the Dii-Plain ................................ Phase 1: Establishment, Progress, and Setback (1934–1939) ........................................................................... Phase 2: Status Quo (1940–1947) .......................................... Phase 3: Reconstruction (1948–1952) ................................... Phase 4: Consolidation and Growth (1953–1960) ..............

138 139 144 150 159

VII. The Emergence of a Dii Christianity .................................... A New Dii Christian Identity ................................................. Dii Traditions and Translatability ......................................... New Elements in Dii Christianity ......................................... Towards a Dii Christian Worldview ..................................... Cognitive Worldview Assumptions ....................................... Affective Worldview Assumptions ........................................ Evaluative Worldview Assumptions ......................................

165 165 167 172 177 180 181 183

contents

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VIII. Communication, Conversion, and Conservation .............. Communication as Cultural Encounter .............................. Communication as Negotiation of Meaning ..................... Conversion – Colonisation of African Consciousness? ... Conversion – Change in Dii Plausibility Structure? ......... The Dii Path towards Conversion ........................................ Crisis ..................................................................................... Context ................................................................................. Translatability ...................................................................... Attitude ................................................................................ Conservation – African Mental Maps of the Universe ....

185 185 187 190 194 198 199 200 201 202 203

Concluding Remarks .........................................................................

207

Appendix A: The First Dii Church Employees ............................ The First Catechists ....................................................................... The First Evangelists ..................................................................... The First Pastors ............................................................................ Appendix B: The Bible-School in Ngaouyanga (1950–1951) .................................................................................... Teachers .......................................................................................... Students ........................................................................................... Appendix C: Norwegian Missionaries on the Dii-Plain (1934–1960) .................................................................................... Appendix D: Statistics, Mission Work on the Dii-Plain (1934–1960) ....................................................................................

211 211 211 211

Bibliography ........................................................................................ Index ....................................................................................................

217 225

212 212 212 213 214

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No man is an island. At least I am not. This study is thus the fruit of inspiration from and collaboration with several individuals and institutions. First of all I would like to thank my Dii colleague, Koulagna Jean, who convinced me that such a study was possible and meaningful to accomplish, and secondly my two Dii research assistants, Djédou Pierre and Abdoul Kadiri. Our fieldtrips and long discussions through the African night have become the foundation of this study. I am also greatly indebted to Ketil Fred Hansen, who put at my disposal copies of all his archive findings from his fieldwork in Cameroon. Copies of documents I could not find in Yaoundé, I actually found in my own neighbourhood in Stavanger! Of much help in the initial phase of this project was also the encouragement I received from the experienced researchers Lisbet Holtedahl and Marianne Gullestad (who left us too early). I would like to thank School of Mission and Theology in Stavanger for granting me a three-year Ph.D. scholarship in addition to access to the library and the NMS Mission Archives with its very helpful staff. Special thanks to Bjørg Bergøy Johansen and Gustav Steensland, archive employees, for going the extra mile with me, and to all my colleagues who read parts of my text and gave me valuable comments. I am also thankful towards the University in Ngaoundéré which received me as a colleague and to my local tutor, Mohammadou Djingui (Badjika), for inspiring meetings during my fieldwork. I would also like to thank School of Mission and Theology, the Norwegian Missionary Society, the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, E. I. Hambro’s legacy and Oslo Lille Indremisjon for granting me funds and enabling me (and my family) to do fieldwork research in Cameroon. Finally I would like to thank Torstein Jørgensen, for his ability to listen, for his ability to encourage, and for asking the right questions; and Thomas G. Christensen, who guided me during my first years as a lecturer in Cameroun, and who read and commented upon the whole manuscript. And to Nina, Daniel and Mikael – nous sommes ensemble . . .

LIST OF MAPS 1. Africa seen from a Norwegian viewpoint in the 1950s. The NMSpublished collection of maps (1955/56) shows Cameroon as a shaded area within the Sudan. Source: Mission Archives A1206 T-0014. 2. The northern part of the ‘NMS-field’ in Cameroon, cut from an NMS-published collection of maps (1955/56). The NMS mission stations are indicated with a cross next to the name of the village, and the black spots indicate villages where the mission had established its work. Source: Mission Archives A1206 T-0014.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Etienne Wahl leading the choir of the first pupils at the mission school in Wack 1934. 2. Halfdan Endresen watching over the Ngaoyanga mission school in 1937. Birgit Endresen, Anne Marie Fløttum, and two African teachers (unknown) are lined up together with the pupils. 3. Evangelisation tour in the Mbé area around 1940. Halfdan Endresen in the palanquin, the future pastor Abdou Daniel in front with the gun. 4. Evangelisation tour in Tagboum 1950. Abdou Daniel is preaching, the chief is sitting behind him at his right and Anne Marie Fløttum at his left. 5. The dóÕñ naa in Sakjé posing with his two lances, taa and hiek zag. Probably in the early 1950s. Õ naa is most likely preparing the young boys in Sakjé for the 6. The dóñ introductory phase of the circumcision rite. Anne Marie Fløttum is watching. 7. The geuk mask worn by the chief of the mask, bangmen, during the rite of circumcision in Sakjé, probably in the early 1950s. 8. Young Dii boys carrying wood to the dóÕñ naa and to the village chief in the final phase of the rite of circumcision. Sakjé, probably the early 1950s. 9. The geuk mask is exposed during a festival on the Dii-plain in 1937. 10. Dii musicians playing the kongnang, Ngaouyanga 1940. 11. The truck used by the NMS missionaries, Anne Marie Fløttum in the front seat. Yoko 1936. 12. The truck is being filled up before departure from Yoko 1936. 13. The first temporary houses at the Mbé mission station 1951. 14. The Mbé chief, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, 1950. 15. The church in Mbé in the 1950s. Anne Marie Fløttum posing with the congregation. 16. Pupils marching at the mission station in Mbé 1957. 17. Maïdawa Thomas greeting the Mbé village chief, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, during his ordination in Mbé 1956.

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list of illustrations

18. Translating the Bible into Mbum, Meng 1960. From left to right: Sverre Fløttum, Abdou Daniel, unknown, Nils Olai Otterøy. 19. Maintaining good relations with the colonial administration during the July 14 celebration in Yoko 1934. The Europeans from left to right: Birgit Endresen, Anne Marie Fløttum, Mme Delteil, unknown, M Deltail, Halfdan Endresen. 20. Maintaining good relations with the village elders. The two unknown persons share a pipe of tobacco somewhere on the Dii-plain in the 1950s.

Map 1. Africa seen from a Norwegian viewpoint in the 1950s. The NMSpublished collection of maps (1955/56) shows Cameroon as a shaded area within the Sudan. Source: Mission Archives A1206 T-0014.

Map 2. The northern part of the ‘NMS-field’ in Cameroon, cut from an NMS-published collection of maps (1955/56). The NMS mission stations are indicated with a cross next to the name of the village, and the black spots indicate villages where the mission had established its work. Source: Mission Archives A1206 T-0014.

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE DII-MISSION ENCOUNTER

1. Etienne Wahl leading the choir of the first pupils at the mission school in Wack 1934. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–002.

2. Halfdan Endresen watching over the Ngaoyanga mission school in 1937. Birgit Endresen, Anne Marie Fløttum, and two African teachers (unknown) are lined up together with the pupils. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 0782–107.

3. Evangelisation tour in the Mbé area around 1940. Halfdan Endresen in the palanquin, the future pastor Abdou Daniel in front with the gun. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–023.

4. Evangelisation tour in Tagboum 1950. Abdou Daniel is preaching, the chief is sitting behind him at his right and Anne Marie Fløttum at his left. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–061.

5. The dóÕñ naa in Sakjé posing with his two lances, taa and hiek zag. Probably in the early 1950s. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–015.

6. The dóÕñ naa is most likely preparing the young boys in Sakjé for the introductory phase of the circumcision rite. Anne Marie Fløttum is watching. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–017.

7. The geuk mask worn by the chief of the mask, bangmen, during the rite of circumcision in Sakjé, probably in the early 1950s. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–040.

8. Young Dii boys carrying wood to the dóÕñ naa and to the village chief in the final phase of the rite of circumcision. Sakjé, probably the early 1950s. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–038.

9. The geuk mask is exposed during a festival on the Dii-plain in 1937. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2968–037.

10. Dii musicians playing the kongnang, Ngaouyanga 1940. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–037.

11. The truck used by the NMS missionaries, Anne Marie Fløttum in the front seat. Yoko 1936. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 0751–010.

12. The truck is being filled up before departure from Yoko 1936. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/ NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2968–099.

13. The first temporary houses at the Mbé mission station 1951. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–017.

14. The Mbé chief, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, 1950. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/ Anthropos/PCD: 2984–004.

15. The church in Mbé in the 1950s. Anne Marie Fløttum posing with the congregation. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 0751–070.

16. Pupils marching at the mission station in Mbé 1957. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 02984–021.

17. Maïdawa Thomas greeting the Mbé village chief, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, during his ordination in Mbé 1956. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–075.

18. Translating the Bible into Mbum, Meng 1960. From left to right: Sverre Fløttum, Abdou Daniel, unknown, Nils Olai Otterøy. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/ PCD: 2984–022.

19. Maintaining good relations with the colonial administration during the 14 July celebration in Yoko 1934. The Europeans from left to right: Birgit Endresen, Anne Marie Fløttum, Mme Delteil, unknown, M Deltail, Halfdan Endresen. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2984–041.

20. Maintaining good relations with the village elders. The two unknown persons share a pipe of tobacco somewhere on the Dii-plain in the 1950s. Photo: Sverre Fløttum/NMS Archives/Anthropos/PCD: 2981–057.

CHAPTER ONE

COMMUNICATING FREEDOM OR COLONIAL EVANGELISM? Mbé, November 1996. One early chilly morning I got in the car together with two Dii pastors and one Norwegian missionary. We were heading three hundred kilometres north toward the famous lamido1 in Rey-Bouba in order for the pastors to ask permission to build a new church on Baba Ray’s land. Where we left the paved road, two of the lamido’s doggaries (soldiers), armed with guns, got in the car. One hundred kilometres later, a new roadblock revealed yet two more armed guards. Arriving at the impressive palace of the lamido we were told to wait outside. An hour passed in the sun. We were then told that the lamido could not see us, because he was in mourning. One of the lamido’s men had killed a government official and had lost his life in the subsequent shooting. The two Dii pastors nodded in sympathy. “We will have to come back next week then.” I was astonished. Six hundred kilometres through the heat and the dust of the Cameroonian highland to ask for a symbolic building permit did not seem to dissuade the two pastors from trying again later.

My first fieldwork in Cameroon taught me a lesson about history and power relations. It taught me a lesson about society structures and the relationship between continuity and change that I had never grasped from the history books. Although I had heard about it from former missionaries and had seen the slideshow, I had never truly understood what African Christianity was all about. More than about leaving behind old ‘heathen’ traditions and more than about explosive church growth and the cheerful song from numerous choirs, it was about living everyday life on African soil. It was about relating new ideas to old tradition and history. The story to be told in this book is not a naturalist detailed historical presentation of the work of the Norwegian missionaries. Neither is it an impressionist work of anthropology, describing the rites and symbolic

1 Lamido, pl. lamibbe, is the political leader of the Muslim Fulbe community. The lamido is also technically the religious leader of the Fulbe, even if he exercises few religious duties. Today even the Mbé chief is called lamido by the population, a sign of Fulbe and Muslim influence on traditional political administration. Lamido can be translated both as sultan and as king.

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practices of the Dii people. It is rather a mosaic of the Dii-mission intercultural encounter, made up by different pieces that together will form a larger picture. And seen from different angles, and in a different light, one might see different nuances in this picture. The final chapter has been entitled Communication, Conversion, and Conservation, indicating different theoretical approaches, focusing on both continuity and change. It is an interdisciplinary study, where the point of departure is mission history, but where most work has been done in the carrefour where theology meets social sciences. And it has been my hope to make this carrefour one of dialogue and not one of conflict; a place where theology can be challenged by material symbolism and where the social sciences hopefully can enlarge their horizon towards the transcendent reality that motivates religious thought and behaviour. Anthropological History Why anthropological history? The traditional (or conventional) modernist historian’s project has been to write history, according to von Ranke, wie es eigentlich gewesen war. The main problem of the historian has been to find the historical sources available, and once found, to evaluate them critically. The historian, unlike the sociologist or the anthropologist, has not been able to ‘create’ his/her own sources, for instance by face-to-face surveys. The academic approach has focused on the originality, authenticity, credibility, and validity of the sources, and historians investigate those who have produced the sources, and why they were produced (Dahl 1973: 48). But parallel with this conventional historical approach a more loosely connected tradition, often called ‘cultural history’, has emerged. This tradition has promoted a somewhat different focus from the conventional historians, focusing on the under-privileged, on sub-cultures, and on the encounter of cultures (Kjeldstadli 1989: 51). As regards the naming of this tradition, no consensus has been reached. Cultural history has been mentioned, but the recent movement is toward the methods used in anthropology and the labels used vary according to the content of the academic work. Knut Kjeldstadli talks about historical anthropology (Kjeldstadli 1989), Robert Darnton about the symbolic element in history (Darnton 1986), and Peter Burke about anthropological or cultural history (Burke 1997). Maybe the most precise thing we can say about this subject is that it

communicating freedom or colonial evangelism?

3

concerns scholars of either history or anthropology who use methods from both disciplines (Kjeldstadli 1989: 50). To accentuate the necessity of qualitative methods in this approach to the discipline of history, let us for a moment consider Burke’s arguments in Varieties of Cultural History. Burke introduces the topic by stating that in a time of fragmentation, specialisation, and relativism, a cultural approach to history has become even more necessary, and that this is the reason why scholars from several disciplines from literary criticism to sociology have been turning in this direction (Burke 1997: 191–192). Several new approaches have been utilised by historians; focus on the importance of symbols, ‘close reading’ of texts, and semiotics. The use of symbols, and especially the interpretation of symbols, have been much debated among historians. Darnton puts it this way: “historians feel more comfortable in prose. They order things sequentially and argue from effect to cause. But ordinary people in everyday life have to find their way through a forest of symbols.” (Darnton 1986: 220). The potential dangers of a symbolic approach to history have been mentioned by several scholars, and is neatly formulated by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her “Telling It as You Like: Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact.” My opinion is that the advantages of a variety of methods outnumber the dangers if certain methodological criteria are fulfilled, criteria that will be discussed throughout this chapter. Among the new methods used by historians we find the ‘close reading’ and interpretation of non-literary texts and the discipline of semiotics, which contains methods used by literary critics and linguists. These methods have helped historians and anthropologists to understand more about the way people communicate and how we use metaphors to convey meaning. The task of the cultural historian is to expand the borders of traditional historical method with insights gained in other disciplines, in the words of Burke, “a substantial group of scholars now view the past as a foreign country, and like the anthropologists they see their task as one of interpreting the language of ‘their’ cultures, both literally and metaphorically.” (Burke 1997: 193). The Encounter between Dii and the Mission The encounter between Dii and the mission, as such, has never received much academic attention, and this has been one major motivation for

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this study. The missionaries themselves have described the work of the mission in Cameroon from different angles, with shorter sections devoted to the work among the Dii. The first published version of the encounter is to be found in the Norwegian Missionary Society’s (NMS)2 five volumes historical presentation of the first hundred years of the society’s existence. Jens Daniel Nikolaisen and Halfdan Endresen, two of the pioneers of mission work in northern Cameroon, wrote the chapter “Sudan” describing the first two decades (1925–1945) of missionary presence, how the Sudan Mission initiated the work in Cameroon and how it was fully incorporated into the NMS in 1939 (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949). The presentation is one of eyewitnesses describing their own experiences and is an informative work, despite much cut and paste from Conference Reports.3 The second historical presentation of NMS presence in Cameroon is Erik Larsen’s Kamerun, written as a tribute to fifty years of mission work in Cameroon, based entirely on interviews with missionaries, and thus without any critical distance to the material (Larsen 1973).4 The two next historical publications from Cameroon do, however, carry significantly more academic weight. They are both written by Kåre Lode and cover much the same period, but the approach of the two projects is slightly different. In 1990 Lode published Appelés à la liberté, the history of the Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne du Cameroun,5 and the focus is on the birth and growth of this church (Lode 1990). Even if it is a missionary presentation of the history, the many interviews with local workers and the extended study of archive material, be it Norwegian, American, or French, make the book expand the narrow perspective of the earlier mentioned works. Two years later Lode wrote the chapter “Kamerun” in I tro og tjeneste, the 150 years anniversary history project of the NMS, where Lode describes the period from 1942 to 1992 (Lode 1992). In all of these publications the Dii people are presented as one of 2

Det Norske Misjonsselskap. In addition to these historical presentations of Norwegian mission work that are collected in the NMS Archives in Stavanger, several books have been published privately by missionaries telling their own stories about personal encounters with a different world. Most known are the books by Halfdan Endresen about the situation of the slaves of the Fulbe (Endresen 1954; 1965; 1969). I have, however, chosen not to include this literary genre as source material in my thesis. 4 The presentations that the missionaries were asked to write to this book have been collected in the NMS Archives, and some of these presentations are, however, interesting reading. 5 The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon. 3

communicating freedom or colonial evangelism?

5

the pillars of the Norwegian contribution to a future Lutheran church that was to be the result of the often complicated collaboration between the NMS and the American Lutheran Sudan Mission. Few academic publications deal with the Dii people. The rites and traditions of the Dii are briefly mentioned in the ethnographic works of Lembezat (1961), Podlewski (1970), and Frobenius (1987), but have received more thorough attention by the Canadian anthropologist JeanClaude Muller who has written two monographs and several articles about the Dii. Of special interest to Muller are traditional rites and kinship patterns, but three articles are of importance to my project. The article “Merci à vous les blancs, de nous avoir libérés !” (1997), draws attention to the relationship between the Dii and the white missionaries, the German and the French colonisers. “Les aventuriers du mil perdu” (1992) describes the relationship between myth, history and politics among the Dii, and “Comment ‘dépaganiser’ sans christianiser ni islamiser” (2000) focuses on the secularising movement among the contemporary Dii.6 Several Master theses have also been written about the Dii, of importance is first of all Rachel Issa Djesa’s Striden om skriften,7 a work in visual anthropology, containing both a film8 and a written thesis. Rachel, herself Dii, focuses on modernity, identity, and the problematic relationship that arose between the Dii pastor Maïdawa Thomas and the missionaries following Maïdawa’s translation of the Bible into Dii (Djesa 2002). Samaki Samuel and Ragnhild Mestad have described other aspects of the Dii and the long term influence of their relationship with the mission (Mestad 2000; Samaki 1999). At the University in Ngaoundéré and at the Lutheran Institute in Meiganga several Bachelor theses have also described the Dii-mission encounter from different angles (Aminatou 2000; Gadji 2001; Issa 2001). Regional Studies Although few studies from the region focus on the work of the mission or on religious conversion, most of them realise that religion plays an important role in changing social relations. Most recent anthropological

6

Several of Muller’s articles have been collected and slightly modified in his latest monograph (Muller 2007). 7 “The Battle over Scripture.” 8 “Missionaries and Power: The History of an Intellectual Dii.”

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works focus on questions related to ethnicity and the somewhat tense relationship between the politically dominant Fulbe and the kirdi9 population. Philip Burnham has written about traditions and ethnic relationships among the Gbaya (Burnham 1996), Kees Schilder has treated Islam and ethnicity among the Mundang (Schilder 1994), whereas Trond Waage has described the multiethnic everyday life of youth living in Ngaoundéré (Waage 2002). The social impact of Islamic religion in Adamaoua and the changes that this religion is currently going through are reflected in the works of Lisbet Holtedahl and Djingui Mahmoudou (Holtedahl and Mahmoudou 1997; Mahmoudou 2000). A different approach toward social change in Adamaoua is described by Quentin Gausset who focuses on religious conversion to Islam and Christianity among the Wawa and the Kwanja and thus thematically is closer to the theme of this book. Gausset gives a detailed introduction to different social theories of religious conversion and draws the conclusion that conversion to Islam or Christianity among the Wawa and the Kwaanja largely depended upon identification with the historical practices of the two religions in the region (Gausset 1997). The two Cameroonian historians Martin Z. Njeuma and Eldrige Mohammadou have initiated a regional search for historical roots through detailed studies of the arrival of the Fulbe and their relationship to other ethnic groups (Njeuma 1978; 1989; Mohammadou 1978; 1979; 1981; 1990). Different case studies belonging to the same region have lately seen the light of day through the efforts of FALSH,10 describing both the history of important Fulbe personalities, the kirdi groups, and important religious leaders (Bah 1998). Hamadou Adama’s presentation of the history of Islam in the region also contains a short section on the relationship between Islam and the Christian mission (Adama 2004). Two Norwegian historians, Ketil Fred Hansen and Marte Bogen Sinderud, have contributed with new insights into the relationship between the lamibbe, the colonial administration and the mission. Hansen has worked mostly with the political organisation of

9 Kirdi is a term generally used in order to describe all the non-Muslim tribes in northern Cameroon that were politically dominated by the Fulbe. 10 Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines at the University in Ngaoundéré. Through the Ngaoundéré-Anthropos project, a collaboration between the University in Tromsø and the University in Ngaoundéré several collections of articles have been published during the last decade.

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the lamidate (Hansen 1992; 2000), whereas Sinderud has focused on the situation of the slaves11 of the lamibbe (Sinderud 1993; 2008). In addition to Lode’s specific church history regarding the EELC, the newly published edition of Jean-Paul Messina and Jaap van Slageren’s Histoire du christianisme au Cameroun, contains a new section on the history of the churches in northern Cameroon (Messina and Slageren 2005). Of interest regarding religious change is also Thomas G. Christensen’s work on the inculturation of the Christian message among the Gbaya (Christensen 1990). Colonial Evangelism? The debate on mission and colonialism has long been that of trench warfare between social anthropologists and church historians, both in the West and in Africa. T. O. Beidelman has described the work of missionaries as “colonial evangelism” (Beidelman 1982), whereas Andrew Walls prefers to talk about “the cross-cultural process in Christian history” (Walls 2002). The same pattern is visible among African scholars, V. Y. Mudimbe being famous for claiming that Christianity was the only option for many Africans in order to survive (Mudimbe 1988), whereas Lamin Sanneh puts much effort into showing the importance of African Christians as the main actors and active agents in this historical process (Sanneh 1983). The last decade has brought renewed interest into the study of Norwegian missionaries with several studies describing the encounter between missionaries and the indigenous population. Lisbeth Mikaelsson has focused on missionary self-presentation in the literary production of the missionaries (Mikaelsson 2000), and Marianne Gullestad has written a monograph about how Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon used photographs to “picture pity” (Gullestad 2007). Hanna Mellemsether wrote her thesis on the fight for independence in the Norwegian Zulu church (Mellemsether 2001), whereas Karina Hestad Skeie has focused

11 The question of slavery in northern Cameroon has been much discussed in mission literature. The term maccudo, pl. maccubé, meaning slave or servant, describes a variety of categories, as opposed to dimo, pl. rimbé which is the category of the free, the Fulbe, Haoussa, Kanuri etc. The Dii were determined to be maccubé by the Fulbe, but considered vassaux rather than captifs, since few Dii were reduced to actual physical slavery. For further discussions about the question of slavery see Bakke (2008) and Sinderud (1993; 2008).

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on the spatial relationship between the Malagasy and Norwegian missionaries in Madagascar. Of the preceding works Skeie’s is the one that is most closely related to my project. She argues that the missionaries were forced to make constant compromises with the Malagasy, and that the result of this negotiation was visible through a contextual reading of missionary texts in the light of Malagasy traditions and history. These negotiations were, however, not necessarily visible in the reports that missionaries sent home to the mission board and supporters in Norway (Skeie 2005). Skeie claims that negotiations were due to a long conversation between the Malagasy and missionaries, thus revealing the influence of the Comaroffs on her work. Jean and John Comaroff have published, so far, two detailed volumes entitled Of Revelation and Revolution describing the encounter between British nonconformist missionaries and the Tswana in southern Africa. In view of the extensive debate that has followed the two volumes, it should be safe to say that a new interest in mission and (post)colonial studies has been the result of their efforts. Among the many approaches to the encounter between mission and the Tswana, described by the Comaroffs, many of which I find many enriching and inspiring, I have chosen to question two particular conclusions introduced by their first volume by relating them to the Dii-mission encounter in Cameroon. First of all the Comaroffs argue that the term ‘conversion’ is a Western construct presupposing an individual spiritual identity, “thereby muddying the historical relationship between subjective experience and collective existence.” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 251). The Comaroffs seem to question that the Tswana traditional religion was a system of beliefs (p. 249, Comaroffs’ italics) that could communicate and relate independently to the message of the missionaries. As a consequence, ‘conversion’ in the Comaroffs’ interpretation of the term was impossible.12 The second argument I will question is the general value of the constant referring to mission as ‘colonisation of consciousness’. Even

12 It will throughout this thesis become clear that I find the Comaroffs’ critique of the term ‘conversion’ both interesting and misleading. Interesting in the sense that there is a clear difference between ideas related to individualism and collectivism between the Norwegian missionaries and the Dii, and this naturally influences religious belief and behaviour. Simultaneously my Dii informants clearly made choices that went against the consensus of the local community based on individual experiences as explained in chapter four. To start a process that changed religious belief and social behaviour was obviously the result of personal initiatives from pioneer Dii Christians, and from my point of view, such initiatives are signs of social as well as religious individualism.

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though their image of mission work as ‘a long conversation’ between the Tswana and the missionaries makes good thinking, I have doubts as to regards the general validity of the Comaroffs’ presentation of the content of this conversation. The Comaroffs’ first volume was met with both acclamation and severe critique.13 Among the critics were Terence Ranger and J. D. Y. Peel, who questioned the lack of Tswana narrative traditions in the work of the Comaroffs. Peel made his point with clarity in his monograph on religious change among the Yoruba where he claims that the Yoruba narrative interacted with the Christian narrative, and thereby created a new Yoruba Christian narrative (Peel 2000). My intention through this study is to show that the Dii people, through their conversation with the missionaries, had the possibility and the resources to evaluate and compare the spiritual message of the missionaries with their own traditional religious practices and beliefs, despite the disturbing material aspects of the civilising mission. I also argue that the Dii were in a position to negotiate the terms of this conversation, thus making the conversation more of a dialogue, even if it was on uneven terms, than colonisation of Dii consciousness or colonial evangelism. Communication, Discourse, Translatability and Worldview Having stated that this is a historical study, it must be added that a wide range of theoretical approaches have been used in order to shed light on different aspects of the encounter between Dii and the mission. In chapter seven and eight we will thus return to the theoretical analyses of what happened when the white missionaries engaged in the long conversation with the Dii people. But before establishing the empirical premises for this intercultural encounter, we shall briefly enter a discussion related to production, communication and decoding of meaning. In an effort to grasp why the first Dii pioneer Christians accepted the message proclaimed by the Norwegian and African missionaries, we have to ask ourselves how meaning was produced, how it was communicated and how it was decoded and lived out. Communication and discourse will thus be important words in this study in order to describe the terms of the conversation. In order for religious conversion to take 13 The Comaroffs use several pages in the second volume of their book to answer their critics, in particular Ranger and Peel (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 35–53).

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place we further have to understand how the message was translated, not only linguistically, but more importantly in relation to the existing social and spiritual practices of the Dii people. Finally, one has to ask how this new message was lived out, and how it reshaped the practical and mental universe of new Dii Christians. As an introduction to the theme under study, therefore three analytic concepts need to be introduced: communication, discourse, translatability and worldview. Understanding the Process of Communication How is meaning communicated? What happens within the chain of cognitive reasoning that is activated when we share our thoughts and ideas with other human beings? In the recent academic debate there are two main approaches to these questions. The first focuses on process, on communication as the transmission of message, how sender and receiver encode and decode their message, and how they use channels and media of communication. The second focuses on semiotics and is more interested in communication as production and exchange of meaning, and thus study how messages or texts interact with people in order to produce meaning. As an example of a process approach to communication, Jacobsen’s model is often mentioned. His model is linear by nature, where an addresser sends a message to an addressee, and where the message is always influenced by contact and code, the former referring to the physical channel and the psychological connections between the two communicators, and the latter describing a shared meaning system which structures the message. To show that the message refers to something other than itself the model also introduces context, in order to form a meaningful spatial triangle of the communication between the addresser and the addressee. Jacobsen argues that each of these factors determines a different function of language, and that this is related to a hierarchy of functions during the act of communication. Two points related to Jacobsen’s arguments are of special interest to our study, first of all the emotive function that describes the relation of the message to the addresser. By this function the addresser’s emotions, attitudes, status, class etc. is communicated, which is important to be aware of in order to understand the effect the message of the Norwegian missionaries had on young Dii pioneer Christians. The second function of interest is the referential, which can be translated the ‘reality orientation’ of the message, what is true and accurate, that which the researcher normally is looking for through his academic efforts (Fiske 1990: 35–36).

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Øyvind Dahl, who has studied intercultural communication in Madagascar (Dahl 1993), also focuses on the fact that the same message can create different mental images and ideas among different readers. One reason behind this, he argues, is that we all have different backgrounds, which we use to interpret the signs that constitute the message. He argues that denotation is the lexical meaning of, for instance, a word, whereas connotation is the meaning constructed when personal experiences and feelings related to the sign are activated. He continues that connotation seldom refers only to personal associations, but rather to normative codes shared by people with the same cultural background (Dahl 2001: 46). To gain greater understanding of intercultural communication Dahl proposes a (process-) model of communication where one cultural filter is placed between the addresser and the message and a second filter between the message and the addressee. This is done in order to show how communication across cultural borders is dependent not only on knowledge of the culture of the addressee, but the addresser must also be aware of his/her own cultural context. In this culture-filter-model the intended meaning is visualised by a symbol that is different in shape from the symbol of acquired meaning, and the addresser’s cultural filter has a different shape from the addressee’s cultural filter (Dahl 2001: 66). This model is a further development of the basic process model, by emphasising the aspect of communication across cultural borders and it thus helps us gain more insight into the historical Dii-mission intercultural encounter. Having so far stated that the process of communication is important, let us move on to the result of the communicative act, the production and exchange of meaning. For the Norwegian missionaries to communicate meaning to the young Dii, they had to create a message out of signs. These signs stimulated the Dii to create meaning for themselves that in some way was related to the meaning that the missionaries were trying to communicate. But it was always a Dii interpretation of the signs that the white strangers communicated, and not the missionaries’ intentional meaning, that were generated in the Dii perception. A semiotic approch to communication is therefore not linear, but structural, in order to indicate relationships between elements in the creation of meaning (Fiske 1990: 39). This approach highlights the importance of the sign, the meaning of which, according to John Fiske, is threefold. First, there is the sign in itself, a human construct that can only be understood in terms of the uses people give it. Second, we must understand the codes or the systems in which signs are organised, and third, we must understand the culture within which the codes and signs operate. A sign

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is always something physical, something that we can perceive by our senses and that refers to something other than itself. But a sign always depends on recognition by its users that it actually is a sign. The two most influential contributors to a semiotic approach to communication are the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.14 Peirce uses the image of a triangle to illustrate the relations between the sign, that to which it refers, and the users of the sign. All three are equally necessary to understand the model. Saussure argues that the sign consists of its physical form, or its sound image, what he calls signifier, in addition to an associated mental concept, signified. This mental concept is in its turn an apprehension of external reality, and the sign relates to reality only through the concepts of the people who use it (Saussure 1974: 66). To understand the importance of Peirce’s triangle the three terms sign, object, and interpretant have to be explained further. The sign always refers to something other than itself, i.e., to the object. The object is then understood, or interpreted by somebody, the interpretant. It is important to notice that the interpretant is not the user of the sign, but it is a “mental concept produced both by the sign and by the user’s experience of the object.” (Fiske 1990: 42). We thus understand that the semiotic school is much more preoccupied with the receiver (or the reader) in the event of communication than the process school,15 which corresponds well with our wish to pay special attention to the Dii-mission encounter from below, i.e. from the Dii perspective, a perspective that will invite us to return to Dahl and Saussure’s ideas in chapter eight. The Octopus Concept of Discourse In order to be able to analyse the production of meaning in the intercultural Dii-mission encounter, we have to approach the available sources where meaning is expressed, the written missionary texts, and the living memory of pioneer Dii Christians. I have chosen to refer to this production of meaning as the ‘discourse’ of the two involved parties, well aware of the large variety of discourse analyses currently 14 For further information about Ogden and Richards, who have created a structural model of communication very much like that of Peirce (often the two models are presented together), see Fiske (1990). 15 ‘Reader’ is often preferred to ‘receiver’ in the semiotic school, indicating more focus on the active role played by the person who receives the message by interpreting it and creating meaning out of signs.

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in use. My approach to the octopus concept of discourse is inspired by Teun A. van Dijk, who has called his introduction to the semantics and pragmatics of discourse analysis Text and Context, revealing what discourse analysis is mostly about (van Dijk 1977).16 Written material, pictures, speech, and actions are in discourse analysis altogether interpreted as text, not in the literal sense of the word, but as entities possible to analyse according to the same scheme. To trace the historical roots of the term we once more have to turn towards Ferdinand de Saussure, who through his research introduced radically new ideas related to text, language and meaning. Saussure, whose theories will be further explained and applied in chapter eight, described language as expressions of signs, and started analysing how these signs were related and how they expressed meaning. His unfinished thinking17 later greatly influenced modern linguistics as well as social sciences. Any discourse, be it written, spoken, or practised, is according to Saussure expressed within a certain context that colours and shapes the meaning of the discourse. A recent development within social sciences is to describe the pragmatics of discourse as related to the bearers of hegemonic status in society,18 an implementation of discourse analysis much influenced by Michel Foucault’s thinking. His monumental work The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1972) introduces the thought that certain practices exist in order to produce and maintain the meaning of hegemonic discourses. Foucault relates the method of archaeology to different techniques shaped by archaeological knowledge that not only concerns the content of the speech and practices of the discourse, but emphasises the different ways in which they are presented (Neumann 2002: 1, 83). Certain discourses can thus be used to maintain power relations and strengthen the dominant ideology within a community that shares the terms of the discourse, and the language that is used is most often rooted in the social environment in which the language is practised (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 107). As a consequence, the strength of any

16 Discourse analysis can be described as a many-legged or octopus concept due to the great variation in the use of the concept in different disciplines (Neumann 2002: 21–22). Originally a linguistic term, discourse analysis has spread to literary critics and to social scientists. It is the latters’ use of the term that is discussed in this thesis. 17 Saussure never published his innovative linguistic theories, but his students collected their notes from his lectures and published, post mortem, Courses in General Linguistics (Saussure 1974). 18 See for instance Fairclough (1989).

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discourse is always limited to the context that accepts its shape. When Norwegian missionaries condemned Dii religious practices, their discourse was without influence until the Dii decided to accept the terms of the conversation, and consequently the context of the discourse. The Dii, on the other hand, created a new discourse that borrowed elements from the missionary spiritual discourse, but applied it to a different context, one of social oppression. A discourse is thus not limited to the leadership of a given society, but subgroups might create discourses that will invent and maintain an ideology of resistance, visualised in this study through the Dii discourse that presents Dii history as a constant struggle against the supremacy of the Fulbe. In order to conclude my approach toward discourse analysis, a few words about philosophy and method should be said. Among different approaches to discourse analysis, the linguist Norman Fairclough has developed his critical discourse analysis in order to reveal power structures used in politics (Fairclough 1989) and the social psychologist Vivian Burr uses discourse analysis to promote a relativist view (Burr 1995). One might say that they use discourse analysis in different ways in order to fit their philosophical approach.19 Fairclough claiming the discourse analysis supports his neo-marxist theories, whereas Burr interprets social constructivism as the only natural position when applying a discourse analysis. I accept neither as necessary examples to follow. A discourse is the way we speak, the words we use to present ourselves to a communicating world, words containing certain layers of meaning. When the missionaries describe conversion as ‘going from darkness to light’ or when the Gospel is presented as ‘the seed that has fallen into hard soil’, there are certain connotations that a trained reader of the genre will easily capture, whereas it remains a misty collection of words for the outsiders. In order to decode the missionary discourse and try to get to the core of their view on conversion I agree with Søren Kjørup who says that discourse analysis is an excellent method, but that it makes lousy philosophy (Kjørup 2000: 39–40).20 Discourse analysis can reveal power structures, and it can be used to criticise essentialism

19

According to Iver B. Neumann, one central element in discourse analysis is plurality in the use of theories and methods in order to critically analyse the social order (Neumann 2002: 26). See also van Dijk (1977: 12–13). 20 I would also argue that to ‘deconstruct’ the way people present themselves in order to understand how they communicate in their social or cultural setting is possible without accepting the philosophical relativism of social constructivism.

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in its most dogmatic forms, but reduced to propaganda for any -ism, it looses its strength as a helpful tool to analyse self-presentation. Translatability The third analytic concept that needs a brief introduction is translatability, a term introduced and promoted by Lamin Sanneh in an effort to explain the success of Christianity in Africa during the colonial period (Sanneh 1989). Sanneh’s focus is first of all on linguistic translation, on the joint effort of missionaries and local Christians to translate the Bible into indigenous languages. His main point is that the translatability of Christianity has to be measured according to its ability to transform the religious universe what was already present, the hermeneutical bridges that were built by the missionaries and the local Christians together. It is important to note, however, that this was no process of dictation and imitation. Sanneh points to the fact that the project was a risky one for the missionaries: [T]he multiplicity of languages in Africa meant a corresponding multiplicity in the terms by which God was addressed. And since each language carried widely differing connotations in the concept of God, missionaries could not be sure what precise implications might come to attach to usage. It thus came about that in the religious and theological sphere, missionaries became ultimately helpless in face of the overwhelming contextual repercussions of translation. (Sanneh 1989: 158)

In the process of translating a message into a different language, the written text is only a small part. The translatability of Christianity is thus first of all about the translation of cognition, translation of signs, of symbols and of a mental universe. Since translatability surpasses translation, the missionaries could never control the content of their message, the mental images that were created by African cognition. Sanneh has helped us understand the importance of literacy, linguistics, and translation, but the cognitive aspect of Christian translatability needs further development, and this will be a crucial point in this study when we return to the emergence of a Dii Christianity in chapter seven. Sanneh, in a later contribution, draws attention to yet another aspect of religious translatability which is of interest to us when he compares the translatability of Christianity in colonial Africa with that of Islam (Sanneh 1994). What made Islam lose its historical advantage as the first monotheist, scriptural religion present in sub-saharian Africa was, according to Sanneh, its lack of translatability. Even if Islam is often

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presented as more genuine ‘African’ than Christianity, Sanneh points to the fact that the initial success of Christianity in Africa, the growth of the Coptic church during the first centuries after Christ, was due to translation of the Gospel into Coptic. This focus on indigenous literacy was adopted by Western missionaries in the modern missionary movement, and also this time the approach was crowned with success. The prestige of Islam, on the other hand, was closely linked to the Arab language and scripture, which for long was an advantage, a sign of development and supremacy in sub-saharian Africa. But in the long run, and faced with an alternative source of prestige, the Arab language lost influence due to the combination of literacy, indigenous language and French or English taught in the mission schools. In the complex historical struggle for religious supremacy, Sanneh refers to the linguistic power play as follows: The strength of Islam in making excellent capital out of its Arab character in Africa was the weakness of Christianity when Christianity failed to shed its European forms. And conversely, the strength of Christianity in making vernacular self-understanding and integrity the principle of religious vitality was Islam’s weakness in denying to mother tongues the consecrated status of scriptural legitimacy. (Sanneh 1994: 45)

We shall throughout this study see that the Dii movement toward Christianity is closely linked to what I have called the accessibility of the new religion. The Fulbe used the Islamic religion as a means to dominate the kirdi population, and knowledge of Arabic was considered a divine secret. Christianity was, on the other hand, in principle open to everyone, and thus stood out as a relevant alternative of empowerment for the Dii unable to take part in the Fulbe economic and religious hierarchy. Translatability thus played, as will be outlined in later chapters, a key role in the historical drama on the Dii-plain. Mission as Worldview Encounter The last analytic concept that needs a brief introduction is worldview. In order to describe the emergence of Christianity as something more than imitation of missionary speech and practices, I have chosen to describe how the Christian message, both as speech and action, influenced Dii worldview. The term worldview is, however, used by different authors to describe different approaches to reality. Whereas Thomas Kuhn uses the term to describe the scientist’s mental approach to the physical world (Kuhn 1996: chapter X), Ninian Smart uses the term more or less as

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a synonym for religion (Smart 1995). My own theoretical discussion related to changes in the Dii approach both to a transcendent and to an immanent reality, is inspired by the worldview theories of two NorthAmerican anthropologists Charles H. Kraft and Paul G. Hiebert.21 As chapter seven will reveal in more details, Hiebert, contrary to Smart, does not equate worldview with religion, but argues that religion is one among many social practices that together form the worldview of a given group. Worldview is, according to Hiebert, the totality of basic assumptions about reality that forms the beliefs and the behaviour of the group (Hiebert 1985: 45), basic assumptions that are taken for granted and never questioned. As such, worldview in Hieberts’ theory is related to the order and meaning of existence. The influence of the symbolic approach in anthropology voiced, among others, by Clifford Geertz, is obvious in Hieberts’ work, an influence that he expresses openly (Nishioka 1998: 61). The strength of Hieberts’ thinking is, however, that his theory in addition to the symbolic approach is grounded in a variety of material practices, and thus is open for the continuous change that any group that shares complex cultural patterns is going through. Hieberts’ approach can thus help us analyse how the arrival of the mission influenced Dii society on many different levels. Not only in terms of introducing a new message related to transcendent matters, but also in terms of a holistic approach where the material and spiritual consequences of the encounter can be evaluated as complementary elements leading to change, and not as opposing analytical categories fighting for supremacy. In order to describe what changed in Dii worldview, the consequences of conversion to Christianity, it is equally important to focus on that which was conserved, the part of Dii worldview that did not change even if the teachings of the white missionaries to some extent replaced the Dii traditional religious practises. I have chosen to describe this as conservation according to an African map of the universe, inspired by Andrew Walls’ terminology (Walls 2002). Walls highlightens the relationship between the traditional and the new religion as the key to understand which changes actually took place as a consequence of the modern 21 In matters that concern my use of worldview theory, Kraft and Hiebert have basically corresponding views. I have, however, found Hiebert’s approach more relevant in order to describe the Dii-mission encounter, and will in the following base my worldview presentation on his works. For an interesting evaluation of the similarities and differences between the two, see Nishioka (1998).

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mission movement. Throughout this study we shall thus see that all the basic Dii assumptions concerning their relationship with transcendent powers were challenged when they engaged in the long conversation with Norwegian strangers and experienced, as a consequence, a long period of communication, conversion, and conservation. Norwegian Archival Material Much of my research has been time spent in different archives in an attempt to understand Norwegian missionaries and the French colonial administrators, and to acquire longer glimpses of the imprints of Dii and Fulbe presence in the written material. First and foremost this research has been done in the Mission Archives, the archives of the Norwegian Missionary Society in Stavanger, Norway. In order to analyse the historical development of mission work, and the public missionary discourse established by missionaries working in Cameroon, two publications have been especially important. Most information was found in the Conference Reports, the minutes of the annual meetings of the missionaries. These reports contain detailed information about the issues that the missionaries discussed, from the meditation that opened the meeting to details concerning the number of nails used to construct a garage. The reports prior to the Second World War are especially detailed with long discussions between the few missionaries present consciously written down like parts in a play. The conferences were important because they were the sole occasion for the missionaries living in different parts of the field to meet and to share their experiences and openly22 discuss further strategies in their work. The minutes from these meetings were equally important since they were the primary contact between the missionaries and the mission-board in Norway. This is probably one reason why questions of economy and lack of missionaries are described in detail whereas missiological and theological questions, unfortunately, are somewhat rare. The second most important source of information regarding mission work in Cameroon is articles written by the missionaries in Norsk

22 The Conference Reports were confidential, i.e. to be read by the mission-board in Norway only, thus a more unfiltered discussion was possible here than in other channels of information.

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Misjonstidende23 (NMt). NMt, published weekly in the analysed period, is a periodical distributed by the Norwegian Missionary Society in order to bring news from the mission-fields and information about the mission-organisation to its supporters. NMt was first published in 1845, and for many years it was the sole information that people in rural Norway received about the world outside Europe and the United States. I have described articles from NMt as front stage publications, being the missionaries’ show window to the mission-interested audience in Norway. When analysing the NMt articles we have to keep in mind that the missionaries stepped into a century-long tradition of mission-communication. The message had to be presented a certain way in order to trigger the readers’ interest to make them invest their currencies, money and prayer, into the mission project. One might suppose that these publications would be basically happy conversion stories, but this is not the case. What we find in the NMt publications is a presentation of the missionary project in Cameroon that is a nuanced presentation of what did work and what did not. The reason behind this is probably that people had to be encouraged by good news, but also challenged by the problems that the missionaries faced (Skeie 2005: 24–25).24 Marianne Gullestad has called this an enterprise of ‘missionary propaganda’ (Gullestad 2007), redefining the term in a morally neutral way, focusing upon the need for publicity in order to engage the supporters in Norway, supporters that had to be both encouraged and challenged. Karina Hestad Skeie has rightly pointed to the fact that a certain literary genre developed through the NMt publications, and that the missionaries to a large extent wrote within the genre. The more pragmatic decisions made face-to-face with everyday challenges were, however, not necessarily reflected in these writings (Skeie 2005: 22–27, 315–316).25

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Norwegian Missionary Tidings. Karina Hestad Skeie argues that reflection related to literary genre is very important in order to understand the information that was sent from missionaries to friends and supporters in their home country. 25 Skeie argues concerning articles published in NMt that “[t]o base one’s research on the missionaries in the field on an edited selection made by the NMS for a Norwegian audience is an uncritical reproduction of NMS ideology.” (Skeie 2005: 18–19). My impression from working with the sources produced in Cameroon is, however, that the missionaries encouraged each other to write more articles in order to receive attention in Norway, and that NMt to a very small extent edited these articles. NMS ideology is from my point of view the product of reciprocal activity. The missionaries ‘learned the genre’ by reading NMt, and continued to reproduce the genre through their own writing. It should, however, be added that a gradual change in publishing politics most 24

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I have therefore called the Conference Reports back stage information, dealing with more principal and practical matters than those of the NMt front stage publications. All the Conference Reports and all the NMt articles written by missionaries working in Cameroon from 1934 to 1960 have been analysed, but articles related to the work among the Dii people have received special interest. The NMS Archives also contain several personal and official letters written by missionaries, and I have consulted most letters written by the missionaries living on the Diiplain from 1948–1960.26 The letters mostly convey information about personal and everyday activities, and only to a limited extent detailed information about the work or the African employees. Every now and then the letters do, however, contain information that puts reports or information from the informants in a different light, as was the case with Sverre Fløttum’s truck-adventure referred to in chapter four. French Archival Material In order to expand the analytic horizon toward the Dii-mission encounter the archives from the French colonial administration have been of much help. Most human activity tends to present itself as the centre of gravity around which everything else revolves. Reading the early Norwegian sources, one might get the impression that Adamaoua mainly consisted of Norwegian missionaries and new converts struggling with the malicious lamido and his noblemen, the whole scenario being watched by the ignorant French colonial administration. The French sources, however, constantly refer to the weak Norwegian Protestant mission without economy or personnel to make any influence on the mainly Islamic North Cameroon. The mission schools and the local teachers are ridiculed for the lack of academic level, and the French reports leave little hope for a future Protestant Christianity in Adamaoua. It is not until the 1950s that the Norwegian mission, now with increased resources, becomes a serious agent of change worth con-

probably have occurred in NMt from the period Skeie describes (1866–1903) to my period of study, but I still agree with Skeie that genre consciousness is important when reading these sources, and that these articles deliver information about a small part of the diverse missionary activity only. 26 The Mission Archives have recently received some boxes with letters and reports from Cameroon that are about to be classified, which means that more archive material might be available in the future.

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sideration by the French administration, due to the mission involvement in the disputes over the slaves and the servants of the Fulbe noblemen. The French sources thus present the work of the mission from another perspective, describing it as the small-scale utopian project that the first decades of mission work must have looked like from the outside. In addition, the French material is an important source containing much logistic information left out in the missionary sources. Constant population censuses, migration patterns, dates of implementations of administrative decisions and general socio-political considerations make these sources interesting background reading. The majority of the reports from the administration are at present found in Archives Nationales de Yaoundé (ANY), Cameroon, since the French left most of the administrative documents in the countries they administered as colonies. During my stay in Yaoundé in January 2006, I had access, in principle, to all the documents available from the period. In practice, however, the staff of the archives was unable to find many of the documents I requested from the catalogue.27 The Yaoundé archives still made my stay an inspiring experience that provided me with much interesting material for this project and for future research. The Yaoundé material basically has been archived according to two different institutions in the French administrative system, Affaires Coloniales (AC), and Affaires Politiques et Administratives (APA). Some of the documents that were sent to France and that were never returned to Cameroon are found in Archives Nationales Section d’Outre-Mer (ANSOM), in Aix-en-Provence, France, where I conducted archive research in May 2005. Here the documents are classified as Agence France Outre-Mer (AGEFOM) or Affaires Politiques (AP). The archive material from the French colonial administration represents a rich variety of documentation. There are the annual and semester reports written by the chef de subdivision and the chef de région, formal reports describing the activities of the administration and the political development within the area of responsibility. The rapports de tournée give more detailed information about indigenous activity in the area visited, a quality often lacking in the other formal reports. Finally the general correspondence between the Ngaoundéré subdivision, the Adamaoua région, and the High Commissioner for northern Cameroon, contains perhaps the

27 But since I had access to Ketil Fred Hansen’s archive material, I there found copies of many of the documents I missed in Yaoundé.

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richest material due to the variety of themes that are treated and the open and informal style of the letters.28 It is to be argued in this study that the relationship between the Norwegian mission and the French administration depended much on the personal opinions of the administrators and the personal relations between the administrators and the missionaries. These different attitudes are clearly reflected in the French material, where for instance the descriptions of the superintendent of the Norwegian missionaries, Halfdan Endresen, vary from severe critique of impertinent behaviour to outright admiration of this man with a “remarkable intelligence, the temper of a man patient, but decided, who knows how to treat the Administration with courtesy.”29 The number of administrative personnel living in Ngaoundéré was very limited, most of the time three to four persons, and this made contact with the few Norwegian missionaries living in Ngaoundéré natural. But unlike the Norwegian missionaries (Endresen spent most of his missionary service from 1932 to 1963 in Ngaoundéré), the French administrators normally stayed less than two years in each position, and therefore the relationship between the mission and the administration varied considerably in character. Fieldwork Experiences My first fieldwork experience among the Dii goes back to 1996 when a scholarship from the School of Theology in Oslo gave me the possibility to visit Cameroon. This trip was followed by a more permanent presence as I worked as a teacher in history of religion at Institut Luthérien de Théologie de Meiganga, Cameroon, from 1998 to 2003. Even if I did not live in ‘Dii country’ several of my students and colleagues were Dii and the stories they told, together with the histories I read, inspired me to start this project. I returned with my family to Cameroon in September 2005 for an intensive period of interviews that lasted until February 2006. Prior to the fieldwork, based on advice from literature on methodology, I had in mind to depth-interview between ten and

28 For more details concerning the contents of the French colonial archives, see Sinderud (1993: 11–13). 29 Archives Nationales de Yaoundé (ANY), 1 Affaires Coloniales (AC) 3399. Letter from chef de subdivision de Ngaoundéré to chef de région de l’Adamaoua 21 December 1951, my translation.

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twenty persons.30 I also decided to use deep, open-ended, semi-structured interviews, based on a few core questions.31 This technique turned out to be of much value, making my encounters with the informants feel more like conversations than interviews. Even if the semi-structured conversations took much more time to analyse than interviews following a strict guide would have done, the extra work paid well off. The conversations took different turns according to the experiences of my informants and gave me a variety of information of spiritual and material nature related to the Dii-mission encounter. I met all my informants at least twice, the first time to discuss the nature of our collaboration, and the second time for a mp3-registered conversation in their compound. Sometimes I felt the need for follow-up questions and returned to the informants for further conversations, and some of them became frequent dialogue partners throughout my fieldwork. I used two different Dii research assistants during my stay. One of them always assisted me during the interviews, and since they also were able to act as interpreters it gave me the possibility to conduct the interviews either in French or in Dii, my own knowledge of Dii being too limited for in-depth interviewing. According to former missionaries and my informants Dii is a very difficult tonal language to learn, and only two white persons actually speak ya̧g dii reasonably well, the two missionary linguists Lars Lode and Lee Bohnhoff. JeanClaude Muller has also argued that the high level of education among the Dii makes French a highly valuable tool for research among them (Muller 1997b: 125). Prior to the interviews my informants were given the choice between speaking Dii and French, and twelve among twentyone informants chose French, whereas the nine remaining chose Dii. The procedure that followed the interviews was that a third person, often the other research assistant, transcribed the interviews. The Dii translations into French were in all cases proof-read by an independent source. Through this method, the project was assured qualified communicative competence on all stages of the process, and I was granted two competent discussion partners who challenged my views and gave me valuable information about the meta-communicative elements of the interview situation. Even if my own communicative competence, after 30

See Steinar Kvale’s reflections on the number of informants in research projects (Kvale 2001: 58–59). 31 Pål Repstad underlines the importance of flexibility during the interview in order make the interview a meaningful conversation (Repstad 1987: 43–44).

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nearly six years of residence in the area, is relatively well developed,32 it was of great help to analyse the process with a ‘double eye’. In order to describe the encounter between the Dii and the mission and explain why some Dii converted to Christianity, my first criterion was to choose as informants persons who had become Christians between 1934 and 1960 and originated from different villages along the Ngaoundéré-Garoua road, where the mission concentrated its early work. The second criterion was that the majority of these informants should have spent a considerable amount of time with the missionaries. This would inevitably lead me to persons formerly holding important positions in the church, which I found necessary in order to try to establish the dominant Dii discourse on mission and conversion to Christianity. I also intended to interview persons who had become Christians without having been in personal contact with the missionaries, in order to obtain a more nuanced picture of the missionaries, and I wanted to have a considerable representation of women. These criteria finally left me with fifteen Christian informants, ten persons who had spent much time with the missionaries (catechists, health workers, teachers, and one pastor), and five persons who had spent little or no time at all with white missionaries. They all originated from the five villages Wack, Karna Manga, Mbé, Ngaouyanga, and Gamba, villages frequently visited by Norwegian missionaries in the first decade of mission presence on the Dii-plain. Most of my criteria were fulfilled, but I was a bit disappointed by the fact that I only managed to find two women that in the end could be recognised as informants. Several other women gave me valuable information during numerous informal conversations, but did not wish to be included as main informants.33

32 It should be noted that although my working language in Cameroon was French, we are not talking about a French language as spoken in France. The French spoken in Cameroon contains words, expressions, modes – in short a complete system of metacommunicative competence, which differs from ‘classical’ or ‘modern’ French as spoken in contemporary France. Having learned to speak French in Cameroon (after a year of intensive French studies in Paris), French was my second/third language, as was the case for most of the Dii that I met. The fact that my French was not ‘superior’ to theirs several times gave me a feeling of communicative equality, that we had a common understanding of the terms of the conversation. 33 Most married women would refer me to their husbands, and even if they took part in the interviews, they left most of the speaking to their husbands. The information I received from the women was, however, of great importance to the project, and in chapter six I have underlined the important role that women played in the establishment of a church on the Dii-plain.

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I started out by interviewing ten persons, and when I had reached fifteen, the ‘law of diminishing returns’ told me that the number of deep interviews was sufficient. One point did, however, strike me as odd during these conversations. Very few of the informants had produced much negative information about the first Norwegian missionaries. At first I associated this with my own situatedness, which will be discussed later, but I intended to verify the information I had collected by also interviewing parts of the Muslim Dii population. I thus included six Muslim informants and asked many of the same questions related to the missionary presence. To my astonishment the answers I received from the Muslims were more or less as positive towards the missionaries as the answers of the Christian informants had been. This led me to the conclusions that will follow in chapter four and include the creation of a ‘modern missionary myth’. Following thorough discussions with my colleagues, I have chosen to keep my informants anonymous. This has been done due to the highly personal aspect of the questions related to religious conversion. In addition most of the interviews contain sensitive information related to inter-ethnic relations in the region. As my intention is that this academic work should be read also in the region under study, I do not wish to expose my informants to any inconveniences due to their willingness to share confidentially their personal thoughts and experiences with me as a foreign researcher. Fieldwork and Situatedness Based on the intensive methodological debate that has haunted anthropologists, sociologists, and historians preoccupied with qualitative fieldwork the last decades, it goes without saying that the researcher never can be a fly on the wall, neither as participatory observer nor in an interview situation (Fine et al. 2000; Kvale 2001; Vidich and Lyman 2000). The researcher will always influence the situation (s)he herself to some extent has created. And one might ask: Is there no way around the problem of situatedness? From my point of view there is no way around the fact that any participant influences any conversation and any situation, but is this necessarily a problem? Academic works will always be a construct that is produced by the researcher, a subjective presentation of a given complexity of existing data, be it material or

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symbolic. This does not mean that analyses should not be as balanced as possible, neither does it mean that fieldwork cannot produce new knowledge. But it means that transparency is more important than ever, it means that the researcher, and the reader, must be aware of the situation within which the knowledge is produced. It means that adequacy is an inevitable principle, that the objects under study should be able to recognise the premises of the academic project. It also means that ‘the innocent anthropologist’ was an illusion that disappeared before (s)he even left the airport. Then how did my own situatedness affect the fieldwork? I had worked for five years as a teacher at the theological seminary of the Lutheran church under study, two hundred fifty kilometres from the villages where I did my fieldwork. I did not know any of my informants, yet I had heard about some of them, and some of them had probably heard about me. This background clearly gave me some advantage as a fieldworker. First of all my prior experience on the field made fieldwork start day one, and not after six months with practical acclimatisation to language, climate and culture. It meant that I already had an extended network connected to the church, the Muslim community, and the University in Ngaoundéré. It meant that I knew which persons could help me find solid informants, persons who could share with me information about the potential informants’ roles and positions in society. My history inevitably also associated me with mission work, and Norwegian missionaries in particular, a fact that naturally influenced my informants’ presentation of the Norwegian pioneer missionaries. What still makes me trust the data I collected as representative of a common Dii discourse on mission and conversion, except my own awareness of situatedness and my critical reading of the interviews, are two things. First of all the fact that my Muslim informants, who did not know me or my history,34 gave the same presentation of the first Norwegian missionaries as the Christian informants. In addition to this, Jean-Claude Muller has described in detail this positive Dii attitude towards missionaries in earlier works (Muller 1997).

34

I was presented to my Muslim informants by my Muslim research assistant, as a researcher interested in Dii history and the relationship between mission, Islam and Christianity among the Dii.

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Delimitation of the Study It should by now be clear that the period under study is 1934 to 1960. Even if the first Norwegian missionaries arrived in Ngaoundéré on March 6, 1925, it was not until the 1934 conference that the missionaries decided to introduce mission work in the two villages Karna and Mbé along the newly constructed road traversing the Dii-plain. The study finds a natural halt in 1960 when Cameroon was granted independence from French colonial rule, the French having administered the ‘colony’ through a UN mandate established following the defeat of the Germans in the First World War. Even if the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon had to wait until 1975 in order to become fully independent from the two mother missions,35 the church, as a confederation between the two missions and the African Christians, was established in December 1960 and given the name Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne du Cameroun (EELC).36 1960 thus marks a change both in terms of national politics and in terms of pioneer mission work turning into church building activities. Important events in the history of the Dii Christian community such as the establishment of the highly influential women’s movement, Femmes pour Christ, and the problems that arose between central persons in the Dii elite and some missionaries over translation work, emerged during the 1960s and developed throughout the 1970s and thus fall out of the time span of this thesis. The historical roots of these events will, however, become evident throughout the thesis. Since the main theme of this thesis is the relationship between Norwegian missionaries and the Dii, I have chosen not to include material related to the French Catholic mission that was established in Harr, only few kilometres from Mbé, in the 1950s. The attitude and actions of the Catholics will in the following be seen only through Protestant glasses. One of my informants from Karna Manga was, however, a Catholic. My interviews with him, together with the clear

35 The Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), and the North American Gundersen Mission that later was included in the Sudan Mission (today part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, ELCA). 36 The first years the church actually was called Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne du Cameroun et de la République Centrafricaine since much of the work of the Sudan Mission was situated in the Central African Republic. Later the church was divided in two, and CAR Lutherans created their own church.

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numerical strength of Protestants vis a vis Roman Catholic Christians on the Dii-plain, convinced me that to fully include the strategy and consequences of the Catholic mission-Dii encounter into my work would exceed the limits of this study and weaken its focus. When the terms ‘mission’, ‘missionaries’, and ‘Dii-mission encounter’ are used in this study, only the Norwegian mission is under consideration unless otherwise indicated. The geographical area under study is the savannah that covers the Adamaoua plateau in northern Cameroon.37 The Norwegian missionaries arrived and settled in Ngaoundéré, a town situated at one thousand two hundred meters above sea level, established by the Fulbe around 1830 due to the good grazing conditions in the area. Ngaoundéré has since grown steadily into becoming the present day administrative, economic, and religious centre of the Adamaoua province. This is where the lamido’s main mosque is located as well as the administration of both the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran church. Approximately forty kilometres further north, down a steep hill, the falaise, the road leads to the Dii-plain with its lowest altitude of five hundred metres above sea level, where the North province of Cameroon begins. Wack is the first village under study along the paved road, followed by Karna Manga and Mbé, only twenty kilometres separating the three villages. Another ten minutes by car will take you to Ngaouyanga, and if you double the distance you will reach Gamba and enter the land of Baba Ray. All along this paved road villages of varied sizes will together form the homeland of the Dii people, a people which in the mission literature and in the French administrative reports is referred to as Duru or Dourou. This name is said to be a Fulbe naming, be douri, referring to those ‘who were already there’. I have chosen to refer to the Dii as a single ethnic group based on Dii self-presentation as a people sharing elements of historical, cultural, and linguistic identity. According to the linguist Lee Bohnhoff ya̧g dii is one language consisting of four major dialects, guum, mam be’, mam na’a, and paan (which also include three minor dialects: naan, saan, and

37 The Adamaoua plateau covers most of northern Cameroon and the eastern part of Nigeria. Whereas the present day province of Adamaoua always is spelled in French, the plateau can be named either Adamawa (Burnham 1996), or Adamaoua (Waage 2002). I have chosen to constantly refer to this part of northern Cameroon as Adamaoua, apart from references to Old Adamawa, which refer to the geographical area that also include parts of present day Nigeria.

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huun) (Bohnhoff and Kadia 1991). Many interesting questions related to ethnicity and the influence of the mission, the French, and the Fulbe on the Dii as active entrepreneurs in the negotiation and production of ethnic boundaries will be raised during this work. I have, however, chosen not to enter into the debate on ethnicity here, but leave this question for later studies.

CHAPTER TWO

OUR ANCESTORS USED TO LIVE ON THIS MOUNTAIN . . . Our ancestors used to live on a mountain named Mgbang Sii. They lived in several different villages that were all equal. No one decided over the others. When the Fulbe from Rey-Bouba arrived, they tried to conquer us by starvation. They cut our harvest before it was ripe. But our ancestors made reservoirs of the grain sad, an herb whose grains are very small and which was the first cultivated food source known among the Dii. They put these grains in huge jars that were hidden in caverns in the mountain, in case of a siege (. . .). But our ancestors were beaten and fled, leaving behind their villages, where no one ever again set foot. But the sad grains are still there, they sleep inside the mountain. But no one knows exactly where they are. Maybe, one day, a hunter will discover them? But no one dares to touch them, no one knows what to do with them.1

Through this short history a Dii from Mbé presented himself and his people to the Canadian researcher Jean-Claude Muller. It is a history that emphasises the unity and peace that once reigned among the Dii people before the arrival of the Muslim Fulbe. But it is also a myth with an open end; it ends with a question and uncertainty concerning the future. In this chapter we will be introduced to the Dii, their symbolic departure from the mountain and their encounter with Islam, European colonialism, and Christianity. The chapter will thus present the historical 1 « Nos ancêtres vivaient autrefois sur cette montagne, nommée Mgbang Sii. Ils étaient groupés en un certain nombre de villages tous égaux. Aucun ne commandait à l’autre. Lorsque les Peuls de Rey-Bouba sont arrivés, ils voulurent nous conquérir en nous affamant. Ils prirent l’habitude de couper nos récoltes avant mûrissement. Mais nos ancêtres firent des réserves de la céréale sad, une plante dont les grains sont minuscules et qui est la première culture connue des Dii. Ils mirent ces graines dans d’immenses jarres cachées dans des cavernes et des crevasses de la montagne, ceci en prévision d’un siège (. . .). Mais nos ancêtres furent vaincus et se dispersèrent, abandonnant leurs villages où il ne reste plus personne depuis lors. Cependant, les graines de sad sont toujours là, qui dorment à l’intérieur de la montagne, mais personne ne sait exactement où elles sont. Peut-être, un jour, un chasseur les redécouvrira-t-il ? Mais alors, personne n’osera y toucher et personne ne saura qu’en faire. » This version of the myth is presented by Jean-Claude Muller (1992: 4). Author’s translation. Parts of this chapter has formerly been published in an article intitled: “The Role of Religion in Social Change: the Arrival of Christianity among the Dii People in Adamawa, Northern Cameroon (1934–1960)” in Swedish Missiological Themes 93, no. 4 (2005): 479–503.

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forces that moved the Dii toward new plausibility structures (Berger 1969), and toward the social reorganisation of traditional structures that will be analysed through different approaches throughout this study. The chapter will also contain analysis of two ‘sociological turningpoints’ as an introduction to how the Dii manoeuvred through the spiritual and political changing landscape of Africa in the first part of the 20th century. The Dii The Dii people (also known under the name Dourou/Duru2) who live in the two provinces Adamaoua and Nord in northern Cameroon number between 40,000 and 50,000 people.3 The Dii form one linguistic group with several dialects among approximately two hundred fifty different languages found in Cameroon. They are spread in approximately one hundred villages numbering from some thirty inhabitants to around one thousand, but several chiefdoms can form a bigger village or a town. The majority of the Dii live on the so-called Dii-plain along the paved road between the two big cities in the region, Ngaoundéré and Garoua. Smaller Dii communities are also found on the Adamaoua plateau and further northeast near the lamidate of Rey-Bouba. Mbé, situated some seventy km north of Ngaoundéré, is the administrative centre on the plain with a sous-préfecture, a small government hospital and the only high school on the plain. In Mbé you also find the Dii Muslim leader, the lamido, and the Lutheran Church has a primary school, a dispensary, and their literature centre here. The Dii traditionally are farmers (sorghum, yams and recently corn), but have also been engaged in trade and are renowned for their blacksmith clan. The last decades a large number have been employed in government administration and in the administration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon (EELC4) as a result of the high level of education among the

2

Dourou/Duru was a name given to the Dii by the Fulbe. No official population statistics are available, Podlewski estimated 35,000 in the late 1960s (Podlewski 1970: 24), Muller’s more recent estimations varies between 30,000 and 40,000 (Muller 1997a: 8), 40,000 (Muller 1995: 39), 40,000 and 50,000 (Muller 2002: 13) and 50,000 (Muller 2000: 41), whereas Djesa proposes 50,000 (Djesa 2001: 41). 4 Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne du Cameroun. 3

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last generation of Dii. There are no recent statistics5 as to the percentage of Christians and Muslims among the Dii, but leaders of the EELC estimate that approximately 50% of the Dii are Christians. The origin of the Dii is hard to trace in details, and no written history is available. Jean-Claude Muller, who has been working among the Dii since 1990 claims that geographical origin is explained in many different ways by different heads of villages (Muller 1992: 12), but they all claim to have their roots in the region. The general impression is, however, that the majority of the Dii lived further north, in what is today the lamidate of Rey-Bouba, but was forced further south following the aggressive Fulbe expansion in the early 19th century (Lembezat 1961: 222; Muller 1997: 61–63; Podlewski 1970: 24). The actual placing of the many Dii villages is the result of migration following the mobility of the Dii, Fulbe, German, French, and to some extent Norwegian interference, the Dii being much influenced by Muslim conquerors, German and French colonialism and Norwegian protestant missionaries. Today an overall majority of the Dii will present themselves as either Christians or Muslims. I have not yet met a single person claiming to be an adherent of the traditional Dii religion,6 and this is confirmed by Muller who claims that the term ‘traditionalist’ has negative connotations, meaning ‘man with no value’ (Muller 2000: 39–41). The traditional religion of the Dii will be further discussed in chapter five, but as an introduction to the theme it is safe to say that their former traditional religious practises contained many of the most central aspects and beliefs that are shared by the majority of sub-Saharan traditional religions.7 The supreme God, Tayii, is most often presented as the creator of all things, who did not interfere unless there was a crisis regarding the creation. According to John Mbiti, a shared characteristic among most tribal

5 Podlewski’s investigations from the late 1960s claim that on the Dii-plain 46% were Muslims, 47% were Protestants, 4% were traditional practitioners (Podlewski 1970: 48). Long time NMS missionary among the Dii, Lars Lode, claims that around 1/3 of the Dii on the plain are Christians, the rest mostly Muslims (Lode 1997: 36). They both agree that on the Adamaoua plateau and further north, a larger percentage is Muslim. 6 My contact with the Dii people goes back to my first fieldwork in the region in 1996. I later worked as a teacher in History of Religion at Institut Luthérien de Théologie de Meiganga in Adamaoua, Cameroun, from August 1998 to June 2003. 7 African Traditional Religion is used as a collective noun without entering into the discussion iniated by Laurenti Magesa as to whether African Traditional Religion should be viewed as one world-religion or several independent religions. For further information, see Magesa (1997).

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images of God is that he is simultaneously transcendent and immanent (Mbiti 1999: 29), and God did not receive prayers in traditional Dii religion. He was, however, offered sacrifices to ensure fertility while the sorghum was still not ripe. This sacrifice was the most important public communication between the male Dii and God. The chief of the village, gbanaa, within three days of the new moon, collected a white ram, cut the throat and poured the blood into a hole in the ground. The gbanaa then addressed his invocations to God, asking for a good harvest, good health, many children and good luck for the hunters, not to mention the most important, good production for the blacksmiths. Then the hole was once more filled, a meal was prepared of couscous made by sorghum and the meat of the sheep, and the traditional beer was consumed in large quantities, women being excluded from the meal as well as the sacrifice (Frobenius 1987: 142). Another tradition to secure the harvest was the practice of washing and painting the skull of the last gbanaa, in order to please the ancestors. This was done on the altar of the gbanaa (Muller 2000: 41). There are no priests among the Dii, the ritual functions are shared by the chief, the circumciser, and by the blacksmith. In smaller villages the blacksmith may be responsible for the circumcision. According to Muller circumcision is “the main cultural and social backbone of Dii political and social structure” (Muller 1996: 102), and the structure of society is to some extent organised according to the roles played by important persons during the rite of circumcision. The actual rite of circumcision is a rite of initiation, making young boys men, and making them Dii. The first objective of the rite is to separate the boys from the girls, all details concerning the circumcision being hidden from the female Dii. The next objective is to learn to control the body and respect the elders by accepting the pain that follows the circumcision and the teaching that follows (Muller 1993: 532). The young boys, from nine to fifteen years, stay for three days with the circumciser before going into the bush for approximately one month where they learn ‘the secret language’ and suffer more physical pain.8 The importance of the circumcision is also connected to the knives used by the circumciser. The knives are regarded as divinities or spirits, yóãóãb. They are sometimes called zág, panther, because they are said to be as dangerous as this animal, and between each ceremony they are 8

For more information about the circumcision among the Dii, see Muller (2002).

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put in jars and hidden in the mountains. The knives can also be used as judges in certain ceremonies where, hidden underneath leaves, the knives will harm the person that is guilty (Muller 2000: 41). Today few young Dii are familiar with details of their own tradition. On the road towards ‘modernity’, the interaction with independent Cameroon, Islam and Christianity, certain rites have been abandoned. These rites were either banned by the government through campaigns of islamisation in the late 1960s and early 1970s or by the influence of Christian missionaries that judged certain practices as ‘evil and sinful’. However, as will be argued throughout this study, the Dii have played an active part in the transformation of their own identity, and they have kept certain traditions and transformed their initial meaning. The circumcision is still practised, even if the Dii themselves claim that the rite has gone from being ‘religion’ to being merely ‘tradition’.9 The Arrival of Islam Islam arrivedz in what is today northern Cameroon in the early 18th century with the nomad Fulbe (Hiskett 1984: 53; Mohammadou 1981; Njeuma 1997: 9),10 who exercised friendly relations with the local population. The herders and their cattle were welcomed as a surplus to the local economy where goods were traded and where milk and meat were sought after commodities. Although the origin of the Fulbe is blur, most scholars (Hiskett 1984: 51–52; Mohammadou 1981: 231; Njeuma 1978: 3) argue that the Fulbe moved east from Senegal and Mali (Futa Toro and Macina) towards Nigeria between the 13th and the 15th century. Migration from Bornu (present day Nigeria) to Adamaoua followed different patterns, but according to the sources it was always friendly. One example of a Fulbe leader who settled in northern Cameroon

9

This is affirmed by Muller (2000: 40). According to Mohammadou the Fulbe clans that later inhabited Old Adamawa originated from Masina, the old Mali empire, and migrated east towards Old Adamawa between the 13th and the 15th century. He continues to argue that nomad Fulbe visited Old Adamawa from the 13th century, and that during the 17th century an increasing number of Fulbe brought their cattle to what is today Northern Cameroon. Around 1700 the first Fulbe settled in Rey through matrimonial alliances with the Dâma and the Môno (Mohammadou 1981). Also in Garoua, Gurin and Chamba Fulbe leaders were installed as Muslim rulers before the jihad (Njeuma 1978: 24). The level of Islamic knowledge among the first nomad Fulbe is difficult to evaluate, but it is established that Islam has been present in Northern Cameroon from the early 18th century. 10

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before the jihad was the Fulbe ruler of Rey-Bouba who settled in Ray through marriage with a local princess. This harmony of trade and good neighbourhood lasted until the arrival of the Fulbe jihad warriors in the early 19th century. Following the success of Uthman dan Fodio and the establishment of his caliphate in Sokoto in 1804, several Fulbe leaders from Adamaoua met in Gurin in 1808 and a group of them travelled to Sokoto to meet Uthman and take part in the jihad. Among the leaders from Adamaoua, Modibbo11 Adama12 was chosen to carry the ‘white flag of the jihad’ and pointed out to be the Lamido Fombina.13 Various traditions differ when explaining why Adama was chosen. In general it is agreed that Adama lacked military skill and royal descent, but he was the most religiously trained among the Fulbe leaders from Old Adamawa (Njeuma 1978: 23–28). Because of his apparent weaknesses Adama’s reputation in the Rey-Bouba traditions is that of a scholar without the strength of a warrior. The Rey-Bouba leader Ardo Bouba Djoda aspired himself to the task of being the flag-bearer in Adamaoua, but his son, Prince Bouba Njidda, arrived too late at Sokoto, and ever since the relation between Adama and Rey-Bouba were tense.14 According to Ray traditions, Adama was chosen as leader of the jihad because he was the only literate among the Adamaoua elite (Mohammadou 1979: 152–153). Adama’s strength as leader was his diplomacy, his ability to unite the diverse Fulbe clans in an ideological project where the Islamic religion was the core. Adama was regarded as a holy man, a man of baraka,15 and all the Fulbe chiefs respected Adama as such. Many of these leaders were only superficial Muslims themselves, and two of the strongest chiefs, in Ray and in Chamba, hesitated to accept Adama as their military leader. They wholeheartedly took part in the jihad but wanted to keep their political independence (Njeuma 1978: 31). They did, however, meet Adama and received the flag of jihad from him. 11

Modibbo (plural modibbe) is the title of a religious (Islamic) teaher. Oral tradition in the region claims that Adama gave name to the region Adamawa/ Adamaoua. 13 Literally Lamid Fombina means the leader/king of the south. 14 According to the Ray traditions, Adama tried to kill Njidda several times and twice he besieged Rey-Bouba. Njidda did, however, survive all the attacks and ended up paying his tribute to Yola, 1000 slaves, 1000 cattle, and ten big elephant tusks annually (Mohammadou 1979: 182, 184). 15 Baraka (Fulfulde), barka (Arabic), means blessing and is an important concept in sufism and popular Islam. Learned men are thought of as holy men, in a special relation to God, and they are respected according to this status. 12

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The military success of the Fulbe in Adamaoua, who were far outnumbered by the local population,16 is rather surprising. It is in general agreed upon that the greatest military advantage of the Fulbe was their skills as horsemen,17 and that the jihad army contained trained Hausa soldiers and other adventurers and booty-seekers. Njeuma also underlines the Fulbe feeling of ethnic superiority, boosted by the success of the Fulbe over the Hausa rulers in Sokoto. This feeling of superiority was strengthened by an Islamic identity with a universal horizon. Kurt Strümpell calls this a mixture and confusion of personal ambition with a renewed religious zeal (Njeuma 1978: 32–33). Prior to the jihad the Fulbe in Rey-Bouba exercised friendly relations with their neighbours Dâma, Godi, Dâma Ndoro, Mono Dori, Liporo and Aray. Some of these groups became allies in the military campaigns that followed. The Fulbe traditions from Ray interpret the violent expansion of the Fulbe in the 19th century as part of the religious jihad to spread Islam. The local population like the Lâmé, the Dâni and the Badje were soon conquered, and the tradition claims that before leaving these villages the Fulbe built a mosque18 and taught them how to pray (Mohammadou 1979: 159). Even if the Aray had exercised friendly relations wit the Fulbe and let Aray women marry the Fulbe, they were not interested in accepting Islam as their religion. This troubled Ardo Bouba Njidda who did not dare to engage in battle with the Aray who outnumbered the Fulbe. Njidda instead came up with a cunning plan. He invited the Aray elite to a friendly discussion and offered them each a traditional Fulbe tunic. The tunics had, however, no sleeves, and while the Aray elite were stuck in their tunics they were all slaughtered. The Fulbe then killed all the Aray waiting outside the city walls and were later able to conquer their villages, and the Aray finally accepted Islam and swore allegiance to the Fulbe (Mohammadou 1979: 160–162). This first phase of the jihad in Ray made the Fulbe control all the villages near the city of Rey-Bouba. The city expanded fast and within the city walls groups of the conquered peoples were integrated in daily-life activities and slowly also came to imitate the Islamic religious practices 16 Njeuma estimates that during the first half of the 19th century the Fulbe constituted around 8% of the population in Northern Cameroon (Njeuma 1997: 4). 17 For more information about the military strength and strategy of the Fulbe in Adamaoua, see Bah (1982). 18 What kind of mosque that was built is not specified by the sources. A village mosque was often, as is also the case in some rural areas today, an open space cleaned and limited either by stones or bushes and regarded as a holy place.

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of their masters. The degree of islamisation in the local villages was much more superficial, and normally only the chiefs and the aristocrats had to accept, at least publicly, the new faith. The Fulbe and their allies gradually expanded their territory of dominance. After having helped Ardo Ndjobdi to fight the Mbum and establish the city of Ngaoundéré, and after having fought, among others, some Dii clans in the Ray area, Ardo Njidda set out for longer slaveraiding expeditions. These southern raids against the Mbum, the Mbéré and the Gbaya were sometimes conducted together with Fulbe from Ngaoundéré (Mohammadou 1979: 168) and such raids were important to the expanding Fulbe economy, slaves being an important trade commodity and also used as tribute to the Caliph in Sokoto. The harmony between the different Fulbe leaders was, however, a very pragmatic one, and later on hostilities between Rey-Bouba and Ngaoundéré occurred (Mohammadou 1979: 203), a conflict that we have earlier seen that the Dii profited from. The chief of the Mbum, Bellaka Koyia, welcomed the first Fulbe who arrived on the Adamaoua plateau. Ardo Ndjobdi, the leader of a Wolarbe clan from Turua in Bundang, had received a flag of jihad from Adama, but the wealthy Wolarbe were reluctant to engage in large-scale wars that would make their cattle suffer. Arriving at the plateau around 1835, the Bellaka offered Ardo Ndjobdi good grazing land at Ngau’hora and for three years the Fulbe and the Mbum exercised friendly relations with exchange of gifts, trade and inter-marriages. The Fulbe community settled on the ruins of a Mbum village called Ngaw-a-ndéré19 and grew rapidly, as did their herds of cattle, a fact that complicated the co-habitation with the Mbum. At this time Ndjobdi invited Koyia to convert to Islam, to accept Islamic laws throughout Mbum country, and accept Ndjobdi and the Emir in Yola as rulers. The Mbum had no intentions to give up their independence, but due to military inferiority they had to flee to Ngau’kor, from where they continued nocturnal raids against the Fulbe (Njeuma 1978: 50–54). To end the conflict with the Mbum, Ndjobdi asked the Fulbe chiefs Bouba Njidda from ReyBouba and Sambo from Tibati, to join him in the fight against Koyia. The siege lasted for three months before the Mbum recognised the

19 Ngaw-a-ndéré means in Mbum the mountain with a navel with reference to the rock-formation resting upon a mountain in the outskirts of town. This later changed to Ngaoundéré (Mohammadou 1978: 277).

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defeat and accepted Fulbe domination. In the peace settlement Islam was accepted as the religion of the Mbum, and Koyia agreed not to interfere with Fulbe administration. The Mbum on the other hand were granted freedom from slavery and the two groups should live in respect and together continue the jihad (Njeuma 1978: 55). Throughout his reign Ardo Ndjobdi was occupied with fighting smaller groups of Mbum and Dii, but soon his followers could engage in a more profitable business (Burnham 1980: 45). Together with their allies, the Fulbe from Ngaoundéré engaged in serious slave-raiding campaigns towards the east and the south, reducing many Gbaya and Kaka settlements to tributary states. Ardo Issa, reigning from 1853 to 1877, stayed according to the tradition no more than two months in Ngaoundéré during his reign. He transformed his palace into a warcamp and constructed high walls around the city. Issa established a bridgehead in present day Bertoua some 400 km from Ngaoundéré, and used it as a base for raids further south. Ngaoundéré expanded to such an extent that it provoked the Ardo of Tibati to attack Issa in order to make him respect the Tibati chief as the superior chief among the Adamaoua Fulbe (Njeuma 1978: 65). In the following battle, the military inferior Issa through clever tactics managed to fight Ardo Hammadou from Tibati (Mohammadou 1978: 287–293). Later Ngaoundéré developed into the leading city in Adamaoua, a centre for trade, cattle and slaves. The Religious Content of the Jihad Uthman dan Fodio was a great politician, but he was also a spiritual leader, an author and an intellectual whose intention was to reform the nominal Islam practised by his Hausa neighbours.20 In a number of letters to the Hausa ruler of Bornu, Uthman argued in favour of the Fulbe right to convert people to an Islam purified of “heathen” practices, and the right to defend the Fulbe community against attacks from the Hausa chiefs (Njeuma 1978: 20–21; Trimingham 1962: 195). Uthman also spent a lot of time preaching to Hausa and Fulbe commoners in the countryside, and they responded enthusiastically to his message. This message was first of all a call for repentance, and people 20 Marilyn Robinson Waldman has written an article which describes the ethnic relationship between Fulbe and Hausa prior to the jihad in details (Waldman 1966).

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were reminded of the torments of hell that waited for the unbeliever. But this fear was modified by the promise of paradise for those who followed the Prophet, a promise that also contained the hope of the Mahdi, an Islamic Messiah that was to appear following the signs of the approaching End of Time (Hiskett 1984: 161–162). Hear, the time when the Mahdi will appear, Know that the conditions [of his coming] will be made manifest, First of all will be greed among the ‘ulamá’ And love of this world, they will not seek after God’s mercy. Second, legal decisions not based on the Koran, Know that in the future there will be no obedience to Islam, . . . .21

Uthman started his religious career by learning the Koran by heart. Later he continued to study more advanced Islamic sciences like tafsir (the exegesis of the Koran), the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, fiqh (Islamic legal theory) and hadith (Islamic oral tradition) (Hiskett 1973: 37–38). Most of Uthman’s personal teachers were from his own clan, but the teacher who influenced him the most was Jibril bin ‘Umar from Agadez who was an intense and zealous religious personality. Jibril was influenced by the great Sufi revival around the Azhar mosque in Cairo in the second half of the 18th century, and he introduced Uthman to the qadiriyya Sufi brotherhood. This mystic reform movement in the Middle East was a response to the general turbulence that the Islamic world faced toward the end of the 18th century. It was also a reaction against the Wahhabisme in Saudi-Arabia that did not accept the veneration of walis (holy men) among the Sufi and the pilgrimages to their tombs. Jibril was, however, also influenced by the Wahhabi radicalism in some theological questions, a doctrinal radicalism that Uthman later argued against in his writings (Hiskett 1984: 40–41, 60–62). To what extent other Islamic revolutions in Western and Central Sudan directly influenced the Fulbe in Hausaland have been much discussed. According to Mervyn Hiskett the influence of the jihad in Futa Toro has been much exaggerated among scholars. He argues that if local revolutions did play a role, it is more likely that news of the jihad among the Touareg in Agadez inspired the Gobir Fulbe (Hiskett 1984: 157–158).

21 Preaching by Uthman dan Fodio, according to Hausu manuscript, ABM, in Hiskett (1984: 162).

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Uthman was troubled by the lack of religious zeal among local Hausa chiefs, he was aware of the European interference of Muslim affairs in the Orient, and he was directly involved in the mystic revival that influenced North and West Africa. This leads us to conclude that the Sokoto revolution was dependent on local events, but that it also was en echo of political and intellectual movements in the Middle East. Uthman chose Moddibo Adama as flag-carrier to Adamaoua due to his religious training. Several traditions underline that Adama was a pious and devoted Muslim who is said to have invited non-Muslim leaders to join the Islamic religion and create a community, “. . . where all would believe in one Almighty God, and there will be no discrimination based on ethnic origins.” (Njeuma 1978: 35). But not all the Fulbe leaders were equally happy with Adama as their superior. The controversies between the lamido in Ray and Adama were partly based on interpretation of the role of religion in the jihad. The Fulbe tradition from Rey-Bouba makes it clear that religious studies were not very popular among the Ray chiefs. But until this time the chiefs in Ray did not like that their sons devoted themselves to studies, because, in their opinion, it led to bad administration of the land; it was not until later that they gradually abandoned this prejudice.22

According to Mohammadou this tendency of laity was distinct for the Yillage Fulbe that lived in Rey-Bouba where the modibbe systematically were kept out of power. This in contrast to the Wolarbe Fulbe in Garoua where religious studies was a sign of virtue and where the first chiefs also had to be trained religious teachers (Mohammadou 1979: 302).23 Islam was, however, the ideological framework of the political revolution that took place and even the traditions from Ray underline that a religious motivation was present behind the geographical expansion. Some groups living close to the Fulbe centre were islamised, and this was also the case with the domestic slaves that inhabited the city of 22 « Mais jusqu’à cette époque les chefs de Ray n’aimaient pas que leurs fils se consacrent aux études, car, d’après eux, cela entraînait à une mauvaise administration du pays ; ce n’est que par la suite qu’ils abandonnèrent progressivement ce préjugé. » (Mohammadou 1979: 221). 23 Philip Burnham argues that few of the Wolarbe were especially known for their Islamic learning, and that the Wolarbe in Ngaoundéré used religious specialist from Bornu (Burnham 1996: 18). This still shows that the Islamic knowledge was important to the Wolarbe in Ngaoundéré, and today Ngaoundéré and Garoua are important Islamic centres whereas Rey-Bouba is still known for being a political state within the state.

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Ray. But we have also seen that few efforts were made to share the Islamic religion with the conquered people. If all that was done was to make the chief publicly confess the new religion, and clean an area for prayer, it is evident that a burning desire to share the teachings of Muhammad was not the major motivation for the jihad. It is evident that the religious enthusiasm inherited from Uthman and transmitted by Adama soon took a more materialistic turn. The local people were offered peace and submission or war, which often was easily won by the militarily superior Fulbe horsemen. Even in Ngaoundéré, where Islamic knowledge was important, it seems that Islam was kept as a secret that added to the prestige and the ethnic superiority of the Fulbe. Another important reason why the local people were rarely converted to Islam was that it would have been a hindrance to the large-scale slave trade introduced by the Fulbe, since Muslims are restricted by the Koran from making a fellow Muslim believer a slave (Bah 1993: 82; Lacroix 1966: 402; Njeuma 1978: 65). To what extent the military movement in Adamaoua was basically a religious war, or to what extent the jihad only was a pretext for the Fulbe to gain more grazing land for their cattle and material wealth from the slave trade, is heavily debated among scholars. Several approaches to the matter have been proposed. A materialistic interpretation of the jihad is presented by Mohammadou who claims that the jihad for most of the Fulbe was a political act. Even if some of the first lamibbe had a religious motivation, the jihad soon turned into a project of changing the Fulbe conditions, from being dominated to being the dominator, and expand the geographical territory to ensure political power (Mohammadou 1981: 238). Quentin Gausset agrees with Mohammadou when he basically sees Islam as an instrument that the Fulbe used to dominate the conquered tribes. He is reluctant to describe the expansion as a religious war, arguing that the lack of active proselytism made it a secular expansion, stating that “The drive of the conquest was clearly economic and political.” (Gausset 2002: 168). According to Thierno Mouctar Bah, the initial vocation of the jihad was rapidly lost and replaced by raids and expeditions linked to political prestige and economic interests of the aristocracy (Bah 1993: 76). S. J. Hogben claims that the jihad first of all was a national fight and that only later Islam was introduced as a means to dominate the native rulers (Smith 1966: 409). Other scholars tend to focus more on the religious content of the military expansion. J. S. Trimingham holds a middle position by arguing

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that the jihad was a racial as well as a religious war (Trimingham 1962: 162). Ketil Fred Hansen claims that religion played a major role and that Islam, together with pulaaku24 were the binding elements of the initial jihad, as it still is for the political organisation among the Fulbe today (Hansen 2000: 81–82). Njeuma also underlines the importance of the religious element in the jihad when he presents the character of the jihad as [A] struggle between two religions – Muslim and traditional. The wars were not merely the outward physical confrontations between peoples, but also a trail of strength for the supernatural forces which buttressed their respective beliefs. (Njeuma 1978: 66)

Like M. G. Smith, Njeuma also draws attention to the complexity of the military campaigns, arguing that although the jihad was clearly religious in its intentions, it contained built-in tendencies that sometimes seemed to reverse the original ideals (Njeuma 1978: 64–65; Smith 1966: 419). Rivalry among the Muslim leaders and the fact that the Fulbe could not enslave other Muslims had to be balanced against the ideals of the jihad to spread the message of Muhammad. This led to what Lacroix calls a tendency to confiscate Islam in order to strengthen the Fulbe power against the native population (Lacroix 1966: 402). Njeuma, in a more recent work, agrees with this point of view, saying that “Islam was therefore a Fulbe ethnic symbol and a vector of their cultural expression.” (Njeuma 1993: 89). From what has been presented so far it is clear that the Fulbe jihad in the early 19th century was a complex movement where a variety of interests, religious, material, ethnic and political were combined. How to evaluate such a complexity of factors within one movement? It seems to me that Smith has a point when he claims that the variety of scholarly interpretations of the jihad often reflects the ideological preferences of the author (Smith 1966: 410–411). Mervyn Hiskett reminds us that “[t]he history of Hausaland, the life of the Shehu and his community, and the rise of the Sokoto caliphate all took place against the 24 Pulaaku is often described as “the Fulani way of life” and consists of behavioural rules concerning pride and honour. According to Stenning, to know profoundly the Fulbe language, fulfulde, is the most important sign of pulaaku. But language to the Fulbe is more than grammar and phonetics, it is not just about speaking the fulfulde, it is about living the fulfulde. The three other components of pulaaku are modesty and reserve (seemteende), patience and fortitude (munyal) and care and forethought (hakkiilo) (Stenning 1959: 55).

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background of world Islam.” (Hiskett 1973: ix). Some of the historians that have interpreted the jihad seem to forget that within the Islamic tradition there is no contradiction between spiritual and material progress. Following the example of Muhammad and the first four caliphs, material prosperity was actually a sign of spiritual blessing, and it is therefore most probable that the Fulbe conquerors initially saw material gain as part of the jihad. Since a traditional interpretation of the Islamic religion has no division between spiritual and secular power, religion is politics and politics is religion. Bah also underlines l’esprit de djihad (the spirit of the jihad) as an important psychological factor behind the military success of the Fulbe (Bah 1982: 67), even if he later calls it a jihad without the will to proselyte (Bah 1993: 86). This to say that the Fulbe themselves interpreted the military expansion as part of a religious project. To question why the Fulbe did not put more effort into converting the conquered people and often refused them to convert (Gausset 2002: 169), is reasonable, and shows the ambiguity of the Fulbe conquest. It is beyond doubt that the jihad soon took a materialistic turn, and that not all of the Fulbe chiefs saw the religious obligations to convert the native population as the most important one. But this does not disqualify the movement from being, in essence, a religious movement. Which leads me to conclude with Smith that “[t]he ambiguous character of Shehu dan Fodio’s jihad derives from the ambiguous character of jihad itself.” (Smith 1966: 419). Islam and the Dii Muller’s historical investigation, confirmed through my fieldwork, states that harmony reigned between the Dii and the Fulbe prior to the jihad (Muller 1997: 62). The few Fulbe in the area were treated as equal trading partners, their cattle brought milk and meat, a welcomed supplement to the Dii diet. The Fulbe profited from Dii farming products and their iron skills, the Dii being the only group in the region who knew the ‘secret of the iron’ (Bah 1993: 77). This harmony ended with the military invasion in the early 19th century. It became clear through Fulbe oral traditions in Rey-Bouba that the Dii were not among the groups that were directly ruled by the Fulbe and had slaves settled within the walls of Ray. The Dii people claim that they never were slaves under the Fulbe, which is partly true since they fled from areas where slavery was a threat, but several Dii villages were conquered (Mohammadou

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1979: 166–167) and had to pay heavy taxes to the lamido in Rey-Bouba. The Dii moved their villages from the immediate lamidate of Ray, but agreed on his demand for soldiers for slave-raiding expeditions. This ambiguous attitude of the Dii towards the Fulbe is well documented in the two following Fulbe oral traditions. When Moddibo Adama returned from his first visit in Rey-Bouba, he was attacked by a group of Dii from the Mambé clan. Adama, whose soldiers were tired after the conflict with the Ardo in Ray, suffered losses, but managed to escape (Mohammadou 1979: 193). This is an example of the Dii resistance against the Fulbe, an act that was later severely revenged by the Rey-Bouba Fulbe. This also shows that although Moddibo Adama and Rey-Bouba were bitter enemies, their ethnic identity united their forces against the kirdi (pagan) population. A later incident speaks of the collaboration between the Dii and the Fulbe. The oral tradition claims that it was a group of Dii soldiers that killed Ardo Bouba Djouroum in 1899 (Mohammadou 1979: 216). The Dii soldiers, referred to in the tradition as servants, were led by a conspiracy of four of Ardo Djouroum own sons and this show how some Dii had close ties to the Fulbe. The same ambiguity was also found in the Ngaoundéré lamidate, where the Dii and the more organised Mbum were involved in armed conflicts with the Fulbe (Burnham 1980: 45), but later took part in Fulbe slave raids against the Mbéré and the Gbaya. The Mbum and the Dii, who initially inhabited the Ngaoundéré surroundings, seem to have avoided the slave-status and contributed to the army of the Fulbe. But the Dii, along with the other kirdi people, had to pay tribute to the lamido in Ngaoundéré (Burnham 1980: 49). The process of islamisation among the Dii was slow and followed the pattern of prestige, conversion of chiefs and the participation in trade (Bah 1993: 82–83). In general it was the impact of the Sufi brotherhoods in the early 20th century that led to the islamisation of the ordinary people in northern Cameroon (Bah 1996). Curiously, Muller argues that the arrival of the Christian missionaries not only opened the way for Christianity, but also for freedom of religion in a wider sense so that it became easier for some Dii to convert to Islam (Muller 1997: 70). After independence in 1960 and the arrival in power of the Muslim president, Ahmadou Ahidjo (a Fulbe from Garoua), Muslims, and especially Fulbe, held all the important political posts in northern Cameroon (Azarya 1976). This influenced very much the process of islamisation among the Dii, since anyone aspiring at a job in the administration in the North

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had to be a Muslim. This state-sponsored campaign of islamisation reached the Dii especially between 1967 and 1969 (Muller 2000: 45) when the Cameroon State built mosques in major villages that did not have a house for prayers built in cement. Traditional religion suffered hard from this campaign, altars and ‘idols’ being destroyed, knives of circumcision were thrown into rivers along with other ‘charms’ and traditional protection. This missionary effort from the State also touched the Christians and led to the destruction of several chapels. We can then conclude that the process of trying to convert the Dii to Islam was a slow and mainly peaceful process, interrupted by violent incidents the first years of the jihad and through the turbulent end of the 1960s. The European Colonial Race for Cameroon The first contact between Europeans and the indigenous population dates back to the 15th century when the first Portuguese explorers arrived at the coast of Cameroon. Due to the shrimps they found swimming in the rivers they named it Rio dos Camarões (Rivers of Prawns), which was later changed into the Spanish Camerones, before the British named it Cameroon, the German Kamerun and the French, Cameroun (Eyongetah and Brain 1974: 53). From the 16th to the 19th century, trade gradually increased between Europe and the West African coast, only to be boosted by the newly discovered American continent and the tragic mass-deportation of African labour across the Atlantic Ocean. Although no permanent trade stations were established on Cameroonian soil in the early period, a considerable number of people from this area were victims of the transatlantic slave trade. Friendly trade and political contacts increased between the coast and the Europeans from the 1840s following several treaties made between local chiefs and white traders. The British, whose political agenda was to abolish the slave trade and encourage legitimate trade, were particularly active. The first missionary from the English Baptist Missionary Society, Alfred Saker, arrived in 1845 and purchased from the King of Bimbia 128 square kilometres of land and created the small colony Victoria. By this time several local chiefs wanted to establish permanent contact with the British, and offered to surrender their territory to the Queen. The British were, however, reluctant to engage themselves in more countries in Africa even if their consul Edward Hewett tried to

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convince the government of the possibilities of trade and the dangers from German and French interests in the region. It seems that fear from European competitors was more important than trade when the British finally, in April 1884, decided to offer the coastal chiefs a place in the British Empire. Great was, however, Hewett’s surprise when he returned to Cameroon and heard that a German gunboat, Möwe, was already patrolling the Cameroon River and that the German flag was already hoisted on Cameroonian soil. Bismarck, who had earlier opposed the colonial practice, had suddenly turned and generous treaties of protection were offered to the local chiefs. These treaties gave the local chiefs monopoly rights to trade with the inland, a right that the British never would grant them, whereas the Germans in return received monopoly rights for trade with Europe. One may ask why the local chiefs were so eager to give up their land and be formally annexed by the European powers. The Nigerian historian Diké argues that it was most often European traders that lured the small kings into these treaties without explaining the consequences of the cross they signed on a piece of paper (Eyongetah and Brain 1974: 59–60). Verkijika G. Fanso claims that the German success in trade was linked to their ‘trust’ system, where the white traders gave local chiefs credit in European goods in exchange for local merchandises to be delivered later (Fanso 1989: 69–70). This system, not practised by the British, was very profitable for the local kings who used the system to improve their own conditions. An argument for German annexation was that the immense credit given to the local chiefs would be lost if Cameroon were to become a British colony. It thus seems that the ruling class chose formal agreements with the German colonial power because they offered the best terms concerning military protection (from rival chiefs) and trading conditions. The local chiefs were experienced in trade and able to negotiate good treaties. This became clear when the Germans violated the treaties because of the profitable inland trade monopoly and took up arms and started a bloody expansion towards Adamaoua.25 The German expansion towards Adamaoua faced a double obstacle. First they had to fight the powerful southern chiefs who wanted

25 For detailed information about the early colonial period in Cameroon, see Eyongetah and Brain (1974: 53–75), Gaillard (1989: 63–116), Kirk-Greene (1969: 41–87), Mveng (1963: 261–305), Njeuma (1989: 32–105), and Rudin (1968: 17–75).

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to protect their inland trade (Gaillard 1989: 74–75) and secondly they faced the military strong and well-organised Fulbe rulers in the North (Kirk-Greene 1969: 60). The Germans soon understood that in order to secure trade routes into the interior and beat the British and the French in the race for Adamaoua, military force was needed. This caused much debate in the German Reichstag that was all along reluctant to the whole colonial project and thought that the traders themselves should pay for their protection (Rudin 1968: 142–143). The local administration managed, however, to convince the politicians of the importance of military expansion and in January 1899 the “Voute-Adamaoua expedition” with 350 soldiers and twelve German officers left Douala under captain von Kamptz’ command (Njeuma 1978: 212).26 The German intention was to establish friendly relations with the Fulbe chiefs, intentions that were crushed when they arrived in Tibati. Lamido Muhammad had the strongest army in Adamaoua, estimated at ten thousand infantry and three thousand horsemen, and he was not willing to submit to the intruders. The devastating military campaigns lasted for nine months before the Germans, helped by the Ngambe people, beat the lamido’s army, burnt and looted his villages and humiliated him to death (Njeuma 1978: 215–220). Internal rivalry among the Fulbe chiefs made them unable to join their military efforts against the invading force whose superior weapons ruined the morality of the Fulbe soldiers. When the British in addition conquered Yola in 1901 and Emir Zubeiru had to flee from the throne (Kirk-Greene 1969: 56–59), the century long Fulbe domination of Adamaoua came to a halt. With the ties between Adamaoua and Yola cut off, the Germans ceased the possibility to fill this administrative gap and asked the lamibe to pay homage to the German administration. The small colonial administration realised that they were unable to administer such a vast area and proposed that the lamibbe loyal to the administration should continue to rule their lamidates and collect taxes on behalf of the two German commissioners residing in the region. The German officials were supposed to respect the local rulers and their religion and engage in language learning in order to maintain peace and good relations between the lamibbe and the administration. Use of military

26 The expedition included 650 porters, 150 boys, cooks and wives of the soldiers under the surveillance of a German officer and 17 soldiers armed with carbines.

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force was to be avoided and the natives were invited to take part in the local administration (Rudin 1968: 186–187). Whereas the Fulbe lost their independence to the German colonial power and considerable income from the abolishment of organised slave trade they at the same time strengthened their administrative position versus other local groups (Azarya 1976: 26, 28). The First World War put an end to the German colonial adventure. After the French victory over the Germans in Ngaoundéré in June 1915 and the joint British-French victory in the south in March 1916, Cameroon was divided between the British and the French (Abwa 1989: 137; Mveng 1963: 361). After the peace-treaty in Versailles 1919 Cameroon was made a mandate under the Society of Nations administered by France (Mveng 1963: 369–370). The new colonial administration soon understood that it depended on the traditional chiefs to govern the vast Adamaoua area, and the French had positive experiences with Muslim rulers from organising their North African colonies (Abwa 1989: 138; Froelich 1962: 85). To win the loyalty of the lamibbe and the public, the French early engaged in a policy of generosity that aimed at securing the traditional chief’s authority. The moments for distributing the political gifts were neatly chosen by the French and often turned into public feasts on the French national Day, the 14 July. On such an occasion lamido Issa was offered the award Officer of the Black Star of Benin in Ngaoundéré in 1919 (Abwa 1989: 140). Events like this were part of the overall French “civilising mission” which aimed at promoting French culture, language and civilisation in the colonies and turn the inhabitants into future citizens of France (Azarya 1976: 21; Eyongetah and Brain 1974: 113). In most colonies the French governed through ‘direct rule’ where little administration and power was left to the local population. Daniel Abwa and Hansen have, however, shown that this was not the case in Adamaoua. With only three to four French functionaries sur place and strong traditional chiefs, the colonial administration had to improvise their politics (Abwa 1989: 164–165; Hansen 1992: 107). The French did, however, gradually reduce the political power of the lamido. Whereas the Germans had left traditional power in the hands of the lamibbe, and to some extent extended the lamibbes political control, the French made the lamido a clerk on the lowest administrative level, supervised by French superiors. The private army of the lamido was gradually reduced to a police force and used as guards in the palace and in the prison. This was indirectly a blow to the lamido’s economy since

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organised slave raiding, which occasionally occurred under German rule, came to a final halt.27 The lamido’s economic position as tax collector was also reduced since the colonial administration claimed more of the chief’s income (Azarya 1976: 24–25). Compared with how the British officially sought to maintain the prestige of the traditional chiefs, the French used every occasion to underline that the lamibbe were the subordinates of the French. Chef de région Bru introduced weekly meetings where the lamido had to visit him, and the lamido was deliberately made to wait outside his office in order to underline the hierarchy (Hansen 1992: 104). The most serious restriction to the lamibe’s power was, however, the French idea of removing several non-Muslim people from the authority of the lamido. The administration probably had a double aim with this policy. First of all their goal was to limit the lamibe’s power according to French colonial practice by making the other chiefs report directly to the French administration. Secondly it was a step towards giving in to the international pressure to fulfil the “. . . plan for complete liberation of the enslaved families and the most rapid possible improvement of their situation.”28 In 1929 the Gbaya were ‘liberated’ and Meiganga made a canton, and the positive experiences from this region made the administrators plan similar cantons among the Dii, the Kaka and the Mbum. In 1933 chef de subdivision Peyron prepared such actions, but the reactions from lamido Abba made the French administration halt the plans (Abwa 1989: 162–163). Few years later the Dii-plain was, however, made a canton after the involvement of the Norwegian missionaries (Lode 1990: 44–45), a complicated power struggle between the French, the Fulbe, the missionaries and the Dii that will be analysed in details in a later chapter.

27 An interesting point made by Victor Azarya is how the Fulbe in Adamaoua managed to adjust themselves economically to the changing conditions caused by the colonial presence. The abolition of slave trade put an end to the income from selling the slaves to Hausa traders, but the Fulbe managed to keep their slaves in the rumde, the agriculture villages, and many slaves developed strong emotional ties to their Fulbe masters. In addition the Fulbe took over the increasing trade that followed the colonial project, despite their previous negative attitude towards commerce (Azarya 1976: 28–31). 28 Chef de région Bru quoted from Abwa (1989a: 163).

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chapter two The French Colonial Administration and the Dii

When analysing the available archive materials from the colonial administration one is struck by the positive mood that surrounds what is written about the Dii-people. They are several times referred to as a hardworking people that create few problems and are loyal to the colonial administration.29 The first French report that I was able to find mentioning the Dii was from 1918 and evaluates critically the German colonial politics in Cameroon. The report claims that the German together with the Fulbe led violent campaigns against the kirdi population in the North and mentions one particular event where the Dii collectively had been severely punished for the acts of one single person.30 Already at this early stage a more positive attitude towards the kirdi population is visible among the French than was the case with the Germans. The new colonial administration faced, however, the same problems as he Germans. In the annual report to the Society of Nations in 1922, the French states that nineteen people had been killed during attacks from the kirdi, and that their aim is to pacificer les kirdi. The French attitude was, however, at least officially, not to join the Fulbe in violent campaigns against the kirdi, but rather to free them from Fulbe rule.31 This political challenge is referred to in several reports the next decades,32 and even if Hansen’s study shows that the French attitude towards the kirdi was at times violent and opposed to the Treaty of Versailles (Hansen 1992: 63), it was not without success. The French colonial administration managed to convince the kirdi that the French would protect them from Fulbe slave raiding expeditions and several cantons were established in the Garoua region. This was done in order to reach a double aim of the colonial power. Firstly in order to improve the direct control over the area by reducing the power of the lamido,33 and secondly in order to improve the humanitarian conditions of the kirdi. To say that administrator Bru was representing the official French policy when he wrote that “[a]ll that I have been doing here for the past three years revolves around the plan for complete

29 ANY/2AC 7904, ANY/2AC 8166, ANY/2AC 8130. ANY/2AC 7233 and ANY/1AC 3401/2 in Hansen (1992: 74). 30 ANSOM C 22, 195. 31 Rapport annuel Societé des nations (RASND) 1922. 32 RASND 1931, RASND 1933. 33 ANY/2AC 8584.

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liberation of the enslaved families and the most rapid possible improvement of their situation.” (Abwa 1989: 163) is an exaggeration, but it shows one side of the civilising mission of the French. The colonial attitude towards the kirdi in Adamaoua was, as we have shown, not that idealistic because of the strong opposition that this politics of liberation was met with by the Fulbe lamibbe. The reasons why the Dii finally had their own canton in 1937 are several, but the natural geographic division created by the falaise north of Ngaoundéré together with the positive impression that the Dii gave the administration are surely among them. It was even proposed by the regional administrator Troullier to make the Dii-plain a subdivision and unite all the Dii from the lamidates of Ngaoundéré and Rey-Bouba.34 Mr. Troullier was impressed by the clean villages, the high birth-rate among Dii women and even proposed to build a dispensary in Wack. He ends his almost euphoric report from 1947 this way: “Finally, the dourou population being particularly interesting, it seems strange to abandon them, the way they are currently abandoned.”35 Despite Mr. Trulliers warm recommendations, the Dii-plain was never made a subdivision. Such a proposition would not only have upset the lamido in Ngaoundéré, but even more the lamido in Rey-Bouba who continued his privileged position as ruler of a ‘state within the state’. Several reports warn about the anarchy that would reign if all subjected people were to be freed from Fulbe rule,36 a discourse that was particularly present when the Norwegian missionaries started their active campaigns to take care of escaped servants in Ngaoundéré in the 1950s. The picture of the Dii among the colonial administration is probably a reflection of the positive attitude of the Dii toward colonial presence. The Dii were not innocent in the kirdi raids against Fulbe commercials, and the Germans stopped the Fulbe revenge raids against the Dii-plain (Muller 1997: 63). The same grateful attitude was granted the French when the Dii-plain was made a canton, and schools, a court of justice, a dispensary and a house for the chief was built in Mbé in the 1940s (Muller 1997: 64). But the archival material also shows the backside of the colonial coin for the Dii people. The report from the tour among

34

ANY/2AC 8130. « Enfin, la population dourou étant particulièrement intéressante il me semble anormal de la laisser abandonner à elle même, comme elle l’est actuellement. » ANY/2AC 8130. 36 RASDN 1931, RASDN 1933. 35

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the Dii in 1947 states that the whole village Gop Nock had left the area because of the heavy burden of forced labour required by the colonial administration.37 Several other Dii also complained about the number of workers demanded by the French. A report from 1953 states neutrally that all the Dii villages now have moved to the new road from Ngaoundéré to Garoua, which will help them sell their products,38 whereas the general impression from my informants is that all the villages were forced to move so that the French easier could control the population. The French control of the colonised population is also reflected in the archival material, containing cultural studies, birth rates, population statistics and detailed descriptions of the attitude of chiefs and villages. Through this information we get the impression that the Dii were a calm and hardworking people with great social mobility. The annual report from the Ngaoundéré subdivision in 1945 explains how 600 Dii left Rey-Bouba after the death of lamido Bouba Djamâ’a, and created two new villages, Mara I and Mara II, out of fear of being punished for the death of the lamido.39 The total population of the Dii in the subdivision was in 1945 reported to be 9,964 (the newcomers not included). In the annual report in 1954, the Dii population had increased to 14,655, indicating high birth rate and further social mobility.40 The colonial administration also watched closely the works of the local chiefs. The first chef de canton41 among the Dii was arnado Gabana in Wack who was nominated in 1938.42 Through the colonial reports we can follow how the French administrators gradually became dissatisfied with him43 and finally moved the chief hood to Zubeïru Kun Mbaa in Mbé around 1950.44 The question of the religious situation among the Dii people is treated only briefly in the colonial reports. An early report from 1923 on Dii customs states that the young are ignorant about their traditions, the old do not speak Fulfulde and that the Dii interpreter was unable to

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

ANY/2AC 8130. ANY/2AC 7843. ANY/2AC 7904. ANY/2AC 3376. Canton was an administrative district within the sub-division. ANY/2AC 7904. ANY/2AC 8130. ANY/1AC 2665.

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transmit any profound understanding of their customs.45 The colonial administration seems to have been rather ignorant towards further cultural studies among the Dii, but it is clear that they were not too happy about the relative success of the Norwegian missionaries among the Dii. They seem rather satisfied to conclude that in 1954 there were still no Christian chiefs among the Dii and that more and more chiefs islamised. Although the percentage of Christians in the Ngaoundéré subdivision at this point is seven per cent of the total population (after 20 years of Christian presence), the reports conclude that since all Christians are children and youth, they have “small chances of increasing in numbers the years to come.”46 A theme related to the arrival of the mission and their contact with children and youth is that of education. Colonial reports are disappointed with the number of children going to school in Ngaoundéré, even if the lamido had made efforts in order to recruit more pupils. The report is not dissatisfied with the fact that three hundred seventy pupils attended primary school, but with the fact that only thirteen pupils from North Cameroon had passed their final exams, and that majority of them were Dii.47 The high level of education among the Dii was again mentioned in a report from 1959, but this time it was mentioned together with a warning that the colonial administration could expect problems from this “developed milieu” in the canton.48 The French Colonial Administration and Christian Missionaries The Norwegian missionaries came to Ngaoundéré in 1925 and were granted permission to establish a mission station a few kilometres outside town, in what is today called quartier norvégien. The first years of their presence, the missionaries caused few, if any, problems for the colonial administration. The annual colonial reports from the French administration mention the different Christian missions working in the country, but they are mainly focused on the larger mission agencies in the South, and information about the small insignificant Norwegian mission is scarce and not always updated. The colonial attitude towards

45 46 47 48

ANSOM/AGEFOM 932/2965. ANY/1AC 3376. ANY/2AC 4638. ANY/3AC 4044.

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the Christian mission was dualistic. On the one hand the missionaries were regarded as co-workers in the mission civilisatrice of the French colonial power, and Christian virtues were regarded as part of the Western civilisation that France promoted. The colonial administration even paid 25 per cent of the overseas travel costs for the French missionaries49 serving in Cameroon. On the other hand the missions were closely watched because of the influence they had on the indigenous population, and the colonial administration feared political trouble following too much focus on the aspect of liberation in the Gospel. At first it seems that the administration was worried about the presence of missionaries from so many different countries in Cameroon, but a report on Les Missions Religieuses au Cameroun from the late 1940s claims that this confusion of Babel is positive for France because it will prevent any foreign nationalism to develop within the mandate area.50 The same report presents a deeper analysis of the catholic and protestant missions. The French Catholics are reported to cause the administration much trouble, but mostly due to “the critical attitude being a part of our national character”,51 most often small quarrels where priests oppose the strict rules of the colonial administration. Especially La Mission des Pères du Saint-Esprit caused many problems in the South, but this was due to personal problems between the responsible leaders in the mission and in the administration.52 Since the policy of the Catholics to transform the indigenous society, and create new power structures, it caused frequent clashes with the politics of the colonial administration that exercised its power through locally elected chiefs. Protestant missionaries were, on a daily basis, much easier to control. Their evangelising methods consisted of maintaining the traditional political hierarchy, and rather focus on influencing the indigenous population on a personal spiritual and moral level in order to change the individual and not the social structures. The problem for the colonial administration was, however, that the few problems the Protestants created were much more serious than those of the Catholics, German and American Presbyterians were for instance accused of having published

49

ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/9. ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/1. 51 “[A]u fond récriminateur qui marque notre caractère national, (. . .).” ANSOM/ 1AFFPOL 2192/1. 52 ANSOM/AGEFOM 355/170. 50

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anti-French propaganda in their home countries.53 The colonial administration so much feared the Baptist World Congress in 1928 that they sent the director of the Protestant Mission in Cameroon, Maître, to Canada to defend the cause of the colonial administration and to avoid that the Congress would propose to send German Baptist missionaries, that were expelled after the First World War, back to Cameroon.54 The same serious concerns were directed against Norwegian missionaries, and especially against pastor Endresen, when they in the 1950s threatened to reveal to the UN inspectors how little the French did to abolished what they regarded as slavery practised by the Fulbe notables.55 The early years of the Norwegian mission were marked by a rather good relationship to the colonial administration, even if the French applied strict restrictions to mission work in Ngaoundéré fearing the reactions from the Muslim lamido. It has already been mentioned that the mission had to build their station on a hill outside town, and they were not allowed to build churches or even arrange meetings in the city. The missionary report from 1934 refers to an incident where the colonial administrator, on behalf of the lamido, complains about singing of Christian hymns in a private house in town.56 The official French attitude towards Christian mission activity had been established through Decret du 28 mars 1933 where rules for religious services were described. The principles in the declaration implied complete freedom of religion and liberty to perform religious services that did not threaten the public order or offend the public, and the Republic were not to support economically any service.57 This directory further regulated the number of churches of a specific denomination that could be built within a certain geographical radius, and claimed that the number of believers that asked for the church had to be at least one hundred within a radius of five kilometres.58 With this in mind it is possible to conclude that the colonial administration in Ngaoundéré was both strict and liberal towards the Norwegian mission. Strict because their wish to satisfy the lamido made freedom of religion and freedom to organise Christian meetings impossible in Ngaoundéré, a practice

53 54 55 56 57 58

ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/1 and ANSOM/AGEFOM 355/170. ANSOM/AGEFOM 799/1856. ANY/2AC 8587, ANY/2AC 4725. Conference Report, Sudan Mission/NMS 1934, p. 2. ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/9. ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/1.

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that was rooted in the fear of disturbance of public order. It was on the other hand liberal because the mission was granted permission to build a church at their station even if the number of local converts were far from one hundred.59 The mission was also granted permission to build local churches outside Ngaoundéré with much less than one hundred believers locally.60 The administration had the possibility to end this liberal practice, but kept it as a means to influence the Mission whenever necessary.61 Even if the Norwegian mission later grew to be an influential actor on the social-religious stage in North Cameroon, the colonial reports before 1950 refers to the Norwegian missionaries as a small protestant ‘sect’ with a weak economy62 and without much success.63 A report from 1950 evaluates the chances of success for the Norwegian missionaries among Muslims to be quasi-nulles, and the administration finds their attempt to work among the more or less islamised servants of the Fulbe a bad idea that only would create problems between the mission and the local chiefs. The report concludes, however, that the Norwegian missionaries continue their work with renewed resources despite their problems and lack of success.64 The first sign of tension between NMS missionaries and the colonial administration can be traced to 1946 when the missionaries were accused of involving themselves with the business of the administration.65 This was only the starting point of what was to become a serious problem

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There were probably only six local Christians when the chapel at the mission station was built in 1936. 60 When the question of freed slaves created tension between the mission and the colonial administration, the colonial administration became stricter when it came to grant permissions to build schools and churches. In the monthly political report in December 1953 the mission is accused of starting schools in the bush (without qualified teachers) and uses the school as a church in order to avoid the complicated process of applying for permission to build a church, a practice that the report will investigate further. ANY/1AC 3474. 61 ANY/2AC 4458. 62 It is several times referred to the fact that NMS missionaries had to be supported by the Americans during the war, and NMS was a small mission compared to the other Protestant missions in the South. In 1946 NMS had five missionaries in Ngaoundéré whereas the American Presbyterian Mission had seventy missionaries and the Evangelical Paris Mission had twenty six missionaries in the southern part of Cameroon. ANY/2AC 8566 and ANSOM/1AFFPOL 2192/1. 63 ANY/2AC 4458. The annual report to UN in 1951 states that NMS had seventeen missionaries and 2,300 local believers. 64 ANY/2AC 4458. 65 ANY/2AC 8566.

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for the French administration, the Norwegian mission’s involvement in the question of slavery. From the very start the French were aware of the slave-problem in Cameroon, and in most annual reports to the Society of Nations/UN the question is referred to. Already in 1922 this complex problem was treated with the assurance that the slaves in Cameroon would soon have their libération complète.66 For the French administration it was important to show the world that their mandate over Cameroon was a success, that the civilising mission progressed, and that fighting slavery was high on the Western agenda in order to fight bad conscience due to the inhuman transatlantic slave-trade. On the other hand the French needed the Fulbe as partners in order to govern northern Cameroon. The same message is therefore repeated on every occasion, that we will put and end to slavery, but we must avoid anarchy.67 One problem that the colonial administration faced was that the indigenous domestic servant of the Fulbe had lost their social infrastructure after years of servitude, and vagabondage and crime was often the result of the new freedom. To resettle former servants in new villages was encouraged and practised by the French, but to such a small extent that it most probably was a means to show their goodwill towards the international observers.68 In general they closed their eyes to this problem in order to maintain l’ordre public. When the Norwegian missionaries started to receive escaped slaves69 at the mission station in

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RASDN 1922. ANSOM/AGEFOM 929/2924, 932/2959, 932/2967. 68 ANSOM/AGEFOM 932/2965. 69 What the Norwegian missionaries called slaves was called servants by the colonial administration. The Fulfuldé term matchobe is a description of the population that is not Fulbe and is not Muslim (Hansen 1992: 20). The French called this part of the population asservis (made servants) and chef de région Bru estimated this to be 70 per cent of the population in Adamaoua in 1923 (ANSOM/AGEFOM 932/2965). In general it is important to make a distinction between the population that accepted the Fulbe political administration and paid tax to the Fulbe and avoided slave raiding expeditions and the groups that were in constant war with the Fulbe. Among these latter groups, large parts of the population were captured and made domestic slaves or sold to slave-merchants. But also among the groups that accepted Fulbe dominance, young boys and girls were sometimes either captured or required as “gifts” to serve in the households of Fulbe notables. What to call this deportation against the will of the individual is to a large extent a linguistic consideration reflecting ideological standpoint. The Norwegian missionaries saw it as in their interest to call them slaves because it gave them religious legitimisation and political and donor goodwill to do so. The French called them servants to avoid the political incorrect and stigmatising slave-label. The Cameroonian historian Martin Njeuma argues this way: “There was, however, a fundamental 67

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Ngaoundéré, serious problems arose between the two European communities. Several monthly political reports from 1950 to 1955 describe the French dissatisfaction with the way the missionaries try to profit from this, for the administration, so complicated question. The missionaries are accused of arrogant behaviour, of doing anything to increase the number of believers and of jeopardising the social order in Adamaoua.70 From being a weak Protestant sect, the Norwegian mission has become an influent institution with contacts within the UN system. A letter from chef de région, R. Crus, to the High Commissioner in Yaoundé describes the influence of the Norwegian missionaries this way: You neither ignore that in Ngaoundéré the leader of the Mission (who recently returned to the field), Pastor ANDRESEN [sic], minutely observes all or acts and gestures, and that he never stops putting pressure on the Administration in order to stop the abuse of power exercised by the local chief and their surroundings . . . Without being in favour of the politicalreligious concepts of Pastor ANDRESEN [sic], whose way of seeing and doing things differ entirely from ours, it is a fact that we have to count him in. Didn’t he, in 1952, go as far as threatening us, in an indirect manner, of course, to reveal to the UN mission the “inhuman actions” of certain chiefs, encouraged, or at least accepted by the Administration, and the practice, according to him, of certain acts to be seen as slavery? At that time, the High-Commissioner SOUCADAUX had personally ensured Pastor ANDRESEN [sic] of our goodwill, and, ever since, my efforts have been directed towards a policy of conciliation, doing my best to balance things between the exaggerations of the Mission and the imperfection or the abuse of the tradition.71

This letter, together with chef de subdivision Maître’s report from 1955, was a long step towards admitting that the French administration for too long had closed their eyes on a serious question, and Maître’s fiftyfive page long report contains several radical measures proposed in order to solve the problem of the captured servants once and for all. After this serious clash between the mission and the administration,

problem between exporting labour in form of what European sources refer to as slaves (. . .) and keeping labour locally in the state and private farms.” He continues to argue that the organisation of captured manpower in rumnde, agricultural villages, can be compared to the organisation of kibbutz in Israel (Njeuma 1997: 14–15). 70 ANY/2AC 4598, 8587. 71 ANY/2AC 4725.

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the relationship gradually became better, and the questions of runaway servants were settled amicably.72 The Arrival of Christianity Christian mission was, as already mentioned, established in Cameroon in the early 1840s. Even if Alfred Saker from the London Baptist Mission founded the first church in Douala, Jaap van Slageren has shown that it was actually missionaries from the Jamaican Baptist Society who first started Christian work on Cameroonian soil. The first missionaries were freed slaves, inspired by the abolition movement in Jamaica to go back to Africa and preach the Gospel. This movement was strong enough to create a theological institute in Calabar in order to train missionaries who intended to return to the continent of their forefathers (van Slageren 2001). The Jamaicans, guided by their natural leader, Joseph Merrick, in turn inspired British Baptists, among them Alfred Saker, to start a ministry in Cameroon. The first mission was thus a joint mission, where British and Jamaican Baptists worked side by side in order to establish Christian communities. The British in the long run turned out to be better organised than their Jamaican colleagues, and when the Jamaican society closed its station in 1852, the remaining Jamaicans continued their ministries as employees within the British mission. Joseph Merrick and Alfred Saker were both linguistic pioneers. Merrick translated the book of Genesis into Isubu in 1844, and continued with several books from both the Old and the New Testament before he died in 1852. Saker translated the Gospel of Matthew into Douala in 1848, and in 1872 his team had finished the translation of the whole Bible (Messina and Slageren 2005: 27–31). Following the German colonisation of Cameroon in 1884 and the Berlin conference the following year, the British missionaries left the area. The German Basler Mission, present in Ghana since the early 1830s, saw this as an opportunity to expand its work in Africa. Since German now was the official language in the colony, mission schools that could train future colonial clerks were welcomed by the colonial

72

For further details on the question of slavery and the relationship between the Norwegian missionaries and the colonial administration see Halfdan Endresen’s own books on the topic (Endresen 1954; 1965; 1969) and Marte Bogen Sinderud’s master thesis (Sinderud 1993).

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administration. German and Swiss missionaries, with some difficulties the first years, thus continued the work of the Jamaican and British pioneers in the Douala region, and even if German now was the official language in the schools, indigenous languages were used in the churches. Further south along the coast, American Presbyterian missionaries built its first church in 1889. This American mission was also a result of the abolition movement in the States, and after having failed to establish its work in Liberia in the 1830s, the mission moved to Gabon and the island of Corisco, and from this island it reached the shore of Kribi. Young devoted Cameroonian Christians were given theological education abroad and returned to build the first church. Later several white American missionaries followed and the Presbyterian mission collaborated well with the German administration and built churches all over the south-eastern part of Cameroon (Messina and Slageren 2005: 36–37, 85–87). The end of the First World War did not affect the work of the American mission in the South. German missionaries from the Basler mission were, however, expelled from the territory that was confined as a mandatory area to France in 1917, and the Germans were to be replaced by missionaries from la Société des Missions Evangéliques de Paris. The French missionaries did, however, not arrive until 1919, and Messina and van Slageren underlines the importance of this period as a period where the Cameroonian protestant pastors, even though few in numbers, stood out and took responsibility. With no white missionaries in the French mandatory area, and schools and mission plantations ruined by the war, local pastors like Lotin, Jacob Modi Din, Joseph Ekollo, and Joseph Kuoh, managed to strengthen the Christian communities and make Douala the principal centre of the evangelical movement in the country. The return of white missionaries made church growth continue, but was a setback for the local pastors. The growing independence within the protestant churches had to wait, due to the conservative attitude of the newly arrived French and Swiss missionaries, another forty years in order to reach its full potential (Messina and Slageren 2005: 46–51). The first Roman Catholic missionaries arrived half a century later than their Protestant counterparts, and it was actually a young Cameroonian, Kwa Mbange, sent to Germany in 1888 in order to become a baker, who inspired the German Catholics to prepare a mission to Cameroon (Messina and Slageren 2005: 133–135; Mveng 1963: 461). The first pallottin missionaries arrived in Douala in 1890, and until the outbreak of the First World War, they built fifteen mission stations along the coast,

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and their statistics show that they baptised more than 150,000 persons in 25 years. The pallottins did not manage to train and ordain local priests before they had to leave the country during the war, but a Roman Catholic foundation was constructed (Laburthe-Tolra 1992; Mveng 1990). The most influential white Catholic missionary in Cameroon, François-Xavier Vogt, arrived in 1922. He was born in Alsace, and thus familiar with German administration, but when France claimed Alsace French territory in 1918, Vogt became French citizen. This background, together with his experience from East Africa, made him a natural choice as responsible in Cameroon when all the German missionaries had to leave the French mandatory area. Vogt soon realised that Cameroon needed local priests in order to become a national church, and already in 1923 he personally was responsible for the establishing of a theological seminary (Messina and Slageren 2005: 157–161). His academic efforts bore fruits, and in 1935 the first four Cameroonian priests were ordained. But the colonial administrators were reluctant to the creation of Christian missions in the North, where they feared problems with the ruling Muslim Fulbe. The first Christian missionary in Adamaoua,73 the American Adolphus Eugene Gunderson, arrived in Ngaoundéré in 1923. It was thus not until the arrival of Gunderson that Christianity was introduced in Adamaoua. Gunderson first received permission to work in Ngaoundéré, but he soon travelled southeast to the Mbéré region to seek timber for construction. Here the Gbaya warmly welcomed him, and Gunderson therefore prolonged his stay and started his work among the Gbaya in Mboula. In the meantime Gunderson’s permission to establish a mission in Ngaoundéré expired, so that when the first Norwegian missionaries, Flatland, Thrana, Oseland and Nikolaisen arrived in Ngaoundéré on March 6, 1925, they were granted permission from the French administrator to establish their work there (Lode 1990: 12–15).

73 The first foreign Christian Mission to be established in northern Cameroon was the American Luthern Brothern World Mission (LBWM) who started their work in 1920 from their base in Nigeria. In 1923 they received a permission from the French colonial administration to establish their mission in Garoua (Messina and Slageren 2005: 107).

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The first Norwegian missionaries were funded by a small society called Sudanmisjonen74 (The Sudan Mission). Fredrik Müller, who in 1916 attended a meeting in Denmark where the lack of missionaries in the Sudan was discussed, was deeply moved by this challenge and on his return to Norway he established a new mission society, the Sudan Mission (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 296). The background for the commitment by Scandinavians to work in the Sudan was the international mission conference in Edinburgh 1910, where the ‘apostle-belt’ strategy was introduced. The idea was to establish a ‘belt’ of mission stations across sub-Saharan Africa to prevent Islam from expanding further south. The focus of the conference was not to evangelise Muslims, but rather to reach the ‘pagans’ with the Gospel before Islam (Sauer 2005). The focus of the Norwegian missionaries in Ngaoundéré was therefore to work among the pagan Mbum, and not the Muslim Fulbe. During their first years Norwegian missionaries were busy with construction and language learning, and thus depended on evangelists from the South to start their work among the Mbum. The people attending the meetings in Ngaoundéré these first years were mainly construction workers and people from the South, and it soon became clear that the Mbum in Ngaoundéré were much more influenced by Islam than first assumed. The missionaries therefore started to look for new areas in order to proclaim the Gospel. After having visited the plain north of Ngaoundéré, mainly inhabited by the Dii people, Thrana proposed to the Norwegian mission conference in 1934 to expand their work to this area. He argued that the Dii were the least Islamised people in the Ngaoundéré region, and that it was only a question of time before the Muslim elite in Ngaoundéré would emphasise the expansion of Islam, at least to the Dii elite. Since Rey-Bouba was closed to missionaries by lamido Rey, Thrana argued that the area was too small for building a station, but he insisted that local evangelists and teachers, supervised from Ngaoundéré should start the work. The conference then decided to send the evangelist Pierre Njemba to live in Mbé and also work in Karna. Two teachers were also hired, Atuba in Mbé, and Martin in Karna. Altogether eleven young Christians from the South were

74 The work of Sudanmisjonen in Cameroon was practically organised by NMS (Det Norske Misjonsselskap), and in 1939 Sudanmisjonen became an integral part of NMS.

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employed as teachers and evangelists by the conference that year, five of them had been trained as catechists by the missionaries.75 From day one, education was the method for establishing Christianity among the Dii.76 Through the school, the mission received their first catechumens who later became the backbone of the church. The Norwegian mission soon established schools in all major villages on the Dii-plain with considerable success, and the Dii were in favour of this expansion.77 In 1951 a Protestant mission station was built in Mbé, a project accelerated by rumours that a Roman Catholic mission was about to be established in the same area. The arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries in Karna, a village some ten kilometres south of Mbé, the following year, triggered a Protestant-Catholic ‘race for souls’ that it seems was taken advantage of by the Dii. The Dii were now in a position where they could demand more qualified teachers or threaten the Norwegian missionaries with ‘conversion to the enemy’, an interesting scenario. The Dii also profited from the building of dispensaries and later on also an agricultural project, efforts made by the Norwegians that created strong ties between the Dii and the mission. Christianity was, however, not established among the Dii without problems, and the success of the mission in the years before the Second World War can be described as a roller coaster. The two existing political authorities, the Fulbe and the French colonial administration, had ambivalent feelings about the establishing of Christian mission among the Dii, and the missionaries were dependent on support from at least one of the two to be able to maintain and expand their work. We shall in the following pages suggest that during the first years of ChristianMuslim relations in the area there was a struggle for the goodwill of the French colonial administrators, and that this later developed into a political controversy between the Dii and the Fulbe, religion becoming increasingly a part of the conflict. To state the reason for this hypothesis 75 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1934, pp. 17–25. According to Lode, it was Ndjemba and Emini who finally were installed by Thrana in Mbé, and Martin was installed in Karna in July 1934 (Lode 1990: 43). 76 Bengt Sundkler writes: “Cameroon welcomed the missions, not so much because of their religious message, but because of their schools. They were all ‘asking for book’.” (Sundkler and Steed 2000: 266). Even if this comment is directed towards the growth of Christianity in the southern part of Cameroon, it probably also covers the experience of the missions in the North. 77 Podlewski comments on the surprisingly high level of school attendance among the Dii, stating that it must clearly be the record in northern Cameroon (Podlewski 1970: 24).

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we shall now further analyse two episodes that include the struggle over colonial goodwill and the development of a Dii-Fulbe conflict based on the new political and religious orientation of the Dii. The “Crisis in Duru” – a Fight for Colonial Goodwill By reading the reports from the early mission conferences, it soon becomes clear that three opponents are dealt with, as the introduction to the conference in Yoko in 1936, written by the superintendent on the field, Halfdan Endresen clearly states: Our relation to the administration has been the best, and it has been easy to obtain permissions for new stations. The Catholics have been relatively calm the past year, but it seems that they are preparing a new offensive, and there are indications that they now consider starting their work in the northern part of our mission field as well. The passive resistance of the Mohammedans has been felt more strongly than earlier. It will probably increase proportionally with the growth of our work. Our success among the Duru-tribe seems particularly to be a thorn in their eye. They can now no longer exploit the Duru, like they did before. Until now they have, however, not dared to create visible obstacles, as they understand that the administration is behind us and protects us.78

The report starts by referring to the colonial administration, which shows that without their goodwill, the work of the mission would be very difficult. Second is a European opponent, the French Catholics, and third is the local opponent, the Muslim administration ruled by the local king, the lamido. The general impression one gets from the written and oral sources available is that the Dii had to pay heavy tribute to the lamido in

78 “Forholdet til administrasjonen har vært det beste, og det har vært lett å få nye ansøkninger om utestasjoner innvilget. Katolikkene har holdt sig forholdsvis rolige i det forløpne år, men de synes å forberede seg til et nytt fremstøt, og der er ting som tyder på at de nu akter å ta fatt også på den nordlige delen av vår misjonsmark. Muhammedanernes passive motstand har vært mer følbar enn tidligere. Den vil rimeligvis øke proposjonalt med vårt arbeids vekst. Vår inngang blant durustammen synes særlig å være fulanerne en torn i øiet. De kan jo nu ikke lenger usett utsuge duruene, som de tidligere gjorde. Hittil har de dog ikke våget åpenbart å legge oss hindringer i veien, da de forstår at administrasjonen står bak oss og beskytter oss.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 3. All translations from Norwegian to English by the author.

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Ngaoundéré. The colonial administration had stated that ten per cent of the harvest should be given to the king, but it is obvious that this was not respected by the lamido. Kåre Lode also claims that the lamido at this point sent his doggaries (his personal soldiers) to capture young Dii boys and girls to serve as slaves in his palace (Lode 1990: 43).79 When the Dii so quickly80 accepted and welcomed the missionaries, we must try to analyse the background of this encounter. Very soon the missionaries started to interfere with the established relationship between the Fulbe and the Dii. Whether this was an explicit demand from the Dii, or this was a general goal among the missionaries of liberating an oppressed people, is hard to tell from the sources, but Muller’s article, with the peculiar title “Merci à vous, les Blancs, de nous avoir liberés !” (Thank you, the Whites, for having liberated us!) indicates that the Dii saw the collaboration of the mission and the colonial administration as a joint force that liberated them from the Fulbe. The year 1937 turned out to be a crucial one for the mission on the Dii-plain. The Dii understood that the missionaries could help them against the heavy burden laid upon them by the lamido and his tax collectors, and that now was the time – and they were right. After having received complaints from the Dii, and after having obtained support from the chef de subdivision, Mr. Delcroix, Endresen took action. When he left for his vacation he paid a visit to the High Commissioner in Yaoundé to discuss the situation of the Dii. The result of this meeting was that the Wack chief became chef de canton, and that the lamido lost his administrative power over the Dii. The Dii should, on their own initiative, pay a tribute to the lamido, but they should themselves decide the size of it. The lamido’s tax collectors no longer had the right to visit the Dii-plain (Lode 1990: 44). Things looked good for the Dii, but the administrative fight over the Dii-plain was not solved with this development. During Endresen’s absence several of the teachers employed by the mission mistreated the pupils in the mission schools, forcing them to do hard labour in their own fields, and forcing them to attend school.

79 It must be added that there were different categories of slaves, and as Hansen (1992) rightly claims, they were treated in many different ways. But it seems obvious that Lode here refers to the capturing of young boys and girls against the will of their parents, thus what we normally refer to as slavery. 80 All the Conference Reports states that the Dii were open to the work of the mission, and Muller (1997) confirms this.

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The French administration was informed, and as a consequence one of the teachers was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The Norwegian missionary Sverre Fløttum later wrote that he agreed with Delcroix that the teacher was guilty of charges.81 But the real problem for the mission started when the new chef de région, Mr. Jaubert, was installed and engaged himself in the matters on the Dii-plain. He was obviously not so favourable toward the mission’s work, and visited village after village, telling the parents that they did not have to send their children to school. According to Fløttum, the interpreters (all the lamido’s men) translated that the parents should not send their children to school.82 And since this was in the middle of the harvest, most parents followed the administration’s advice and took their children out of the school. A further blow to the mission was the news of the transfer of Mr. Delcroix, who all along had supported the missionaries. According to the Norwegian missionaries, it was Mr. Jaubert who was behind the transfer, and that this was a favour granted to the lamido. The missionaries further saw an alliance between Mr. Jaubert and the lamido in the next move by Mr. Jaubert, when he declared all the mission authorisations for schools among the Dii, invalid (Lode 1990: 45). It is clear that with Mr. Jaubert as chef de région, new authorisations would be difficult to obtain, and that no Dii would dare to sign an application that was bound to be denied. It is also obvious that the lamido was about to show the Dii that he still held considerable power, and the mission’s work among the Dii was here at a crucial point. The missionaries protested heavily against this new order and by reason or by luck, the details of what happened in the French colonial administration is not quite clear, Mr. Notary replaced Mr. Jaubert as chef de région. Hansen’s analyses of the French colonial archives show that Mr. Jaubert was against the establishing of a canton on the Dii-plain, and that he thought an indirect rule through the lamido was the most efficient way to control northern Cameroon. This attitude of Mr. Jaubert was well known by the French, and he was even called le boy du lamido in a letter from Delcroix to the High Commissioner (Hansen 1992: 75). The official policy of the French was in any case to rule larger ethnic groups directly through a chef de canton. The new chef de région put

81 82

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 11. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 12.

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aside Mr. Jauberts demands and told the mission that they could continue their work as before, and according to Endresen’s report in 1939, Mr. Notary told him that “if there should be any more problems in Duru territory, we should arrange it amicably”.83 Mr. Notary’s further investigations about the lamido and his abuse of power towards the Dii, led to the calling of the lamido to Yaoundé, where, amongst others, Mr. Delcroix’s testimony, forced lamido Abbo to resign, and he was exiled to Tignère (Lode 1990: 45–49). The ‘Duru crisis’ was a serious setback for the missionaries, but it was a most important administrative victory, and it was a considerable political victory for the Dii. The French colonial administration was all along reluctant to mission activity in the North. The Norwegian mission had to establish their station on a hill far from the city centre of Ngaoundéré, and they were not allowed to build a church, not even arrange meetings in town. The mission’s report from 1934 even claims that the French administrator during a meeting with the mission told them that the lamido had complained about the singing of Christian hymns in a private house.84 This shows that the Norwegian mission never had a carte blanche to expand their work as they thought it best. The ‘Duru crisis’ shows, however, that even if the French wanted to respect the lamido, and to use his hierarchy to maintain order, they also saw it in their interest to limit the political influence of the traditional king over other ethnic groups (Hansen 1992: 62). For the Dii people, the outcome of the conflict was of great importance. It clearly showed that their complaints had been heard by the missionaries, and that the missionaries had the power to influence the colonial government and help them to be ‘liberated’ from the lamido in Ngaoundéré. To talk about a full liberation from the Fulbe is an exaggeration. The Dii seems to have been relatively free even before the arrival of the missionaries, and the influence of the lamido continued to be strong also in the years that followed, but the Dii-plain had become a canton, and the road towards social change was indicated by the mission schools. It seems that the Dii-mission alliance was a winwin situation for both of them. We shall in the following chapters see that the Dii first of all accepted the missionaries because they brought

83 “. . . at om det blev noen historier i Duru i fremtiden, skulde vi ordne det i minnelighet.” Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1939, p. 4. 84 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1934, p. 2.

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with them new and interesting information through the schools, where the young Dii were introduced to literacy and to a new religion. I will later argue that the Dii came to believe that the missionaries were their allies who could help them out of an unsatisfying political situation, and who brought with them interesting information that gave hope for a better spiritual and material future. The initial phase of work among the Dii was interpreted by missionaries as a fight against the lamido over goodwill among the French colonial administration. What was seen as a conspiracy between the lamido and Mr. Jaubert caused many problems for the missionaries, but the outcome of the conflict was that the missionaries gained confidence in their work and in their ability to influence the colonial government. This self-confidence was important when missionaries later challenged both the lamido and the French authorities over the question of abolishing slavery. The Dii-Rey-Bouba Controversy; a Social Reorganisation of the Dii According to missionary reports, it was only the lack of qualified personnel that restrained the expansion of the mission on the Dii-plain in the post-war period. One Norwegian missionary wrote in his report in 1950 that it would be possible to establish congregations in 20–30 new Dii villages in addition to the seventeen villages where Christian work already existed (Lode 1990: 89). It has also been mentioned that the fear of the Catholics accelerated the work, and that the Dii profited from this ‘race’. Even the pressure from Islam was now felt more noticeably on the Dii-plain, an area hardly touched by Islam twenty years earlier. As Endresen put it in his opening speech to the Norwegian missionaries in 1956: The Catholics prepare themselves to ‘conquer northern Cameroon’ – they even state it openly –, and the Mohammedans are becoming all the more aggressive. If we cannot get teachers to the places that are now open for us, we risk that the Catholics beat us or that the Mohammedans get ahead and close the door on us. Now really is the time to act decisively.85

85 “Katolikkene forbereder seg til å ‘erobre Nord-Kamerun’ – det sier de åpent –, og muhammedanerne blir stadig mer agressive. Kan vi ikke snart skaffe lærere til de stedene som nå står åpne for oss, risikerer vi at katolikkene kommer oss i forkjøpet eller at muhammedanerne får overtaket og stenger dørene for oss. Nå gjelder det i sannhet å kjøpe den beleilige tid.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1956, p. 4.

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It now had become clear that the Islamic leaders in Ngaoundéré looked upon the mission as a serious challenge to their traditional influence over the non-Muslim population. The loss of political power to the colonial administration, and the arrival of a religious competitor had slowly shifted the Fulbe focus from a mainly political influence to more emphasis on religion and conversion of the non-Muslims. In Rey-Bouba the story was a little different. In exchange for military support, the lamido of Ray was granted political ‘independence’ from the French, and the non-Fulbe population in this ‘state within a state’ had to pay high taxes to the lamido. Since the fumbling efforts to establish a church in the late 1930s failed, this land had been closed for the mission. In 1952, however, Baba Ray accepted that some evangelists could start working in his area. Clearly, Christian mission among the Dii had consequences on the perception of ethnic identity and social organisation. The Dii are traditionally, like the Gbaya further southeast, an acephalous people, which means that no chief has ever reigned over the Dii, but that each village had its own headman (Hansen 1992: 72). The Dii argumentation for social organisation was that each village needs a chief to organise the rite of circumcision, a chief of soil to arrange the place of circumcision, a circumciser, and a blacksmith to make the knives used in the ceremony (Muller 1997: 61). By the time of the Fulbe arrival it was estimated that only 150–200 persons inhabited the largest Dii villages. A chief in one village did not necessarily gain the respect worthy of a ‘chief’ in a neighbouring village. Around 1950 reports from missionaries estimated that Mbé contained approximately 3,000 inhabitants. After being made chef de canton, the chief in Mbé and his village slowly grew in respect among other Dii villages. This was due to the reorganisation of administrative structures by the colonial administration, and to some extent Norwegian missionaries influenced this development. According to Lode, the Mbé chief, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, was a pagan that welcomed the missionaries (Lode 1990: 89), whereas Muller claims that Mbaa was a Muslim who followed the traditional Dii religion and sent his children to the Protestant school (Muller 1997: 61). In any case, his newly won position apparently moved the chief to gradually attempt to reorganise the structure of Dii chiefdoms. In 1955 Kun Mbaa travelled to Gamba, a Dii village inside the Rey-Bouba territory. The reason behind this visit is somewhat vague, but according to my informants Kun Mbaa was one among the relatively newly appointed chef de canton who had been invited to France by the colonial government. At his return

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he wanted to pay a friendly visit to the chief in Gamba with whom he shared family ties. According to Lode the visit was interpreted by many as an occasion for the chief of Mbé to be acclaimed chief of all the Dii. When the lamido learned this he became furious, and as a response to the political provocation of the Mbé chief, he expelled all Christian evangelists from his area. Another incident, which added to Baba Ray’s anger, was that one of the evangelists encouraged Christians to refuse to participate in the forced labours imposed by the lamido. After negotiations carried out by the mission leaders, they were allowed to replace three of the evangelists, on the condition that none of them came from Mbé, and these new evangelists were regularly summoned to do forced labours (Lode 1990: 89).86 The lamido clearly interpreted the incidents as an attempt by the Dii to weaken his political position and his income. A change had taken place among the Dii. From being a loosely united ethnic group, organised in small villages, the Mbé chief was now accused of trying to proclaim himself chief of all the Dii. The lamido, of course, reacted. Most interesting is the way he reacted, by expelling all Christian evangelists. I think it is reasonable to interpret the reactions of the lamido as a strike against, not only the Dii, showing increasing ethnic self-confidence, but at Christianity, not only as a religious, but also as a socio-political opponent. The evangelists were expelled as representatives of the emerging church; Christianity was thus seen as part of the new Dii identity.

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Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1957, p. 4.

CHAPTER THREE

LIKE A LABYRINTH IS HIS LIFE – A MISSIONARY DISCOURSE ON CONVERSION One might ask: But when they become Christians, what is the nature of their conversion? What do they turn away from? Here we have to be careful. If one thinks thoroughly through this question, one will conclude that their conversion is more radical than it is for us in an old Christian country. We have hundreds of years of Christian life and Christian culture behind us. . . . Compare this with the thick, dark wall of heathendom that has existed for thousands of years. Like a labyrinth is his life. Spiritual forces, most of them evil, surround him. When he wakes or sleeps, cultivates, builds, he is constantly surrounded by spirits that he has to consider, if not he will be harmed. Immorality, quarrels, fighting and untruthfulness is he fed with from infancy. But love, helpfulness, empathy and compassion are unknown words. We easily forget that when we received the faith, we could take the whole Bible into our hands and through it receive knowledge about the road to salvation and the Christian life. How many Africans can do the same?1

Norwegian missionaries found on the Dii-plain a people open towards their activities and could finally report home stories about the first local converts. But what did the term ‘conversion’ mean to the missionaries? To what extent was the missionary agency predetermined, i.e. biased in a Western worldview which the missionaries imposed on the indigenous

1 “Kanskje man ville spørre: Men når de blir kristne, hva er det da deres omvendelse består i? Hva er det de vender seg bort fra? Her bør man være forsiktig. Tenker man vel over dette spørsmålet, så vil man nok komme til det resultat at deres omvendelse er mer radikal enn den er for oss i et gammelt kristent land. Vi har hundrer av års kristenliv og kristen kultur bak oss. . . . Sammenlign så dette med hedenskapets tykke, mørke mur, tusener av år har den bak seg. Som en labyrint er hans liv. Hele hans liv er omgitt av åndsmakter, de aller fleste onde ånder. Når han våker eller sover, planter, bygger, så er han stadig omgitt av ånder som han må ta hensyn til, ellers vil det gå ham galt. Usedelighet, trette, strid, løgn og bedrag får han innsuget med morsmelken. Men kjærlighet, hjelpsomhet, medynk og barmhjertighet er ukjente begreper. Vi har også lett for å glemme at da vi kom til troen, kunne vi ta hele bibelen i vår hånd og gjennom den få kunnskap om frelsesveien og kristenlivet. Hvor mange afrikanere kan det?” Johannes Thrana, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 6, 1941, p. 5. Parts of this chapter has formerly been published in an article intitled “A Missionary Discourse on Conversion: Norwegian Missionaries in Adamawa, Northern Cameroon 1934–1960” in Mission Studies 24, no. 1 (2007): 99–126.

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population, and to what extent was the missionary agency a relative one, open for negotiation with the indigenous population? This chapter contains in-depth analysis of all the two hundred seventy one articles in Misjonstidende written by or about2 the Norwegian missionaries working in Cameroon in the period 1934–1960.3 The aim is to analyse how the Norwegian sources describe the religious encounter between Christianity and Traditional African Religion, and their legitimisation of their project through the construction and negotiation of ‘self’ and ‘the other’. The reactions of the indigenous population to the message of the missionaries will also be briefly analysed, but only through the looking glass of the Norwegian sources. If conversion was some kind of reorientation, a way out of a labyrinth of evil forces, what was, according to Norwegian missionaries, the population in Adamaoua to be converted from – and what were they to be converted to? Conversion as a Process of Growth and Liberation In order to establish an analytic approach towards the missionary idea of conversion, I will start by looking at their use of biblical images. The missionary theological discourse in Cameroon is surprisingly homogenous regarding the relatively large number of missionaries present in the actual period.4 In the NMt articles, biblical images were used eighty three times as metaphors for the work. An overall majority, forty seven, were connected to images of farming. The missionaries regarded their work as that of the sower, and the image of ‘seed/time to sow’ was found eighteen times in the articles. The agricultural metaphors also focus on the hope for ‘fruit and harvest’, an image that was found twelve times in the texts. The resistance the missionaries met was described nine

2

When the missionaries themselves are not authors of the analysed articles, the articles are interviews with the missionaries, often on vacation in Norway. Other articles about Cameroon are not included in this study. 3 Since mission work in Cameroon until 1939 was funded by Sudanmisjonen (the Sudan Mission), many articles were written by the Norwegian missionaries in the periodical Lys over Sudan (Light over Sudan) that the missionaries themselves edited from 1937 to 1939. Most articles in this periodical were, however, later published in NMt. 4 In 1934 there were four missionary couples present in Cameroon. The number of missionaries experienced a steady growth (apart from during, and the first years following, the Second World War) towards 1960 when there were thirty seven Norwegian missionaries present at the conference.

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times as ‘the hard soil’ that the missionaries had to labour, but despite this unfertile landscape we find the metaphor ‘spring’ (and each time connected to the idea of growth) used eight times. From this we can already draw the conclusion that the parable of the sower found in the synoptic gospels (Matthew 13:4–8; Marc 4:3–8; Luke 8:5–8a) played an important role in the self-understanding of the missionary and his/her relation to the mission project in Cameroon. This because the text, the way it was read by the missionaries, challenged to action (to sow) and it explained both the resistance (the unfertile soil) and the success (the harvest) that the missionaries experienced. No studies have been carried out in order to analyse the social background of the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon, but our general knowledge about their socio-cultural surroundings and the extensive use of agricultural metaphor points in the direction of concluding that the majority of the missionaries and the mission supporters in Norway between the two World Wars were engaged in farming. Knowing that NMS had most of its supporters on the coast of southern and western Norway, where farming often was combined with fishing, it is surprising that the biblical metaphor of fishing is practically absent from the NMt articles, occurring only two times.5 But more important for the use of biblical images than the missionaries’ own background was probably the occupation of the people with whom they were in contact. The Dii, the Gbaya, the Mbum and the Tikar, who were the first ethnic groups to take interest in the missionaries, were all farmers and hunters. The fact that the missionaries contextualised their discourse towards those who welcomed them shows how the indigenous population from the very start influenced the missionary discourse and their theological reflections. This becomes even clearer when we know that the politically dominant Muslim Fulbe, known as cattle people all over West Africa, refused to enter into contact with the Norwegian missionaries. The biblical image of Jesus as the herder and provider for domestic animals, an image much used in

5 When this metaphor is used it is underlined that mission in Cameroon is fishing with fishing rod, and not net. This use of biblical metaphors also points to the fact that the missionaries in northern Cameroon never experienced mass conversion to Christianity among the indigenous population, but that they were converted one by one or in small groups.

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the Lutheran theological discourse in Norway, is totally absent from the Norwegian sources. Apart from the metaphors connected to agriculture we find two other metaphors frequently used in the sources. Firstly, conversion to Christianity is regarded as a movement from darkness to light, an image that is used fourteen times in the sources. Secondly, conversion is seen as a movement from bondage towards freedom and peace, a metaphor found eleven times in the missionary texts. Why did they choose these metaphors among the many images found in the Bible, and what did these metaphors mean to the Norwegian missionaries and to the people that they interacted with? Is it possible to conceptualise metaphors? Lakoff and Johnson, in their influential study Metaphors We Live By, claim that certain metaphors are orientational and present in all cultures (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). If there are spatial metaphors that are culturally coherent, are there also temporal metaphors? What about the missionaries’ use of the Gospel as light contrasted with the ‘darkness of heathendom’? The use of light/darkness certainly is coherent within a Western culture, but when the first Christian Africans rapidly adopted this metaphor into their stories of conversion (Siroma 1986: 2–3), was this a discourse imposed by the missionaries or is it possible that the first Christians also were inspired by their own cultural context? Darkness is the realm of spirits, and spirits very often are potential forces of chaos, forces that have to be pleased in order to maintain social order.6 Even if the strong midday sun during the dry season might be considered an enemy, the morning sun brings warmth to the often-chilly Adamaoua plateau. The day is the time to work and harvest, and the fire at night is inevitable in order to cook, warm, and chase wild animals. One ancient proverb among the Dii people claims that a person with sig dii (a black liver) is evil, whereas a person with sig hee (a white liver) is a good person. This tradition was contextualised by the Dii into an early Christian hymn with the following lyric: Nan sig hee vu laa Yeesowu; Nan sid dii vu laa Seeɗanu (The people with white livers are waiting for Jesus; the people with black livers are waiting for the devil). Even if the missionaries interpreted darkness very differently from the indigenous population,7 it is probable that the

6

See for instance Magesa (1997: 55–56), Mbiti (1999: 80–81), Ray (2000: 13–15). See Philip D. Curtin who argues that ideas about the ‘dark continent’ arose from a feeling of Western superiority (Curtin 1964). 7

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light/dark metaphor to some extent was culturally coherent for the first Cameroonian Christians and therefore also influenced the missionaries’ use of the metaphor. Freedom is another central term in the missionary discourse. To the Norwegian missionaries in the analysed period, freedom was a most relevant theme. Norway was in 1905 ‘freed’ from a five hundred year long political union (with Denmark and Sweden), two World Wars did come and go, so difficulties caused by some form of external oppression were well known. In a colonial setting in northern Cameroon, where the kirdi population, according to their own discourse, experienced political oppression both from the political superior Fulbe and the French colonial administration, freedom was a theological discourse that was easily understood. The way the Norwegian missionaries gradually became involved in the political controversy over Fulbe right to keep servants or slaves in their households against their will gradually also influenced the way the missionaries expressed themselves theologically. Freedom thus became a most relevant theological theme due to a feeling of common experience and due to the current political situation of the kirdi population in Adamaoua. In order to establish an overall theological approach to the missionary work in Cameroon, we can so far conclude that the biblical metaphors used by the missionaries explain conversion to Christianity as a process and as a movement. First of all, a process of growth, where the seed (the word) needs time and good conditions in order to bear fruit. Secondly a movement from some kind of bondage towards some kind of liberation, conceptualised by the use of the freedom/bondage and the darkness/light metaphors. Having established the missionaries’ theological approach, we shall in the following thematically analyse the discourse of conversion by focusing on the changes that the missionaries judged necessary in order for the indigenous population to become Christians. The agricultural metaphor indicates that conversion is hard labour and that stones have to be turned. The following analysis thus focuses on what the missionaries thought that people had to be converted from, and how such a reorientation was negotiated.

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chapter three Conversion as Liberation from Spiritual Oppression What does it mean to be a heathen? It means to really be bound in the strongest bondage that any man can experience – first and foremost bound by the chains of sin and the devil, but many also in brutal slavery by evil men.8

An overall majority of the material that indirectly deals with religious conversion is related to what I have analysed as ‘liberation from spiritual oppression’. A colourful language marks the missionary discourse on ‘heathendom’ in the front stage publications, but a relevant question can be posed as to the nucleus of these descriptions. Spiritual oppression is often, as already mentioned, referred to as ‘darkness’9 a well-known metaphor connected to Africa, immortalised by Joseph Conrad through his novel Heart of Darkness. The use of this metaphor, both in the missionary text and in Conrad’s book, appeals to feelings of chaos and disorder that are linked to the African continent, even if Conrad’s novel deals as much with the savage coloniser as the savage colonised (Conrad 1996). Why are these strong feelings of chaos and disorder so dominant in the missionary discourse? I would argue that the missionaries’ feeling of disorder arose from what they never understood about the social organisation of the traditional practices, that they experienced a serious clash of worldviews. This ignorance is described the following way by Andrew Walls: “Destruction of cult was easy; trying to comprehend a society so different from the norm of Christendom exposed the gaps in European intellectual and, indeed, theological equipment.” (Walls 2002: 39). One example being one of the much used terms in the missionary sources, ‘fetishes’.10 What is striking about the frequent use of this term is the absence of explanation as to what kinds of objects these fetishes were, how they were used and what they actually meant to people. Fetishes were often connected to

8 “Hva vil det si å være hedning? Det er virkelig å være bundet i den største ufrihet som noe menneske kan oppleve – først og fremst bundet av syndens og djevelens lenker, men mange også i brutalt slaveri hos onde mennesker.” Gudrun and Sverre Knudsen, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 35, 1955, p. 5. 9 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 51–52, 1934, p. 470; No. 41, 1937, p. 4; No. 7, 1952, p. 5; No. 10, 1952, p. 1; No. 27, 1952, p. 1; No. 6, 1953, p. 1; No. 13, 1956, p. 1; No. 14, 1956, p. 15; No. 9, 1958, p. 5; No. 13, 1960, p. 8. 10 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 42, 1950, p. 5; No. 38, 1952, p. 4; No. 24, 1954, p. 5; No. 25, 1958, p. 5; No. 38, 1958, p. 9; No. 25, 1958, p. 2. On missionary use of the concept of fetish, see also “Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter” (Keane 2007).

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the word ‘superstition’,11 but the content of this term is also left unexplained. The missionary discourse on the disorder of heathendom also refers to ‘idols’, exemplified by the sticks and stones used by the Pere people in order to venerate their ancestors, and the carved wood and clay altars and the skulls of former chiefs used in fertility rites by the Dii people.12 But once more the reader, both of the NMt articles and the Conference Reports, are left ignorant as to the role that the idols play in the social organisation of the traditional society. Among the few local practices that are explained in details are the rites connected to the ‘children of sorcery’. These rites are explained as taboos connected to children born ‘the wrong way’, twins, and children whose mothers died giving birth. In all three cases the babies were abandoned in the bush and left to die. The missionaries strongly condemned these practises as signs of heathendom,13 but since these practices were explainable within the cognitive framework of the missionaries’ cultural background, they knew how to react. By building homes for orphans, by raising the abandoned twins themselves, by feeding the motherless babies with cow milk, they entered into a negotiation with the local population that gradually abandoned these practices. In general the sources contain a rather massive critique of local religious practices, both in its traditional and in its Islamic clothing, often described as the ‘chains’14 or the ‘ironhand of heathendom’.15 This critique could be analysed in many different ways, but I mainly see it as a frustration based on lack of understanding of the local community. In accordance with Iheanyi Mbaekwe I would argue that this discourse serves one particular purpose – to contrast the spiritually liberating message of Christianity with what the missionaries, according to their theological approach, experienced as spiritual oppression (Mbaekwe 1979: 75). It is always touching to witness baptism out here. To see them bend their heads and be baptised in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy

11 12 13 14 15

Norsk Norsk Norsk Norsk Norsk

Misjonstidende No. 41, 1960, p. 5. Misjonstidende No. 8, 1951, p. 4; No. 33, 1952, p. 5. Misjonstidende No. 4, 1951, p. 1. Misjonstidende No. 11, 1957, p. 4; No. 41, 1960, p. 5. Misjonstidende No. 3, 1941, p. 4.

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The only plausible explanation for the missionaries, lacking knowledge about the organisation of traditional society, was to interpret what they did not understand according to a theological paradigm they did understand, i.e. Christianity as practised in their own cultural context. But Lutheran theologians in Norway did not explain life as a labyrinth full of evil forces. It was the African approach to life as a labyrinth inhabited by forces (though not all of them evil) that influenced the missionary discourse. Since this labyrinth was unknown to the missionaries, they reduced this complex to a concept they knew. Therefore their discourse is that of a spiritual battle between two forces, which also explains why the missionaries from their point of view did not have to acquire knowledge of what they regarded as heathendom.17 Whenever heathendom is analysed in my material, the source of this spiritual force is Satan18 and the only way to be liberated from this force that influence culture on all levels is, according to missionary discourse, the liberating Gospel. The goal of the missionaries was to create a new spiritual order, a new worldview, according to 1. Corinthians 8:4–5, where Paul first claims that “an idol has no real existence”, and later adds that, “there might be so-called gods in heaven or on earth”. There is a clear confusion in this paulinean language that takes a trained religious mind to set straight – the fetishes do not work, because the spirits do not exist – still there are very dangerous spiritual powers connected to them. The complexity of the biblical imaginary and the complexity of the traditional African universe made it a difficult task for the Norwegian missionaries to communicate what they regarded as the spiritually liberating message.

16 “Det er alltid like gripande å vera vitne til dåp her ute. Å sjå dei bøya hovudet og bli døypte i namnet åt Faderen og Sonen og den Heilage Ande, dei som før levde i mørke uvitande om Frelsaren som kom til jord for å frelsa alle menneske (. . .).” Inga Botnen, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 35, 1951, p. 5. 17 Interesting parallels could be drawn to Peel’s analyses of the missionary discourse from the work among the Yoruba in Nigeria. He argues that the missionaries interpreted the traditional practices as ‘nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ that was ready to be filled by the Christian message (Peel 2000). 18 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 35, 1951, p. 4; No. 33, 1952, p. 5; No. 22, 1954, p. 4; No. 27, 1954, p. 1; No. 23, 1955, p. 4; No. 35, 1955, p. 5; No. 14, 1956, p. 15; No. 25, 1956, p. 5; No. 25, 1958, p. 2.

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What does it mean to be a heathen? This is a crucial question in the missionary discourse on conversion, but paradoxically a question that only to a small extent is answered. The missionary conclusion is that heathendom is some kind of bondage that limits people and that only the Gospel can free them from this oppression. Did the missionaries succeed in their project of spiritual liberation? On the one hand they did, because large groups of people gradually accepted this new spiritual alternative. On the other hand the missionaries’ constant complaints about continued superstition among the new Christians shows that they were unable to eradicate the African spiritual worldview. Conversion as Freedom from Social Oppression The missionaries (who Peel (2000) sometimes refers to as ‘mission-journalists’) working in Cameroon reported home what they experienced as different from life in Europe. They were children of a European temporal and cultural context and it is not difficult to find negative statements about what they experienced as lack of civilisation, development, hygiene and good moral behaviour among the Africans. In order to gain support they thought it their duty to report this home so that people in Norway could engage in a project of transformation of this poor continent. Reading the sources one is, however, struck by a very clear focus on social justice as part of the evangelical mission that gradually develops in the missionary discourse. The major social effort that rests upon the church of Christ in Africa is first of all to overcome all prejudice of colour and give every man equal opportunities. It is the duty of Christianity to eradicate, with the blessings of the GOSPEL, the curse that until now has rested upon the children of Ham.19

The anthropology of this statement is that of the inter-war years, but a clear social consciousness is present in the missionary discourse. This focus on equality appears several times in the sources20 and creates a

19 “Den store sociale innsats som Kristi kirke må gjøre for Afrika, er i første rekke å overvinne all farvefordom og gi hver mann like chanser. Det er kristendommens plikt å ta bort med evangeliets velsignelse den forbannelse som hittil har hvilt over Kams barn.” Karl Flatland, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 4, 1934, p. 35. 20 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 30, 1934, p. 60; No. 45, 1940, p. 4; No. 34, 1951, p. 1, No. 40, 1957, p. 1.

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basis for the mission’s work. Because every man is equal before God, he has the right to be treated as a brother and has the right to hear the Gospel. When a delegation of five pastors and catechists from Cameroon, two missionaries and three Africans, travelled to a Lutheran conference in Marangu (East Africa) in 1955, the missionary Halfdan Endresen was shocked by the apartheid they met in Congo and in Kenya. The only hotel in Leopoldville that accepted black and white guests was the mission hotel, and they faced equal problems in Kenya where they ended up sleeping in a missionary home.21 The missionary discourse on social oppression in Cameroon is to a large extent coloured by presenting the oppressor both as a social and a spiritual adversary. The missionary social liberating effort was always directed against what they called ‘the tyranny of the Fulbe’,22 and the Fulbe Muslim dominance was regarded as much as an obstacle for evangelisation as social injustice. The best example of early political intervention of the missionaries is the ‘liberation’ of the Dii people from Fulbe political rule described in chapter two (Lode 1990: 43–46; Hansen 1992: 74–76). In order to continue the promising work among the Dii people, the missionaries, influenced by the Dii discourse of social oppression, had to challenge the Fulbe political leader, the lamido, and the French colonial administration. Their effort was, however, crowned with political administrative freedom for the Dii, who in 1938 were granted the right to govern their own canton. The missionaries interpreted the positive result of this conflict as ‘Christianity’s transforming influence on society’,23 and later the Dii people were to become one of the dominant groups in the new Lutheran church. The most obvious link between the missionaries and social oppression was, however, the fight to liberate what the missionaries called ‘the slaves of the Fulbe’. Odd Magne Bakke has pointed out that the missionaries initially treated the problem of slavery only as an obstacle for evangelisation and not as social injustice that they had to fight (Bakke 2008). But when they finally engaged themselves with the problem of slavery, it had an enormous impact on social relations in northern Cameroon. The slave issue increased the already existing conflict between the mission and the Muslim rulers, and it also created a serious conflict

21 22 23

Norsk Misjonstidende No. 1, 1956, p. 1 and 4. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 7. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 7.

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between missionaries and the French administration. But according to the missionary discourse this kind of social action was an imperative and the effort was well worth it. The attitude we necessarily have to show towards slavery puts us in opposition to the Muhammedanian rulers and other bigger slave-owners, but gives us, on the other hand, goodwill among the wider population. Many are those who have sought refuge at the mission station and have come under the influence of the word of God.24

Cameroonian former servants or slaves who converted to Christianity were often referred to as slaves who had been freed from the ‘chains of heathendom’,25 clearly showing how the missionaries saw social slavery and spiritual slavery as closely connected. But the fact that the missionary effort against slavery first gained strength in the 1950s, after 25 years of presence, shows that this activity was the result of a lengthy negotiation. It was the result of an internal mission-negotiation, and negotiation between the missionaries and the local population. In this case it was a slow process, and it took the mission 25 years before the everyday problems of the local population became an important part of the missionary agenda in Cameroon. Did the missionary discourse on conversion from social oppression have an impact on the indigenous population? It obviously did. The ultimate recognition was received by Halfdan Endresen when he in 1960 was granted the free Cameroon’s highest order by President Ahidjo, himself a Fulbe from the North, for the mission’s fight against slavery.26 Conversion as Liberation from Ignorance The mission schools soon became the most important vehicles for the Gospel in northern Cameroon. This was not connected to an ideology of fighting illiteracy, but a consequence of the Protestant Sola Scriptura combined with the local interest for modern education. In order to be 24 “Den stilling vi nødvendigvis må innta til slaveriet, bringer oss i opposisjon til de muhammedanske herskerne og andre store slaveeiere, men fremkaller på den annen side velvilje blant det alminnelige folk. Mange er de som ved å söke tilflukt til misjonsstasjonen er kommet inn under Guds ord [sic] innflytelse.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 2. 25 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 41, 1960, p. 5. 26 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 24, 1960, p. 5.

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baptized and become Christians, i.e. being baptised, people had to learn to read the Bible and Luther’s Catechism. The success of the schooling project was overwhelming, and the few missionaries could not recruit enough local teachers to meet the demand from all the villages that wanted schools. The missionaries realised that the village chiefs asked for teachers rather than catechists, but the mission sought to employ teachers from the Protestant missions in the South who could be both teachers and catechists. The initial idea was to teach only vernacular languages in the schools, but because the variety of indigenous languages combined with teachers from the South made it an impossible project, they thus settled for three local languages, Mbum, Fulfulde and Babute.27 Another problem for the mission was that the village chiefs basically wanted the children to learn French, and saw the mission as a helpful tool in this enterprise. The pupils on the Dii-plain even went on strike in order for the mission school to teach them French.28 The missionaries took these local demands seriously and after much discussion the missionaries opted for French, religion, and one local language as curriculum in the schools. The missionaries concluded that it was “with great sorrow that we accept French to be the language in our schools”,29 fearing that the pupils would appreciate French more than Christianity and that this would make these ‘children of nature’ arrogant and despise honest work.30 This shows once more that the local population from the start influenced the strategies of the mission. Even if the question about French in the schools came up from time to time, the missionaries soon saw the schools as mission work ‘in itself ’, as part of a larger project where transmission of faith became part of a larger civilising mission.

27

The missionary approach to local languages was a complicated issue that never found ideal solutions. In Adamaoua the missionaries faced 15–20 different languages, and they did not have the capacity to engage in more than three African languages. From the start they engaged in Mbum (and the translation of the Bible into Mbum), but later found that Fulfulde and Babute were more efficient in certain parts of their area (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 326). Local Christians like Maïdawa Thomas from the Dii, made an effort in order to translate the Bible into their own language, and later translation into several vernacular languages were initiated. 28 NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 9, folder 1. Station Diary, Ngaoundéré 1935–1940 (November 1937), p. 59. 29 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 24. 30 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 27.

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To provide the natives with knowledge is in itself a risky project, but nevertheless we do it, and we have to do it. We also have the experience that it can become a gain as well as a loss.31

The loss was the fear of creating arrogant future colonial clerks who despised the soil and corporal work. The gain was to educate pupils to read the Bible, become Christians and create a future Lutheran Church in the Adamaoua. Conversion in the eyes of the missionaries depended upon what they regarded as freedom from ignorance or more precisely freedom from illiteracy because literacy soon became a requirement for baptism.32 This was, however, a requirement that was hard to carry out in practice. After constant negotiation with locals who wanted to be baptised, and after repeated back stage discussions, the missionaries opened up to the possibility that women and elders in some cases could be exempted from this demand if they orally could recite what the missionaries demanded before baptism. Literacy was however an obstacle that had to be overcome by the majority of those who wanted to be baptised. The missionaries even discussed church discipline for parents who refused to send their children to school.33 There were some experiments with learning Bible stories by heart in certain villages,34 experiments that corresponded well with African traditional learning, but this method of learning did not convince the majority of the missionaries. The traditional Protestant attitude of the missionaries made the Western literate tradition a necessity for entering into a spiritual project. The intention of the missionaries was, however, to translate the spiritual message into vernacular languages. The goal was thus not to promote the French language as a sign of civilisation and progress, but it was the price they had to pay in order to create means and places of communication for the heart of their project – the Gospel. With the focus on schools the missionaries soon entered into a competition over the future of Cameroon – the children. Their opponents

31 “Å utstyre de innfødte med kunnskaper er i og for sig et vågestykke, men ikke desto mindre gjør vi det, og vi må gjøre det. Vi har også erfaring for at det kan bli til vinning så vel som til tap.” Sverre Fløttum, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1939, p. 46. 32 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1946, p. 21; 1950, p. 14; 1957, p. 33. 33 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1953, p. 60. 34 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 8.

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were the Muslim Koran schools, the Catholic schools and the French administration schools, and this was a competition where the Protestants did well. The number of pupils in the mission schools grew from 175 in 1934 to 2,700 in 1960, and the missionaries claimed that the strength of their school was the way they treated the children.35 The intention of the missionaries was that they should not only teach the children literacy and the Gospel, but they should “teach them how to live”.36 This attitude of parenthood must have impressed the local children who often fled from their parents in order to attend school,37 and one pupil even had to spend eleven nights on his way to school after passing the vacation with his family.38 The schools thus became important arenas for transmission of an extended mission, a mission of evangelisation and civilisation. Conversion as Liberation from Sickness The Norwegian missionaries’ second large project was to establish a work that could help fight the many diseases they faced among the indigenous population. Once again one is struck by the absence of principal discussion regarding the establishment of this work. It seems that the tradition from other NMS mission-fields, especially South Africa and Madagascar, set the standard and delivered the premises for holistic missionary work in Cameroon. The first principal discussion about the construction of a hospital appeared in 1949 when American missionaries wanted to join the Norwegians in the construction of a hospital to serve the white missionaries. This proposition was turned down by the Norwegians who thought it imperative to first build a hospital for the local population before thinking about the white missionaries.39 Later a missionary discourse of deaconship developed based on the Christian duty to help, a duty that was so obvious that it hardly needed to be mentioned.40 The missionaries were well aware of the fact that the hospitals became tools or means to evangelise, but did not see this as a problem, it was rather part of their intentions. 35 36 37 38 39 40

Norsk Misjonstidende No. 14, 1949, p. 4. Norsk Misjonstidende No. 14, 1946, p. 5. Norsk Misjonstidende No. 19, 1946, p. 1. Norsk Misjonstidende No. 28, 1955, p. 4. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 18. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 44.

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Through this charity work we would like to point out the Saviour of the world to these sick. That is why we have daily meetings and sermons, teaching of catechism and women’s meetings as well as visits in the huts in the area. It is a work that demands patience and love. The word of God is sown in the peoples’ hearts, and it is up to God to give growth and life in his time.41

Several examples of Cameroonians who were converted to Christianity after being healed by the mission are presented in NMt,42 showing the link in the missionary discourse between physical healing and conversion. One of these articles contains a translated essay written by Siroma, the son of a ‘medicine-man’, who one night after having become a Christian was surprised by a snake. Siroma avoided the snake in a miraculous way, and instantly thanked Jesus for the physical protection he provided.43 This clear connection between Christianity and physical healing/protection in the missionary discourse finds a clear parallel in African Traditional Religion where one aspect of religion is to provide protection against accidents and diseases.44 A discourse of religious protection against illness, known and practised also in Norway, seems to have been boosted by the focus that traditional practices lay upon physical protection. One particular ritual exercised by the missionaries was therefore the burning of charms used for this protection.45 The mission thus challenged the worldview of the Africans by a dual approach. Firstly, the spiritual mission aimed at conversion from faith in spirits that did not exist, or could not help, into faith in a God that did exist and could protect. Secondly, the civilising mission aimed at convincing the sick that diseases like leprosy were contagious by intimate contact. To sum up the coexistence of reason and faith in their

41

“Gjennom dette barmhjertighetsarbeidet ville vi så gjerne få peke på verdens Frelser for disse syke. Derfor har vi møter og daglige andakter, katekumenundervisning og kvinnemøter, foruten besøk i alle hyttene rundt om. Det er et arbeid som krever tålmodighet og kjærlighet. Guds ord sås i hjertene, så får Gud gi vekst og liv i sin tid.” Aksel Aarhaug, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 30, 1957, p. 8. 42 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 19, 1946, p. 1; No. 38, 1947, p. 1; No. 5, 1954, p. 5; No. 16, 1954, p. 5; No. 35, 1957, p. 1; No. 22, 1959, p. 4. 43 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 19, 1946, pp. 1–2. 44 For further readings on the aspect of proctection from illness as an element of African Traditional Religion, see Magesa (1997: 193–211), Mathieu and Bohnhoff (1982: 238–246), Ray (2000: 52–58), Thomas and Luneau (2004: 238–246). 45 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 35, 1957, p. 1.

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theological project the missionaries called their leprosy-hospital outside Tibati Ngaoubela – hill of mercy.46 Did the mission succeed in liberating the local population from sickness? To some extent they did, one good example being their work among the lepers. The first stage in this process of liberation was to create trust. Before 1957 the hospital of the French administration treated one leper in Tibati. In 1958 the new mission hospital located in the same area had fifty regular patients.47 The second stage was the dual mission of spiritual and physical enlightenment. The missionaries played an important part in the eradication of leprosy, and many Africans who were healed interpreted this physical liberation as a spiritual liberation. The missionaries did, however, often complain about the continued influence of the local ‘medicine-man’,48 indicating the limited success of their enterprise. Conversion as Liberation from Destructive Behaviour In order to be found worthy of baptism, the sign of a complete conversion, the new convert had to show good moral behaviour. The list made by the missionaries concerning destructive behaviour was long and difficult to adopt for the new local Christians. First there was the question of matrimonial status. The missionaries claimed official papers of marriage (etat civil) from the French colonial administration in order to baptise married candidates.49 This was a large obstacle for many who wanted to be baptised, and it seems that there were different practises among the missionaries concerning the implementation of this duty.50 Another much discussed matrimonial issue was that of polygamy. The missionaries regarded polygamy as sin, a destructive practice that was incompatible with the Christian message,51 therefore a theological

46

Norsk Misjonstidende No. 30, 1957, p. 1. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1958, p. 18. 48 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 10. 49 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1958, p. 5. It was actually the French colonial administration that imposed this matrimonial practice upon the Norwegian missionaries. Several letters from the administration remind the missionaries of this official duty. See for instance the letter from H. Nicolas, chef de région, Adamaoua, September 1, 1945 to the Norwegian mission, and the response from H. Endresen September 29, 1945. ANY, 1AC 3399. 50 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1958, p. 8. 51 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 7, 1940, p. 7; No. 39, 1956, p. 3. 47

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discussion, for instance about polygamy in the Old Testament, was never launched. The missionaries’ practical solution was to deny the polygamous husband baptism unless he sent away all but his first wife.52 Concerning women in polygamous marriages there seems to have been different practices among the missionaries. Some allowed baptism only to the first wife,53 whereas others accepted all the wives for baptism.54 Showing once again the civilising aspect of conversion, the principal discussion about polygamy is often not theological, but, from a Western point of view, rational. The truth is that such [polygamous] homes are ruled by hatred, envy, jealousy, fear, quarrels, fighting and mutual accusations. (. . .) The husband takes little part and cares little about these repeated internal fights among the wives, unless they deal with the question of adultery (. . .).55

The fact that several local Christian men married more than one woman shows that they only partly accepted the message of the missionaries. They continued to attend church and call themselves Christians even if they were denied the Lord’s Supper and any responsibility in the church. The other major aspect of destructive behaviour that the missionaries had to fight was alcoholism. Several articles in NMt56 deal with the negative effect of alcoholism and the issue is repeatedly discussed in the Conference Reports.57 There are probably two major reasons behind the missionaries’ strong focus on the abuse of traditional brewed alcohol. First, the temperance movement was very strong during this period in the milieus where NMS recruited their missionaries. Secondly, alcohol was often served at traditional feasts where ancestors or spirits were venerated, and thus it was a sign of heathendom.58 Another aspect of these feasts were the dancing and drumming that were often

52

Norsk Misjonstidende No. 29, 1959, p. 5. Norsk Misjonstidende No. 29, 1959, p. 5. 54 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 39, 1956, p. 3. 55 “Sannheten er at slike hjem beherskes av hat, misunnelse, sjalusi, frykt, trette, slagsmål og gjensidige beskyldninger. (. . .) Ektemannen tar lite del i eller bryr seg ikke særlig om disse stadig innbyrdes konestridighetene med mindre de går ut på spørsmålet om utroskap (. . .).” Johannes Thrana, Norsk Misjonstidende No. 39, 1956, p. 3. 56 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 38, 1952, p. 4; No. 41, 1952, p. 5; No. 3, 1953, p. 5; No. 25, 1953, p. 5; No. 33, 1955, p. 8; No. 24, 1957, p. 1. 57 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1948, p. 7; 1949, p. 19; 1949, p. 20; 1950, p. 11; 1952, p. 6; 1953, p. 15, 1954, p. 13, 1958, p. 19; 1958, p. 20, 1960, p. 18. 58 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1950, p. 11. 53

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mentioned in the NMt articles,59 presented as signs of immorality and lack of civilisation, once compared with the “the cold northern wind at home”.60 The new converts did, however, continue to play drums and dance after having become Christians and the missionaries gradually, but sometimes reluctantly,61 accepted these practices as elements of the new African Christianity. Did the missionaries succeed in liberating the population from what they regarded as destructive behaviour? In view of the large number of candidates that were refused baptism and the frustration expressed in the sources over the immoral behaviour of the first Christians, the answer can only be a very limited ‘yes’. One might ask how realistic it is to change culturally rooted behaviour in a few decades, but one obvious reason behind the lack of success in the transmission of ethical guidelines was the lack of presence of the missionaries. The missionaries regularly visited only a very limited number of schools and congregations. A fact that was repeatedly pointed out by the missionaries, but received little attention in Norway, was the great importance of the local workers.62 The Gospel was in northern Cameroon communicated to the indigenous population by African teachers and evangelists, first employees from the South and later locally trained converts. In one central area of recruitment for the Norwegian mission, the Dii-plain, the first permanent mission station was built in 1948,63 and in 1936, during the first expansion among the Dii, no missionaries visited the area from January to October.64 With such lack of influence on daily life activities, it is only natural that cultural practices opposed to the ideas of the missionaries prevailed. This chapter can thus be concluded by stating that conversion to Christianity never was interpreted by the Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon as a sudden individualistic rupture with the past, but rather as a process of growth in knowledge and ethical conduct towards a specific goal, baptism. In order to reach this goal, the indigenous population had to be liberated from forces that were obstacles on the

59 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 3, 1953, p. 5; No. 25, 1953, p. 5; No. 14, 1954, p. 1; No. 33, 1955, p. 8. 60 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 3, 1953, p. 5. 61 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 20. 62 Norsk Misjonstidende No. 47, 1934, p. 420; No. 23, 1935, p. 203; No. 43, 1936, p. 349; No. 9, 1939, p. 3; No. 23, 1940, p. 1, No. 28, 1947, p. 5. 63 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 25. 64 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 26.

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road to baptism. This meant liberation from spiritual and social oppression, ignorance, sickness and destructive behaviour. Simultaneously, though less explicitly, the Norwegian missionaries through fighting these theological obstacles became promoters of a civilising mission that radically changed the social structure of the local societies. This civilising path towards theological and social conversion was paved with negotiations based on the cultural background of the missionaries and the cultural background of the population they encountered. The missionaries started out with a biased agenda, but this agenda was gradually reconsidered and reconstructed according to the agenda of the local population. Conversion to Christianity was, as a consequence, regarded as the intended result of a civilising mission that sought to promote a new worldview. The new message of the missionaries had to negotiate a place in a society where traditional practices were partly eradicated and partly maintained by what was to become the new Christians in northern Cameroon.

CHAPTER FOUR

AND IT IS REALLY THANKS TO YOU THAT WE ARE SAVED – A DII DISCOURSE ON CONVERSION We became . . . slaves. Well, the missionaries came and said that there will be no more slavery. No more slavery. They fought against the Fulbe. Even against the slavery in the palace [of the lamido]. The missionaries entered and brought out the slaves by force. Their children are now doctors and nurses and all sorts of things. That’s why the Dii accepted the missionaries. To be saved from slavery, from oppression. And it is really thanks to you that we are saved.1

Several voices in the modern historical and anthropological debate on mission and colonisation argue that even if the Christian mission sometimes was separated from the colonial mission as such, mission was still ‘colonisation of the African mind’.2 The Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe even argues that in this encounter, to become Christian was the only possible position for the African in order to survive (Mudimbe 1988: 47–48). This chapter thus seeks to shed light on one aspect of the complex history of colonisation, mission, and religious conversion by answering the two following questions: How does the Dii-generation who received the first missionaries, looking back and re-constructing their past, explain their conversion to Christianity? And how do they evaluate the role of the first Norwegian missionaries in this social and religious reorientation?

1

Interview informant 19, a Dii Muslim, Mbé 15 December 2005. « Nous devenons des . . . ses esclaves. Bon, les missionnaires sont venus dire qu’il n’y a pas d’esclavage. Il n’y a pas d’esclavage. Ils ont fait cette lutte avec les Foulbés. Même les esclaves qu’il a mis dans son palais, les missionnaires arrivent à arracher ces eslaves-là. Les enfants sont maintenant des docteurs, des infirmiers . . . ils sont là. Voilà porquoi les Dii acceptaient les missionaires . . . pour être sauvés d’esclavage, des menaces. Et c’est vraiment . . . nous sommes sauvés grâce à vous. » All translations from French to English by the author. Parts of this chapter has formerly been published in an article intitled “ ‘And it is really thanks to you that we are saved . . .’: an African discourse on Conversion and the Creation of a Modern Myth” in Exchange 36, no. 2 (2007): 156–183. 2 See Beidelman (1982: 6); Comaroff and Comaroff (1991: 199) and D. Frawley, ‘Missionary Position’, cited from Stanley (2003: 367).

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Methodological Considerations Having worked as a missionary in northern Cameroon for several years my general impression was that critique of the mission on several levels was common among the present day Christians, but not so among the old Dii generation. This impression was confirmed when I, as earlier mentioned, read Muller’s works. He was surprised by the positive historical presentation of Dii relations to the Whites in general, and to the Norwegian missionaries in particular (Muller 1997). In order to map these close relations between the missionaries and the first Dii Christians, I entered into a ‘long conversation’ with some of the pioneer Dii Christians. I also received interesting information through adoption of the feminist ‘study-up’ approach which led me to interview also Muslim informants who had been in contact with the missionaries but had rejected their message.3 My local geographical and sociolinguistic knowledge made the interviews interesting encounters and raised many questions related to reconstruction of history, construction of identity through self-narration, and my own influence and situatedness. Having discussed several methodological questions in chapter one, I will here only briefly comment upon the use of oral historical sources. Personal memory, what Jan Vansina calls ‘reminiscence’, is never a random collection of memories, but is “part of an organized whole of memories that tend to project a consistent image of the narrator and, in many cases, a justification of his or her life.” (Vansina 1985: 8). Memories are also selected and interpreted in a social setting where the individual is constantly interacting with significant others. It is therefore to be expected that my Dii Christian informants with time have undergone some kind of common remembrance selection that is both related to society and to each individual’s present view of reality and the world (Vansina 1985: 190). What will be of interest in the following then, is to find out how the first Dii Christians together have constructed a Dii discourse on conversion and missionaries, and what events and elements that have been worth selecting in order to create this narrative. The story that follows is one that I was presented by my

3 Due to the sensitive information that I collected related to religious conviction and potential ethnic conflicts I have chosen to anonymise my informants. The Christian informants will in the footnotes be numbered from 1 to 15 whereas the Muslim informants will be numbered from 16 to 21. The first time an informant is introduced, the date and the place of the interview will be mentioned.

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informants, one that I am now about to reconstruct as my own analysis of what happened when the Dii met the Norwegian missionaries. The First Encounter In the early 1930s the majority of the Dii people lived scattered in small villages around the newly constructed road going from Ngaoundéré to Garoua. The road was constructed by the French colonial administration in the 1920s,4 using the local population as labours. The workers received daily rations, but hardly any salary and were generally badly treated by the French administration and their African clerks. This means that the Dii people had experienced ‘the white man’s burden’ and already had an impression of European presence when the first Norwegian missionary, Johannes Thrana, visited the Dii-plain in 1933. One of my informants was born around 1922, and is among the few Dii that still remembers the arrival of the first missionaries. He explains his first impression of the Norwegians as follows: When the missionaries arrived, they brought with them a (. . .) record player, yes it was a record player (. . .) such a thing with noise inside. It did sing some songs that praised God. They said that they had brought us the word of God, that they had brought us the school . . . ‘That’s what we have brought you.’ Actually, a lot of people, when hearing the sound from the record player thought that what they heard was the voice of God and that God lived in the record player. A lot of people came to ask the Whites to open the box so that they could see God. Then the White said that God did not live in the box. ‘I have recorded these songs far away in order for you to believe in God and to attend school.’5

4 The first road connecting Ngaoundéré and Garoua intended for cars was constructed between 1919 and 1929. The present road was constructed in the 1950s, still through forced labour. Interview informant 18, Ngaoundéré 28 November 2005. ANY, Affaires Politiques et Adminastrives (APA) 11781/C, Rapport Trimestriel 1929, 3e Trimestre. 5 Interview informant 7, Mbé 24 October 2005. « Quand les missionnaires sont arrivés, ils emportaient avec eux un (. . .) magnétophone, oui c’est un magnétophone (. . .) cette chose émettait du bruit à l’intérieur. Il chantait certaines chansons et la louange de Dieu. Et ils dirent qu’ils nous apportaient la parole de Dieu, qu’ils nous apportaient l’école . . . “Voilà ce que nous vous avons apporté.” En réalité, beaucoup de gens, en entendant les sons sortant du magnétophone croyaient entendre la voix de Dieu. Les Dii pensaient que Dieu habitait dans le magnétophone. Beaucoup de personnes sont arrivées et reclamaient que les blancs leur ouvrent cela, afin qu’ils puissent decouvrir Dieu. C’est là que le blanc leur dit que Dieu n’est pas dedans. “J’ai apporté ce magnétophone pour vous faire savoir que c’est ailleurs que j’ai enregistré ces louanges de

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His story is confirmed through other interviews. It was primarily curiosity that drew the Dii towards the white missionaries. Several early pupils at the mission schools say that it was rumours of unseen wonders, such as large images with motives from the Bible, which caught their attention and made them attend school.6 In order to catch the attention of the masses, the first missionaries also distributed small gifts like sugar, salt, and soap to the people who attended the meetings.7 This way they slowly gained the confidence of the Dii and revealed the true intention of their visit, which was to proclaim the word of God. The Dii soon accepted the missionary schools, even though their intentions to attend them at first were quite different from the ideas of the missionaries, who basically saw the schools as a means to evangelise the Dii. Apart from being some kind of distraction, the school introduced the Dii youth to literacy, a skill that only the clerks working for the colonial administration mastered. Lacking knowledge of the Dii language, the missionaries used Mbum in the schools, a language that was known in the region in the 1930s because of the slight political domination exercised by the Mbum people who originally inhabited the region. In order to increase further the utility of the school, the pupils went on strike to force the missionaries to teach French,8 a demand that the missionaries only reluctantly accepted.9 The missionaries were surprised by the extensive interest for schools among the Dii, and they were far from able to meet the demands from all the Dii chiefs that wanted schools. The mission’s Conference Reports reveal that the chiefs most often asked for teachers and not catechists, but the missionaries still interpreted this to mean that the Dii were a people where ‘the doors were open’ for the Gospel. One Muslim informant, himself a schoolteacher, interprets the attitude of the Dii chiefs rather different: The Dii would not [send their children to school]. But when they understood the importance of the French school a lot of families decided to send their children anyway. (. . .) When the sub-prefect or some authority or . . . wrote a letter to a village chief, he could go to the catechist in

Dieu. Ce que je veux avec vous c’est de croire en Dieu et d’aller à l’école.” » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 6 Interviews informant 7; informant 8, Koundini 25 October 2005. 7 Interviews informant 2, Wack 12 October 2005; informant 10, Ngaouyanga 18 October 2005. 8 NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 9, folder 1. Station Diary, Ngaoundéré 1935–1940 (November 1937), p. 59. 9 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 24.

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chapter four the next village. Then the chief had to pay the other chief in order to borrow his catechist to read him the letter. And this created a rivalry, a competition. If he saw that everyone asked for a catechist, in order not to have to pay a lot for the reading of his letter, it was this competition between the chiefs. ‘No, no, no it’s my catechist, he is not yours . . . he’s mine.’ You had to pay a chicken, sorghum or money in order to borrow a catechist to read a letter. This provoked . . . the missionaries did this on purpose . . . they did it on purpose.10

J. D. Y. Peel describes conversion among the young Yoruba in Nigeria as a balance or trade-off between the attraction of becoming a Christian and its costs (Peel 2000: 233), and the arrival of the school among the Dii was far from a harmonic mission success story. Most of the Dii I interviewed had to flee their parents in order to attend school during the first decade of missionary presence. 11 A widespread idea among the adult Dii was that the white man ate African children12 and therefore they avoided sending the youngest children to the mission. Other ideas that circulated were that the white man would run away with the children or that the children would never return after having received their education. The latter was partly true since a good number of pupils left with the missionaries, either to continue their education elsewhere or to work as teachers in villages far away. The result either way was that the children were lost labour force on the family fields. The curiosity of the children did, however, often exceed the fear of the parents. The fugitives that feared punishment from their parents if they returned home were normally allowed to live together with the African teachers, but they had to help the teachers work their fields in order to receive food. The missionaries also helped these pupils by offering clothes, food, and even money to the ‘abandoned’ children’.13

10 Interview informant 18. « Les gens ne voulaient pas. Mais quand ils ont compris l’importance d’aller à l’école française . . . mais les gens de beaucoup de familles se sont décidés à envoyer les enfants à l’école. (. . .) Quand le sous-préfet ou bien une autorité ou bien . . . écrit une lettre au chef du village là, il peut aller trouver le catéchiste de l’autre village. Le chef, il faut qu’il paye le chef là-bas pour qu’il donne son catéchiste pour lui lire la lettre. Ce qui a créé une émulation, une concurrence. S’il voit que chacun demandait son catéchiste . . . pour ne pas avoir à payer l’autre cher pour la lecture de sa lettre. Il y avait cette concurrence entre les chefs : “Non, non, non c’est mon catéchiste c’est pas le vôtre . . . c’est le mien.” Donc on donne un poulet, on donne du mil, de l’argent pour que le catéchiste soit prêté à l’autre village pour lire la lettre du chef. Ça a provoqué . . . ça les missionnaires ont fait exprès . . . ils ont fait exprès. » 11 Interviews informant 7; informant 19; Siroma (1986). 12 Interviews informant 15, Mbé 16 December 2005; informant 7; informant 10. 13 Interviews informant 9, Mbé 24 October 2005; informant 2.

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A proper dormitory for the pupils was first established when the missionaries built a permanent mission station on the Dii-plain in Ngaouyanga in 1948. The Attraction of the Message and the Media Understanding religious conversion means to study both personal, individual motivation for spiritual reorientation and wider social changes that moves society towards new plausibility structures (Berger 1969). For the majority of the first generation of Dii Christians the personal motivation for conversion to Christianity was closely linked to school attendance where they were in daily contact with the Christian message. Kees Schilder, who has studied the arrival of Christianity further north in Cameroon, describes conversion among the Mundang as “an unintended effect of the wish to learn to read and write.” (Schilder 1994: 200). From my interviews it is clear that once the pupils on a regular basis were in contact with the mission schools they slowly became interested in the strange message proclaimed by the teachers. This interest is in the Dii discourse linked both to the media and to the message. In order to learn to read and write the Dii pupils had to listen to the teacher’s stories about Jesus, and it seems that they were impressed by the detailed knowledge they were presented about this peculiar man who lived in Palestine a long time ago. They came and showed us the photo of Jesus. They gave the date of his birth. ‘This is the way that his mother gave birth to him, and this is what he was about to do when they killed him.’ (. . .) He died because of the sins of man. And everyone that accepts him in his heart and follows his path will be saved. (. . .) To me, that’s what caught my attention. And I decided to believe in him, because if one day he would rise from the dead, he would raise me from the dead as well, he would save me.14

It is obvious that a citation like the latter is influenced by a lifetime of Christian practice and theological reflections, but it still reveals that the

14 Interview informant 7. « Ils sont venus montrer la photo de Jésus. Ils ont donné sa date de naissance. “C’est de telle manière que sa maman l’a conçu, voilà ce qu’il était en train de faire lorsque on l’a tué.” (. . .) Il serait mort à cause du péché des hommes. Et que toute personne qui l’acceptait dans son coeur et suivait son chemin serait sauvé. (. . .) Pour moi, c’est cela qui m’a plu. Et j’ai décidé de croire en lui afin que si un jour il revient de la mort, il puisse aussi me ramener de la mort et qu’il me sauve. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri.

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Dii pupils developed some kind of fascination for the message that they heard at school. It seems for instance as if the idea of a judgement day was an idea that captured the young pupils and drew their attention towards the mystery of the Christian message. To many of my Christian informants the idea of Jesus as a personal saviour, who would assure them a place in paradise, became the most important doctrine in the new religion.15 One informant adds that for those who did not accept Jesus as a saviour, it was fire and suffering that waited, and that this thought was constantly in their heart.16 Adding to the attraction of the message was the attraction that concerned the media, the fact that the pupils themselves could discover this information through written texts.17 The informants argue that they themselves could, for the first time, through Mbum and French books, discover what were hidden secrets both in traditional religion and in the religion of the Fulbe. I was Muslim as my father, and we used to pray together until the arrival of the word of God. Everybody went to listen. Since I did not want to be isolated I decided to go and listen myself. I went there all the time with my friends. Later, I asked to be enrolled, and the catechist accepted me and taught us the word of God. And my father told me, ‘My son, since you have become a Christian you have to leave this house,’ and I went to live with the catechist. (. . .) I discovered that my life, it was a new life. Because, if I had stayed Muslim I would not have learned anything, I would have prayed without understanding anything since everything was in Arabic. When I became a Christian, I learned to read the Bible in French and in Mbum, and that is what I followed.18 15 Interviews informant 4, Karna Manga 18 October 2005; informant 5, Ngaouyanga 17 October 2005; informant 7; informant 8; informant 9; informant 11. 16 Interview informant 6. 17 To make conclusive statements about what most attracted the Dii youth to the mission schools, the message or the media, depends on how the statements of the first pupils are interpreted (Schilder 1994: 200; Comaroff 1991: 224), which again involves questions related to the ideology and situatedness of the researcher. What is beyond doubt is that these questions are closely related and that no explanation lacking one of the two elements is satisfactory. 18 Interview informant 2. « J’ai été musulman avec mon père, nous avons prié ensemble. Jusqu’à l’arrivée de la Parole de Dieu. Tout le monde y accourait. Comme je ne voulais pas être isolé, je me suis décidé d’aller écouter moi aussi. Je m’y rendait chaque fois ainsi que tous mes pairs. Après, j’ai demandé à être inscrit, le catéchiste m’a inscrit, il nous enseignait la parole de Dieu. Et mon père m’a dit : “Mon fils, comme tu es devenu chrétien, ne rentre plus dans ma maison, laisse ma concession,” et j’ai quitté la maison paternelle. Je suis allé rester avec le catéchiste. (. . .) J’ai vu que ma vie, c’était une nouvelle vie. Car si j’étais musulman, je n’aurais rien appris, j’allais prier sans comprendre quelque chose comme tout est en arabe. Comme je suis devenu chrétien,

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From the above citation it becomes clear that one important reason behind Christianity’s success among the Dii was its accessibility. Those who attended school, regardless of gender and social position, had the possibility to learn to read the Bible and to discover the secrets of religion. Robin Horton has argued that the success of Christianity in Africa was due only to an inevitable mass-movement towards modernity, a mass movement that would have occurred with or without the arrival of the two world-religions Islam and Christianity (Horton 1971). The eagerness of the Dii to join the mission schools to some extent supports Horton’s theory, but his theory fails to explain why the Dii in northern Cameroon chose Christianity as their path towards modernity. Christianity was only one among three actors on the stage of modernity in the Adamaoua, and it arrived after Islam and the colonial administration. Eldridge Mohammadou has through his collection of Fulbe oral traditions showed how the Fulbe arrived early in the 19th century and with military superiority, monotheism and literacy introduced significant changes to the traditional Adamaoua way of life (Mohammadou 1979). The secrets of religion and literacy were, however, not revealed to the people that the Fulbe regarded as their subjects. The Dii were denied any real knowledge about Islam, and those who called themselves Muslims at the time of the arrival of the missionaries were mostly traders who imitated the Fulbe prayers they had witnessed in Muslim centres such as Garoua and Ngaoundéré.19 One of my informants even claims that if a Fulbe spent the night in your house (which he rarely did), he would not open his Koran until it was dark in order to hide its message from the Dii.20 The second power appearing was the colonial administration, but the brutality of the Europeans and their support of the existing Fulbe authorities21 made their relationship with the Dii somewhat tense. Ketil Fred Hansen’s study of the French colonial administration indicates that the administration suffered from limited economic liberty due to

j’ai appris la Bible en français et en mboum et c’est ce que j’ai suivi. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre. 19 It is obvious that many indigenous groups in northern Cameroon could explain their conversion to Islam in terms of liberation and/or empowerment (van Santen 2002), but it is still clear from my informants that the Dii at this stage never were included into the ‘circles of savants’ in the Muslim Fulbe milieu. 20 Interviews informant 3, Karna Manga 18 October 2005; informant 5. 21 For more information about the relationship between the lamibbe and the French colonial administration, see Abwa (1989a).

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the low tax-income in the Adamaoua, and basically used its resources to improve the political administration of the area (Hansen 1992: 83). Philip Burnham’s study of the region also concludes that education of the masses never was a priority in North-Cameroon (Burnham 1996: 86), and thus the administration was of little help when it came to these needs of the Dii people. Accessibility was also a factor that favoured the mission in the growing conflict between Christianity and African Traditional Religion since the secrets of traditional rites to a large extent were hidden to the young Dii. Muller’s study of circumcision among the Dii shows how the males were initiated to certain secrets through this rite,22 but responsibility in these kinds of rites was through birth only. If you were born outside the family of naŋ (blacksmiths), d–̧ŋ naa (guardians of tradition) or gbanaa (chiefs) you were without influence on the public practice of traditional religious rites in society. A consequence of this lack of accessibility was that the traditional organisation of Dii society, where the gbaa, the ancestral gods, provided blessings and protection, did not convince the young Dii generation of its ability to meet the challenges of the New World. The old idea that the ancestral gods existed under the surface of the earth was challenged by the arrival of Christianity, and the strength of the new media disfavoured the old beliefs. In the words of one of the first Dii catechists: We said to ourselves: ‘The word of God has arrived, let’s follow the Gospel. Let’s leave behind the traditions of our ancestors . . . is the soil capable of speaking? The soil that we use for construction . . .’ we made fun of it. We only wanted to listen to the Gospel.23

Another informant puts it this way: But the tradition, it, it, it . . . absolutely not, it did not speak . . . it did not speak to you. But when the word . . . when the word of God arrived, we spoke directly to the living God. And that the old, our old, knew that a living God existed . . . but they did not know where to find him. They [the evangelists] had brought us something that the parents did not, did not believe in. Well, I, I had to put that aside, leave the tradition behind

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For further information on circumcision among the Dii, see Muller (2002). Interview informant 2. « On s’est dit : “La parole de Dieu est arrivée, allons suivre l’évangile. Laissons tomber des traditions des ancêtres . . .est-ce que la terre est capable de nous parler ?” La terre qu’on construit, cette terre, on se moquait d’elle. On allait seulement écouter l’évangile. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre. 23

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and follow the reality that I had already learned about and that gave me . . . that gave me strength.24

One might be surprised by the ease with which many young Dii left the religions of their parents. Not that it was without sacrifice, the pain of separation from family is present in many of my interviews, but it still seems that the ‘pull-factor’ was very strong when it came to the mission schools. Towards Social Change Through my interviews it became clear that curiosity and fascination related to the message and to the media of Christianity made a new Dii generation follow the path indicated by the missionaries. But it also became clear that acceptance of Christianity had other, and much wider motivations and implications than the purely theological ones. My impression is that the young Dii, seeking social reorientation as a way out of the shadows of Fulbe and French dominance, became agents of change in Dii society. For many families the old family structure was in transition. The youth no longer obeyed their parents, and as such the movement towards Christianity was a painful youth rebellion. Schilder claims that the Mundang youth strategically used the missionary message in their battles to escape several forms of paternal control (Schilder 1994: 204), and the young Dii no longer depended on their families in order to survive neither on a material nor on a spiritual level. A small ‘society within society’ grew up around the mission schools. Material security was now assured through work on the teacher’s fields and through financial support from the missionaries. Spiritual protection was now sought through prayers, singing of Christian hymns and through gradual understanding of the message they in bits and pieces extracted from the Bible through the Mbum language. The rhythm of life was also changed by the introduction of new religious feasts that gradually replaced the traditional gatherings. 24 Interview informant 6. « Mais pour la tradition, ça, ça, ça . . . n’absolument rien, ça ne parle pas . . . ça ne vous parle pas. Mais comme la parole, comme la parole de Dieu est venue on parle directement au Dieu vivant. Et que les anciens . . . nos anciens connaissaient qu’il y a un Dieu vivant, [mais] ils ne connaissait même pas où il se trouve. On a amené déjà quelque chose que les parents n’ont pas, n’ont pas cru. Bon . . . je . . . je dois la mettre à côté, laisser la tradition et suivre la réalité que j’ai déjà écoutée et que ça me . . . ça me donne la force. »

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chapter four And when we celebrated Christmas, all the youth in this village, for instance, we went to celebrate in another village for two to three days. We played games, we celebrated Christmas, we celebrated Christmas. Well, another year, other villages invited yet other villages who went there with the word of God. The catechists came together to preach the Gospel, we sang, we danced, we had fun. And when the others saw this, they said, ‘We’ll follow this religion.’ That’s the way people came to join us.25

Whereas the feasts of harvest and circumcision had been the most important social events in traditional Dii society, the missionaries saw these feasts as ‘heathen’ and told the new Christians not to take part in them.26 The traditional events were thus challenged by the celebration of Christmas, Easter and Harvest Festival. The latter replaced the harvest feast and became one of the great social events in the new church. The arrival of the mission also changed the social hierarchy within Dii society. Earlier prestige and social rang was linked to roles in society that performed and preserved traditional rites, and the productive population had to contribute to the household of the chief and the d–̧ŋ naa who were considered the elite of society. Apart from Islamisation and Fulbeisation, which were extremely narrow paths for the Dii because of the strict preservation of the Islamic religion by the Fulbe, there were few possibilities for the Dii who sought to increase personal social status. To become a clerk in the colonial administration demanded Western education, and was thus reserved for people from the South. To succeed in trade you were dependent on Muslim Fulbe and Hausa networks, and in these networks the ethnic protectionism was strong. But with the arrival of the mission a new specialist, the teacher/catechist, was introduced in Dii society, a specialist with material and religious skills that served the population. The same way that the productive population contributed to the traditional elite, they

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Interview, informant 2. « Et quand on fêtait Noël, tout les jeunes de ce village, par exemple, nous allions fêter dans un autre village pendant deux à tois jours. On jouait, on fêtait noël, on fêtait noël. Bon . . . une autre année, d’autres villages en invitaient d’autres, qui s’y rendaient avec la parole de Dieu. Les catéchistes s’y réunissaient pour nous prêcher l’évangile. On chantait, on dansait, on s’amusait et quand beaucoup ont vu cela, ils dirent : “Suivons cette religion.” C’est ainsi que les gens sont allés. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre. 26 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon 1959, p. 12. The missionaries did not object to the actual circumcision, but labelled the rites that surrounded them as ‘heathen’ and encouraged the Christians to circumcise their children at the hospital. The harvest feasts were regarded as pretexts for drunkenness and immoral behaviour and were to be treated by the missionaries under the category ‘drinking and dancing’.

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now had to contribute to the construction and to the maintenance of the schools and the catechist’s home. The post of the teacher, initially kept by people from the South, was soon to be employed by the first educated Dii catechists. These local catechists knew the language and the customs of the population and they were therefore judged by the missionaries to be better placed to guide the pupils spiritually than the teachers from the South. They also had the advantage that they could help the pupils translate difficult French expressions into Dii.27 These pioneers of the mission schools, like the influential catechist Dadi David, and the first Dii pastors, Maïdawa Thomas and Bobbo Etienne, whom Peel describes as “being the wave of the future” (Peel 1978: 446), soon became role models for the next generation of Dii pupils. They became images of social mobility, they mastered different languages, they could read the letters from the administration, and they received a salary (however small) from the missionaries. What interested us was that we read the Bible in Mbum. When we went to school in Dii country they taught us in Mbum. We read the Mbum and we understood the message. That’s when everybody said, ‘I want to attend school and become a catechist.’ So what interested us and what pushed us to go to school was to become catechists so that they could send us to the countryside, and on the countryside we would teach the word of God to others, we taught the children. We were the clerks of the missionaries.28

Even if my informants, among whom the majority were to become members and leaders of the church, evaluate positively the social changes introduced by the missionaries, it is important to note that these changes also highlight the complex power structure that existed in colonial Cameroon. The acceptance of the ‘missionary path’ towards changes also meant submission to a new moral regime where the Norwegian missionaries set the rules. School attendance was free of economic charges, but a certain behavioural change was asked from the pupils, and the mission schools soon started using the curriculum from

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Interview, informant 9. Interview informant 2. « Ce qui nous a intéressés, c’est le fait que nous lisions la Bible en mboum. Quand on allait à l’école en pays dii, on nous enseignait en mboum. On lisait le mboum et on décelait le message. C’est là que tout le monde se disait : “Moi, je veux aller à l’école pour devenir catéchiste,” pour qu’on nous envoie en campagne, et en campagne, nous enseignions la parole de Dieu à des personnes, on enseignait les enfants. On était désormais comme les fonctionnaires des missionnaires. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre. 28

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the French administration in order to receive economic contributions from them. This way the Norwegian mission at times joined the French administration in their mission civilicatrice. Discipline in the classroom was demanded, participation in church activities was expected, and teachers and catechists who did not follow the strict moral standard set by the missionaries lost their jobs. Liberation from what was experienced among my Dii informants as physical and religious oppression thus in some ways led to the acceptance of another, yet softer, moral and intellectual regime, the mission. Liberation from Forced Labour The mass-movement that developed among the young Dii towards the mission schools was influenced by the power relations that existed in the Adamaoua, and one motivation among others that kept the Dii youth in the mission schools was that they soon learned that as pupils they were spared from forced labour. Some Dii parents accused their children of attending school only in order to escape from the hard work on their families’ and on the chief’s fields.29 This kind of escape might have motivated some pupils, but the majority of my informants pointed out that it was the forced labour required by the Fulbe and the colonial administration, and not the work on the family field, that frightened them throughout their youth. One informant claims that he was one of many young Dii who had to carry his village’s sorghumtax on his head from Ngaouyanga to Ngaoundéré, a journey that took five days.30 Randomly chosen persons could also be forced by Fulbe from the lamido’s court to carry their luggage across the plain, or they could be forced to do maintenance work on the lamido’s palace in Ngaoundéré. Another informant claims that sometimes when the Dii arrived in Ngaoundéré in order to sell their sorghum, they were robbed by Fulbe traders and had to return to their village empty handed. To attend the mission schools seems to have been the easiest way to escape this harassment. First of all because as a pupil you were not chosen to do forced labour and secondly because education gave the Dii self-confidence to stand up to Fulbe oppression and report abuse to the colonial administration. 29 30

Interview, informant 5. Interviews, informant 1; informant 5; informant 7.

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Forced labour was also part of the French colonial administration’s policy in order to effectuate what they saw as development of their colonies. What made the Dii suffer particularly was the construction of the road that was to connect Ngaoundéré and Garoua. To turn the steep hill that leads from the Ngaoundéré plateau down to the Diiplain into a road was hard labour and many Dii lost their lives during road-construction in these hills in the late 1920s.31 Documentation from the colonial archives shows that five hundred workers at all times took part in the work administrated by the Ngaoundéré sub-division,32 and these workers were changed every three months. When we know that the total Dii population on the plain was inferior to 10,000 during this period, it is evident that the Dii suffered considerably from these forced labours. When the construction of a new road down the same hill started in the 1950s it is understandable that the Dii youth saw the mission schools as safe havens that could protect them against the administration which had abused their parents. The parents did not want me to attend school. You understand? I wanted to, I said, ‘I will go. (. . .) I do not want to continue being a heathen or to do the forced labour.’ Those days there was forced labour. They take you and three months you work on the building project, three months of forced labour. If you have the strength or not, the whip behind you. They really did whip you.33

The impression I am left with after my interviews, both from the Christian and Muslim informants, is that it is not the fact that the colonial administration and the Fulbe lamido demanded labour that has left the deepest scars among the Dii. Society’s hierarchy depended on forced labour in order to exist, and on all levels the farmers living in the Adamaoua were accustomed to contribute with the only currency they had, labour. The parents demanded that their children contribute on the family field. The chief demanded that the population contribute to the chiefdom. The lamibbe demanded that the local chiefs contribute to the welfare of the local king, and so on. The scars of the Dii are thus

31

Interview, informant 18. ANY, APA 11781/C, Rapport Trimestriel 1929, 4e Trimestre. 33 Interview, informant 20. « Les parents ne voulaient pas que je parte à l’école. Vous comprenez ? Moi-même je désire, je dis : “Je veux partir. (. . .) Moi je [ne] veux plus rester encore païen ou bien faire le travail forcé.” Dans ce temps là c’était le travail forcé. Alors on vous prend trois mois vous travaillez au chantier, trois mois [de] travail forcé. Ou tu peux ou tu ne peux pas, la chicotte derrière. On vous chicotte bien. » 32

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not related to the labour as such but they are related to the way the Dii were treated by the local administration and their African clerks. The Dii scars towards the Fulbe are equally related to the way they were treated by their Muslim conquerors. They were forced by the whip, they were not treated as human beings, and as a result it was their dignity that was violated. The Fulbe really did oppress the Dii. (. . .) They oppressed them by not considering them human. This means that the Fulbe did not consider us as human beings. Maybe some kind of monkeys, I don’t know. From the moment they arrived, they tortured the population the way the Germans had done. That’s exactly what the Fulbe did.34

This citation expresses through a self-narrative historical perspective the frustration felt by the Dii towards the Fulbe.35 It is not an objective analytic statement about socio-political conditions at a given historical moment, but it is a manifestation of problematic relations related to attitude and self-esteem. And in the following I will argue that this vague feeling of not being considered human was one important reason why the Dii engaged in a relationship with the Norwegian missionaries. The Missionaries Came with Tenderness . . . One striking element in the Dii discourse on conversion to Christianity is the repeated focus on the importance of the attitude of the first missionaries and catechists. The missionaries are judged through comparison with the French colonial administration and the Fulbe, and given these circumstances the missionaries are well considered in the eyes of the Dii. One of my informants, a Muslim who for several years worked in the colonial administration and later in the Cameroon

34 Interview, informant 5. « Les Foulbés ont vraiment opprimé les Dii. (. . .) Ils les opprimaient en ne les considérant pas comme des hommes. Cela veut dire que nous les Dii, les Foulbés ne nous considèrent pas comme des hommes. Peut-être des espèces de singes, on ne le sait pas. Dès qu’ils arrivaient, ils torturaient seulement les gens comme les Allemands l’avaient fait. Les Foulbés ont fait exactement de même. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre. 35 The frustration felt by the Dii towards the Fulbe is a shared caractheristics between the kirdi population in northern Cameroon. One example being the Mundang, studied by Kees Schilder. “The struggle against Muslim-inspired arrogance of ”the Fulbe” runs through Mundang ethnic thinking like a continuous thread, not only today but in the past too.” (Schilder 1994: 36).

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State administration, describes the attitude of the missionaries in the following way: The attitude of the missionaries towards the Dii . . . well, you know that when the new faith was introduced among the Dii, it was accompanied with social acts: education, health (. . .). They learned to be cooks, drycleaners, carpenters, mechanics, and the missionaries also respected the Dii. They did not despise them, they respected them, they treated them like human beings, the way they were and their social life. This was surprising because the Dii considered all Whites to be equal, administrators, traders, missionaries . . . they were white. Well, one thought that they were all the same. When the missionaries stood out, they adopted an attitude that inspired mutual respect. They [the Dii] said, ‘These are different.’ They listened to them. And the acts of the missionaries that followed convinced the Dii that they did not come to wage war. They came to help them to be elevated to the same level as the others.36

This attitude is mentioned by several of my informants,37 and it is often la douceur, the tenderness, of the missionary approach that is emphasised. One former schoolteacher claims that “the missionaries preached tenderness, and they preached with tenderness – but they never brutalised.”38 Yet, what does ‘tenderness’ mean in the Dii discourse? Apart from the obvious fact that the missionaries did not beat the Dii into becoming Christians, tenderness is linked to what the Dii experienced as the freedom to choose. They were impressed by the fact that they themselves had something to say, since freedom was rare merchandise in the Adamaoua in the early 20th century. The missionaries in the Dii eyes were promoters of freedom of religion, and they were representatives of a world-religion that the Dii could take part in if they so wished. Through the preceding chapter it became evident that the missionaries, 36 Interview, informant 18. « L’attitude des missionnaires envers les Dii . . . bon, vous savez quand la nouvelle foi [était] introduite en milieu Dii, [elle] était accompagnée d’oeuvres sociales : l’enseignement, la santé (. . .). Ils apprenaient à être cuisinier, blanchisseur, à être menuisier, à être maçon, à être mécanicien, et les missionnaires ont également respecté les Dii. Ils ne les ont pas méprisés, ils les ont respectés, ils les ont pris comme des hommes, dans leur état et dans leur vie sociale. Cela a surpris parce que le Dii considèrent les Blancs comme la même chose, l’administrateur, le commerçant, le missionnaire . . . pour lui c’est le Blanc. Bon, on pensait que c’était la même [chose]. Quand les missionnaires se sont dissociés, ils ont adopté un comportement qui inspire le respect de la personne de l’autre. Ils ont dit : “Ceux là sont différents.” Ils ont prêté l’oreille. Et les actes des missionnaires par la suite ont prouvé aux Dii qu’ils ne sont pas venus faire la guerre. Ils sont venus les aider à s’élever aux niveau des autres. » 37 Interviews, informant 14, Youkou 15 November 2005; informant 1; informant 2; informant 5; informant 7; informant 9; informant 11; informant 14; informant 16. 38 Interview, informant 13, Ngaoundéré 11 October 2005.

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according to today’s standards, were far from open towards an equal two-way religious dialogue between African traditions and Christianity. But the Dii show through their discourse that they do not judge the missionaries according to a Western modern dialogue between religions, but they compare them to the other colonising powers, one internal and one external, the Fulbe and the French colonial administration. And often he [the missionary] came, he asked nothing from the village, not for the chief to pay tax, tax, tax . . . nothing. He only came to preach and then he left. Sometimes, on the contrary, it was the missionaries who gave the chief a present in order to say, ‘Here chief, here’s some salt for your family,’ or something like that. They came with freedom, with patience, without brutality. Even where they were turned down, I don’t think that they brutalised.39

When we compare the Norwegian sources with the Dii discourse the difference is sometimes striking in terms of cause and effect. The missionaries were very focused in their work, and their object was clear, to proclaim the Gospel and through baptism create disciples. As a result the missionary reports and articles that were sent back to Norway focused on success and failure in terms of school and church attendance, number of baptisms and consultations in the hospitals. Not a single article in the missionary production focuses on the missionaries’ success as promoters of freedom of religion, and yet this is what most deeply touched many of my informants.40 It is also clear from my interviews that the tenderness of the missionaries included charity work organised by the mission. But once again one is struck by the different approach to the concept in the missionary sources and in the Dii discourse. Well . . . the attitude of the missionaries was different from the governmental authorities. Earlier the authorities made the Dii suffer a lot. Is that not so? They even had to transport the sorghum from here to Ngaoundéré by foot. Well, once our white man arrived, what did he do? He took all the sorghum. Mister Fløttum took the truck and he transported people’s sorghum, that they transported on their heads to the mountain . . . in his

39 Interview, informant 12, Ngaoundéré 22 November 2005. « Et souvent il venait, il ne demandait rien au village, ni au chef de payer un tribut, un tribut, un tribut . . . rien. Il vient seulement faire la prédication et il rentre. Parfois au contraire, ce sont les missionnaires qui font le cadeau même au chef pour dire : “Voici le sel, c’est pour la famille,” ou quelque chose comme ça. Ils sont entrés avec la liberté d’une manière patiente, pas de brutalité, là où on les refusait même je crois eux ils ne brutalisaient pas. » 40 Interviews, informant 2; informant 5; informant 9; informant 11; informant 12.

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truck, and delivered it to the authorities. It was after that that they stopped doing things. It is because the missionaries bore testimony of charity. (. . .) They came with tenderness and not brutality like the others.41

The missionary sources basically mention health work when reports are written about charity among the Dii. The mission’s leprosy village in Foubarka helped eradicate leprosy among the Dii and the dispensary in Mbé saved many lives through medical treatments, small operations, and vaccination. This substantial work of the mission is, however, hardly mentioned when my informants give reasons for conversion to Christianity. What are, on the other hand, constantly repeated are stories that bear witnesses of missionaries who did charity work and at the same time took a firm stand against their oppressors. One such story, told by several informants, is the above-mentioned myth-like testimony about the Norwegian pastor Sverre Fløttum who used his truck to transport the tax of the Dii to the colonial administration and to the lamido in Ngaoundéré. One might question the degree of ‘liberation’ from taxes that the missionaries contributed to, as long as they by transporting the tax became part of the system that maintained the practice. But since the tax was normally transported on the head of village youths, the Dii discourse seems to interpret the missionaries’ truck-interference as a great relief for all the Dii living many days’ march from Ngaoundéré. The fact that the importance of stories like this by far outnumbers the importance of health work in my interviews raises, however, several questions. Why have these stories reached mythical dimensions in Dii oral tradition, and what is the symbol-value of these acts of charity in Dii collective memory?

41 Interview informant 1. « Bon . . . la façon de faire des missionnaires était différente de celle des autorités gouvernementales. Avant, les autorités faisaient beaucoup souffrir les Dii. N’est-ce pas ? Ils ont même eu à transporter le mil d’ici jusqu’a Ngaoundéré à pied. Bon, dès que notre Blanc est arrivé, qu’a t’il fait ? Il a stocké tout le mil. M. Fløttum a pris la voiture et il a transporté le mil des gens . . . qu’ils transportaient sur la tête jusqu’à la montagne . . . avec la voiture, jusqu’à le verser aux autorités. C’est depuis là qu’ils ont cessé de faire ces choses. Ça c’est parce que les missionnaires ont temoigné la charité. (. . .) Ils sont venus avec la douceur, et non brutalement comme les autres ont fait. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre.

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chapter four The Creation of a Modern Myth

What is a modern myth? And if it exists, how is it created? Most scholars would argue with Malinowski that myth is “not an explanation in satisfaction of scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants”.42 In the study of history of religion myths are described as expressions of sacred events, often from the origin of the world, including gods and superhuman beings, that remain valid as models for human activity (Bolle 1987: 261; McCall 1969: 41). In this strict sense Norwegian missionaries in the Adamaoua are very far from the universe of myths. Myth is, however, used in a much wider sense in a number of recent historical and anthropological works. In these works the relationship between myth and history is extensively debated, especially related to societies where oral tradition still is an important means of transmitting knowledge. Myth thus tends to play an important role in much oral history from Africa, making it hard for conventional historians to reconstruct events ‘as they actually were’. Elizabeth Tonkin argues that historians often see the past as ‘another country’ whereas she herself prefers to analyse how oral history creates individual self through an interconnection between memory, cognition, and history. Instead of labelling myth as unrealistic ways of representing the past, Tonkin argues that mythic structures might encode history, and that they register actual happenings or significant changes (Tonkin 1992: 8). This line of thought is shared by Paul Ricoeur who does not limit the origin of myth to gods or to a primeval reality. He argues that myths are received through tradition and can be accepted as credible by a group without any guarantee of authenticity. The acceptance of myths basically depends on the credibility of the narrator, and the myths can, according to Ricoeur, answer a wide range of questions, such as “[h]ow did a particular society come to exist? What is the sense of this institution? Why does this event or that rite exist? Why are certain things forbidden? What legitimizes a particular authority?” (Ricoeur 1987: 273). The central function of a myth is to connect the present to the time of the origin of the myth whether the myth’s origin is the

42 B. Malinowsky, cited by Joseph D. Bettis in his work on Malinowsky and the social function of religion (Bettis 1969: 182). I. Strenski provides in one of his works a detailed analysis of Malinowski’s use of myths (Strenski 1992).

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unidentified past of creation or a sociologically important turning point for the group concerned. As a consequence the myth is a particular type of explanation with a complex relation to history. Ricoeur states that it is this very specific function of the myth that creates both its tie to, and its conflict with, history (Ricoeur 1987: 273).43 How is a myth created? Myths are created in order to legitimise existing social structures, rites, and authority, often through the actions of heroes or superhuman beings during turbulent times. It is relevant to speak of the late 19th and the early 20th century as a turning point, a time of turbulence and reorientation for the Dii people as a whole. Oppression by the lamido in Rey-Bouba led to migration of several Dii villages from the Tcholliré area. To obtain relative stability under the lamido of Ngaoundéré they had to accept extensive taxes and forced labour, demanded both by the Fulbe and the colonial administration. Through all my interviews, it became evident that few heroes stood out in this turbulent period of Dii history. The former chief in Mbé, Zubeïru Kun Mbaa, was praised for wise administration and for being the only chief to create a modern centre on the Dii-plain. But clever negotiation with missionaries and the colonial administration alone is not enough to become a hero. The time of the great Dii warriors was passé when Kun Mbaa became chief and most of these great warriors disappeared into oblivion because the military actions of the individuals were too minor to be remembered. In the same way the victories in battles with the two main military opponents, the Fulbe and the German colonial forces were insufficient for great tales around the fire. Into this void entered the Norwegian missionaries. They arrived as strangers that took the side of the Dii, with enough economic and moral resources to challenge the existing rulers. They introduced, through African employees, new social structures, rites, and authorities in Dii society and initiated a spiritual reorientation that included the question of the origin of man. The missionaries were strangers who introduced a new moral regime, but through the Dii looking glass they also created a bridge into participation in the local political administration and they reduced forced labour, taxes, and the threat of slavery. One might still wonder how a handful of Norwegian missionaries could arrive at such a status among the Dii population. From 1934 to

43 S. A. Shokpeka offers further reflection on the relationship between myth and history in African tradition (Shokpeka 2005).

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1948 no missionary lived permanently on the Dii-plain, the one missionary placed in Ngaoundéré being responsible for the plain. This means that visits by the missionary, who seldom had a car at his disposal, were rare, and that the daily work of the mission depended on the African teachers and catechists. We shall in the following briefly analyse three examples from the Dii discourse that are stories, repeated several times by my informants, which add mythical dimensions to the behaviour of the missionaries. The first example concerns Halfdan Endresen, the superintendent of the Norwegian mission who never lived on the Dii-plain but still was engaged in the situation of the Dii. Several informants44 give the missionaries credit for the political freedom that the Dii were granted by the colonial administration when the Dii-plain became a canton in 1938. One result of this political decision was that the Dii no longer had to pay the heavy tax that the lamido required, but that the Dii themselves could decide the size of their contribution to the king in Ngaoundéré. The transport of sorghum did thus not end as a result of this French change of politics, but the burdens of the Dii were eased since the doggaries (the soldiers) of the lamido no longer were allowed to enter the Dii-plain in order to claim taxes. The tax was to be brought to Haman, a village on the Adamaoua plateau twenty five kilometres from Ngaoundéré where the tax collectors would pick it up and they themselves bring it to town (Larsen 1973: 43). According to missionary sources (Larsen 1973: 43; Lode 1990: 45) the missionaries did play a minor role in the creation of a Dii canton. Endresen, on his way to vacation in Norway in 1937 stopped over for a meeting with the French High Commissioner in Yaoundé. During this informal meeting Endresen lobbied in favour of the Dii and explained their difficult situation. I have, however, not been able to find evidence in the colonial archives of this meeting, and Hansen and Abwa’s studies of colonial activity in the Ngaoundéré subdivision leave no trace of missionary influence on the decision to make the Dii-plain a canton. This does not mean that such a meeting or meetings never took place, but it indicates the informal nature of the contact and the limited influence of the missionaries in political matters. In the Dii discourse, however, the missionaries are not portrayed as careful lobbyists, but as active fighters for the Dii cause.

44

Interviews informant 5; informant 6; informant 7; informant 9.

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One of my informants, a close friend of the Mbé chief, explains how Kun Mbaa interpreted the intervention of the missionaries. He knew that it was thanks to the missionaries that he became chef de canton. It was thanks to the missionaries that the Dii from now on were respected. It was thanks to them that Mbé had a school, a market and all kinds of things. He even wanted to become a Christian, but his court was against it.45

The second example that adds to the special status of the missionaries in the Dii discourse deals with Fløttum’s truck-adventure and the issue is still the tax that the Dii had to pay to the lamido and to the colonial administration. Fløttum is, as already mentioned, praised by several informants46 as a person that not only helped the Dii transport their sorghum to the lamido, but also as a person who stood up against the colonial administration and fought the Dii cause, a person that helped put an end to the general suffering of the Dii people. At that time, Mr. Fløttum, pastor Fløttum . . . when Fløttum arrived he went to tell the governor, the préfet, ‘The Dii suffer a lot, they do transport the things by foot all the way to here, they suffer a lot.’ ‘What do you want to do with them?’ asked the governor. ‘I want to help them.’ Fløttum had a big truck. He took the truck and he started to load the sorghum from Ngaouyanga to take it to the government. Later he went to Mbé, and so on. (. . .) Mr. Fløttum made his truck available. It was from village to village. That is how the missionaries helped the Dii and liberated them . . . liberated me . . . from the transport of the sorghum.47

Due to the importance of what sounds like a well-organised mission campaign in the Dii discourse, one would expect to find detailed description of this transport in the mission archives. Surprisingly enough 45 Interview informant 7. « Il savait que c’était grâce aux missionnaires qu’il est devenu chef de canton. C’était grâce aux missionnaires que les Dii sont dorénavant respectés. C’est grâce à eux que Mbé a eu un marché et tout autre chose. Il voulait même devenir Chrétien mais c’était les notables qui y étaient opposés. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 46 Interviews informant 1; informant 5; informant 7; informant 9. 47 Interview informant 5. « En ce temps là, M. Fløttum, Pasteur Fløttum . . . quand Fløttum est arrivé, il est allé demander au gouverneur, le préfet : “Les Dii souffrent beaucoup, ils transportent les choses à pied jusqu’ìci, la souffrance est grande.” “Que veux-tu faire d’eux ?” demanda le gouverneur. “Je veux les aider.” M. Fløttum avait un gros camion. Il a pris le camion, commencé à charger le mil de Ngaouyanga pour le verser au gouvernement. Après il a porté à Mbé, ainsi de suite. (. . .) Et M. Fløttum mettait sa voiture à contribution. C’était de village en village. Voilà comment les missionnaires ont aidé les Dii et les ont . . . m’a libéré . . . du transport de mil. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre.

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not a single document among Conference Reports, station diaries or publications in the mission magazines describes this incident with a word. One letter from Fløttum to Endresen does, however, mention a proposition that might concern the event that my informants refer to. In this letter Fløttum writes that the Dii chief has offered him one sac of sorghum for every two sacs that he can transport on his truck to Ngaoundéré, and he considers this a good deal for the mission that will help balance the transport budget.48 Is it possible that this prosaic sorghum-deal between the Dii chief and a missionary from Norway has turned into a mythic story of resistance towards, and liberation from the lamido and the colonial administration in Ngaoundéré? The third example of the missionaries’ status as heroes is related to the citation that introduced this chapter, where the missionaries are presented as brave freedom fighters that liberated the slaves of the Fulbe by force. Even if the large majority of Dii would argue that these slaves originated from other ethnic groups, they clearly sympathise with all groups that were badly treated by the Fulbe, and they also admit that forced labour was some kind of slavery. One informant explains these dramatic events as follows: Earlier, slavery existed. There were slaves. They captured us and enslaved us. Well, when there were . . . the missionaries came to defend [us]. They became angry and they started to fight with the Fulbe, it was like war after war. Especially when they were installed at the mission in Ngaoundéré. A lot of slaves were kept by the lamido. The missionaries liberated them all. They said, ‘There will be no more slavery.’ They fought against the Fulbe. We were saved by the missionaries and we are proud of them.49

Jean-Claude Muller also refers to similar stories in his article “Merci à vous les Blancs, de nous avoir liberés !” a result of his fieldwork among the Dii in the early 1990s (Muller 1997). According to Muller the missionaries are described by his informants in a western like manner as cowboys that entered the palace of the lamido with guns in their hands in order to liberate the slaves. Muller interprets the origin of 48

NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 12, folder 5, serie H. Interview informant 3. « Avant, il y avait l’esclavage. Il y avait les esclaves. On nous arrêtait en esclavage. Bon, quand il y avait . . . les missionnaires sont venus [nous] défendre. Ils se sont fâchés, ils ont combattu avec les Peuls, c’était comme des guerres et des guerres. Surtout quand ils étaient installés à la mission à Ngaoundéré. Il y avait beaucoup d’esclaves chez le lamido. Les missionnaires les ont fait tous sortir. Ils disaient : “Il n’y a plus l’esclavage.” Ils ont combattu avec les Peuls. Nous étions sauvés par les missionnaires et nous étions fiers d’eux. » 49

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this fantastic version of history to be an incident that is described by Lode and occurred at the lamido’s palace in 1958. One night during a heavy rain, lightning struck the mud walls of the palace and parts of the wall were destroyed. Eight female slaves used this occasion to flee from the palace and seek refuge at the mission station (Lode 1990: 120). Once more one is struck by the different approach to history in the Dii discourse and in the Norwegian, French and Fulbe sources. The missionaries often complained about how difficult it was to liberate the ‘slaves’ due to the reluctant and bureaucratic approach of the colonial administration.50 The colonial administration often complained about the missionaries who involved themselves with the ‘servants’ of the Fulbe,51 which was not their business at all. The Fulbe reported to the colonial administration that the missionaries kidnapped persons that by free will lived in their households.52 What becomes clear from the presentation of this “historical gossip” (Vansina 1985: 17–18) is the rather obvious conclusion that a given discourse not necessarily represents history ‘as it actually was’. Stories might turn into myths because they serve a certain purpose. The missionary effort in the quest for political liberation for the Dii was, according to missionary and colonial sources, rather modest. Endresen called for a meeting with the High Commissioner in order to improve the working conditions of the mission. Fløttum carried some sorghum on his truck, probably because it was a good deal for the mission, and he probably returned with an empty truck anyway. And after having witnessed slavery for 25 years the missionaries finally started to challenge what they, as children of their time, saw as a morally unacceptable behaviour both by the Fulbe and by the French administration. These actions were, however, of great symbolic value to the Dii people. The Dii needed help in a politically and socially intolerable situation. Many Dii youth accepted the message of the missionaries and became active agents in the social changes that followed. These changes had to be legitimised, and with time the missionaries were turned into myth-like heroes that through their efforts legitimised this spiritual and social 50

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 4. Chef de région, R. Crus wrote several letters to the High Commissioner in Yaoundé where he complained about the activities of Endresen, due to his involvement in the liberation of escaped slaves/servants. ANY, 2AC 4725. 52 The lamido and other Fulbe slave owners wrote several letters to the colonial administration in order to complain about the Norwegian missionaries for the way they protected the runaway slaves/servants. ANY, 1AC 3399. 51

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reorientation. Analysed through this angle the Dii discourse tells us more about Dii agency than it does about the Norwegian missionaries. It also tells us that these stories are still needed in order to maintain the ethnic boundaries between the Dii and the Fulbe. The Dii use incidents where missionaries were involved to ‘construct’ their past, in order for it to better fit the present organisation of society, and in order for it to serve contemporary political needs. The Dii discourse shows that Christianity was accepted by the Dii youth first of all because of its accessibility and because it was a fascinating message that opened new doors and at the same time answered old questions. Christianity was also accepted because of the attitude of the missionaries. The Christian religion taught charity and compassion, and the missionaries and catechists showed charity and compassion by treating the Dii with dignity and respect. Another important reason behind the success of Christianity among the Dii was what the Dii discourse interpreted as social liberation from oppressing forces. Through the creation of a canton and through the introduction of schools the Dii was able to enter the political processes that were about to form their future. The same processes also helped them being liberated from forced labour, the threat of slavery and to some extent, exaggerated taxes. These changes led to a considerable social reorientation of the traditional Dii way of living, regarding both internal changes and changes in the relationship to the most dominant ethnic opponent, the Fulbe. In order to legitimise these changes, the actions of the first missionaries were turned into fantastic stories of resistance towards and liberation from both the colonial administration and the Fulbe authorities.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CRISIS OF DII TRADITIONAL RELIGION In the preceding chapter a question was raised concerning the ease with which the young Dii-generation abandoned the beliefs of their parents. But what were these traditions of the fathers, and what was actually the content of the religion of the Dii ancestors? Is it possible to isolate a clearly defined set of cultural practices and label it ‘Dii traditional religion’? In this chapter I will give a presentation of, and critically analyse, some of the holistic religious cultural practices that the Dii people used as guides in organisation of daily life activities. The chapter starts with an introduction to the study of African Traditional Religion before it seeks to explore the rites and cosmology of Dii traditional society, the way in which they sought contact with, and blessings and protection from, a force vitale (Tempels 1949: 30) through fabricated altars and ritual instruments. Included in this presentation is a critical analysis of the Dii image of God, Tayíí, and a crucial question will be if it is possible to reconstruct the image of a traditional high-God preceding the influence of the monolithic world-religions. Finally the chapter will give a short presentation of the political difficulties that the Dii people experienced following the arrival of the Fulbe warriors in the early 19th century and the arrival of the German, followed by the French, colonial administrations a century later. Through the presentation of a Dii myth of origin, the crisis that Dii traditions experienced will be analysed through an African holistic approach where social changes are always interpreted as carriers of religious implications. Studying African Traditional Religion The term African Traditional Religion is a Western construct. Most African languages do not even have a word that describes the cultural practices for which our everyday term is religion (Mbiti 1999: 2; Ray 2000: xii).1 This is also the case with the Dii language, where the closest

1 If one comes to think of it, what does the word religion actually mean? It is hardly possible, even for scholars working with the theme, to summarise the vast number of

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one can get to the term religion is the word ëina, an adoption of the Fulbe diina (Muller 2002: 11–12). This word is actually of Arabic origin (Wehr 1980: 305–306), and thus in the original sense of the word it is a term that describes religious practices in the Muslim world, but in the Dii context it refers to the practice of African Traditional Religion, Islam and Christianity. The question how to study African religion is thus a question almost as heavily debated as the actual content of African religious practices. For long descriptions of African religion, and often lack of religion (Chidester 1996: 11–16), was limited to travellers’ and missionaries’ reports from the early 19th century and were later followed by articles and books written by ethnographers and anthropologists that based their studies on the formers’ findings. The colonial governments in Africa gradually detected that they needed more reliable information about the traditional societies they governed, and started hiring academic anthropologists for this purpose. The most prominent example of this practise is Evans-Pritchard who was invited by the British colonial administration to Egypt and Sudan in 1926. The government sponsored Evans-Pritchard’s studies of the Nuer and the Azande in Sudan, and in between field studies, he taught sociology in the Faud I University in Cairo (Platvoet 1992: 108–109). A dual development followed this first phase of academic exploration of African religion. On the one hand lengthy field-studies were published by scholars like Geoffrey Parrinder and Placide Tempels, examples of missionaries who became interested in the religious practices of the people they tried to evangelise (Westerlund 1985: 18), and who later influenced a whole generation of African religious scholars (Idowu 1973: 137–139, 155–156; Magesa 1997: 47; Mbiti 1999: 10, 12). Jan Platvoet argues that Parrinder and Tempels ‘upgraded’ the loosely structured patterns of thoughts and beliefs in African Traditional Religion into [W]ell-articulated, readily a-brief, they strongly westernized and Christianized African thought patterns and religions after the model of the systematic European philosophies and theologies; that is, they shaped the indigenous religions of Africa after the ‘Judeo-Christian template’ of their own religion by presenting them with the help of categories and

definitions that have been launched in order to describe this cultural phenomena, and to describe actual religious practices a specified vocabulary exists in any given religious community. One example of this academic debate can be the different use of the term among scholars of religion and anthropologists (Westerlund 1985: 19–20).

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structures derived from (the study of ) the Biblical religions. (Platvoet 1992: 113)2

On the other hand anthropologists left behind evolution theories and became more interested in the structure or function of religious practices and thus studied how religion influenced the structure of social relations rather than religion sui generis. Structuralism and functionalism in the study of African religion was from the 1960s followed by a wave of researchers like J. Middleton and Godfrey Lienhardt who in their turn shifted the focus in modern anthropology from function to meaning (Eriksen 1993: 249–250; Westerlund 1985: 17). Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and Nigel Barley further developed this movement by focusing on interpretation of symbols as the key to understanding religious practices.3 Platvoet (1992) has described the history of the study of African Traditional Religion as a move ‘From Object to Subject’ indicating that whereas ‘outsiders’ were pioneers in this study, the ‘insiders’ soon engaged in the project. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s African scholars themselves entered the academic stage and ‘wrote back’ the African point of view. The two most influential writers were John S. Mbiti and E. Bolaji Idowu, two excellent African theologians who set out to defend African traditions and philosophy against descriptions that they experienced as “inadequate, derogatory and prejuducial.” (Mbiti 1999: 7). Being Christian theologians, their scholarly crusade also included the dogmatic fight for the African perception of God, not just by describing the fact that most Africans are aware of a distant high-God, but by comparing the image of God in Africa to the Hebrew concept of God, and stating that a) God is real to Africans, b) God is unique, and c) God is the absolute controller of the universe (Idowu 1973: 146–155).4 But although they shared justified rage and frustration towards much Western academic writings, not all African scholars were Christian

2

See also Adogame (2004). Geertz did not study African Traditional Religion, but influenced many African scholars (Magesa 1997: 2–3). For further reading on the use of symbolism by these authors, see Barley (1983); Geertz (1973); Turner (1968). 4 Mbiti’s books African Religions and Philosophy and Concepts of God in Africa, together with Idowu’s African Traditional Religion have become classics in milieux of theological training all over Africa. Even today I often hear echoes of Mbiti and Idowu when discussing theology with African students be it in Cameroon or in Stavanger. 3

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apologists. The Ugandan atheist scholar and novelist Okot p’Bitek attacked Christian apologists, missionaries and African nationalists (including his East African colleague Mbiti) claiming that the latter group “attempt to show that the African peoples were as civilized as the Western peoples. They dress up African deities with Hellenic robes and parade them before the Western world.” (p’Bitek 1970: 41). This internal African academic discussion continues in recent academic works (Liyong 1988; Magesa 1997; Ray 2000), and is often commented by Western scholars (Breidlid 1994; Breivik 1986; Ludwig and Adogame 2004; Platvoet, Cox, and Olupona 1996; Westerlund 1985). More important, however, is that this academic discussion has moved from the theological seminars to African towns and villages and has entered everyday language of self-narration and religious identity. This will become clear in the following where an attempt will be made at reconstructing the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian concept of God among the Dii. Having presented a brief overview of approaches towards the study of African Traditional Religion, we might return to our initial question, how do we study African religion when the focus of the study is historical changes? To clarify this question three brief points have to be made. Firstly, in order to study changes among the Dii, their cultural practices must be studied according to Dii self-presentation of ‘the traditions of the ancestors’. Even though Laurenti Magesa and John S. Mbiti have launched interesting arguments for studying African religious practices as a world-religion (Magesa 1997: 14–28; Mbiti 1999: xiii),5 the focus of this study is on the way the Dii regarded Dii traditional religion as one isolated plausibility structure (Berger 1969)6 that was challenged by Christianity, and therefore their religious universe will be analysed as such. Magesa and Mbiti’s approach can, however, help us remember that the similarities between the religious practices of different ethnic

5 Many Western scholars have met this unifying point of view with reluctance. One example is Ruth Finnegan who argues that “[t]o speak of ‘African religion’ in generalized terms might do for an early colonizer or contemporary propagandist: for a serious student of comparative religion it would be unpardonably misleading and superficial.” (Finnegan 1977: 9). 6 This does not mean that I consider Dii traditional religion to be a complete and closed religious system, but that my focus is on self-narration, and as long as my informants retrospectively describe the religion of their parents as a religious system, this will also be my approach, even if this view also will be criticised.

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groups in the Adamaoua are numerous, and this is an important reminder when studying historical influence and change. Secondly a few words have to be said about the relationship between religion and magic in African traditional practices. Idowu accuses Western scholars for confusing religion with magic, but adds that “although the two commingle, they should not be confused.” (Idowu 1973: 147).7 In this analysis I will bear Idowu’s advice in mind and sometimes make an academic distinction between religion and magic. Religion will thus in general be presented as limited to the rites, practices and beliefs connected to transcendent powers that influence human existence. Magic will on the other hand in some cases be connected to the way in which the Dii attach supernatural powers to living individuals, thus indicating that certain humans secretly are in contact with and to some extent control transcendent power. Magic will in my later analysis enter the wider analytic category of cosmology or worldview as a ‘religious subsystem’, whereas religion will be treated as the most important social practise in terms of creating the basic premises for man’s approach to reality.8 Since this distinction between religion and magic to some extent is present in my interviews it will later help us analyse what happened when the Dii plausibility structure was challenged by an alternative approach to reality by the missionaries. Thirdly, a few words have to be added about sources. The written sources about Dii traditional religion are very limited, no written sources

7

In general, African scholars pay relatively little attention to the role of magic and sorcery in the study of African Traditional Religion (Westerlund 1985: 36–38), whereas Western scholars like Evans-Pritchard and Parrinder have made the theme the nucleus of some of their books (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Parrinder 1958). Magesa calls witchcraft “the human embodiment of evil”, and dedicates a whole chapter of his book to what he calls “The Enemies of Life” (Magesa 1997: 161–192). Mbiti says that “[f]or African peoples sorcery stands for anti-social employment of mystical power, and sorcerers are the most feared and hated members of their communities.” (Mbiti 1999: 195). Furthermore most African writers distinguishes between ‘white’ (good) magic and ‘black’ (evil) magic, a distinction that I myself experienced while doing fieldwork among marabouts in Meiganga, Cameroon (Drønen 2001). This underlines the initiated individual’s control over supernatural forces, and makes it even more reasonable to distinguish analytically between sorcery/magic and religion. 8 Man’s conception of reality will be based on his/her worldview, a term that Paul G. Hiebert refers to as the “basic assumptions about reality which lie behind the beliefs and behaviour of a culture.” (Hiebert 1985: 45), and that Charles H. Kraft defines as “the totality of the culturally structured assumptions, values and commitments (allegiances) underlying both a people’s perception of reality and their responses to those perceptions.” (Kraft 1994: 2) cited from Nishioka (1998: 459). See also Kraft (1996) for religion and magic as cultural subsystems.

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exist from the time before the arrival of Islam and only Frobenius’ short report published in 1925 gives a systematic presentation of some Dii rituals as practised before the arrival of the Norwegian missionaries.9 In the five villages where I did my fieldwork, very little was left from public traditional Dii religion. The elders that organised traditional feasts argued that what they practised today was merely tradition, that no one believed in it anymore.10 This leaves us with the living memory of those who experienced the major changes that occurred with the arrival of the missionaries as our main source of information to the practice of Dii traditional religion. But their memory covers only a few decades, and when we compare the fragments of what they remember with Frobenius’ report that was probably based on travels in the region from 1910–1912,11 we realise that significant changes have occurred from 1910 to 1930–1950. This should again make us very reluctant towards drawing conclusions as to a non-historical interpretation of African Traditional Religion.12 According to Yves Person, religion is first of all language, a language that is expressed as rites, organised through liturgy, which again is a presentation of gestures that symbolise beliefs. Person argues that any historical study of religion should have as its starting point the religious service, and from there move on to dogma, and not the other way around. He therefore proposes to study African religious practices under four headings, rites, goal, dogma, and function. He adds that the historian should pay particular attention to the fourth point, function, that by no means is to be confused with the second point, the goal (Person 1993: 19). I find Person’s approach fruitful, but I would like to add that for a historian interested in religious change, Person’s second point might be of equal interest to his fourth point,

9 Much of the German archives from Cameroon were destroyed during the Second World War and in the French archive material, few detailed descriptions of Dii traditional religion are found. The Norwegian missionaries reported briefly from Dii traditional feasts, but most often condemned what they saw and refused to let the reader in on any details. 10 Interview informant 15. 11 Eldridge Mohammadou’s introduction to Frobenius (1987: 7). Frobenius’ report also leaves us as ignorants as to methods of transcribing Dii terms, and to which villages, and in what part of Adamaoua he did his fieldwork. 12 Yves Person argues that much writing on African Traditional Religion lacks historical approach and therefore fails to describe the changes that have occurred over time. He particularly criticises Parrinder and Mbiti for being non-historical or even anti-historical (Person 1993: 18).

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and in the following Dii traditional religion will be analysed with these considerations in mind. Dii Traditional Religious Rites When I asked my informants about the religion of their parents, they all started out by explaining the importance of the family altar, the gbaa, and the rites connected to this place of worship. Contrary to the two Western researchers who have published material on Dii rites and traditions (Frobenius and Muller), and in their presentation focus on community rites, my informants first of all shared with me their childhood memories of rites exercised within the family compound. Daily religious life revolved around the family altar, which was placed beside the entrance of the main hut13 in the concession. The altar was made up of a platform constructed from clay, often with holes in it, and on top were placed two to three trunks of wood together with two to three stones, all painted red. Sometimes an iron bracelet was attached to one of the pieces of wood.14 My informants always referred to the gbaa as an idol (once more an evidence of missionary influence on collective memory) but it was never considered a god,15 rather a means to contact the ancestors, and thus not feared, only respected by the children.16 One way of pleasing the ancestors was for the father of the house to always make sure that a small portion of food was thrown on the ground close to the gbaa during the meal.17 In addition important events like departure for hunting or longer travels were secured through rites where a mixture of sad18 flour and water was sprinkled over the chests of the male family members, as explained by one of my informants:

13 According to some informants the gbaa could also be placed close to the traditional barn. 14 My informants were unable to show me any such altar in the villages where I did my fieldwork, but they all agreed that such altars probably still exists in some villages far away in the bush. I have, however, seen recent pictures of the altar from villages in the Rey-Bouba area. 15 At least not a god in the creator-god sense. The difference between spirits and minor gods was not always very clear among my informants. 16 Interviews informant 1; informant 2; informant 3; informant 4; informant 6; informant 10; informant 11; informant 12; informant 13; informant 14. 17 Interview informant 7. Similar practices are reffered to by Jean-Marc Ela when describing the practices of the kirdi population in northern Cameroon (Ela 2001). 18 Sad is a kind of small sorghum, which used to be important in Dii traditional rites, but that is no longer cultivated in large quantities.

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chapter five When it comes to my father . . . he used to place a piece of chopped wood by the entrance of the door (. . .) three pieces of wood that were painted red. Every morning, before going hunting he gathered my elder brothers with their quivers and made a libation of water containing flour of sad. He then sprinkled my brothers’ chests with this flour. Then he prayed, ‘When you go, that you might step the serpent on the head so that it hits you with its tale in order for you not to be injured in the bush. But that the animals will find you so that it will be a good hunt, that you might be lucky.’ He prayed and he used the names of these gods, the forefathers, the forefathers . . . the grandparents who were already dead, in order for them to give them luck during the hunt.19

The gbaa was also consulted when the family experienced cases of sickness and diseases. The sickness was most often thought of as provoked by the gbaa waa vñu, the children of the gbaa. In order for the spirits of the ancestors, yóÕóbÕ , to restore the balance of good relations between man and the spirits, one elder could kneel before the gbaa and cry out the invocations of the family.20 The yóÕóbÕ could then either manifest itself positively in a dream in order to reveal the cause of the illness and explain how to heal it, or the yóÕóÕb could inhabit a person that ‘spoke the language of the yóÕóÕb’. The message that the yóÕóbÕ would pronounce would then be in negative terms, most often a manifestation of rage due to the neglect of the ancestral spirits.21 If these invocations of the family elder in front of the gbaa did not help, the family could call a diviner who would help the family determine if the source of the illness was neglect of one of the ancestors or whether it had other sources.22

19 Interview informant 9. « Du côté de mon père . . . lui il avait l’idée de mettre un petit bois taillé sous la porte (. . .) trois morceaux de bois (. . .) il met les petits rouges-là. Chaque matin quand il veut aller à la chasse . . . on demande les enfants, par exemple nos grands frère-là, et ils se réunissent là avec leurs carquois et puis ils commencent à mettre cette farine sur la poitrine de chacun. Alors ils prient, [le père] dit : “Bon à la sortie comme ça il faut qu’ils piétinent peut-être le serpent sur la tête et que le serpent les tape de la queue de manière [à ce qu’ils ne soient pas] menacés dans la brousse. Mais [qu’ils trouvent] les animaux [et] qu’ils [aient] la bonne chance, n’est-ce pas.” Il prie et il utilise le nom de ce dieu-là, les anciens . . . les anciens . . . leurs grands-parents qui sont déjà décédés d’ouvrir la chance pour [eux] quand ils partent à la chasse. » 20 Interview informant 12. 21 Interview with Gadji, 25 October 2006, recently returned from his fieldwork among the Dii related to his Master thesis about the image of God among the Dii. 22 It is not within the limits of this study to enter into all the different explanation of causes of maladies present among the Dii. Most often the cause is said to be some kind of sorcery, as explained by Kadia Matthieu and Lee Bohnhoff in their informative article “Sickness, Medicine and Sorcery in Duru Society.” (Matthieu and Bohnhoff 1982). According to Frobenius, if the diviner found out that it was the supreme God (tagelle in Frobenius’ transcription) that was behind the malady, no one could do

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Dii religion thus put a lot of emphasis on the power of the ancestors to provide protection, both from accidents during farming and hunting and from attacks during times of wars. There were no priests to perform the public religious rites in traditional Dii community, hence the ritual functions were shared by the chief, the circumciser, and the blacksmith. The annual ritual cycle of Dii tradition started with hen lúgúd, the rite that marked the start of the planting of the sorghum seeds. The circumcisers, who were responsible for the rite, initiated the rite by brewing beer, whereas the chief announced the time when people could start the planting of the new seeds. The whole village was invited to help the chief with his fields, and following the invocation to the ancestors made by the circumciser, the work could begin. A feast followed the community labour and the chief offered food and beer to those who had helped him, and on some occasions the chief offered some of his seeds to the village members (Muller 2002: 19). Following the celebration in the chief ’s compound, each family repeated the rite before their family altar before sowing their fields.23 The next public gathering was the rite of maturity, a sacrifice that was offered to the supreme God in order to ensure fertility and blessings for the whole village. This sacrifice was organised before the sorghum was ripe, when it had reached a shoulder’s height, and according to Frobenius this was the most important public communication between the male Dii and the supreme God (Frobenius 1987: 142). The chief of the village, within three days of the new moon, collected a white ram, cut the throat and poured the blood into a hole in the ground. The chief then addressed his invocations to the supreme God, asking for blessings. Then the hole was once more filled before the male population shared a meal consisting of couscous made from sorghum and the meat of the sheep. To accompany this meal, traditional beer was consumed in large quantities. It should be noted that women were excluded from the meal as well as the sacrifice (Frobenius 1987: 142). Frobenius’ interpretation of this rite focuses on the direct relationship between the Dii and the supreme God, and shows that there also existed

anything to help the patient (Frobenius 1987: 150). My informants could, however, not confirm Frobenius’ information. One probable reason behind this was that the informants regarded most diviners as charlatans (that always would have an answer at hand), rather than individuals with profound insight into Dii traditions. 23 Interview, informant 14.

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rites and invocations where the Dii contacted the supreme God and asked for blessings without the ancestors as porte parole. It is remarkable that none of my informants mention this rite as an example of the public traditional gatherings they had attended,24 a fact that either indicates that significant changes have occurred in Dii traditional religious practice over time, or that Frobenius has confused Dii rites with rites performed by other ethnic groups.25 What many of my informants referred to as the most important rite during their childhood was the harvest feast that was celebrated when the sorghum was ripe. I particularly remember the sorghum-feast, especially when we wanted to start consuming the first harvest . . . the people did not eat the food like they do nowadays. (. . .) In every village people came to them [the circumcisers or blacksmiths] to ask them to start the invocations because people were starving . . . ‘You must pray so that we can eat.’ (. . .) The yams, the beans, the sorghum, we waited for it to be ripe . . . then they organised the feast, they organised it together with the village chief.26

Several informants focus on the dangers, most often sickness and accidents, that were connected to eating from the new harvest before the circumcisers or the blacksmiths had performed the rite that allowed consumption. The guardians of traditions usually initiated the rite by collecting some yams, beans and sorghum and placed them close to the altar of the chief and around the jar that hid the knives used for circumcision.27 The circumcisers then sprinkled both the altar and the 24

Information about this rite is also absent from Muller’s publications. It could also indicate significant local variations, since we do not know the extent of Frobenius’ fieldwork, neither the area in which he did this fieldwork. It is however surprising that 21 informants from five different villages on the Dii-plain, some of them recognised as guardians of tradition, do not seem to know this practice. 26 Interview, informant 9. « Je me rappelle surtout la fête du mil, surtout lorsqu’on voulait manger les premières récoltes . . . les gens ne mangeaient pas la nourriture comme maintenant. (. . .) Dans le village les gens venaient chez eux. Ils demandaient : “Il faut déjà faire la prière parce que nous sommes affamés, il faut déjà faire la prière pour qu’on mange l’igname, le haricot, le mil” (. . .) on les attendait jusqu’à que cela soit d’abord bien mûr avant qu’il commence, donc ils organisaient une fête . . . les gens [l’]organisaient avec le chef du village. » 27 Muller argues that the circumcision-knives earlier were kept in a special hut in the chief ’s compound. This hut could have three different names (the hut of the leopard, the home of the red ochre, or the home of the spirits) in order to indicate the content of the hut, but still avoid naming the secret instruments. Due to Muslim and Christian pressure during the 1960s and the 1970s the knives that still exist are nowadays hidden in the bush (Muller 2002: 61). Frobenius writes that the knives together with the rhombes, both symbols of the power of the ancestors, were kept in jars that were hidden 25

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jar with the sad mixture and this ceremony finished when the chief blessed his family (Muller 2002: 20). A great feast in the village followed this phase of the rite. People started to hit their bells, to sing and to dance, and this was the sign that people could start consuming the harvest. But before eating each family repeated the ceremony from the chief ’s compound at the family altar.28 In the villages that kept the skulls of the deceased chiefs, this was the time when the skulls were brought out and cleaned. They were then painted with two crossing red lines before they again were placed in their huts (Muller 2002: 21). One of my informants29 claims that not only the chief, but also important people in the village had their skulls removed and that a special hut was constructed for the skulls. Various medicines were then planted around it for protection. By the end of the rainy season people visited the hut and sacrificed a sheep or a goat and prayed that the skulls, and through them the deceased chiefs who had now become ancestral spirits, would watch over them and protect them.30 The villages that did not keep the skulls of the deceased chiefs during the same period cleaned the tombs of the chiefs and poured traditionally brewed beer on them,31 and it was said that this brought equal blessings as the cleaning of the skulls. This was also the time for the cleaning of the knives used for circumcision, and the period ended with a feast where the masks were brought out and the grass around the village was burnt. If the women walked on the burnt grass the following morning, the chances of an imminent pregnancy increased considerably (Muller 2002: 21–22). If the harvest was exceptionally good, the owner of the field would invite family and friends, especially the in-law family, and ask them to

in the mountain. He also mentions that the rhombes received sacrifices during this rite (Frobenius 1987: 143). Both Muller and Frobenius agree, however, on the respect with which these secret objects were treated. 28 Interview, informant 9. 29 This informant (informant 7), born in the early 1920s was one of two informants that had heard about the rite, but he was the only informant with any detailed knowledge about the veneration of skulls. The rite, although somewhat differently from my informant’s version, is described by both Frobenius and Muller and this indicates that the rite was generally practised at least in some villages. The fact that so few informants knew the rite shows, however, that the number of villages that practised the rite must have been limited and that the rite early on was abandoned due to Muslim and missionary influence. 30 Interview, informant 7. Frobenius’ report contains a detailed description of how the chief was buried and how the circumciser killed a cock for sacrifice, dropping one drop of blood on each skull for the benefit of the village (Frobenius 1987: 151–152). 31 Interview, informant 6.

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help with the harvest and at the same time organise a feast. Food and large quantities of beer were prepared for the guests, and sometimes the circumcisers were invited to bring the masks for the dance. The masks frightened the women and the uncircumcised boys, who were not initiated into the secrets of the masks, and it was these feasts that the missionaries witnessed and wanted to ban, arguing that they were immoral rites.32 The next important public event in the annual cycle of Dii religious rites was mεd yaga, ‘sprinkle the instruments’ (Muller 2002: 22), a feast that was organised in the dry season when people started burning the bush in order to hunt wild animals. We celebrated this feast once a year . . . early in the dry season. And each family had its day. (. . .) We prepared and we ate and we drank, and we offered to the gods. You took all your weapons. The women took the calabashes they used for fishing, and the men . . . their bows and spears that they used for hunting, we put them in front of these gods. (. . .) And the day that we ate this couscous they made this sprinkling. The women went fishing, and the men also went hunting . . . and they came back with antelopes . . . without lying. In large quantities, too.33

The rite was performed in the compound of the chief, and the whole village was invited to share the large meal. A dried buffalo skin was placed near the altar of the chief, indicating the purpose of the invocations (Muller 2002: 22). Once more we notice that blessing is connected to a rite organised by the chief and the circumcisers, the sprinkling of the sad-mixture, and the sacrifices to the ancestors through the visible altar. Finally a few words have to be said about the most important rite de passage among the Dii, the male circumcision. The actual rite of circumcision was a rite of initiation, making young boys men, and making them Dii. The first objective of the rite was to separate the boys

32 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1959, p. 12. One of my informants (informant 14) noted, however, that without plenty of traditional beer it was impossible to make people come help with the harvest. 33 Interview, informant 13. « Et on célèbre l’affaire là une fois par an . . . et au début de la saison sèche. Et dans chaque famille chacun a son jour. (. . .) On prépare, on mange et on donne aussi à ces dieux. Vous prenez toutes vos armes. Les femmes prennent leurs calebasses pour la pêche, et les hommes . . . les arcs et les lances pour la chasse, on [les] mettaient devant ces dieux. (. . .) Et le jour où vous mangiez ce couscous, on vous faisait cette aspersion. Les femmes partaient à la pêche, et les hommes à la chasse . . . et, vous reveniez avec du gibier . . . sans mentir. En grande quantité, même. »

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from the girls, all details concerning the circumcision being hidden from the female Dii. [T]he main objective was that the women should never discover the secret. And what had to be done in order for the women not to understand anything? The men decided that the circumcision took place in the bush. They fabricated the panther-rhombe, and they said that this thing lived in the bush. (. . .) Which is a pure lie, since the circumcision is performed with small knives. They came up with this plan so that the women should not be aware of anything.34

The fact that the children could be injured or even die during circumcision was hidden from the women behind stories about the panther that the children had to face. The fabricated rhombes were tied to a rope, and when quickly turned around in the air, they made a noise that resembled the cry of the panther.35 The next objective of the rite of circumcision was to teach the children to control their bodies, to prepare them for times of war and respect the elders by accepting the pain and the teaching that followed. The young children, from nine to fifteen years, had to stay for three days with the circumciser before going into the bush for approximately one month where they learned ‘the secret language’, rules as to division of work between men and women, and they suffered more corporal pain.36 The importance of the circumcision was also connected to the knives used by the circumciser. The knives were regarded as divinities or spirits, as materialisation of the power of the ancestors. They were sometimes called zág, panther, because they were said to be as dangerous as this animal and between each ceremony they were put in jars and venerated on special occasions. The knives could also be used as judges in certain ceremonies where the accused person had to walk across a field and where the knives, hidden underneath leaves, would harm the person if he was guilty (Muller 2000: 41).

34 Interview, informant 7. « [L]e principal objectif était que les femmes ne découvrent jamais le secret. Et que fallait-il faire pour que les femmes ne découvrent rien ? Les hommes se sont décidés que la circoncision se déroule en brousse. Et, ils inventèrent tout une panoplie de mensonges pour étoffer cela. Ils créèrent la panthère-rhombe ; et ils dirent que c’est cette chose qui habite la brousse. (. . .) C’est du pur mensonge, car la circoncision se fait à l’aide de petits couteaux. Ils ont monté tout ce plan pour que les femmes ne soient au courant de rien. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 35 Interviews, informant 7; informant 12. 36 Interview, informant 12.

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A structuralist approach would be to call this rite “the main cultural and social backbone of Dii political and social structure” (Muller 1996: 102), and interpret the structure of society as organised according to the roles played by important persons during the rite of circumcision.37 One of my informants underlined this point of view and said that children of persons who had not offered a large enough sacrifice to the circumcisers could be cut with the ‘hyena-knife’, which was not as sharp as the ‘panther-knife’. The child would then suffer enormously, and the operation would not be fulfilled.38 Even if I find it an exaggeration to argue that the entire Dii society was organised around one single rite, the example shows how the elite used religion to maintain the hierarchy of social structures. This rite also underlines maintenance of social structures in terms of division between men and women, and it is an important ethnic marker indicating what it means, not only to be adult, but to be an adult Dii.39 This short presentation of Dii traditional religious rites clearly shows that Dii religion had as its primary goal to please the ancestors and the ancestral spirits, symbolically present through the family altar, the knives of circumcision, the rhombes, and the skulls of the deceased chiefs. These transcendent powers, the ancestors and the supreme God, were believed to bless the Dii through protection from sickness, accidents and enemies, through fertility, both in terms of children and harvest, through luck during the hunt and through securing the production of the blacksmiths. These blessings were dependent upon esteem for the ancestors, and thus the traditions of the past had to be respected in order for the Dii to receive the blessings. As to function, it is obvious that the elite maintained the structure of society by being responsible channels for securing the blessings. They decided when to sow, when

37 I have in one of my articles adopted this citation from Muller without thinking thoroughly through the consequences of a strict structuralist interpretation of Dii society. Even if there is some truth in this approach, several important aspects of society, especially the individual’s search for meaning through religious expressions, suffer from lack of interpretation if structuralism is the main analytic approach. 38 Interview, informant 12. 39 Dii girls are not circumcised, but they have rites de passage that teaches the girls their responsibilities in society. These rites are, however, not celebrated in public as is the case with male circumcision. None of the old Dii women that I spoke to wanted to share information about these rites with me. My male informants said that they did not know anything about these rites, only the women knew, and whether this was true or not, they clearly showed that these were traditions that they still respected. For more detailed information about the male circumcision among the Dii, see Muller (2002).

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to harvest and when to celebrate. One could say that they regulated the rhythm of everyday life. One informant argued that this organisation of society also was economic in terms of supplies. When people had to wait for the harvest to be ripe, they made sure that no one started the harvest too early, and made sure that the food would last.40 The physical pain during circumcision also prepared the young men for the wars that at times were fought between different ethnic groups. We have also seen that religious rites maintained social structures in terms of preservation of ethnic identity and gender relations. Dii Cosmology: God, Ancestors and Myths of Origin In chapter two we were introduced to Dii cosmology by stating that the traditional religion of the Dii contained many of the most central aspects and beliefs that are shared by the majority of sub-Saharan traditional religions. The supreme God,41 Tayíí, was presented as the immanent creator of all things and the transcendent ruler who did not interfere with creation unless a major crisis threatened the society of adherents. John Mbiti claims that one shared characteristic among most African images of a supreme God is that he is simultaneously immanent and transcendent. He also carries names that indicates his power and greatness, such as, among others, “the Wise One”, “the big Eye”, “the Powerful One” (Mbiti 1970: 3–7). Among my Christian informants there were different opinions as to the image of God in Dii traditional religion, but they confirmed Mbiti’s concept of a simultaneously immanent and transcendent deity.42 Eight informants agreed to the fact that a supreme God existed within traditional Dii cosmology prior to the arrival of the missionaries, but they only had a vague idea about this tradition. They argued that people did not know how to contact this deity, and therefore made their invocations through the gbaa,43 thereby

40

Interview, informant 9. I use the term supreme God well aware of many African scholars’ (Mbiti, Idowu and Awolalu, among others) criticism of Western terms used to describe God in African Traditional Religion. I find the term well balanced between Western scholars who use terms like ‘supreme being’ and African apologists defining all African images as ‘the one universal God’. See Westerlund (1985: 29–30). 42 Only two informants said that they had never heard of a supreme God before they were exposed to the Christian message, interviews, informant 2; informant 12. 43 Interviews, informant 1; informant 3; informant 4; informant 5; informant 8; informant 9; informant 10; informant 14. 41

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confirming the transcendence of their God. The last five informants had more precise descriptions of the Dii supreme God. They all claimed that the name Tayíí, derived from taa yíp, which means ‘he who thinks and thereby creates’. They had a clear idea of Tayíí as the creator who had retired from his creation and thus he became the unknown God that could only be reached through the ancestral spirits.44 This latter group also presented Tayíí as simultaneously immanent, recognisable through and present in nature. [T]hey believed that God was on the mountain . . . in a big river. They believed that God was present in a big rock, in a cave or a in a cavern, in profound waters . . . in general, the Dii thought that God was present in all things that were important and frightening.45

The informant cited here also said that many had the idea that God lived under the earth, since that was where the dead were buried, and thus the home of the ancestors. This notion is shared by Frobenius who, due to the offering of blood into a hole in the ground, concluded that the Dii located their God under the surface of the earth (Frobenius 1987: 142). It is interesting to note that the informants with the clearest ideas about God in Dii traditions were the most theologically educated, and among those who had been most frequently in contact with the missionaries. This supports Benjamin C. Ray’s argument that “[m]ost African concepts of God (. . .) bear the imprint of Christian and Islamic concepts.” (Ray 2000: xiv). It is also worth noticing that several informants spoke of Tayíí as the unknown God, a term much used by the missionaries with reference to Paul’s Areopagus performance.46 Comparing my interviews with Frobenius’ description from 1910, it could be argued that the idea of a supreme God existed among the Dii before the arrival of the Christian missionaries. If we add to this observation the fact that Islam had influenced the Dii only to a small extent prior to the arrival of the missionaries, and considering the

44

Interviews informant 6; informant 7; informant 12; informant 13; informant 15. Interview informant 7. « [I]ls croyaient qu’il y avait aussi Dieu sur la montagne . . . dans une grande rivière. Ils pensaient que Dieu se trouve aussi dans un grand rocher, dans une grotte ou une caverne, dans une eau profonde . . . bref, les Dii pensaient que Dieu habite tout endroit qui est imposant et effrayant. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 46 Acta 17: 16–34. Paul finds an altar with the inscription ‘to an unknown god’, and uses this occasion to tell the people about the universal Hebrew God. 45

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particular semantic origin of the naming of God, it is difficult to argue that the concept of Tayíí was an invention due only to influence from the Christian or Muslim concept of God. It is, however, clear that the missionaries, through their focus on the unknown God, influenced the image of Tayíí among the Dii, and it is also evident that the ideas of Mbiti and Idowu, through seminars and Bible-schools have helped ‘christianise’ the traditional Dii conception of God. Having stated that Dii traditional religion recognised a force vitale, a force that was the origin and sustainer of all things, we will in the following take a closer look at man’s place in Dii cosmology, and his/her relation to this force. My interviews show that the ancestors played an important role in everyday religious life, and the informants sometimes made a distinction between ancestors and ancestral spirits. The first term signified relatives that had died at a certain age and were respected in society. Sometimes the spirit of the dead could manifest itself by entering the body of a woman shortly after the funeral.47 The ancestral spirits, the yóÕóÕb, seem to have been somewhat more distant ancestors whose powers were connected to the instruments, the knives of circumcision and the rhombes, used in religious rites. It was thus the tradition of these elders that had to be respected in order to receive blessings and avoid accidents. Ray, in his study Symbol, Ritual, and Community, focuses on the fact that African individual identity first of all is linked to being a member of a larger community, citing Mbiti’s famous words “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” (Ray 2000: 92). This feeling of belonging is not just related to the close living family or the extended African family, but as much to dead relatives that continue to exist as spirits. Dii cosmology thus contained strong relations between the living and the dead, since the dead were closer to the force vitale and could therefore guarantee access to the blessings and protection that this force provided. Thomas and Luneau have called knowledge about God and mystical and ritual approaches towards this supreme being les garants de la certitude (Thomas and Luneau 2004: 127), arguing that African Traditional Religion first of all is a way to create meaning and order into the struggle for existence, basing their analysis on Clifford Geertz’s approach towards chaos.

47

Interview, informant 8.

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chapter five There are at least three points where chaos – a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability – threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. (Geertz 1973: 100)

Although the three points are related, Geertz puts most emphasis on the first, the analytic capacities of man, and relates it to the analytic puzzle man is faced with, trying to sort out the mystery of existence. He argues that for those who are able to embrace them, “religious symbols provide a cosmic guarantee (. . .) for their ability to comprehend the world.” (Geertz 1973: 104). Religion is thus not a way to limit the problems and suffering that man encounters, but a way to make the everyday problems supportable and sufferable. Inherent in this analysis is what Geertz calls mood and motivation, the fact that rites and religious practice activates in man a mood related to a perspective of ‘grasping’ an ultimate reality, a particular manner of constructing the world, in other words, faith in something that motivates man’s actions (Geertz 1973: 110). Following Geertz’s reasoning ancestor worship among the Dii cannot be explained only as a way to maintain social structures. To call upon the ancestors was also a way in which the Dii did seek to organise life according to a religious mood in order to establish contact with the supreme being that was the source of all blessings and at the same time was their barrier against chaos. Dii cosmology or worldview, where religion was but one important element, was thus constructed with an inherent logic. Within this logic some unexplainable (for the outsider) practises such as the sprinkling of flour and water belonged to a symbolic vertical axis that provided blessings and protection due to contact with the divine, communicated through a medium. If this medium was not treated with respect the same inherent logic made man suffer from the malcontent of the medium. The ancestral spirits were thus both parts of the world of the living and that of the supreme God. These spirits also influenced another important element of Dii cosmology, the horizontal axis where magic and sorcery were elements that regulated the relationship between individuals. Dii cosmology was thus a defined (but not closed) system where man through his analytic capacities placed himself in relation to powers larger than himself, not in order to “deny the undeniable – that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon the just – but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is unendurable, and that justice is a mirage.” (Geertz 1973: 108)

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Yet another central element in the analysis of African worldview is the myth, often linked to ideas concerning origin. This can be either the origin of man, the origin of an ethnic group or the origin of a specific village. In chapter two we were introduced to one version of the Mbang Sii myth, as Muller presented it. Six among my Christian informants had some detailed knowledge about this myth, and their versions corresponded more or less with Muller’s version.48 Seven other informants agreed that the geographical origin of the Dii was the Rey-Bouba area, where the mountain is situated, but they did not mention the Mbang Sii Mountain as part of their explanations.49 The two informants from Ngaouyanga indicated a different origin from the four other villages, and we will return to this information in the next chapter. When we consider the fact that both Frobenius and some of my informants related the idea of the supreme God to a mountain, it becomes an interesting point regarding the Dii myth of origin referring to Mgbang Sii. As expressed by one of my informants: They knew that God existed inside the mountain, but it must be added that before the wars people lived on the plains and the valleys. It was from the pressure of war that people found themselves on the mountain. And from this point onwards, they believed that God existed also on the mountain.50

It was argued in chapter four that myths often have more symbolic than historical value, even if historical facts most often are embedded in myths one way or another. Few, if any, historical facts indicate that the Dii actually have their biological origin on the Mbang Sii Mountain.

48 Interviews informant 1; informant 2; informant 3; informant 5; informant 6; informant 7; informant 15. 49 Interviews informant 4; informant 9; informant 10; informant 11; informant 12; informant 13; informant 14. Four of my informants had heard myths explaining that the first Dii were born with a tale and that the blacksmiths had to cut them off – hence the importance of the blacksmith in traditional Dii society (interviews, informant 2; informant 3; informant 4; informant 13). Three informants claimed that the first Dii fell from the sky, but this seemed to be a myth located only in the village Karna Manga (interviews, informant 4; informant 7; informant 14). One informant had heard that the Dii were created in caves, located at the Mbang Sii Mountain. None of my Christian informants mentioned the myth of the lone hunter, as explained by Muller (1992) and Siroma (2004). 50 Interview informant 7. « Ils savaient que Dieu était dans la montagne, mais seulement, il faut dire qu’avant les guerres, tout le monde habitait les plaines ou les vallées. C’est sous la pression de la guerre que les gens se sont retrouvés sur les montagnes. Et à partir de cet instant, ils crurent qu’il y avait aussi Dieu sur la montagne. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri.

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But neither is it likely that my informants actually meant that this was the place where the first Dii was created. Myths are often connected to that which is sacred, Thomas and Luneau relating the three following characteristics, transcendence, mystery, and affectedness to the sacredness of the myth. They argue that affectedness sometimes leads symbols to be transformed to simple signs with the result that the sacred becomes profane (Thomas and Luneau 2004: 158). There is reason to believe that this transformation has occurred also with the Mgbang Sii myth of origin. The original idea of Mgbang Sii as a sacred symbol pointing to the supreme God as creator of the Dii was probably, as we shall see in the following, turned into a profane sign of resistance against the Fulbe and a sign of political independence. Crisis and Change Concerning geographical origin of the Dii, the general impression to be drawn from Mohammadou and Muller is that the majority of the Dii lived in the present lamidate of Rey-Bouba prior to the Fulbe jihad in the early 19th century (Mohammadou 1979; Muller 1992). This information is confirmed by my informants, and corresponds geographically with our myth, Mgbang Sii being a peak of 1597m situated not far from the town of Tcholliré. According to Fulbe oral traditions it was during the reign of Ardo51 Bouba Ndjidda (1798–1866) that the Fulbe attacked the Dii for the first time. It was, however, not all the Dii that were attacked during this first attack, a group of Dii was even spared due to their importance as blacksmiths providing the Ndoro with metal tools for manual labour (Mohammadou 1979: 164). The second strike against the Dii ‘animists’ was much stronger and took place after Njidda had returned from the south where he, together with Ardo Sambo of Tibati, had helped Ardo Ndjobdi to fight the Mbum and take control over Ngaoundéré. Martin Njeuma dates this incident to the late 1830s (Njeuma 1978: 53–55), whereas Mohammadou dates it earlier during the same decade (Mohammadou 1979: 280). Muller claims that the Fulbe aggression against the Dii lasted for a period of approximately forty years before the Dii were either defeated and accepted the Fulbe as

51 Ardo (plural, arbe) is the secular title for the chief of the Fulbe clan-leaders. This title was later replaced by the title lamido, king, that also refers to the leader as a religious leader.

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rulers or had fled the region (Muller 1992: 10). The Fulbe sources name several Dii villages (Mohammadou 1979: 166–167),52 most of whom were defeated and enrolled into the lamidate by Ardo Njidda, others were destroyed and the inhabitants fled south where they sought refuge among the Mbum in the Ngaoundéré lamidate (Muller 2002: 11). One of my informants53 who had detailed historical knowledge about the movements of the different Dii villages said that each village has its particular history and its particular pattern of movement leading to the present geographical settlement. In an attempt to generalise Dii history he did, however, claim that several Dii villages for a long time exercised friendly relations with the Fulbe in the Rey-Bouba region. Reconstructing the movement of his own village, Wack,54 he said that when, among other things, the Fulbe aggression and heavy taxation started to bother this village, they fled the Fulbe in order to seek refuge at the Mgbang Sii Mountain where they joined other Dii groups. The Fulbe tried several times to attack the Dii, but the mountain gave protection against the Fulbe raids. During the last Fulbe attack a peculiar situation arrived. A Dii arrow killed one of the lamido’s pregnant wives, and the Fulbe withdrew in order to mourn the dead. Fearing the revenge of several Fulbe clans, the Dii then fled and followed the chain of mountains until they arrived at the falaise, an area controlled by the lamido in Ngaoundéré. Here they established contact with different Mbum villages that helped them negotiate terms of settlement with the Fulbe lamido. Due to better treatment and less taxes, the group that had abandoned the Wack village further north settled here, and was followed by several other Dii villages which for the same reasons fled the lamido in Ray.55 52 My recent investigations among the Dii show disagreement between Fulbe and Dii oral traditions concerning details of the jihad. This is not surprising – the history of the conqueror and the conquered very seldom do correspond . . . 53 Interview informant 18. I had several long meetings with this informant, and my approximately ten hours taped interviews with him, covering different subjects, contain so much detailed historical and geographical information that it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to present it all here. I will in the following, however, try to give a short résumé of some of the historical information that was revealed during our conversations. 54 Most Dii villages have kept their original names. Wack was for instance the name of the village that exited in Rey-Bouba, and the villagers kept the name of the village even if the geographical location changed several times. 55 According to informant 18, Wack was the first village to settle on what today is called the Dii-plain, and was followed by the villages Sii, Haa, Mbé, Tagboum and Nyadou. It must, however, be noticed that all informants tend to highlight their own

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The Dii for a while helped the Fulbe capture slaves among the Gbaya and the Laka until controversies, for reasons unknown to my informants, emerged and the lamido turned against them. What followed was a period of further submission with heavy taxation and forced labour for the Dii. The period culminated with a situation where the Fulbe in Ngaoundéré and the Dii on the plain were on the edge of a war. According to Dii oral tradition the situation was miraculously resolved by the arrival of the German colonial army who upon their arrival in 1901, killed the lamido in Ngaoundéré and made the Fulbe army leave the Dii-plain in a hurry.56 This fantastic tale was to become the prelude to a new chapter of freedom, submission, taxation, and forced labour in the history of the Dii people, but this time with white colonialists.57 What conclusions can be drawn from this short historical résumé? Without any knowledge about the situation of the Dii prior to the arrival of the Fulbe, and regardless of the, at times, peaceful and fruitful cohabitation between the Dii and its Fulbe neighbours, it is obvious that the present Dii generation considers the Fulbe a colonising power. Even if the Dii was always an acephalous people, moving around in small groups even before the arrival of the Fulbe, it is evident that the changes that occurred among the Fulbe following the jihad has marked the Dii historical development considerably. To the Dii groups living on the Dii-plain the refuge on the Mbang Sii Mountain marked a turning point in their history. The victory against the Fulbe while residing on the mountain has turned into an oral myth of resistance and a denial of ever having submitted to the pressure of the colonisers. Historical narrative

village over the other Dii villages, and this information might thus not be historically correct. The general content of what this informant told me corresponds, however, with the written sources available, and adds several interesting details. The fact that the Dii were accepted by the Ngaoundéré lamido highlights the information, mentioned by several written sources, that the Fulbe lamibbe seldom acted as one united block, and that controversies between the lamibbe in Ray and Ngaoundéré made it possible for the Dii to flee one lamido and seek refuge with the other. 56 Interview informant 19. 57 That the miraculous arrival of the German army at this crucial point in Dii history made the Dii positive towards the white colonisers is one of Muller’s main points in his article “Merci à vous les Blancs, de nous avoir libérés !”, where also the positive Dii attitude towards the missionaries is mentioned. My impression is, however, that Muller has exaggerated the positive Dii feelings towards the colonial administration. My informants mentioned the arrival of the Germans as a positive event, but put much more emphasis on the taxes and forced labour that the colonial administration introduced.

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has mingled with the sacred, and this paradise lost has in oral tradition become a starting point for a long crisis. The crisis started with the Fulbe pressure in Rey-Bouba and led to departure from what the Dii regarded as their place of origin. The crisis led to new submission to the lamido in Ngaoundéré and later to the German and French colonial powers. The creation of the Mbang Sii myth shows how religious elements enter historical facts and how self-narration is a holistic endeavour, where the profane and the sacred inhabit the same universe. We have commented upon the ease with which the young Dii generation left the religion of their fathers, and it has been noted that this did not happen in a void. Based on the Dii history of departure and submission it is but natural that a new generation started questioning a religious tradition that no longer was able to provide the protection and the blessings that their fathers promised. Faced with an alternative religious tradition, presented by strangers that did not intend to further submit the Dii to taxation and forced labour, but rather to give hopes for improved social conditions, we shall in the following analyse how the young Dii left their tradition for something new, for an emerging Dii Christianity.

CHAPTER SIX

ESTABLISHING A CHURCH ON THE DII-PLAIN Having presented in the last chapter an outline of Dii traditional religion and the crises that developed through historical change, this chapter will focus on the establishment of a new religious institution, the church, on the Dii-plain. The chapter will first and foremost describe the work of the Lutheran mission but also analyse the role that local African Christians played in this enterprise. The lack of reports and letters written by African teachers and catechists makes this a difficult task, and highlights a most general problem in African historical research. It leaves us with missionary Conference Reports, published articles in NMt, French archive material, and letters written by the missionaries as our main historical sources. Interviews with Dii Christians, conducted by earlier missionaries, together with my own fieldwork interviews can to some extent colour and fill gaps in the archive-material, but detailed information about what happened forty to seventy years ago is difficult to reconstruct for the human mind. The main challenge is therefore to “read between the lines of missionary records” (Ranger 1994: 275) in order to detect the actions and intentions of the local workers and the power-relations that existed between the Dii and the missionaries. Bengt Sundkler, Lamin Sanneh, Terence Ranger and others have shown that the importance of African workers is constantly underexposed in missionary sources, but in this process of deconstruction and reconstruction it is nevertheless important to be aware of the limitations that the sources after all leave us with. The expansion of the Norwegian mission to new areas was first and foremost dependent upon the response of the local population, but the work was also limited and promoted by several external factors. Among these external factors were the attitudes and actions of the French colonial administration and the Fulbe lamibbe, and as we shall see, these institutions could be either allies or adversaries dependent on the people in charge of the institutions and their political, religious and personal agenda. Another important external factor was the economic limitations that the Norwegian mission faced due to limited funds and few missionaries being sent from Norway. Finances were a central issue

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discussed at all the annual conferences, an issue that became increasingly difficult during the Second World War and the years of reconstruction in Europe. By approaching the matter through this angle of internal and external influence, the establishment of a church will be analysed through four phases: 1) Establishment, progress, and setback (1934–1939), 2) Status quo (1940–1948), 3) Reconstruction (1949–1952), and 4) Consolidation and growth (1953–1960). Apart from searching for the often unseen but highly important influence of local labour and witness as reported in the archive sources, special attention will also be given to the role that women played in the establishing of a church among the Dii on the plain. Phase 1: Establishment, Progress, and Setback (1934–1939) Chapter two introduced us to the dramatic power-play between the Dii, the Norwegian missionaries, the colonial administration and the Fulbe lamido in Ngaoundéré that led to the establishment of a Dii canton and the selection of the Wack chief, Gabana, as chef de canton on the Diiplain in 1938.1 In this chapter we shall see that this turbulent period, although it produced an important administrative victory for the Dii, also led from success to a serious setback for the Norwegian mission. Following the 1934 missionary conference’s decision to accept Thrana’s advice and establish work in Mbé and Karna, with Djemba, the most experienced and trusted African evangelist, as responsible and Martin and Atuba as teachers,2 the Norwegian missionaries finally experienced success in the northern part of their field. As expressed in the 1935 Conference Report: The Duru have showed a more positive attitude towards us than any other tribe on our field. Following the first, normal uncertainty and fear of what is new and different, we have received several demands for new teachers. We are faced with a tribe which we hope can be saved from

1 It is interesting that Larsen, Lode and Hansen all claim that Kun Mbaa, the Dii chief, was the first chef de canton. The colonial archives clearly states that the Wack chief was chef de canton from 1938 to 1950. ANY, 2AC 7904 and 1AC 2665. A colonial report from 1955 (ANY, 2AC 8587) claims that Dii became canton in 1939, but the earlier report (ANY, 2AC 7904) seems more accurate and refers to Arret No 101 du Janvier 1938, that states that Dii is made a canton. This information was also confirmed by several of my informants. 2 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon 1934, p. 25.

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chapter six the ironhand of the Mohammedans and be won totally for Christ – if we choose the right moment.3

The 1936 report brought even more positive news: The work among the duru-tribe looks very promising. The duru show an extraordinary interest for the mission. The school attendance is steadily growing, large crowds are gathered wherever the missionary comes to visit, and many towns ask for teachers. Five new stations were authorised during the year, but two of them still lack teachers. On several stations large, solid school buildings and houses for the teachers have been built without any help from the mission.4

The reports show that the number of pupils in the Ngaoundéré district5 grew from around thirty in 19336 to one hundred two in 19357 and reached its peak with two hundred forty-six pupils in 1936.8 Among the pupils on the ten mission schools in the district, the overall majority were pupils from the nine schools on the Dii-plain, and in December 1936 the first Dii was baptised. The missionaries wished to follow up this unexpected success and proposed already at the 1935 conference a budget for the construction of a mission station in Mbé that they 3 “Duruene har vist sig mer velvillig stemt overfor oss enn nogen annen stamme på vårt felt. Efter den første, ganske naturlige uvisshet og frykt for det nye og fremmede, får vi nu den ene ansøkningen efter den andre om å sende dem lærere. Vi står her overfor en stamme som det kan være håp om å redde ut av muhammedanismens fangarmer og vinne helt og holdent for Kristus – så sant vi forstår å benytte den beleilige tid.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon 1935, p. 5. 4 “Arbeidet blant durustammen ser meget lovende ut. Duruene viser en ganske usedvanlig interesse for misjonen. Søkningen til skolene øker jevnt, store skarer samles overalt hvor misjonæren kommer på besøk, og mange byer ber om lærere. 5 nye stasjoner er autorisert i årets løp, men to av dem mangler enda lærere. På flere av utestasjonene er opført store, solide skolehus og lærerboliger uten nogen som helst hjelp fra misjonen.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 5. 5 Prior to the establishment of a permanent mission station in Ngaouyanaga in 1948/49, the Dii-plain was considered part of Ngaoundéré district and supervised by the missionary living in Ngaoundéré. In the following the growth of the mission will be measured by the number of pupils in the schools on the Dii-plain. This is the most reliable way to visualise the growth of the work since the reports sometimes mention the number of pupils only on the plain, and since Ngaoundéré only had one school with rather few pupils. The number of church attendances in the Ngaoundéré district from 1934–1949 mentioned in the reports say little about the situation among the Dii since Ngaoundéré often had a large number of chrurch visitors from the South, and since no separate numbers from the Dii-plain are available. 6 The 1934 Conference Report reveals that “between twenty and forty” pupils attended school in Ngaoundéré during 1933. 7 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1936, p. 69. 8 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 73. The report highlights the fact that among the new pupils there are also many young girls.

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sent back to the direction in Norway together with demands for more missionaries. Due to the financial situation of the funding society, the Sudan Mission, which suffered from deficit budgets for several years, both construction and new missionaries were, however, put on hold (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 316). The mission among the Dii was also soon to be met with resistance among its local opponents in Ngaoundéré. A detailed presentation of the ‘crises in Duru’ was given in chapter two, details that will not be repeated here other than to cite Thrana, who in his introduction to the 1938 conference stated that, “[a]bout the crices in Duru enough is said and written.” The hard fact for the mission was that the number of pupils in Ngaoundéré district fell from two hundred forty-six in 1936 to ninety-seven in 19379 (on the Dii-plain from two hundred to sixty).10 These facts led the missionaries to conclude that the Dii still to a large extent were influenced by both the lamido and the colonial administration and became reluctant towards the mission due to the controversies between these three external powers. The Dii were most probably confused since many seemed to have mistaken the missionaries for colonial administrators, and at this stage a white person was associated with colonial presence, a most natural conclusion for people who had been under colonial rule for thirty-five years and never had experienced white people in other settings. One of the first Dii teachers to be employed by the mission was Bobbo Etienne, who was eighteen years old when he joined the mission school. He was soon appointed teacher in Tagboum, where he in 1938 became responsible for thirty-two pupils. He explains that during the ‘crises in Duru’ the colonial administrators gathered the pupils and their parents and asked them why they took their children away from work in the fields. According to Bobbo the Dii naturally experienced this as an order, and all of them left with their children. Bobbo was obviously, as were the rest of the teachers, confused, and together they went to Ngaoundéré to discuss the matter with the missionary in charge of the Dii-plain, Halfdan Endresen. Endresen encouraged the teachers to continue their work, and Bobbo, together with a few others, returned in order to start over from scratch. Bobbo spent several months in Tagboum with only one pupil, and this pupil, Maidouki, was later to become responsible

9 10

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1938, p. 7. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 10.

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for the personal security guards of the first president in Cameroon, Ahidjo. Several teachers decided, however, to leave the mission and find work elsewhere,11 a highly understandable decision by underpaid employees who were tired of Whites who quarrelled among themselves. The conference’s conclusion was that the blame for the problems had to be shared between the teachers, the administration, and the Dii population – in addition to the mission that had not been able to supervise the explosive growth. Once more the missionaries concluded that they were in dire need of a mission station on the Dii-plain, and this time Fløttum proposed Ngaouyanga, because it was closer to Rey-Bouba, as a new location, and once more a budget-proposal including construction on the plain was sent to Norway.12 No budget increase and no missionary did, however, arrive, and the following year more problems with the colonial administration emerged. As already described in chapter two, the French chef de région Mr. Jaubert, wanted to close down all the schools among the Dii, an act that would have shaken the foundations of missionary presence among the Dii. This potential disaster was, however, averted, thanks to the new chef de région, Mr. Notary, and the relationship between the administration and the mission slowly went back to normal. The number of pupils continued, however, to decline, and by the end of 1938 the number was down to fifty-eight,13 before the tide turned and new possibilities opened up for the mission. In 1939, the Sudan Mission, with finances healthier than ever, became an integral part of the NMS, and promised to send more missionaries to the field. In addition the lamido in Rey-Bouba for the first time opened his country to Christian workers and the 1930’s, a period of establishment containing both explosive growth and serious setback, ended with good hopes for the Lutheran mission’s presence among the Dii. The majority of teachers and catechists employed by the Norwegian mission were Christians educated by the Presbyterian mission in the South. The question of the importance and necessity of these local workers was discussed at all the missionary conferences in the 1930’s. The few Norwegian missionaries, to a large extent occupied by construction, language learning and translation, seem to have been divided 11

Interview with Bobbo Etienne, conducted by Kristine Oseland, 1971. NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 37, folder 27. 12 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, pp. 9–15. 13 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1939, p. 10.

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in their view upon the local workers, as expressed by Endresen at the 1939 conference: There are rather different opinions here in Sudan as to the use of native workers in the mission’s service. One thing is nevertheless realised by the majority: that without native workers we are getting nowhere in the large and densely populated Sudan. It was finally when our mission received a considerable number of teachers and catechists from the Presbyterians that our work seriously started to grow.14

The problem with these workers was thus that on the one hand they were indispensable in order for the work to succeed, and on the other hand they did not match the quality standards set by the missionaries. The missionaries in all the reports complain about the moral standards of the majority of their African employees, and it seems that they use their own commitment to the work as standard, expecting the Africans to accept poor housing and a low salary as they did themselves. The African workers from the South naturally saw things differently. They were employees who had left their homes in order to make a living, and from 1937 to 1938 the mission lost half its staff of local workers due to quarrels with the colonial administration and low wages.15 During the 1939 conference, Endresen proposed several improvements for the teachers in order to encourage them to stay, realising the importance of this help, especially on the Dii-plain where there were no missionaries and where several new villages asked for teachers. The conference also realised the need for local Christians to be educated, naturally because they knew the language and culture better than the people from the South, but also because the missionaries wanted employees ‘committed to the cause’ who would accept poor material conditions. No detailed records about the southern or the first Dii employees are to be found in the NMS Archives.16 Siroma André, himself one of 14

“Det hersker høist forskjellige meninger her i Sudan om benyttelsen av innfødte arbeidere i misjonens tjeneste. En ting innses vel dog av de aller fleste: at uten innfødte arbeidere kommer man ingen vei i det vidstrakte, sparsomt befolkede Sudan. Det var først da vår misjon fikk et større antall lærere og katekister fra presbyterianerne at vårt arbeide for alvor tok til å skyte vekst.” Halfdan Endresen, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1939, p. 34. 15 The total number of teachers employed by the mission was 43 in 1937 and fell to 20 in 1938. The number on the Dii-plain was 12 in 1937 and 7 in 1938. Conference Reports, Cameroon, 1938, p. 7 and 1939, p. 10. 16 The only trace of a list of Dii employees to be found in the NMS Archives, is the account book from Mbé 1956–1960 that shows the number of catechists employed by the mission during this period.

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the Dii Christian pioneers, has however published his personal historical presentation of Dii traditions and included in this publication lists of the first pupils and employees among the Dii.17 According to these lists seven Dii were employed as teachers/catechists from 1937 to 1939, and six Dii followed the Bible-school that the Norwegian missionaries organized in Ngaoundéré from 1938–1939 (Siroma 2004: 65).18 Little is also written in the Norwegian sources about the pattern of involvement of women in the mission’s activities during the first years. From Siroma’s list of pupils and general comments in the reports it is clear that very few of the first pupils were girls. The major reason behind this was probably because it was the youth that first of all attended school.19 The parents feared the Whites and refused to send the youngest children to school, and young girls from fourteen to eighteen were already being prepared for marriage according to traditional customs. In the 1937 report it is, however, mentioned that the Dii women, who at first were reluctant towards the mission, had started to join their meetings. It is also mentioned that a few young girls finally joined the school.20 According to Siroma, Sinda, who was later to become the first wife of Dourmani Belmont,21 was the first female pupil among the Dii to attend the mission school in Ngaouyanga (Siroma 2004: 59). Phase 2: Status Quo (1940–1947) All hopes of new missionaries and further expansion from the late 1930’s were, however, smashed by the arrival of the Second World War. In

17 These lists also include the first Norwegian missionaries among the Dii, and in these lists several inaccuracies occur. It is, however, likely that Siroma knew his classmates and colleagues better than he knew the white missionaries, and other information I have gathered confirm to a large extent the content of the lists, even if some errors proably are present. 18 Three out of six Dii students at the Bible-school also figure on Siroma’s list over teachers/catechists employed by the mission, Dourmani Belmont, Bobbo Daniel, and Mbarbela Paul who were employed on the plain when they finished the Bible-school in 1939. 19 The Norwegian sources tell us little about the age of the pupils. One report from the French colonial administration after a tour on the Dii-plain in 1947 states, however, that « Les ’petits Ecoliers’ de la Mission Protestante sont pour la plupart des hommes de 18 à 25 ans. » ANY, 2AC 8130, Rapport de tournée, p. 5. 20 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 5. 21 Dourmani Belmont was one of the first Dii catechists and was later to become the first deputy from the Dii-plain to the National Assembly in Yaoundé.

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the four volume NMS presentation of the society’s first one hundred years of existence, Nikolaisen and Endresen describe this chapter of missionary history in Cameroon with the title “Orphans” (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 340). Following the German invasion of Norway, the economic situation became very difficult for the missionaries who were forced to stay in Africa until the end of the war. All construction work was stopped, the missionary salary was cut in half, all budgets were reduced to a minimum and the local congregations became fully responsible for paying their workers. During the first two years of the war limited funding was secured through gifts from the Norwegian government and Protestant friends in the United States, England and South Africa. But 1943 became a very difficult year because the funds from the United States did not arrive in time, and the missionaries basically lived from what they produced themselves. The 1944 financial report concluded that the budgets were deficit and feared that the deficits would continue to increase.22 In 1944 the Lutheran World Convention and the Norwegian government again managed to transfer funds to Cameroon, and secured continuation of a minimum of mission work. Missionaries were also granted funds from the United States to spend five to six months each in South Africa in order to meet Norwegian colleagues and regain physical and mental strength (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 340–341). Even if most mission-led projects were put on hold, and the Bibleschool in Ngaoundéré had to close down in 1942, it seems that the political situation in northern Cameroon still made mission work possible. Thrana describes the situation in 1943 as follows: Even if the present situation in the rest of the world only to a small extent has influenced the situation here in the interior of the country, it is though inevitable that it has not disturbed the situation in some ways. Many young men have been enrolled into the army, others leave to profit from the good conditions that are offered everywhere. The constant transportation of military equipment has disturbed the daily life of the population along the roads. Whenever a convoy was announced, all the women, along with some men left to stay in their fields until the convoy had passed and things went back to normal.23

22

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1944, p. 5. “Selv om den tilstand som rår i verden i dag ikke i noen særlig grad har kunnet innvirke på forholdene her langt inne i landet, så er det dog uunngåelig at den på enkelte hold har grepet forstyrrende inn. Mange unge menn er blitt kalt inn til militærtjeneste, andre tar ut på reis for å få tak i noe av den gode fortjeneste som tilbys 23

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The missionaries throughout the war complained about the lack of Norwegian personnel, and it is obvious that they gradually became tired because of the length of the commitment and the lack of contact with family and friends in Norway.24 The local African workers seem to have continued the work as before during the first half of the war, but as the general demand for labour increased during the war, and this labour was well paid, teachers and catechists gradually left the mission. When Endresen summed up the situation of local workers in 1945 he stated that workers loyal to the mission always received salaries far lower than those working for the colonial administration, but that the situation at that time, where the administration paid ten times the amount of the mission, was intolerable.25 In 1937 the mission employed 70 African teachers and catechists26 whereas the number had decreased to 35 by the end of 1944 (Nikolaisen and Endresen 1949: 343). What is interesting to note is the fact that local congregations seem to have been strengthened through these hard times. During part of the war they had to pay local workers all by themselves, and even if the number of paid workers, and thus also the number of schools was gradually reduced, the number of pupils on the Dii-plain stayed more or less intact. It has been mentioned that the number of pupils varied from the peak in 1936, with nine schools on the plain and two hundred forty-six pupils in the district to ten schools and fifty-eight pupils in 1938. In 1945 there were only five remaining schools on the Dii-plain, but ninety-three pupils in the district.27 This shows a consolidation of the work during the war, even without any missionary budgets and with a decrease in missionary presence.28 It stands to reason that the first employees to leave the mission were the teachers and catechists from the South,29 and that the newly educated Dii workers stayed with

overalt. På befolkningen i byene langs bilveien har de stadige militærtransporter ofte virket nokså forstyrrende på deres daglige, tilvante liv. Når det kom bud om at en konvoi var i farvannet, dro alle kvinner ut av byen og mange menn med dem, for å oppholde seg ute på sine marker inntil konvoien hadde passert, og alt ble rolig igjen.” Johannes Thrana, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1944, p. 1. 24 When the Fløttum family finally left for Norway in 1947 they had spent nine years in Cameroon because of the war, and during this period they had not once seen their two boys who were placed in a boarding school in Stavanger. 25 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1946, p. 22. 26 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1938, p. 7. 27 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1946, p. 38. 28 The number of missionaries on the field from 1942–1945 varied between six and eight, dependent upon how many who were in South Africa on vacation. 29 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1944, p. 1.

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the mission that now had become ‘theirs’ during difficult times. Bobbo Etienne explains how all the employees on the plain were gathered by Endresen, and how the missionary told them that the war had arrived and that no more money was arriving. Endresen continued to say that those who wished to continue the work were most welcome to do so, but that those who wanted to could leave. The three young Dii catechists Bobbo, Omarou and Abdou Daniel decided to be patient and continue their work even without any salary. All the southerners working on the Dii-plain, except Waal Etienne, left.30 This shows that the missionaries had succeeded in educating Dii workers to follow their examples as devoted, hard-working individuals who did not leave their posts even if salaries ten times their own were to be earned at the colonial administration which was in constant need of labour during the war. This image of devoted employees was confirmed through one of my interviews, with a Muslim clerk who worked for the colonial administration during this period. Even if he earned, at that time, five times the salary of the mission employees, he often contacted them in order to borrow money. He further indicates that those who chose to work with the mission never did it for the money, but rather because of their close relation to the missionaries and the prestige that was associated with these posts.31 Due to newly arrived funds, Endresen during the 1946 conference proposed to double the salary of the local workers and pay a bonus to those who had stayed with the mission during the hard times. It is also worth noting that the footprints of some of the southern catechists who had faithfully worked with the mission since the beginning are to be found repeatedly in the missionary reports. It looks as if a few chosen ones became part of the missionary family because of the importance of their the work. Among these, Paul Gonom, the first person to be baptised by the Norwegian mission, Pierre Njemba, the pioneer on the Dii-plain, and Waal Etienne were the most trusted employees in the Ngaoundéré district. Njemba was the first employee to receive a small pension from the mission, and he was even encouraged to make a final evangelisation-tour in order to encourage the congregations to

30 Interview with Bobbo Etienne, conducted by Kristine Oseland, 1971. NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 37, folder 27. Djemba, who during the war did not work on the plain, was the only person from the South who received a salary throughout the war. His salary was funded by the “Native Missionary Society” in Ebolowa, that managed to pay him even during the hard times of war (Lode 1992: 9). 31 Interview informant 18.

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continue their work. He was also offered a double bonus at the end of the war because of the duration of his employment with the mission.32 But this gratitude and trust did not cover theological matters. Even if Njemba was an experienced catechist, and the missionaries were few in numbers, the 1941 conference decided to postpone the question of giving him the right to preside at the Lord’s Supper since he was not an ordained minister.33 No signs of any later discussion concerning this matter are to be found in the missionary archives.34 The general state of affairs and the arrival of new missionaries created optimism and encouraged the mission to employ workers on several stations that had recently been abandoned. The new missionaries who arrived in 1947 were in the difficult situation which required them to be responsible for the districts even before they had started their language studies, and Thrana described the situation of the new missionaries as an attempt to ‘hold the forts’. Due to considerable changes in the politics of the colonial administration, Thrana feared that it would take time before the situation would be stabilised and that things would go back to the way they were before the war.35 One special concern of Thrana’s was that the colonial administration decided to build a new mosque in Ngaoundéré. The administration’s effort to build a mosque in the town centre has encouraged the Mohammedans to practise their religion more zealously. That those who govern show such an interest for Mohammedans and acknowledge their devotion, but no interest for the Christian mission, must naturally give the Mohammedans the impression that Islam is the national and preferred by those who are “important.” This “belief ” is also right. The goodwill and the interest of those who govern towards the Mohammedans today must be considered a tragic comedy. What the fruits will be, time will show. They will hardly be good, at least not for mission work.36

32

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1946, pp. 25–26. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1941, p. 2. 34 The Conference Reports from 1943, 1945 and 1947 are missing from the NMS Archives. In 1947 there were too few missionaries on the fields to hold a conference due to difficulties of finding transport for the new missionaries that were to replace those who had spent the war-years in Cameroon. The 1946 conference mentions the 1944 report (that normally was to be discussed at the 1945 conference) but does not indicate whether this conference was held or not. It is interesting to note that the new missionary, Fosse, who was a deacon, and thus not an ordained theologian, was granted permission at the 1950 conference, to officiate both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. 35 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1948, p. 1. 36 “Administrasjonens tiltak med å bygge en moske i byens sentrum har vakt muhammedanerne opp til større iver i deres religion. At de styrende viser slik interesse for 33

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According to Lode, riots against the colonial administration in the South made the administration in Adamaoua strengthen the power of the lamibbe in domestic political and religious affairs, in order to avoid situations like those that had emerged in the South (Lode 1992: 17). The colonial administration thus turned out to be an unfaithful ally for the Norwegian missionaries. Even if they generally approved the Norwegian demands to start new schools,37 which for the colonial administration was considered as a help in the development of the mandate area in their charge, they always made sure not to give favours to the missionaries in explicitly religious matters. The traditional Fulbe political rulers kept their positions because the French were dependent on the lamibbe’s influence in order to maintain political control over the area, and the Fulbe traditional religion, Islam, was favoured as part of this political deal. On the ‘ground’ in the mission field it seems that a fresh optimism also inspired local workers. A new temporary mission station among the Dii on the plateau was established at Ngangasaou, and by the end of 1947 Ngaoundéré district had fourteen schools and two hundred five pupils. Whereas the number of people who attended churches in Ngaoundéré district on Sundays averaged six hundred thirty-three in 1936,38 and had dropped to three hundred twenty-six in 1945,39 the number increased to six hundred five in 1947.40 This shows that even if the missionaries went through turbulent times, the local congregations benefited from newly employed workers and school and church attendance grew steadily. When things finally stabilised in 1948, the work was back on track and the number of pupils and church attendance among the Dii had once more reached the 1936 level.

muhammedanerne og deres tilbedelse, men ingen spesiell interesse for den kristne misjon, må naturlig inngi muhammedanerne den tro at deres religion som er landets nasjonale og foretrukne av de ‘store’. Denne ‘tro’ er også helt riktig. De styrendes velvilje og interesse for muhammedanerne i dag, må vel nermest (sic) betegnes som tragi-komisk. Hvad fruktene derav vil bli, for (sic) tiden vise. Gode blir de neppe, i hvert fall for misjonsarbeidet.” Johannes Thrana, Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1948, p. 3. 37 Already the following year, Thrana in his report praised the colonial administration for goodwill and good collaboration. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 2. 38 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1937, p. 73. 39 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1946, p. 38. 40 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1948, p. 30.

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1948 was to become the serious turning point in the work of the Norwegian mission in Cameroon in general and on the Dii-plain in particular. From maintaining the work for several years with a handful of missionaries, the 1949 conference welcomed six new missionaries, and Thrana introduced the conference as follows: In many ways we feel that we have started a new era in the history of this country. It is difficult to recognise and understand that it is the same country as it was before and during the war.41

What marked this change on the Dii-plain was first of all the construction of a mission station in Ngaouyanga where the teacher Ingrid Flakk and the nurse Marta Lofthus were to become the first permanent missionaries among the Dii. What had been proposed at most conferences since 1935, a permanent station on the Dii-plain, was finally realised. In addition to detailed discussion about the quality of buildings to be constructed, the 1949 conference also decided that the Bible-school should start again, and that it should be built in Ngaouyanga. Thrana, who had already built the temporary houses in Ngaouyanga, was chosen to initiate the work, and Fløttum was designated director on his return later the same year. Three main arguments were presented in favour of this decision. First of all, the Dii-plain was a natural choice since this was where potential candidates for such a school could be found42 due to the important interest in the mission school among the Dii. The second argument was that Muslims who until recently had been absent from most villages on the plain, had now increased their activity in the area. Thirdly the Catholics were reported to be preparing for entering the plain, and this was considered an even bigger danger than the Muslims.43 In 1949 Fløttum and his wife returned to Cameroon and moved to Ngauyanga in order to start the Bible-school together with Ingrid Flakk. The 1950 report shows optimism on the plain and comments on

41

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 2. During this conference one argument against a Bible-school on the Dii-plain was that the Dii was thought of as especially bound to the plain. The young Dii catechists were said to refuse even to move to Ngaoundéré, therefore many Dii catechists would not help the need for catechists in the church in general. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, p. 11. 43 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1949, pp. 10–11. 42

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increased interest among the young for schools. The only hindrance to further expansion was, as an echo from all the other conferences, the lack of qualified local workers. In addition to the lack of intellectual help, the forced labour imposed by the colonial administration related to construction of the new road also made it impossible to find manual laborers, and as a consequence Fløttum spent a lot of time with his students on construction work. The buildings in Ngaouyanga were built according to traditional custom, with clay-bricks and a grass-roof, but a detailed budget related to the construction of concrete houses in Ngaouyanga was discussed at the conference, and in March 1950 it seems that long-term planning for Ngaouyanga was the order of the day.44 But 1950 would be a year of important changes for the Norwegian mission on the Dii-plain. In a letter to Endresen in February 1950, the same letter which proposed transport of sorghum to Ngaoundéré, Fløttum mentioned that the chief in Mbé had asked the mission to build a larger school in his village. According to Fløttum Kun Mbaa had heard rumours that the administration was preparing the construction of a school, and that he would prefer that the mission be first.45 Later the same spring the General Secretary of the Norwegian Missionary Society, J. Skauge, visited Ngaouyanga and took part in the extraordinary conference in Yoko in June/July 1950. At this conference, only three months after the previous conference, the situation on the Diiplain seems to have changed radically. Suddenly Ngaouyanga was out of the question as the permanent station on the plain, because Fløttum proposed that the station and future work should be located in Mbé. In a passionate presentation of the superiority of Mbé as the future station, all arguments in favour of Ngaouyanga were gone with the wind. Mbé was highlighted as the centre on the plain, and since the road had been moved, Fløttum had found a perfect hill for the construction of a station.46 It is also mentioned that the chief and the population in Mbé

44

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, Ngaoundéré, March 1950. NMS Archives, Kamerun, Serie H, Box 12, folder 5. Letter from Fløttum to Endresen 17 February 1950. 46 Fløttum even argues that there was “NO OTHER REASON” (Fløttum’s highlighting in the report) not to build in Mbé earlier because there was no natural place for a station in the old village. Now he had found a hill close to town where the breeze could cool down the Norwegian missionaries during the hot dry season. He seems to have forgotten that one important argument among others for the establishment in Ngaouyanga was that it was strategically close to Rey-Bouba. It is interesting to note 45

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“heartily welcomes” the mission. As for Ngaouyanga, Fløttum argues that the mission was never well received in the town, and that the history of the village linked it to the Islamised Mbum people whereas Mbé and the other Dii villages had recently arrived from the northeast after escaping lamido Ray, and were thus are more open towards the Gospel.47 This proposal was accepted without any discussion at the conference, which was extraordinary, especially considering the importance of the decision.48 Maybe a partial explanation to this mystery can be found in the report that Skauge wrote to the NMS board on his return from Cameroon. Here he presents Ngaouyanga as a village with a Muslim chief which had “recently included the whole village in the Muslim community”,49 a village that was closed to the mission. He also presents the plain as an area under strong Muslim influence, an area where mission work had flourished in the 1930’s but that now was more or less dead.50 This last information is somewhat strange due to the fact that the number of congregations in Ngaoundéré district in1950 was twenty-one, that twenty-eight local workers were employed, that the average church attendance was 840 and that the number of pupils was 354 – the highest numbers ever in the history of the mission. Anyhow, Skauge’s presentation of the situation was accepted by the NMS board, and the following year funds were secured for a permanent, concrete-house, mission station in Mbé, and new missionaries to the plain.51 What were the reasons behind this sudden change of politics on the Dii-plain? One obvious reason was the problems that the mission faced in Ngaouyanga, which had become one of the few thoroughly Islamised villages on the plain. In addition, the Muslim chief suffered, according to my informants, from a mental illness that made him an

that several informants asked me during my fieldwork why the missionaries always built their stations on a hill. When I asked their opinion they thought it was because it was easier to watch over the local population from above . . . 47 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, Yoko June/July 1950, pp. 2–3. 48 Kåre Lode argues that to move the mission station from Nagouyanga to Mbé was an obvious decision (Lode 1992: 19). And in retrospect it may seem so. But analysing the Conference Reports, it is clear that much emphasis was put on the strategic geographical situatedness of Ngaouyanga. 49 NMS Archives, Kamerun, Report from Skauge’s inspection to Cameroon 1950, p. 12. 50 NMS Archives, Kamerun, Report from Skauge’s inspection to Cameroon 1950, pp. 13–14. 51 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 2.

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unstable partner who refused to send pupils to the mission school,52 the large majority of pupils coming from other villages on the plain. It is also evident that the Mbé chief, Kun Mbaa, played an important role in these changes. He wanted, according to my informants, to improve the status of Mbé as the leading village on the plain, and he understood the advantages of having the Norwegian missionaries present in the village, and thus promised the mission many pupils if they built their station and a larger school there. Kun Mbaa was well aware of the administration’s plans to construct a school in Mbé, but still wanted the mission to come. Kun Mbaa’s lobbying was successful, and soon after the arrival of the missionaries he was also appointed chef de canton by the colonial administration, and Mbé thereby became the official ‘capital’ on the plain. But Kun Mbaa had other contacts as well. According to the colonial administration’s annual report in 1953, the Dii chief had asked the lamido in Ngaoundéré to send him an imam in order to lead the prayers in the Mbé mosque and thereby further increase the prestige of the town.53 Several important incidents were to show that Christianity was about to be rooted on the Dii-plain during this period. On April 4, 1949, the young catechist Maïdawa Thomas from Wack is said to have had the vision that one day the Dii would be able to read the Bible and sing Christian hymns in yaÕg dii. Even if his project was met with resistance from the missionaries, Maïdawa started out on his own. Several hymns were translated and his notebooks were to become the starting point for a later Dii literature and translation centre in Mbé (Lode 1992: 83).54 1950 continued to be a year with progress in mission work, largely because of the zeal of what was to become the new generation of local Dii catechists. Even if Fløttum complained about the lack of relevant literature for the students, the plain experienced the positive effect of having a local Bible-school. When the students went on weekend-tours 52

Interview informant 10. ANY, 2AC 7843. The French report has put the word mosque in quotation marks, indicating the poor condition of this building. 54 This was also the start of a difficult literature-collaboration between the Norwegian and American missions. Lee Bohnhoff wished to work with the Dii language in Mbé, but the Norwegian mission refused. Bohnhoff thus continued the revision of Maïdawa’s Gospel according to Mark together with Kadia Matthieu in Tcholliré, and the project was published in 1966 (Lode 1992: 83–84). Bohnhoff moved to Mbé in 1970 to continue the work with Maïdawa, and the serious conflict that followed have been described in detail, from Maïdawa’s point of view, by Rachel Issa Djesa (Djesa 2002). These serious conflicts delayed the publication of the Dii New Testament until 2001. 53

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to hold meetings and services, as many as 1000 persons would gather to listen to the new message being preached. It seems that their former African schoolteachers, such as Waal Etienne, who had a reputation for being a devoted evangelist, had inspired Dii students to become active evangelists. An article in the Norwegian Missionary Tidings states that Etienne alone had converted three hundred people through his service,55 and it goes without saying that few missionaries could match such contact with the population. 1950 was the first year with separate statistics for the Duru district, and we can read from the report that the average church attendance was eight hundred two persons, approximately ten per cent of the entire Dii population on the plain.56 Fløttum writes in his annual report that people, as a consequence of these tours, had started giving away their fetishes and abandoning their gbaa,57 and a religious power-struggle became visible on the plain following the tours of the students. This is again discussed in Fløttum’s report the following year where he writes that heathendom still holds considerable power over the indigenous minds, but that it is about to ‘crack’.58 This is a typical commentary from the missionary reports, without any explanation as to what this heathendom consists of or what part of the Dii worldview is about to crack. Fløttum’s optimism is exemplified by information about the district meeting that took place in Tagboum, where the Sunday service in front of the chief compound gathered five hundred fifty persons. This must most likely have been a large majority of the village, and Fløttum adds that only fifty persons in the crowd were Christians.59 This example

55

Norsk Misjonstidende No. 24, 1948, p. 1. According to the 1939 Conference Report (p. 26), recent information from the colonial administration stated that approximately 7000 Dii lived on the Dii-plain in Ngaoundéré subdivision, and around 8000 in Rey-Bouba (subdivision Garoua). Ngaouyanga was the northernmost village in Ngaoundéré subdivision (approximately equivalent to what the Norwegian missionaries limited as their district). This information is repeated in an administrative report from 1945 that claims that there were approximately 10,000 Dii in the Ngaoundéré subdivision, 3000 on the plateau and 7000 on the plain. (ANY, 2AC 7904). A report from 1946 claims that there were 8621 Dii in the canton. The 1954 statistics from the colonial administration claim that the Dii in Ngaoundéré subdivision numbered 14,655 persons. This number also includes the Dii that lived on the Ngaoundéré plateau, but indicates that the population on the plain had increased considerably since 1943. ANY 1AC 3376. The reason given for the population growth on the plain is high birth rates and continued immigration of Dii from Rey-Bouba. 57 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 10. 58 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 2. 59 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 11. 56

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does not necessarily show that the Dii worldview was about to crack, but it shows the curiosity that was connected to the work of the mission on the plain during this period. Even in the Rey-Bouba area people asked the mission to send teachers and start schools. This was however halted by the colonial administration which refused the mission such authorisations, still fearing the reactions of the Lamido in Ray.60 Was this hostile attitude of the colonial government a result of the Norwegian missionaries’ fight against slavery? The missionary records do not indicate this, but new findings in the French archive material show that a stricter attitude towards the mission becomes visible during this period. The colonial administration had earlier often accepted requests for authorisations from the mission that did not formally fill all the administrative criteria. According to Décret du 28 mars 1933 sur la régime des cultes rather strict rules on the creation of new congregations were set up by the administration. Among other regulations, the number of indigenous ‘interested’ persons had to be more than one hundred before permission to start a congregation could be granted. Such interest in the activities of the mission was never present in new villages in the area where the Norwegian mission worked,61 and the French administration never strictly applied these regulations. During this period the requests of the Norwegians were, however, clearly treated more critically and references to this décret appear several times in the French archival material when discussing problems with the Norwegian mission.62 A Norwegian request for visas for nine new missionaries were in the same period subject to close examination by the French administration. The investigation of the request went all the way to the French Ministre de l’intérieur and was also sent to the Services de sécurité in other parts of Africa under French colonial rule, in order to map the behaviour of Norwegian missionaries elsewhere. Both the chef de région in the Adamaoua and the director of Service de la surété in Yaoundé were opposed to granting visas for the new Norwegian missionaries, arguing as follows:

60

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1953, p. 15. It is also clear that the Norwegian missionaries avoided these regulations by always starting schools, not by building churches, and permission to start schools was easy to get. Later the schoolbuildings were used for meetings and services. 62 ANY, 1AC 3399, letter from Chef de région (?) in Ngaoundéré to the Haut Commissaire de la République in Yaoundé, November 23, 1950. 61

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chapter six Despite the efforts they have made until now, it is probable that the Norwegian missionaries who evangelise in the North-Cameroon region will continue to face a hostile milieu, and all evangelisation activity will risk provoking permanent problems with the traditional chiefs who are also religious chiefs.63

In a letter from the direction of Affaires politiques et administratives that finally decided to accept the Norwegian request, it was argued in a most peculiar manner in favour of the Norwegian mission: Finally any denial risks creating diplomatic complications, and will possibly even be sent to the mandate counsel of the United Nations.64

The argument is exactly the same as in the controversy over the slaveissue referred to in chapter two. It hereby becomes clear that this stricter attitude of the French colonial administration is linked to the French notion that the Norwegian missionaries during this period were regarded as trouble-makers whose actions complicated the relationship between the administration and the Fulbe chiefs. It is also an example of the political importance of the presence of the Norwegian missionaries and their fight against domestic slavery in northern Cameroon. Adding to the importance of the Bible-school was also the presence of a primary care dispensary in Ngaouyanga. Fløttum writes in his 1950 report that patients came all the way from Wack, thirty kilometres further south, where there already was a government dispensary, to be treated at the mission dispensary in Ngaouyanga, a sign of much faith among some in the mission’s abilities to heal. Doctor Skulberg was granted a budget by the 1952 conference in order to visit the dispensary on the Dii-plain from time to time, and in 1951 a small dispensary, open once a week, was established in Mbé.65 Inga Botnen, who was appointed responsible for health work on the plain, did, however, complain about the strong faith among the Dii in traditional medicines. It was only when everything else failed that they sought help at the dispensary. This 63 « Malgré les efforts déployés jusqu’ici, il est probable que ces missionnaires norvégiens qui évangélisent dans la région Nord-Cameroun continueront à se heurter à un milieu hostile, et toutes tentatives d’évangélisation risquent beaucoup plus de provoquer des heurts permanents avec les chefs coutumiers qui sont aussi des chefs religieux. » ANY, APA 11335/F, letter from P. Sprauer, Director of Services de sécurité to the Director of Affaires Politiques et administratives, Yaoundé. 64 « Enfin tout refus risquerait d’entraîner des complications diplomatiques, peutêtre même un recours au Conseil de tutelle de l’Organisation des Nations Unies. » ANY, APA 11335/F. 65 Conference Reports, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 25; 1952, p. 12.

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made her work a difficult task, but Botnen also writes in her report that all those who had been helped encouraged her to continue, and she underlines the importance of the work as a way not only to physical healing, but also as a way to spread the Gospel.66 Even if the small village schools experienced steady growth in this period, the most important changes were connected to the school in Ngaouyanga. Ingrid Flakk writes in a private letter that there were only three pupils at the school when she arrived,67 but with a missionary present, the quality of the infrastructure increased, and the best pupils from all the small villages soon gathered in the missionary-run school. The annual report states that thirty-four pupils started the 1950 school year, and at the end of the year fifty-seven pupils attended the mission school. The fact that the mission had established an educational centre on the plain drew more and more pupils to the school, a development that continued when the school moved to Mbé in 1952 and the number of pupils grew to one hundred forty-seven.68 The increased number of pupils required more teachers, and Ingrid Flakk praises her new assistants from Mbé, Siroma André (the son of an important dóÕñ naa), and Dadi David for their excellent work. At this stage there were few female pupils in the mission schools on the plain. In 1950, only five out of the thirty-four pupils in Ngaouyanga were girls, a portion that slowly grew to eleven girls out of seventy pupils by the end of 1951, with eight girls staying at the school dormitory.69 No statistics are available for 1952, but in her annual report Solveig Bjøru notes that several new girls started school that year, but that few of them continued to the end of the school term. She had, however, good hopes for the future since a female teacher, Adji Marie, was about to start teaching.70 One might wonder why so few girls started school these first years. From my interviews with Dii women it becomes clear first of all that parents were more reluctant to send girls than boys to the schools.71 Another obvious reason was that whereas young boys who started school had African colonial clerks and teachers/catechists as role

66

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 12. NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 37, folder 27. Ingrid Flakk’s letter to Henny Waala, 1971. 68 Conference Reports, NMS Cameroon, 1951, p. 11; 1953, p. 16. 69 NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 37, folder 27. Ingrid Flakk’s letter to Henny Waala, 1971. 70 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1953, p. 16. 71 Interviews informant 1; informant 4. 67

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models, and could imagine paid jobs at the end of their education; girls had no such motivations at this stage. The slowly increasing number of girls can be linked to the arrival of Norwegian female missionaries, and we have also seen that women in general gradually became more interested in mission meetings. Ingrid Flakk could therefore write in her 1951 report that the first Sunday in August was one of great joy because one girl was baptised, and one girl was confirmed.72 1950 was also the time for structural changes in the work of the mission schools. The colonial administration had decided to pay contributions to the largest mission schools, and for all teachers with a diploma the administration would pay two thirds of their salaries. In order to receive these grants the mission had to reorganise the content of the school’s curriculum according to the French administration’s curriculum. The Mbum language and (Christian) religion73 had to be taught in addition to the 27,5 hours per week required by the French school system.74 According to mission reports, the missionaries had no second thoughts about letting the colonial administration dictate their curriculum, since this more or less had been the practice thus far. The earlier discussion about French versus local languages had silenced and local languages as well as religion became added subjects to the standard curriculum in the certified schools. The importance of a higher academic level in the school was emphasized in the mission conferences’ discussions because of the urgent need of new, well-educated teachers and catechists. The school had become the key to church growth on the Dii-plain, and the fact that the mission by this decision was spun closer to the colonial administration in a web called mission civilisatrice was not questioned by the 1951 conference. Neither did the conference comment on the fact that the colonial administration through school financial support actually helped the mission’s evangelical task.

72

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1952, p. 12. Even if this subject only concerned the Christian religion, it was still called religion. 74 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1951, pp. 14–15. Even if 27,5 hours per week was required by the administration, it seems that the Norwegians modified this somewhat. According to one of my female informants, they had Bible-training each morning until ten o’clock, followed by the French curriculum the rest of the day. 73

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Phase 4: Consolidation and Growth (1953–1960) The 1950’s continued to be a decade of church growth on the Dii-plain, and this was mainly due to the fact that this was the period when the Dii women finally entered the stage and started playing an important role in the establishing of the church. It has often been argued that women in Africa generally were more ready to accept Christianity than men (Hastings 1993: 112; Peel 2000: 234). This was not the case among the Dii where it was the male youth who were the pioneers in terms of adherence to the new religion. Women did, however, slowly enter this arena and were to become the backbone of the church also among the Dii.75 Their strategies and motivations for joining the mission were, however, as we shall see in the following, rather different from those of the young men. The path towards the schools was in the early 1950’s still narrow for most girls, and this period starts symptomatically with Solveig Bjøru’s complaints in the 1954 report about the parents who refuse to send their girls to school because they are afraid that their daughters will not be married. When Adji Marie’s father learned that the mission intended to hire her as a teacher, he instantly found her a husband during the school vacation, and all hopes for a good Dii role model for the young schoolgirls were lost.76 The school in Mbé at this point had only twelve girls out of one hundred thirty pupils, a number that actually had declined from the previous year. But changes were about to occur on the plain, and as often it came from unexpected directions. Olav Toft, who replaced Fløttum as missionary pastor in Mbé in 1952, writes in the 1954 report that he recently had attended a meeting in Nyandou, where four hundred people had gathered in front of the chief ’s compound, eleven people were baptised and thirty-nine received the Lord’s Supper. Interestingly enough, it was not the work of the catechist that had resulted in these fruits. Toft writes that it was Hawa, the wife of the catechist, who was the main reason behind this growth, doing an excellent work among the

75 The Dii women were to play an important role in the well-known Cameroonian women’s movement, Femmes pour Christ (Women For Christ), that started their first gatherings in the Mbé district in 1966. In 1967 the group had registered ninety-nine members in Mbé alone, and they had weekly meetings (Lode 1992: 59). Since this movement was started after the period under study the movement as such will not be further mentioned here. The roots of the movement are, however, described in this chapter. 76 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1954, p. 16.

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women in the village.77 A similar story is told in the report the following year about Didi Marie. Didi was a Dii Christian woman without any theological training who spent, together with many other farmers, most of the rainy season in her field in the bush several kilometres from Mbé. Here she started teaching the Gospel to her colleagues who were unable to attend the meetings in Mbé. When the rumours of this missionary zeal reached Mbé, a catechist was sent to help her, and together they started teaching more than sixty catechumens in the bush.78 These and other efforts by women in turn influenced the attitude of the parents. The 1956 mission report shows that in Mbé, the number of female pupils increased from twelve to twenty-one, whereas the number of boys was relatively stable.79 This development continued, and the 1957 report states that the mission then had three certified schools on the plain, and that sixty-eight out of two hundred fifty-nine pupils were girls. In the new school in Sassa-Mbersi, almost one third of all the pupils were young girls.80 This growth in the percentage of female participation was noticed and appreciated even abroad, and in 1957 the mission was granted a gift from the French organisation FIDES81 in order to build a dormitory for the girls in Mbé. The last statistics of female representation in the schools from this period comes from the 1958 report and states that sixty girls then attended the school in Mbé on a regular basis, and that half of them lived in the new dormitory. Out of three hundred sixty-four pupils attending the certified schools in Mbé, Sassa-Mbersi, Tagboum and Harr, one hundred two were girls.82 Having put much emphasis in the previous chapters on the social and religious changes that attracted the male Dii population towards the mission and the church, let us now turn to my two woman informants who each have their individual story indicating two different paths taken by women towards the mission and the Gospel. One of the informants was recruited by Adji Marie and encouraged to leave her village to join the school in Ngaouyanga, Adji clearly being a female role model who drew the attention of my informant towards the mission school. Adji herself had been encouraged by Ingrid Flakk to find more 77

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1954, p. 16. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1955, p. 13. 79 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1956, p. 7. 80 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1957, p. 7. 81 Le Fonds d’Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social. 82 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon 1958, p. 7. The total number of pupils on the Dii-plain, including the bush schools grew during 1959 to 705. 78

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potential female pupils for the school, and this shows how a womens’ network emerged with motivations and goals for school attendance that differed from those of the young boys.83 Adrian Hastings has put much emphasis on the importance of women missionaries as role models and the “impression they communicated in life as well as by formal message, that women were equal, free, and capable of independent responsibility.” (Hastings 1993: 111). My other female informant never went to school because she had to take care of her mother who was a leper. Her mother received treatment thanks to mission involvement in the lepers’ situation during this period, and through this work she became interested in the Gospel that was preached by the African nurse-assistants. My informant’s mother regularly visited the church and later moved to the leper village in Foubarka.84 Her daughter followed her, and was, in a way, ‘socialised’ into Christianity through her mother’s disease. This is another example of how gender influenced the path towards the Gospel, it was one of the daughters, and not one of the sons who had to care for the sick mother. This example leads us to another important development on the Diiplain during the second half of the 1950’s, the emerging health work. It was mentioned in chapter four that the importance of health work was not dominant in my informants’ discourse on conversion, but this can also be related to the fact that the majority of the informants were males who saw Christianity as a tool for ‘hard’ social change. Mission health work might have been regarded as ‘softer’ than schools because the schools led to employment and social changes that again led to more political independence for the Dii. The female informant with the leper mother leads our thoughts in this direction, that it was people whose voices seldom were heard in the public discourse who profited most from health work. And in this respect lepers are a good example. In 1953 the mission built a dispensary in Mbé and received 10,000 pills for leper treatment from the American Leprosy Mission, starting by the treatment of forty lepers.85 The following year the report from health work among the Dii states that confidence was about to be established

83 Interview informant 1. A more detailed presentation of the differences concerning the content of male and female conversion stories will appear in the following chapter. 84 Interview informant 4. 85 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1954, p. 17.

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between the dispensary and the population. One hundred nine lepers were regularly treated, some of them with twenty to forty kilometres to walk in order to receive their treatment every third month. Health work was further expanded with the construction of a delivery room and once more a female orientation was present in the mission diaconia.86 In 1955, 208 lepers were being treated, and the mission conference decided to prepare a project for the construction of a leprosarium on the plain. The need of local nurses also became more and more visible, and lacking relevant options, the mission started a nursing school in Mbé and Ngaoundéré where seven local candidates, among them two Dii, Abbo Emanuel and Selbe Pierre, were taught by Norwegian missionaries.87 By 1956 the number of lepers in contact with the mission had increased to five hundred,88 but it was not until 1958 that a village was built for lepers in Foubarka, a few kilometres outside Mbé. The 1959 report shows that thirty lepers lived there permanently, and that twenty-four out of them were catechumens. This village was a joint effort between the mission, the local chief and the French administration who were together responsible for building the houses.89 Once more an example of the collaboration between the colonial administration and the mission related to a shared mission civilicatrise. The second half of the decade also gave birth to important changes which marked the development from a mission based Christianity to an indigenous church-based Christianity on the Dii-plain. This was first of all linked to the steadily growing number of educated Dii catechists and the ordination of the first three Dii pastors. The 1954 missionary report bears witness of forty-five newly baptised and nine hundred twenty-three persons who attended church on an average Sunday. With only one missionary pastor present on the plain, the responsibility of the local catechists grew rapidly. In this situation, important local leaders, like Dadi David, stood out and were repeatedly honoured in the missionary reports. Others still did not match the standards set by the missionaries, and one year three catechists were sacked on the

86

Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1955, p. 14. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1956 pp. 7, 52. It is interesting to note that when employment was at stake, the candidates were men, whereas the healt work in general was more directed towards women. When employment is possible health work suddenly has become part of the ‘hard’ changes and caught the attention of the male part of the population. 88 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1957, p. 7. 89 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1959, p. 6. 87

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plain due to abuse of locally brewed alcohol. New people did, however, replace them and secured a steady church growth with a peak of church attendance in 1956 with an average of 1893 persons, a number that stabilised close to 1700 by the end of the decade. One of the reasons for this growth was that Rey-Bouba gradually opened up for mission activities. Apart from the Gamba incident described in chapter two, where lamido Ray interpreted Kun Mbaa’s visit to Gamba as a political provocation and ordered all the catechists to leave his area, the mission gradually expanded into Ray’s kingdom. Several villages asked for catechists even if they were punished for these acts by the lamido’s doggaries. The missionaries discussed this issue at several conferences and were well aware that some of these requests were probably linked to the villagers’ wish to gain more political independence from the lamido in Rey-Bouba. This clearly shows that the involvement of the mission was experienced as containing political implications and that people who experienced daily oppression had noticed the consequences of the mission’s involvement on the Dii-plain and in their fight against slavery in Ngaoundéré. One of the most important milestones on the road towards an indigenous church on the Dii-plain was reached on December 16, 1956. On that Sunday Maïdawa Thomas, as the first Dii, and the second African ever in this part of North Cameroon, was ordained as pastor in what was later to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cameroon. The missionary reports and the collective Dii memory bear witness of a celebration that will be spoken of in generations to come, and Dii hymns, translated by Maïdawa, were sung with great pride. Maïdawa was the only local pastor working on the plain during this period since Bobbo Etienne was placed in Ngangha and Daniel Abdou joined the missionary team in Meng to translate the Bible into Mbum. The ordination of Maïdawa was followed by several changes in the emerging church structure on the plain. A new district council was created and for the first time a local treasurer was appointed, and these were important steps towards a local church structure. But this development also created unexpected problems for the missionaries. The housing of the new pastor in Tagboum turned out to be a difficult case for the missionary conference. Missionary Odd Dankel explains in detail the difficulties he had experienced dealing with this question, and in rather sarcastic terms he describes how the pastor demanded not only a house, but wooden doors, windows and even a tin roof from the mission. The conference obviously regarded this as a matter for the local district

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to handle, and also said that the local chief should contribute to the construction. What the conference failed to see was that they had once more succeeded in creating local workers in their own image: A pastor who no longer accepted to live in a mud hut, but who expected a house with wooden doors and a tin roof paid by the mission. The housing discussion also touched another aspect of Dii agency in the creation of a local church. When Dankel confronted the Tagboum chief with the fact that he had not contributed to the construction of the pastor’s house, the chief had an interesting answer. He hinted that the Catholics would give him all sorts of help, even money, if he accepted them in his village. His answer was a reflection of the Protestant – Catholic ‘race for souls’ that we were introduced to in chapter two. Odd Dankel had himself played an active role in this race, and pushed several village chiefs to promise him pupils before the Catholics arrived. The Tagboum example is one among others where the village chiefs used this race in order to be granted favours from the mission.90 Unexpected changes also appeared among the pupils in the mission school in Mbé. The Norwegian teacher Karen Ulland was shocked when she one day received a letter, signed by fifty-four pupils, declaring that they would go on strike in order to increase the small salary they received from the practical work they did on the station every morning. Ulland called the letter “a bomb” and could not understand the changes that had appeared among these “nice and sweet Duru-boys”.91 After a few days the majority of the pupils had returned to the classrooms, and it turned out that the pupils had heard ‘somewhere’ that they had to organise a société and go on strike in order to increase their income. This incident might be interpreted as an innocent example of change in a society on its path towards national political independence, but it might also be an indication of how the young Dii pupils interpreted their relationship to the mission. To be part of mission activities was not just a sign of a spiritual reorientation, but could also, one way or the another, be interpreted as employment, a relation that carried wider material implications than the Norwegian missionaries at that time could imagine.

90 Another example was the chief in Haar who demanded a certified teacher in order to accept the Protestants instead of the Catholics. Dankel explicitely states that these were the conditions that the mission conference had to deal with in the puzzle of placing the few certified teachers they had. Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1957, p. 39. 91 Conference Report, NMS Cameroon, 1957, p. 6.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE EMERGENCE OF A DII CHRISTIANITY The establishment of a church on the Dii-plain was at times a turbulent project, but it was still a steady process of local acceptance and indigenization of the missionary message and the missionary media. In this chapter we will address the Dii interpretation of the missionary message, that is, the theological content of this new religious institution. The Dii were socialised through schools, meetings, and services into new patterns of organisation of their society, but what were the actual spiritual changes experienced among the Dii? How did this change in social structures affect personal beliefs and patterns of moral behaviour? In the following the spiritual reorientation of the Dii will be analysed through three different steps. First, some perspectives regarding the new Christian identity will be presented as a change both in Dii social relations and as a change in personal moral perception and behaviour. Second, Dii Christianity will be analysed according to two different concepts of assimilation. One is the concept of the ‘translatability’ of Christianity in terms of relating the message to Dii traditions, and the other consists of the new religious elements which were incompatible with Dii traditions and thus replaced or coexisted with tradition in various ways. The third step in my analysis will be to give a short presentation of Paul Hiebert’s theory of worldview and of how it can be related to my material. This presentation will be followed by an analysis of the influence of Christianity on Dii worldview, using Hiebert’s notion of cognitive, affective, and evaluative assumptions as human strategies to organise worldview. A New Dii Christian Identity It was argued in chapter four that the arrival of the mission schools gradually changed social relations among the Dii due to the creation of a new intellectual elite that challenged the existing power structures in the Dii villages. This new pattern of social relations gradually replaced the family and village identities with new markers of identity. Simultaneously a Dii Christian identity slowly emerged with its own

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agenda and characteristics faced with material and spiritual changes. The emergence of this new identity was partly a reorientation of the entire Dii society as a result of the utility of the mission schools. A Dii chief who asked for a school for his village did not necessarily intend to change the religious identity of his village, but the result was most often that it changed both religious and social behaviour. This development took place in several parts of northern Cameroon; Philip Burnham argues that the American Sudan Mission to a large extent influenced the ethnic consciousness of the Gbaya in south-eastern Adamaoua the same way as the Norwegian mission influenced the Dii. Gbaya pastors became natural community leaders in a society which had never experienced indigenous organisational structures that could pursue collective interests (Burnham 1996: 85–89). The interaction between people from different Dii villages increased as a result of the mission schools. The first villages that received schools became centres where youth from other smaller villages settled, and later young Dii from all the villages on the plain gathered in the mission dormitory, first in Ngaouyanga, then in Mbé. These centres became crossroads for news and gossip from the whole Dii area, and they became places of exchange of ideas and gave birth to new ways to promote Dii values. This ethnic awareness developed both as a result of increased contact between Dii villages and increased contact between the Dii and other ethnic groups in the new Lutheran church. This change of behaviour was not only due to collective changes in social structures, it was to a large extent an individual reorientation because the Gospel that was preached asked the individual to choose the course of his or her life. A young Dii could abandon his family based on either a personal religious experience or because of personal motivation of improved social status. In either case it could be a choice without the acceptance of the community that surrounded him. Hence, this chapter seeks to analyse the spiritual imagination of the Dii Christian pioneers who became ‘prophets’ in a weberian sense of the word and entrepreneurs in the reconstruction of Dii religious beliefs. It further seeks to investigate the specific changes in Dii religious beliefs which served as motivations for the Dii youth who, more often than not, had to base their move towards Christianity on individual experiences. Due to the lack of written sources from the first Dii Christians, it is still my informants’ testimonies that will be our main guide to the spiritual changes that appeared among the Dii, and I experienced these personal discussions with my informants as challenging encounters.

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Some of them did not reflect upon the profound religious shift that had taken place in their lives. They basically saw Christianity as a natural development that followed the arrival of the schools, literacy, and the newly gained access to the Bible. Others had very clear and detailed memories of specific events in their lives that had moved them towards the new faith or they had original analyses of the spiritual changes that had occurred. And it gradually became clear that these movements could be analysed along two lines. First of all along what we, inspired by Lamin Sanneh, might call the line of ‘translatability’ (Sanneh 1989: 158–164).1 This analytic category concerns elements from the traditional beliefs that were changed and translated into Christian beliefs. Secondly the spiritual reorientation can be analysed as new elements which Christianity added to traditional beliefs, and that in some cases replaced the old beliefs. Dii Traditions and Translatability The most obvious example of the translatability of Dii traditions concerns the image of the Dii supreme God, Tayñii. As already described in chapter three the Norwegian missionaries focused on Paul’s description of the unknown God2 in order to recreate the image of the biblical God in the Dii environment. Through my interviews it appears to me that the ñ to Dii easily overcame the transition from the traditional image of Tayii the biblical image of God. Even if Dii ideas about a creator-God were somewhat vague, they were sufficient to serve as a foundation for the construction of a biblical narrative of creation that explained the Godintended relation with creation. When asked about the message of the first missionaries one of my informants gave me a detailed narrative of how God created the world and how he intended, through salvation, to relate also to the Dii people.3 The idea of God as the creator had obviously been easy to accept. Other aspects of the Christian deity 1 The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from Sanneh’s work concerns his focus on the linguistic translation of the Christian message and the Bible into vernacular languages. His theory also contains, however, also elements related to the ‘translation’ of traditions, where traditional elements are embedded with new meanings due to Christian influence. 2 This allegory is also used by Sanneh as an example of the most common missionary approach towards the concept of translatability (Sanneh 1989: 158–164), see also Peel (2000: 155). 3 Interview informant 4.

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required, however, more serious translation, such as the whereabouts of the deity, his jealousy (Sanneh 1989: 160), and his accessibility through prayers. The various locations of Tayñii that were turned into a God in heaven and the accessibility through prayers that the Dii Christians experienced have already been described in other chapters. But the missionary writings bear witness that the Dii were reluctant towards adopting the image of a jealous Hebrew God. Dii traditions were inclusive in spiritual matters. Adoption of neighbouring spirits and means of protection were frequent, and according to some of my informants, all the gris-gris amulets used by the Dii were of foreign, mainly Islamic, origin. When the missionary sources describe the Dii who burned their amulets due to Christian preaching, it was thus not traditions of Dii origin that were cast off, but influence from other tribes. To exclude all other means of protection, blessings, and opportunities to reduce the luck of the neighbours, was difficult to accept for the Dii, and the ‘you shall have no other gods before me’ became a doctrine that was only gradually accepted within Dii Christianity. The second aspect of translatability concerns protection. Central in Dii traditional religion was the notion that the gbaa through the ancestral spirits provided protection against accidents and sickness. This protection ought to be interpreted as simultaneously material and spiritual. It was a physical protection against snakebites, leopard attacks and malaria as well as protection against different types of sorcery, for instance the yún4 and the súkáñ,5 practices of genuine Dii origin. Variations of imported sorcery also existed among the Dii, for instance the notion of the solok which, according to my prior investigations, was of Mbum origin and was interpreted differently by the Mbum, the Gbaya, the Fulbe, and the Dii (Drønen 2001). Not only sorcery, but also protection could be adopted from the traditions of other ethnic groups. The most influential group in this domain was the Fulbe who used literacy and secret knowledge from the Koran as their most important protective tools. When the Dii Christians abandoned the gbaa, and thus also the protection that followed this religious practice it is obvi-

4 The yún is an animal that certain initiated people can control in order for it to either bite, in order to harm specific persons, or it can steal from them. For more information about the practice of yún among the Dii, see Djesa (2002). 5 Súkáñ is another type of sorcery and once more an initiated person can use this sorcery to attack other people from a distance. This practise is often related to jealousy. Interview informant 8.

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ous that Christianity must have been regarded as the bearer of strong spiritual powers. None of my informants expressed that conversion to Christianity was experienced as some kind of secularisation or rationalisation of their approach towards reality. Spiritual dangers did not cease to exist, but protection was now attributed to the new religion. The Dii gained new techniques from new masters in the spiritual battle for survival. Prayers, singing, new rites de passage, a new Christian liturgy, and new Christian rites replaced the old practices. The simple evidence of success within the new religion is expressed in my interviews with the simple fact that the informants experienced meaning and belonging, spiritually and materially, within the realm of the new religious community. The success of the physical protection that was offered through the arrival of dispensaries on the plain and a hospital in Ngaoundéré as a complimentary protection to the supernatural powers of Jesus highlights this development. It was mentioned in the preceding chapter that a female path towards conversion was cleared by the arrival of the dispensaries since the women, being responsible for birth and the upbringing of the future generation, were in closer contact with sickness and maladies than the men. Taking care of lepers was another female burden that was eased due to the arrival of the mission. A less evident path towards the protection provided by the new religion which was experienced mainly by women was what one of my female informants experienced as the break with the voyance. Well, what I left behind. There is for instance ‘la voyance’ . . . you understand? When I am sick, I pray . . . you understand? Well, I have no other medicines. I know that God is my medicine. What I did before was this ‘voyance’, but when I entered into the religion that stopped me from that. . . . There are many things (. . .). Wisdom has been shared.6

She claims that she was seriously attached to these traditional ‘seers’ and her perception of reality was closely related to what the voyants explained to her. A seer in the Dii tradition generally connected everyday problems to a spiritual reality they themselves claimed to master. Often personal problems were, according to the seers, related to neglect 6 Interview informant 1. « C’est à dire, ce que j’ai laissé, il y a par exemple la voyance . . . tu vois ? Quand je suis malade, je prie . . . tu vois ? Bon, je n’ai plus d’autre remède. Je sais que c’est Dieu qui est mon remède. Ce que je faisais avant, c’était cette voyance, mais quand je suis entrée dans la religion qui m’a empêché cela. . . . Il y a beaucoup de choses (. . .). La sagesse est partagée. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre.

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of the ancestor, for instance by forgetting the daily sacrifices to the gbaa. Problems could also be related to the breaking of different food taboos that existed within the community,7 or a certain person could have engaged a sorcerer in order to harm you. But the seers were also consulted about personal concerns for the future, and Dii women used the seers in order to straighten out gender related problems such as future marriages, fertility, and problems in polygamous marriages. My informant felt that her life to a large extent was dictated by the seers’ advice, and she claims that she experienced the school in Ngaouyanga and the introduction to the Christian concept of protection as a relief, as a change of practise that improved her basic living condition, thanks to prayer, medical treatment, and biblical promises of protection.8 A third aspect of Dii traditional religion that survived within the emerging Dii Christian consciousness was the importance of blessings. The efficiency of religious practice was actually measured according to the blessings that it provided, and as mentioned in chapter four, the lack of blessings was probably one reason behind Dii spiritual reorientation towards Christianity. Blessing is, of course, a spiritual gift which is impossible to measure empirically. Blessings can only be experienced, and expressed, through self-narration. As expressed by one of my informants: What I have received from the faith? I have a good life. Nothing has happened to me. What I want, God gives to me. I have received what is good from the Gospel. I was married and we had children. I have received a lot of good things from the church. . . .9

My Dii informants argue that blessings followed the new religion, and the Dii discourse has a very down to earth idea of these blessings. To put it bluntly, the rain kept coming even after conversion to Christianity, and the sorghum continued to grow. Such experience could be interpreted in different directions. Either Christianity could be abandoned because it did not increase the blessings, or it could be taken as an affirmation that the new religion actually was that of the real sustainer

7 Different villages seem to have practised different food taboos. One common taboo among the Dii was, for example, monkeys. 8 Interview informant 1. 9 Interview informant 2. « Ce que j’ai recu de la foi ? Je vis bien. Rien ne m’arrive. Ce que je veux, Dieu le donne. J’ai eu le bien dans l’Evangile. Je me suis marié, j’ai eu des enfants. J’ai eu beaucoup de biens de l’Eglise. . . . » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre.

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of the world. It is evident that the informants who attended the mission schools experienced the school as a blessing in terms of leaving behind what they describe as ‘ignorance’. Literacy and monotheism seem to have filled the intellectual gap that the Dii experienced versus the Fulbe and other Islamised and literate groups, and thus had serious consequences in terms of self-esteem. An interesting example of translatability and of the compatibility between Christianity and traditions among the Dii was presented to me during one of my interviews. Each time my informant was asked to explain why the Dii performed the different traditional rites he made allusion to biblical stories, as if Dii traditions were hidden behind the actions of the Israelites in the Old Testament. The first example that came up was when I asked him about the sacrifices to gbaa in Dii traditions, and he explained the actions of his forefathers as follows: Yes it was a sacrifice . . . a sacrifice. It is exactly as when the Egyptians and the Israelites venerated the golden calf when Moses helped them escape from Egypt, it’s just like that. And one also gave food to these gods . . . in order for them to eat.10

When we continued the discussion, my informant moved on to tell me about the image of God in Dii tradition. His point was that the mere existence of the gbaa could be explained according to the experiences of the Israelites; because the Dii did not know the exact location of God, they had to create a visible example of the deity. But they [the Dii] knew, the creator God existed, but since they had not seen him . . . it is exactly as the children of Israel did . . . in the desert. Moses took us here, and he left us here, we were about to die from starvation, from thirst . . . and he went to stay somewhere we did not know. Create a god. And they created the golden calf, it is exactly the same thing.11

The third example appeared when we discussed the rite of circumcision and the origin and meaning of this rite.

10 Interview, informant 13. « Oui, c’est le sacrifice . . . le sacrifice. C’est exactement comme les Egyptiens et les isréalites adoraient le veau d’or quand Moïse les avaient fait sortir de l’Egypte, c’est comme ça. Et on donne aussi la norriture à ces dieux . . . pour manger. » 11 Interview informant 13. « Mais ils savaient, il y a Dieu le créateur, mais comme ils ne l’ont pas vu . . . c’est exactement comme les enfants d’Israël avaient fait . . . dans le désert, Moïse nous a emmenés, il est venu nous abandonner ici, nous mourions de faim, de soif . . . et il est allé rester où nous ne savons pas. Créons notre dieu. Et ils ont créé le veau d’or, c’est exactement comme ça. »

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chapter seven But for us the idea came from . . . we have somehow extracted the idea from the Bible, but without knowing it, as . . . you know, the eighth day Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the church . . . you know, like that. But we adopted, we took that, but without knowing, without knowing. Well, that’s why we have circumcised people until today. . . .12

Dii traditions and the biblical traditions have melted together and created a new Christian narrative that not only explains the present situation of the Dii Christians, but also explains the actions of the forefathers without judging them like the missionaries did. The stories from the Bible have created an interpretative framework that leads to new conclusions concerning plausibility structures. A Bachelor thesis in history from the University in Ngaoundéré, written by the young Dii scholar Martine Aminatou, concludes along the same line as my informant that the Dii interpreted Jesus as an ancestor who replaced the yóÕóbÕ spirits in Dii traditions (Aminatou 2000: 18). The Dii story is thus being interpreted, as Peel writes in his introduction to Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba, “in terms of the various ‘grand narratives’ that are told to make intelligible the recent history of the world and Africa’s place within it”. (Peel 2000: 2). New Elements in Dii Christianity Having briefly presented translated elements in Dii Christianity, let us now move on to the new religious elements that were introduced by the mission and accepted, although not always according to the mission’s intention, by the new Dii Christians. Since the idea of a creator God already existed among the Dii, the most radical news in the new religion concerned this God’s relation to the world in terms of a saviour. It was explained in chapter four how the person of Jesus was approached with curiosity, and how the catechists gradually convinced many of the pupils of the special role that this man had played in history. The idea that one person, who was simultaneously man and God, was the saviour of all humankind must have been radical news for the Dii religious imagination. But it seems that the missionaries and the 12 Interview informant 13. « Mais pour nous l’idée viens de . . . on a pris un peu l’idée de la Bible, mais sans savoir, comme . . . n’est-ce pas, au huitième jour Marie et Joseph ont apporté Jésus à l’Eglise . . . voilà, c’est comme ça. Mais nous adaptons, nous prenons cela, mais sans savoir, sans savoir. Bon, c’est pour cela qu’on fait circoncire les gens depuis ce temps jusqu’aujourd’hui. . . . »

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catechists did a good job through their teachings since the large majority of my informants had very orthodox answers when explaining the central dogma of Christianity. They crucified him, they told us that he died for us. And at school, we learned a lot about it. And we, we knew that he was our saviour. That he will save humans after death.13

This can be interpreted as a result of the African version of the French pedagogical approach, where things are repeated again and again until the pupil, like an answering machine, can reproduce the correct answer when questioned. But the different approaches that the informants used to present the classic dogmas of Protestant theology bear witness of personal experiences that exceed the repetitions of the Sunday-school pupil. One informant chose to explain the meaning of Christianity while we discussed how he had experienced the leaving behind of traditional protection: The protection, this protection the way I see it, it is that they said that it is the dead that protect us. Now, when I look at the Bible of truth, that Jesus has arrived, when the Bible arrived, they told us, ‘What you practise is in vain. Because the trees, the water etc. are vanities. But if you confess with your [heart] that Jesus Christ is the saviour, you will receive redemption.’ That’s why we give our hearts to Jesus Christ and him alone.14

Theological key words, familiar from the Lutheran tradition, like repentance, redemption and salvation are constantly repeated and lead the thoughts towards another new element in the Christian religion, the eschatological aspect. The Dii religious tradition had no notion of salvation or a judgement, but had clear ideas about a spiritual existence after death. Most religious practices were directed towards the ancestral spirits, the yóÕóbÕ , as mediators between humans and the world of spirits. Few of my informants had detailed knowledge about the transition 13 Interview informant 8. « On l’a crucifié, on nous a dit qu’il est mort pour nous. Et à l’école, on a appris beaucoup de choses le concernant. Et nous on a su que c’était lui le sauveur. Que c’est lui qui allait sauver les gens après la mort. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 14 Interview informant 5. « La protection, cette protection que je vois, c’est qu’on a dit que c’est les morts qui nous protégeaient. Maintenant, quand je vois dans la Bible de la vérité, que Jésus est venu, quand la Bible est venu, on nous a dit : “Tout ce que vous aviez pratiqué, c’est des futilités. Car les arbres, l’eau etc. ce sont des choses vaines. Mais si vous confessez de votre [coeur] que Jésus Christ est le sauveur, vous aurez la rédemption.” C’est pourquoi, [nous] mettions désormais notre coeur en ce Jésus Christ, lui seul. » Translated from Dii by Djédou Pierre.

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from living human person to spirit, and about whom this transition concerned. One informant, however, claimed that transition from living human person to ancestor could take place already at the funeral of the recently deceased person. The spirit of the dead could manifest itself in a woman during the funeral and make her speak in the name of the new spirit.15 There does not seem to have been a close connection between moral behaviour in this life and consequences for the destination of spirits after death. The spirits were regarded as neutral spirits which, as long as they were satisfied through sacrifices, could help people receive blessings and protection in the ‘here and now’ dimension. It was therefore a qualitative difference between the eschatological aspect of tradition, and the strong emphasis that Christianity put on judgement, salvation and eternal life in heaven. Moral behaviour, therefore, had different consequences in the two religious approaches. In Dii traditions all religious practice concerned this life, whereas Christianity put equal, if not more emphasis on the hereafter. This takes us to the next point in our analysis, the role of moral behaviour in the religion preached by the missionaries and the African catechists. I have, based on the presentation of the missionary discourse on conversion and the social changes within Dii society, argued that the Norwegian missionaries introduced a new moral regime among Dii Christians. This was first of all related to what we can refer to as specific in the Dii context, the traditional veneration of the ancestors, reliance upon spirits, and trust in the traditional religious specialists, all practices that the missionaries judged immoral. But the missionaries also put much emphasis on moral issues which were important in their home country, such as the abuse of alcohol and matrimonial status. Whereas the eschatological aspect of Christianity seems to have been easily accepted by the new Christians, the Dii were, however, more reluctant towards a new moral regime. I have already referred to several cases where catechists lost their jobs due to their abuse of alcohol, and it seems that the Dii refused to accept the missionary reasoning that since the traditionally brewed alcohol was closely connected to traditional heathen rites, it had to be judged immoral and abandoned.16

15

Interview informant 8. Traditional beer was, for example, used as an incentive when family and friends were invited to take part in the harvest of large fields, interview informant 14. 16

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The mission faced equal problems related to questions of marriage and family structure. Missionaries insisted upon the traditional interpretation of the God-given organisation of family life, and the clash with the loose Dii family structures was considerable. One issue was how easily traditional marriage could be broken by either part. A more serious threat to the mission’s view on morality was the question of polygamy. The strategy of Dii Christians who considered the prestige of polygamy as more important than full membership in the church was dual. The most serious consequences were experienced among those who were employed by the mission. Three of my informants lost their jobs at the mission because they married more than one woman. All of them found it impossible to continue as church members, converted to Islam, and were employed by the colonial government. What surprised me through the interviews with these three persons was the fact that they all expressed a very ‘Christian’ interpretation of Islam, as if the credo of Christianity was still important to them, and was compatible with their understanding of Islam.17 Especially interesting was their presentation of Jesus, who tended to be more saviour than prophet. What they rejected was thus not the Christian dogmas as such, but the mission’s moral regime. The strategy of several others, from what I detected through more informal conversations, was that lay Christians without responsibilities in the church who were polygamous, continued to attend church and to consider themselves Christians, but without being baptised and without being formal members of the church. The significant difference in the statistics between church attendance and baptised members is a clear indication of this.18 A selective reception of the message seems to have been more important than the moral consequences of the message preached by missionaries and catechists. Another aspect of moral change, which also shows how women experienced Christianity differently from the men, concerns the question of slavery. Whereas all the male informants focused on the fact that the missionaries helped liberate the Dii from social oppression and the slaves in Ngaoundéré from the Fulbe noblemen, one of my female informants focused on the situation of the slaves within the Dii community. She explained how the moral teaching of the missionaries

17 18

Interviews informant 15; informant 19; informant 20. See appendix D.

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made the Dii give freedom or equal rights19 to the slaves that they themselves kept, mostly Laka, but also some Gbaya slaves, who were received as booty from participation in Fulbe slave raids.20 The most surprising findings in the Dii discourse on how they had experienced and accepted the Christian message was, however, related to what constantly was referred to as the notion of liberty. At first glance it is easy to refer to the missionary discourse which put much emphasis on this term. It may also seem natural to go along with the Comaroffs’ interpretation of the Tswana adoption of the missionary discourse, a discourse that was used by Africans even when they argued against the missionaries (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In the Norwegian missionary discourse the term liberation is, however, largely related to what the missionaries saw as liberation from spiritual oppression. ‘The ironhand of heathendom’ consisted of spiritual and moral ignorance connected to traditional practices. When the Dii use the term liberation it is interesting to note that they hardly use it in terms of a spiritual liberation. Tradition was not experienced as an ‘ironhand of heathendom’. The Dii did not live in constant fear of ancestral spirits, and the rituals related to spirits were considered rather as positive elements which helped the Dii organise everyday life. Fear was, however, related to the threat of sorcery, which the missionaries mistook for Dii traditional religion.21 When the Dii use liberation as a central theological term, the content of the term changed radically from the missionaries’ understanding. Whereas the eschatological aspect of a spiritual liberation is downplayed, the term takes a mere ‘here and now’ meaning. The Christian message, and not only the missionaries’ message, is interpreted as a liberating force in the Dii discourse. The religious interpretation of this approach clearly has its roots in traditional religion. The approach towards transcendent beings, what the Dii learned to call religion, had an immanent nature, it served as a means to an end in this life. Therefore Dii Christianity took a less intellectual, and a more practical turn than the Norwegian missionaries intended. Liberation in the Dii

19 It seems that the majority of slaves kept by the Dii were raided at an early age and raised more or less as part of the family. 20 Interview informant 4. 21 I will also here support Idowu in his observation of sorcery and magic as elements of a worldview that for analytic purposes can be separated from traditional religion (Idowu 1973: 147).

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discourse refers almost exclusively to liberation from Fulbe and colonial oppression. Christianity could thus refer to victory where traditional religion had failed, and liberation was being interpreted as a religious category, not merely a description of improved social conditions. This point becomes even clearer when compared with another expression which Norwegian missionaries reported home and that was adopted in the Dii discourse on conversion, that Christianity ‘opened the Dii eyes’. When I discussed the relationship between the missionaries and the Dii with one of my informants he told me the following: My point of view is that it is the Whites [the missionaries] who brought us the light, they opened our eyes. And I think that if they had not come, we would have stayed in the dark.22

When I asked him to explain what he meant by this ‘darkness’, he gave me the following explanation: The darkness means the existence under the yoke of the Fulbe, and it is the Scripture of the Whites that came and arranged everything.23

What is interesting in this statement is not the lack of critical reflection in praising the missionaries. What is interesting is the conclusion that the arrival of the Bible arranged the problem of social oppression which was related to the Fulbe. Social change is interpreted in religious terms and spiritual bricks pave the road towards a new Christian Dii identity. Towards a Dii Christian Worldview To analyse the emergence of Dii Christianity means to analyse Dii concepts of religious practices and beliefs, of protection and blessing, in short we are dealing with how the Dii related to ultimate reality. In order to grasp analytically the changes that occurred among the Dii as a result of their relation with Norwegian and African missionaries, I will in the following analyse these changes as changes in Dii worldview.

22 Interview informant 8. « Le point de vue est que ce sont les blancs là qui nous ont apporté la lumière, ils nous ont ouvert les yeux. Et je pense que s’ils n’étaient pas là, nous serions restés dans l’obscurité. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 23 Interview informant 8. « L’obscurité signifie l’existence sous le joug des Foulbé, or c’est l’écriture du blanc qui est venue tout arranger. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri.

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Paul G. Hiebert, who is much influenced by the symbolic anthropological approach of Mary Douglas (Douglas 1973), Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1973), and Victor Turner (Turner 1975), defines worldview the following way: At the core of each culture, there seems to be certain basic assumptions about the natures of reality and morality. Many are taken for granted and never questioned. Together they form a more or less consistent worldview that orders people’s experiences and gives meaning to their lives. (Hiebert 1983: 369)

Hiebert later presents a shorter definition and says that worldview is as a set of “basic assumptions about reality which lie behind the beliefs and behaviour of a culture.” (Hiebert 1985: 45). It must first of all be pointed out that worldview does not equal religion in Hiebert’s theory. Religion is one part of social praxis that together with law, politics, aesthetics, technology, economics, and social organisation form the ‘raw material’ of a worldview. This raw material is being bred by three analytic strategies of relating to reality, what Hiebert calls the cognitive assumptions, the affective assumptions, and the evaluative assumptions. The cognitive assumptions shape the mental categories people use for thinking; they determine the kinds of authority people trust, and they influence the kind of logic people use. In short, “these assumptions give order and meaning to life and reality.” (Hiebert 1985: 46). The affective assumptions deal with beauty and aesthetics in terms of music, architecture, dress and food. I interpret Hiebert to include also ‘emotional mood’ in terms of self-esteem and general feelings towards other people within this analytic category. The third category is the evaluative assumptions which “provide the standards people use to make judgments, their criteria for determining truth and error, likes and dislikes, and right and wrong.” (Hiebert 1985: 46). Hiebert also adds that evaluative assumptions determine the priorities of a culture in terms of shaping the desires and allegiances of the group that share the worldview. These three assumptions or strategies in turn influence all the social practices, and what is a dominant worldview within a certain group is defined by the most important practices, and by the strength of the discourses used by the advocates promoting the different practices. When Hiebert’s worldview theory is visualised it becomes clear that it is strongly influenced by Geertz’s idea of culture, where “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” (Geertz 1973: 5).

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Y. B. Nishioka rightly points out that Geertz’s symbolic approach to culture corresponds well with one of Hiebert’s major interests, which is “the tendency of human beings to seek explanatory systems by which they can meaningfully structure their lives, overcoming the dread of chaos caused by death, suffering and the like.” (Nishioka 1998: 462). When comparing Hiebert’s categories of social practice that influence worldview with what has been described thus far it is obvious that the arrival of Christianity influenced Dii worldview on many levels. The technology, politics, economy, and social organisation of Dii society were all in one way or another affected by the arrival of the mission. But since the scope of this chapter is to analyse how the Christian message related to, and changed the Dii worldview, it is the relationship between the social practice of religion and the cognitive, affective and evaluative strategies related to this practice that will be treated in the following. I understand religion to have been a strong social practice in Dii society where the transcendental elements were related to and influenced most other social practices.24 In order to make the religious category reflect the discourse of my informants I would argue that the category of religious social practice ought to be divided into several specific sub-categories which were related in different ways, for example; religious belief, religious practice, moral behaviour, and spiritual approach towards reality.25 The question to be dealt with in what follows is thus how Christianity affected these categories, and to what extent the traditional religious approach to reality was replaced or remained dominant in the production of worldview. An internal fight for primacy between old and new ideas occurred among the new Dii Christians, and even though this to a large extent was an individual development,26 I will try to draw some general conclusions based on the 24 It could also be argued that in a postmodern European or North-American setting technology and economy would be the strongest categories that influenced the other categories such as politics, law, aesthetics, social organisation and religion. 25 It is obvious that a detailed historical study of how any category influence worldview would demand a splitting of each category into smaller sub-categories in order to analyse how each sub-category influence the others, which sub-categories that are the most im portant and how their discourses influence the rest of the web. 26 I find it important here to remind us of Charles H. Kraft’s critic of Hiebert and the symbolic approach towards worldview and his highlighting of the importance of personal agency in the construction of worldview. Kraft argues that structures or webs do not carry meaning, only persons give meaning to structures (Kraft 1996), a fact that is worth mentioning when considerenig how a small number of converts among the Dii have influenced the worldview of later generations.

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empirical material presented thus far. This will be done through analysing which religious ideas gained primacy among the tree assumptions used by Hiebert in his analysis, cognitive, affective, and evaluative. Cognitive Worldview Assumptions The first set of assumptions referred to by Hiebert is the cognitive. To what extent did Christianity influence, form and change the underlying mental categories that the Dii used for thinking and relating to reality? I would argue that Christianity influenced these assumptions only to a small extent. Christianity was on the contrary presented in order to fit the already existing cognitive assumptions of the Dii. The Christian God was presented as a force that was already present as an important part of Dii worldview, he was the unknown God that needed only minor changes in order to unite the biblical worldview and the Dii worldview; God was the real creator and sustainer of all things. It is true that the large focus on literacy and Western scientific progress in health care was seen also as a civilising mission that sought to promote a Western enlightenment-rational worldview. But it is highly questionable whether the Dii actually experienced Christianity as a force that primarily introduced a new modernity-logic into their relating to reality. Even if literacy and Western medicine led to improved material living conditions, it is striking to what extent the informants focus on Christianity as a means to protection and a provider of blessings, clear signs that the mental approach to reality have only slightly changed. Literacy and Western medicine became new and important tools used to cope with traditional challenges like the fight for everyday survival, sickness and death. In the case of sickness, when the missionary strategy was to replace sacrifices to the ancestors and traditional medicine with prayers to Jesus, accompanied with new medicine, it is no wonder that the basic cognitive approach towards reality stayed relatively intact. It could be argued that the Dii easily accepted the ‘hard’ consequences of modernity but to a smaller extent the ‘soft’ presuppositions. They easily adopted the use of the technical tools of modernity introduced by the missionaries, but they never adopted the philosophical and scientific premises that Europe used to build a new enlightenment worldview. It was perfectly possible for a Dii to accept quinine in order to fight malaria without accepting the scientific explanation of how this sickness entered and developed within the body. It becomes clear from

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my interviews that the Western so-called rational question of causality was hard to accept for the general population. It is of no concern to a Dii that a mosquito infects us with this disease called malaria, but the crucial question is; who made this mosquito sting me, and not my neighbour? This is not to say that Christianity did not influence the cognitive assumptions of the Dii, because to some extent it clearly did. But the message preached by missionaries did not radically change Dii cognitive assumptions, and the civilising mission clearly failed in its attempt to make the Dii adopt a Western rational worldview. What prevailed was a Dii Christian rationalism based on a mixture of old traditions, ‘biblical logic’, and Western modern rationalism. Affective Worldview Assumptions The second set of assumptions according to Hiebert concerns what he calls the affective, and concerns beauty, style, mood, and aesthetics. I have chosen three aspects of Dii Christianity which I consider to be of special interest: ritual, music, and mood. I will argue in the following that the arrival of Christianity changed practice more than reflection, and that affection was more influenced than cognition. In the case of rituals, new Christians abandoned the old practices quite readily, such as sacrifices to the gbaa and the harvest feasts. This was due in part to the religious content of the rituals, but even more due to the fact that old rituals were replaced by new rituals which were judged as compatible with Christianity by the missionaries, and judged as more relevant for the future by the new Christian generation. Regular devotions at school, meetings, and services replaced daily sacrifices to the ancestors. The harvest feast was turned into a celebration of thanksgiving. Circumcision, which the missionaries soon realised they could not force the Dii to abandon, was performed at the dispensary, and its traditional religious significance was stripped from the ritual. The young Christian generation was socialised into a new set of rituals which affected their worldview. These rites were accompanied by a new kind of music, when missionary hymns were soon replaced by the daily rhythm of African life. Despite some missionaries’ attempt to eradicate drums and dancing, Dii Christianity soon used traditional means to express new meaning (Gadji 2001). Traditional music developed within the structure of the church to become more organised, both in terms

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of the creation of church choirs and influence from Christian music from other parts of the world. The third, and in my opinion most radical change introduced by Christianity concerned what we might call the collective mood of the Dii. Kees Schilder has entitled his study among the Mundang Quest for Self-Esteem, and what the Mundang sought from Islam further North in Cameroon (Schilder 1994) is, to judge from the discourse of my informants, what the Dii experienced from meeting Norwegian missionaries. My informants, as we saw in chapter four, expressed repeatedly the sense of being noticed, of being taken seriously, of being treated with respect, as one important reason behind their movement towards Christianity. Jeffrey Cox, in his “Master Narratives of Imperial Missions” gives several examples of how grand narratives are used to promote an emotional or so-called scientific view of the world. Cox’s first example is the master narrative of global Christian expansion, and he argues that even if this narrative is not always triumphalist or celebratory, it always focuses on the documentation of God’s providential work in the world (Cox 2005: 4). Cox’s second example is the imperialist master narrative which focuses on the supremacy of Western power, whether military, bureaucratic, economic, or cultural (Cox 2005: 7). His third example is the postcolonial master narrative that focuses on the marginality of the colonised and the “unmasking” of the abuse of power in the imperialist narrative (Cox 2005: 8). In line with Cox’s analysis I would argue that there also exists a master narrative among the Dii people. This narrative, which has greatly influenced the Dii Christian worldview, is what I would call ‘the master narrative of Fulbe oppression’. In this great narrative, missionaries, and thus also Christianity, have played, either intentionally or unintentionally, a leading role. This narrative is only to a small extent linked to the experience of systematic terror recognisable through historical sources, whether written or oral. The Dii, on the contrary, constantly repeat that they were never slaves under the Fulbe. The Dii discourse or the Dii narrative is thus clearly affective in form, and is used as a strategy in the construction of a Christian Dii worldview where the acceptance of a different modernity, a different literacy, and a different monotheism have strengthened Dii self-esteem.27

27 Tom A. Steffen proposes several interesting points related to the role of symbol and narrative in the construction of worldview (Steffen 1998).

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I will not hereby argue that Dii Christians were no longer emotionally attached to the traditions of their ancestors, or that backsliding to traditions or conversion to Islam never occurred among them. But what becomes clear through my interviews is that the superiority, and what was experienced as ignorance, of the Fulbe was such a strong social determinant that it shaped the Christian narrative, and that this narrative plays an important part in the construction of a Dii Christian worldview. Evaluative Worldview Assumptions The evaluative assumptions provide, according to Hiebert, standards that people use to make judgements, such as criteria for determining truth and error and consequently, what is to be considered as right or wrong behaviour. In terms of religion this leads us to the question of moral thinking and moral behaviour, and the central question is to what extent Dii Christians changed their moral behaviour as a consequence of accepting the new religion. It has been well documented so far that questions of ‘good moral behaviour’ were approached differently by the missionaries and by the new Dii Christians. In terms of protection from sickness, which became an important battlefield between missionaries and traditional practitioners, Dii Christians seem to have had a pragmatic approach towards this rivalry. The issue for them was not one of moral behaviour, but about being cured. Missionaries complained that patients came to the dispensary in Mbé only after having tried all sorts of traditional remedies, and they therefore had trouble convincing the Dii that it was considered ‘wrong’ to seek traditional healing. This pragmatic approach also modified the claim for universal truth which missionaries argued Christianity required in all aspects of life. The prevailing Dii cognitive assumption was that different sorts of spiritual influence were a constant tide. New beliefs in different sorts of sorcery, healing, and protection appeared constantly, although at a slow pace. The Fulbe, after a century of presence, had largely influenced traditional ideas of spiritual protection. Amulets containing pieces of paper with verses from the Koran made their way even into ethnic groups which for various reasons resisted Islamisation. Different types of sorcery existed among different dialect groups among the Dii due to varied influence from and interaction with other ethnic groups, like the Gbaya in the southern, and the Laka in the northern part of the

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Dii-plain.28 In terms of evaluating the Christian message and moral behaviour related to these beliefs, Dii strategies varied considerably. When discussing how the new Christians related to traditional healing one of my informants put it the following way: They know that in heaven, it is Jesus who is the chief in that department. I think that here on earth, there are people who know more than yourself, and if you do not search. . . . Sometimes, when they preach, they say that in the Bible, God says that he who searches shall find, he who asks will be answered, that when we check around we will be showed. But when you are there and do not do anything, and sickness arrives, it will be difficult for you to be healed.29

The inclusiveness of African Traditional Religion and the impact these ideas exercised over the cognitive assumptions in Dii worldview, made the exclusivist claim of the missionaries on behalf of Christianity a difficult task. Even if Christianity to a large extent influenced standard norms of matrimonial status and the large majority of Dii Christians was monogamous, we have also seen that for some Christians polygamy was judged compatible with Christianity. It is thus a feeling of ‘accept and neglect’ of the Christian exclusivist claim that colours my interpretation of the Dii evaluative assumptions. Jesus was granted all power in the hereafter, but in this life Christianity was one among other strategies in the search for meaning and better material living conditions.

28

Interview informant 8. Interview informant 8. « Ils savent que dans le règne céleste, c’est Jésus qui est le chef de ce côté. Je pense qu’ici sur terre, il y a des gens qui te dépassent, et si tu ne cherches pas. . . . Des fois, lorsqu’on prêche, on dit que dans la Bible, Dieu nous dit que c’est en cherchant que nous allons trouver, que c’est en demandant que nous aurons, que c’est en se renseignant qu’on va nous montrer. Mais quand toi tu es là sans rien faire, si la maladie arrive, il te sera difficile de guérir. » Translated from Dii by Abdoul Kadiri. 29

CHAPTER EIGHT

COMMUNICATION, CONVERSION, AND CONSERVATION In the title of this chapter I have introduced the terms communication, conversion, and conservation. Three terms that, even though not too often repeated, represent the pillars upon which the historical study has been constructed. This final chapter is an effort to look back and consider how these analytic terms can sum up the historical findings of the project. The historical encounter between the Dii and the Norwegian missionaries was first of all about communication. The chapter therefore sums up what Norwegian missionaries intended to communicate, the process the intended message went through, and finally how the Dii interpreted this message and reconstructed its content according to their apprehension of the world. It further enters the historical and anthropological debate that concerns the second analytic term, conversion, and analyse whether this term is a mere Western ideological construct, void of meaning, or if it is an adequate term describing religious change in Africa under colonial rule. Did the Dii actively and intentionally accept the profound changes that the first missionaries and African catechists initiated, or were they, as some authors seem to argue, without means to respond to this powerful historical current that swept over most of Africa south of the Sahara? It is my contention that conversion can be a workable analytic term if it is explained contextually, and I will therefore use the four terms crisis, context, translatability, and attitude in order to describe the path towards religious conversion among the Dii. Finally, the chapter will conclude by asking how and why much in Dii reasoning and consciousness never changed as a result of the Christian missionary impact. Communication as Cultural Encounter In the beginning was the Word. Then there was enlightenment and industrial revolution. Then there was modern Christian mission. This is a bluntly constructed chain which, in spite of its childish simplicity, is of importance to this presentation. The Norwegian missionaries were actually convinced that their mission, their rather fearless encounter

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with the unknown, was based on a divine commandment: to make disciples of all nations. And they thought that this commandment was for the most part self-evident and self-explanatory. It has been asserted throughout this study that such was not the case, and that what they intended to share, the timeless Gospel, was actually wrapped in temporal and material clothing very difficult to unwrap. This made their mission a joint, potentially ambiguous mission, one of evangelising and one of civilising. Which of these two missions was the most influential varied considerably according to the individual agents of the mission, the Dii respondents, and the material conditions of the different encounters. For some, the encounter with white missionaries was a ticket to the New World in terms of education, clothing, scholarship, and employment. For others, it was a message of forgiveness and protection as experienced in the daily struggle for material survival and spiritual uncertainty, communicated by a Dii evangelist on the sorghum field in the bush. For yet others, the mission hospital was the final card to play in the fight against sickness and disease, a card that sometimes lost, but often won, giving hope of new physical life, and sometimes a renewed spiritual life as well. In the first chapter we were introduced to several process-models of communication, and in the following the encounter between the Dii and the mission will be analysed according to Øyind Dahl’s culture filter model (Dahl 2001: 66–69). Of importance to this model is that each person who intends to transmit a message does so through a cultural filter. The content of the filter of Norwegian missionaries was described in detail in chapter three, and it showed how Norwegian history and Lutheran traditions were blended together with enlightenment ideas. These blended ideas in turn created a missionary discourse where the missionaries defined their challenge as obstacles to be overcome in order to make the Dii ‘good Christians’. This was, however, not a message easily embraced by the Dii, and they even had problems understanding it. In order to decode the message of the Norwegians, the Dii actively used their own cultural filter. One early connotation of the Norwegian message conveyed to the Dii was that these Whites would eat Dii children, as strangers apparently sometimes did, one way or another. Other connotations unintentionally conveyed made all Whites members of the colonial administration. Missionaries and their message were interpreted according to Dii mental images of who these strangers were, what they said and what they did. Having passed through these two filters one obvious conclusion is

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that probably very little of the intended missionary message, in terms of a ‘pure’ Gospel, was understood by the Dii in the initial phase of the encounter between the Dii and the missionaries. But according to Dahl’s model two other important elements influence any intercultural communication. The first element is that of context, and I interpret this to be the social and historical context of any encounter; and secondly, the internal relationship between the persons who communicate. What this study has shown is that both elements were of utmost importance in the Dii-mission encounter. The message accepted by the Dii was a message that was related to context and to the relationship with individual Norwegian missionaries. The missionaries first of all interpreted obstacles they met as spiritual obstacles, a spiritual oppression from which the Dii had to be liberated. The Dii, far from seeing the spiritual powers of the ancestors as a problem, experienced the oppression they suffered as physical due to Fulbe and French political and economic domination. The spiritual freedom which was the intended meaning of the missionary communication was in the Dii context interpreted according to their contextual, experienced need, and thus related to the social oppression they experienced. It has become clear that many groups, for example the Mbum and the Fulbe, rejected any contact with the mission, but what happened in the encounter between the Dii and the mission was that personal relations developed between the Dii and individual missionaries. It has also become clear that myth-like stories were told about the first missionaries, because they entered into the conflict on behalf of the Dii, and had resources to act on their behalf. The linear communication thus took place simultaneously on several levels, even if the Gospel was not necessarily at the core of all these levels of interaction. Communication as Negotiation of Meaning Even if Dahl’s model contains aspects of context and relations it is still a linear process model. In order to better understand how the Dii made the missionary message relevant in their own context, it is important to show how the encounter between the Dii and the mission was one of negotiating meaning. This brings us back to Saussure’s linguistic theory (Saussure 1974). Among Saussure’s findings two points of relevance will be underscored for our project, the importance of the linguistic sign and

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the internal relations between the signs. It has already been mentioned that according to Saussure the sign is an abstract unit consisting of a signifier, which can be labelled a ‘sound image’, and a signified, a concept which contains meaning and reference. What is important is that the relationship between signifier and signified according to Saussure is arbitrary, which means that there is no natural or necessary link between, let’s say a word and the mental images this word creates in the minds of its users. This brings us to the second point of interest to us in Saussure’s theory, the internal relationship between the signs. The meaning of a language is according to Saussure ‘diacritical’, which means that meaning can only be created out of opposition between one signified and another, that the contrast and relation between the signifiers is what gives them meaning. The specific units of a language can only be discovered and defined in relational terms and thus a new idea or mental concept will always relate to a concept already cognitively present in the repertoire of the user. As a consequence new ideas must negotiate value and meaning with reference to a system of interrelated items, and the meaning of these ideas will be defined by their place in the system (Culler 1974: xxi). How can this approach help us understand the Dii-mission encounter? First of all by highlighting that in order for the Gospel to become Dii it had to negotiate a place in the already existing Dii cognitive universe. New ‘spiritual agents’, introduced by the mission’s preaching and teaching, had to be related to the already existing Dii cosmology and worldview. What did ‘God’ mean when the Dii first heard the term, and how did this concept negotiate its cognitive Dii meaning? Surely more according to a pre-existent notion of a distant force that provides what humans depends upon in times of crisis than a jealous protector-judge who watches every step we take. How did the new concept of a ‘saviour’ fit into Dii cosmology? Surely more as an important ancestor, whose powerful actions made him stronger than the other ancestors, than as a peace-loving moral intellectual who preached redemption from sin. More in terms of a spirit who could protect humans from evil, and especially the ultimate evil that was to follow judgement day, than as a dogmatic one-third of the theological concept of trinity. Religious conviction in the end must be about personal experiences within a given community. To the Dii who considered themselves Christians, the Christian message, as explained to them in Mbum and Dii terms, must gradually have made sense through negotiating a place in relation to the already existing ideas that described the transcendent

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reality which was an integral part of everyday Dii life. And through this negotiation key theological terms were translated into Dii, audibly and mentally, thus giving new meaning to the already existing ideas about how to manoeuvre through the material and spiritual experience called everyday life. How then did the Dii interpret these key theological terms? From my understanding of Saussure’s thoughts about construction and negotiation of meaning applied to the encounter between the Dii and the mission, key theological terms could be constructed from entirely different material. To quote one of Saussure’s explanations of the relationship between form and substance: Or if a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense, perhaps nothing of the old one remains. Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does constitute a purely material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, e.g. its location with respect to other streets. (Saussure 1974: 108–109)

Key theological terms became important because they played a role in that they were related to other ideas in the Dii cognitive consciousness. Freedom was an important term, both in the Dii and in the Mission discourse. The mental bricks that constituted the concept of emancipation were, however, quite different in the two cases. But the term was equally important in relation to other terms such as bondage, oppression, and slavery in all the varieties that these mental concepts were understood by the Dii and by the missionaries. The missionary ‘bricks’ in this construction were related to ‘heathendom’, and all that which the missionaries interpreted as beliefs in powers opposed to the good will of the biblical God. The Dii in a sense had to be freed from themselves, from their beliefs, attitudes and practices. The Dii ‘bricks’ were first of all related to physical oppression, forced labour, taxes, and, to some extent, sorcery. The Dii sought emancipation from physical oppressors who made daily life a struggle for survival, and spiritual powers that created fear and uncertainty. Other key terms in the Dii discourse were compassion and liberation from ignorance, two terms that were linked to the attitude of Norwegian missionaries. The newly arrived Whites were related to the existing mental image of other colonising agents, the French and the Fulbe, but their empathy and behaviour contrasted with this image, and new meaning related to one sign was created through opposition with related signs. The same analyses can be related to what

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in the Dii discourse was presented as liberation from ignorance. What was a missionary mental image of literacy, a path toward the scripture, toward salvation and civilisation, was a Dii mental image of increased self-esteem due to initiation into religious secrets and means to negotiate a better future with former oppressors. Conversion – Colonisation of African Consciousness? From the initial communication between Norwegian missionaries and the Dii followed what the missionaries reported home as ‘the first Dii converts’. What did religious conversion mean in the variety of encounters that included white missionaries and indigenous people in sub-Saharan Africa during European colonialism? Let us start with a brief presentation of some scholars who claim that the term ‘conversion’ is useless as an analytic category when describing religious change in Africa as a consequence of modern Christian mission.1 Their main argument seems to be that the indigenous population which came into contact with the message of the missionaries for a variety of reasons, European or African, were themselves unable to describe this experience as a religious conversion. It was the promoter of the message who described what happened as conversion, and this is interpreted as merely a sign of the uneven terms of their relationship. Peter Pels argues, based on his studies of a Catholic mission in Tanganyika, that the term ‘initiation’ is more useful than conversion because “it shifts our attention from an individual change of mind to an unequal yet reciprocal relationship.” (Pels 1999: 7). The focus of Pels is on the social nature of this reorientation where the initiated put their bodies at “the disposal of the initiators and are (in)vested with some of their powers in return.” (Pels 1999: 29). The Comaroffs are even more severe in their condemnation of the term conversion. They claim that the missionaries among the Tswana saw conversion as a rational choice among alternative, mutually exclusive faiths, a position not even close to how the Tswana themselves interpreted the message of the missionaries. The Comaroffs on the

1

The mere fact that both Pels and the Comaroffs constantly refer to the term conversion when describing this religious change, does, however, somewhat weaken their argument. The title of Comaroffs’ much debated sixth chapter is “Conversion and Conversation”.

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contrary claim that the Tswana “were not constrained by a sense of systematic theology or universal truth, by any meaningful idea of personalized professions of faith or by the notion that adherence to one religion excluded involvement in all others.” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 250). Hence, according to the Comaroffs’ interpretation of the inner life of the Tswana who joined the mission, religious change was not due to a personal conviction related to religious truth, but rather the result of a long conversation where the everyday forms of the colonising culture reshaped the ‘heathen’ world (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 248–251). One important lesson can be learned from Pels and Comaroff, namely the importance of the subject who experiences religious change on behalf of the promoter of the message. But to what extent can their analysis be of value when describing the changes experienced by the Dii people? Did Christianity among the Dii become an initiation into adulthood? This thought is interesting when related to the significance of teachings that followed male circumcision among the Dii, which initiated them into secrets, taboos, and behavioural patterns within Dii society. Christianity, with its focus on education and a new moral regime, prepared youth for new everyday practices, empowered by the practical knowledge of the missionaries. But at the same time Christianity represented something radically new, a transgression of the limits of social behaviour into which the Dii had first been initiated.2 The secrets of religion were revealed to everyone, and with time it became clear that age and gender did not restrict this message. Even if the majority of first generation Christians consisted of young men, the women soon joined, and became leading figures in the expansion of the church. Pels’ ideas of initiation thus describe only to a limited extent the experiences of Protestant Christians in northern Cameroon. Then what about the Comaroffs’ critique of the term ‘conversion’ related to the situation among the Dii? Before answering this question their definition of the term needs further clarification. Instead of relating their discussion to the more general ongoing academic debate on conversion in Africa, the Comaroffs tend to read into the term the

2

I do agree with Laburthe-Tolra who underscores the difference between conversion and initiation by pointing to the fact that whereas initiation is a public confirmation of traditional practices, conversion to Christianity and adoption of a Christian liturgy, at least publicly, is a denial of traditional religion (Laburthe-Tolra 1999: 478).

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narrow meaning of the Nonconformist missionaries under study. Hence, their conclusion is that [M]odern Protestant conversion is itself an ideologically saturated construct. Framed in the imagery of reason and the reflective self, it is a metonym for a moral economy, representing personal conviction as a form of resource allocation that echoes, on the spiritual plane, the material economics of the marketplace. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 251)

As already outlined in chapter three the analysis of missionaries’ use of Scripture showed that Norwegian missionaries never interpreted conversion to be a sudden rupture with the past like Paul’s Damascus experience. Their image of conversion was almost exclusively that of growth, of the seed that is planted in the African soil, and one is tempted to wonder what kind of plants they expected as results, whether it was the biblical grape, the Norwegian apple, or the African mango. The Comaroffs constantly refer to the missionaries as ‘colonial evangelists’ who, when their preaching failed to produce believers, put even more effort into their civilising mission, and who, through taking control over space and speech, shaped the long conversation in which the Tswana slowly imitated the rites of the churchmen. The missionaries thus did not occupy and colonise a territory, but they colonised Tswana consciousness. Does this picture from South Africa reflect the relationship between the Dii and Norwegian missionaries in Cameroon? It is obvious that the Norwegian mission also was one of civilisation, an attempt to bring modernity, the way they apprehended it, to uncivilised Africans. But the encounter between the Dii and Norwegians avoided to a large extent the uneven terms of the conversation the Comaroffs describe. Norwegian missionaries faced three opponents who, according to the Comaroffs’ definition, must be regarded as colonial opponents (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 19–28); the Fulbe, the French Catholics, and the French colonial administration. These represent four colonising powers which, by physical or mental occupation sought to influence the Dii. This competition gave the Dii hard currency which they used to negotiate better terms in what were, after all, uneven terms in a negotiation over the Dii future. The Dii used this power to influence the content of the Protestant school, by forcing the missionaries to teach French, and to send them better qualified teachers. Even if the vernacular language of the school and the first Bible translation was in Mbum, a language chosen by the mission since it was relatively well understood on the plain,

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the preaching of the Gospel was soon to be in the Dii language. This was due to the large number of Dii catechists who were educated and employed among the Dii, and due to the weak presence of Norwegian missionaries on the plain. As a consequence, the Dii themselves, not the missionaries, translated the Christian message into their own language. The placing of the mission station also followed Dii priorities, as the mission’s strategy changed according to the way they were received, in this particular case the hostility they encountered in Ngaouyanga and the active positive lobbying of the Mbé chief. Was Norwegian mission among the Dii still ‘colonisation’ of Dii consciousness? First of all this question depends on the definition according to which one describes colonisation. If the Comaroffs’ wide definition of the term continues to influence future academic discussion, any external person interacting with ‘the natives’ risks being described as an ‘agent of empire’. The major problem with this approach is probably the emotional presuppositions connected to the term itself, and the danger is that any fruitful discussion between academic milieux of former ‘colonised’ and ‘colonisers’ will be stranded. However, at its best the Comaroffs’ 14 page definition of colonisation can enlarge the debate, describing colonialism as an encounter and an experiment that was the result of several specific historical events and an encounter which engendered unpredictable results (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997: 15–29). Due to the negative connotations related to the term I still hesitate to call the Norwegian-Dii encounter ‘colonisation of the Dii mind’. The missionaries’ presence radically changed the Dii practical and mental approach towards reality. Temporal changes, the disrupted rhythm of everyday life, was due to missionary influence. But if the tune changed the rhythm was unchangeably Dii, unchangeably African. And the term ‘colonisation’ to some extent inevitably designates some kind of imprisonment. Due to their strong hand in negotiations, due to their freedom to accept only bits and pieces of the missionaries’ spiritual and practical empowerment, it is difficult to argue that the Dii became prisoners of the Norwegian missionaries’ mental, practical, or moral regime. If ‘colonisation of consciousness’ so far is disqualified as an appropriate term to describe the Dii movement towards the Christian religion, how can the ‘sociology of conversion’ be adequately described? Philippe Laburthe-Tolra (1999) points in his extensive study of the Beti in southern Cameroon to several points of interest to this discussion. LaburtheTolra’s main point is that conversion under colonial rule had to do with rationality. He is careful not to use the term in a reductionist manner,

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but argues in favour of a use of the term that includes not only material, but also moral and spiritual aspects of rationality (Laburthe-Tolra 1999: 474). Aware of the important material impact of the colonial project in Cameroon, and conscious as to the civilising aspect of the Catholic mission among the Beti, Laburthe-Tolra still points to conversion as a calculated choice made by the young Beti. This choice was based on several contextual conditions; the Whites became a guarantee against the threat of slave-raids from the north, the colonial administration secured trade, and the mission offered education as a path towards ‘modernity’, not unlike the situation the Dii faced further north a few decades later. But instead of portraying this social drama as ‘colonisation of Beti consciousness’ Laburthe-Tolra shows that psychology of conversion in a colonial setting is dependent on the psychology of colonisation. The white man played a leading role in the play, and the Beti were strongly motivated by the material strength of this actor, but the drama could have had several possible endings, it was not a socially determined move in history. The Beti made, according to LaburtheTolra, conscious choices as to the role they chose to play. Yet another element is central to Laburthe-Tolra’s analysis, what he calls “des facteurs proprement religieux” (Laburthe-Tolra 1999: 472, 481). Inspired by Weber’s analysis of religious change, Laburthe-Tolra leaves important space for a transcendent element that must have motivated the young Beti in their rapid conversion to Christianity, and even if his study leaves much to be desired when it comes to the content of this transcendent element of religious change, it can serve as a bridge to the next part of this chapter. Conversion – Change in Dii Plausibility Structure? Having commented upon the social and material aspect of conversion, we will in the following move on to what I consider the nucleus of religious change – the way groups and individuals relate to “the realm of the world” (Landau 1995) in a spiritual or transcendent manner. As described by Peel (2000: 8–9): Of the various interwoven narratives that we have been considering, that of local religious change has to be placed at the core. In spatial terms, this is the site of the action: it is where mission does or does not make a difference, it is where colonialism and capitalism do or do not produce any concrete effects. Theoretically, religion too has to be at the center of the

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picture: if it is not, then any study of the social influence of missionaries runs the risk of reading like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

Marc Spindler makes a pertinent remark when he points to the fact that “conversion has increasingly become a field of research for social and cultural anthropology and for general history, whereas missiologists are generally busy with other urgent matters.” (Spindler 1997: 293). The most important questions related to religious conversion are still to be discussed, and where missiology and church history once were the only players on the field, the social sciences now dominates, and with what result? Spindler reminds us that the social sciences’ approach to the ‘sociology of conversion’ first of all has been to point to the benefits of conversion, be it social or material, what the individual so to speak ‘gain’ by joining a new religious movement. The problem of neglecting a transcendent reality is that the social sciences miss important aspects connected to the change of identity that occur within the subject of a religious conversion (Spindler 2003: 72). It is true that the Dii at first considered the message of white missionaries and African catechists as games and simple amusement. But it is equally true that my informants gradually interpreted the words and the actions of missionaries to be of fundamental meaning to their own experience of life-as-lived. And it is my contention that Dii traditional religion, even if it cannot be described as a closed dogmatic system of belief, was a clearly defined set of strategies used to control the universe and create meaning and order in everyday life. These strategies, manifested through the search, in various ways, for blessing and protection, what Thomas and Luneau (2004) calls the quest for certitude, leads us towards Peter Berger’s theory of the practice of religion as based on a certain plausibility structure (Berger 1969). Although an agnostic theory, the importance of the theory for our purpose resides in the stress it puts upon the historical importance of religion in the human project of world-construction and world-maintenance. Religion is viewed by Berger as a sacred cosmos, inhabited by mysterious and awesome power, which is other than humans and yet related to us in order to create an ultimately meaningful order (Berger 1969: 25–26). No matter how open the Dii were towards influence from other groups in spiritual matters, it is clear that their vision of the world was related to an overall plausibility structure that explained the whereabouts of the Dii and their relation to a clearly defined set of ancestors and divinities. And that the elements which were considered sacred, like the altar

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of the gbaa and the circumcision knives, secured a ‘right’ relationship with the sacred, which on a deeper level was opposed to chaos, hence the danger of being “abandoned on the edge of the abyss of meaninglessness.” (Berger 1969: 26–27). The Dii rituals were thus performed collectively in order for these legitimate formulas to be repeated and remembered by those relating to the Dii plausibility structure. Daily sacrifices were not theology, and the sharing of a small piece of the meal with the ancestors was not a dogmatic ritual performance. But everyday practical activities were embedded with sacred meaning of coherence and order, what we might call a religious paradigm of Dii everyday experiences. This is the paradigm of which the boundaries were maintained and secured by religious specialists, the d–̧ñ naa, the blacksmiths, and the chiefs. It was, among other things, this paradigm that was challenged when the Norwegian missionaries arrived among the Dii and started their strange sermons about the one God who through his son would put an end to all sacrifices, to all the reality-maintaining efforts of the Dii religious specialists. It is obvious, as commented upon by the Comaroffs, that such speech alone would draw few adherents towards a new plausibility structure. But the Word, followed by actions that witnessed to the relevance of the new message made it an interesting message for a new Dii generation looking for alternative answers in the “Age of Confusion” (Peel 2000: 230). Yet another point can be drawn from Peel’s study of the Yoruba, that the message of Norwegian and African missionaries clearly had ethical and metaphysical attraction that coloured and gave meaning to the practical actions. If the practical actions helped to empower the Dii materially, a most natural conclusion to be drawn was that the message could also empower them spiritually. Added to this, and underscored through his narrative approach to the theme, Peel mentions the importance of the long durée of the Christian world-religion (Peel 2000: 9).3 Behind what was clothed as a European civilising mission were hidden thousands of years of wisdom which showed how people had related to the sacred through generations, and had constructed plausibility structures different from those of the Dii. If we remain for a moment with this image and agree, to some extent, 3

I interpret Peel’s use of the long durée as associated with the annales school of Marc Bloch and Luien Fébvre, who through the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale influenced a whole generation of historians in terms of using ‘mental history’ as a methodological approach. For a very short introduction see (Neumann 2002: 24–25).

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with Berger that religious practice is socially constructed, several interesting questions are raised. The civilising mission of the Norwegians was thus based on a specific Norwegian-Lutheran influenced plausibility structure, necessarily quite different from, for example, a Jewish-Greek plausibility structure dating two thousand years. Which structure did the Dii relate to? It is again obvious that the technology and the power of Norwegian missionary discourse attracted many potential converts. But we may step out of our historical context for a moment, and try to picture a contemporary Dii farmer. He is living in a hut quite familiar to that of his grandfather, cultivating the field more or less like his grandfather, without any motorised vehicle or electricity in sight, and he is telling his children about the Light brought by missionaries. This scene makes one wonder. It might tell us that a message related to the ultimate and uniquely meaningful order of existence had been communicated, and not simply that of European civilisation which followed the enlightenment. So what about Dii conversion, was it a radical break with the past, a sudden denial of the traditions of the ancestors? Based on missionaries’ focus on conversion as a slow and steady growth,4 and on interviews with my informants who all expressed the meaning of Christianity as a gradual process in their lives where the biblical narrative slowly changed their approach towards everyday life, there is little evidence of cognitive or emotional revolution. Conversion among the Dii was not a total rejection of the past, but a spiritual and practical reorientation towards a different future. Radically new elements in the Christian faith, such as the introduction of a personal saviour and a clearly defined hereafter, might indicate a new paradigm with a clearer separation between the immanent and the transcendent than was the case within Dii traditional religion. The theoretical enlightenment-inspired content of the schools, and the missionaries’ attempt to rationalise sickness,

4 The big difference in approach between the Nonconformist missionaries in the Comaroffs’ study and the Norwegian missionaries among the Dii might be explained by a variety of arguments. The most evident is the time span, since the Comaroffs’ sources date from 1850 onwards. Another element might be the education and the experience of the missionaries. Whereas the Comaroffs repeatedly refer to the poor theological training of the British missionaries, the majority of the Norwegian male missionaries were trained missionary-pastors, and the women had followed a minimum of one year missionary training at the Misjonsskolen for kvinner. In addition the superintendent of the Norwegian mission, Halfdan Endresen, had spent eight years in Madagascar as a missionary before coming to Cameroon.

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might also have led in the direction of transference into another world. These were real and radical changes which influenced the everyday life of the Dii who sought contact with the mission, both materially and spiritually. This variety of conflicting changes was, however, as indicated by Terence Ranger (1972) and Elizabeth Isichei (1970) met with a number of different strategies in order for the Dii to cope with seemingly incommensurable paradigms. To what extent Christianity and Dii traditional religion should be interpreted as such will be the theme of the last section of this chapter. But before we arrive at a conclusion, I will try to sum up several points which describe the gradual Dii movement, materially and spiritually, towards Christianity: the Dii conversion, if you like. The Dii Path towards Conversion In the following I will introduce what I have called ‘the Dii path towards conversion’ in order to describe why some Dii chose to call themselves Christians as a consequence of the Dii-mission encounter. And after all, maybe Peel is right when saying that self-presentation is the only workable definition for religious conversion (Peel 2000: 216). By now it should be unnecessary to repeat that I consider conversion to be a process of religious change taking place over time, often a considerable amount of time. I also take conversion to be a dialectic process where social changes always play an important role, but where individuals, as agents of change can initiate, accelerate, restrain, or even reverse the forces of change. This part of the study is thus an attempt to sum up the fact that both material and spiritual aspects of reality move man towards religious affiliation,5 and in the following I have located four essential marks on the path that moved the Dii towards Christianity; crisis, context, translatability, and attitude. The first two marks focus on macro changes in society, and point to the material aspect of religious change. Crisis and context are thus

5 It should also be noted that conversion, being simultaneously an individual and a community process, is always connected to limited groups of a population. So if the Norwegian missionaries considered the fact that an average of fifteen to twenty percent of the Dii population went to church each Sunday on the plain in 1956 a success, it must be noted that eighty percent had no interest in what was going on inside the church building.

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analytic categories which include resource distribution, political independence, and colonialism in the analysis of the Dii movement towards the moral economy of Norwegian missionaries. But this explanation will never be sufficient when analysing religious change in Africa. The next two marks on the path therefore focus on changes on the individual level, where face to face encounters created personal relations which affected ideas related to the ultimate meaning of existence. This is where translatability, the contextual presentation and adaptation of a new and foreign message and new and foreign practices, becomes an important element in religious change. And this is where attitude, mood, and empathy are evaluated and either lead to rejection or lead to closer personal relations with the advocates of the new message, and the content of the message itself. There is no ‘either-or’ between these marks, all the four elements constantly interact, and together they formed the Dii path towards Christianity. Crisis The first mark on the Dii path is related to the fact that some kind of crisis usually precedes conversion, a fact that was accounted for in chapter two. What was referred to as a crisis in chapter five was the result of the century long Age of Confusion that the Dii experienced as a consequence of political changes in Adamaoua during the 19th and early 20th century. It is, however, important to note that such a feeling of crisis can both precede contact with the proselytiser and it can be a consequence of interaction with the advocates of a new faith. In the Dii case, most available sources point in the direction of interpreting the period prior to the arrival of Norwegian missionaries as one of profound changes which limited Dii ability to master their own future. The feeling of being marginalised opened the doors to agents that could be seen as allies in a constant struggle for independence, resources, and liberty. But the arrival of Norwegian schools, viewed by many chiefs as a vehicle towards material progress, by challenging Dii religious authority actually increased the level of crisis within Dii society. What some parts of the population experienced as the solution to the crises, a combination of material and spiritual empowerment through the message of the Bible, was by others interpreted as a disaster for the guardians of Dii traditions. The lack of potency to respond to the Fulbe and French spatial colonisation, their control over corpus and crops, was interpreted by the young generation as a lack of spiritual

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strength in Dii tradition. When my informants as youths made fun of traditional rites and asked whether the soil was capable of speaking it was a direct comparison between traditional media and scriptural religions, Islam and Christianity. It was a change of roles that enabled the youth to amuse themselves at the expense of the parent generation. And since Islam was partially responsible for the migration away from the Dii homeland and reduced Dii self-esteem, it was the Bible, and not the Koran that was the most obvious guide out of the crisis. Context Conversion takes place within a dynamic context. This context encompasses a vast panorama of conflicting, confluent, and dialectic factors that both facilitate and repress the process of conversion. When seen from a broad perspective, conversion is part of a human drama that spans historical eras and both shapes and is shaped by geographical expansion and contraction. Context embraces an overall matrix in which the force field of people, events, experiences, and institutions operate on conversion. (Rambo 1993: 20)

Initial conversion to Christianity among the Dii took place in a very specific context. The advocates, the Norwegian missionaries, were rooted in a specific historical and ideological setting, and arrived in Cameroon in a colonial setting equally specific. The Comaroffs, Peel, and others have showed us at great length how the intricate and complex relationship between missionaries as, on the one hand individually devoted idealistic bearers of an ancient, if not to say eternal, message, and on the other hand, as colonising agents representing an enlightened Europe on a dark continent, influenced the work of Christian mission. In addition this study has underscored the complex, and at times tense, relationship between the European actors, the Protestants, the Catholics and the French administration. Prior to this conglomerate of foreign influence, the Dii had already experienced a century long expansion of Fulbe supremacy that politically, economically, and spiritually affected their daily activities. The result of this massive foreign influence was that the Dii ability to construct a stronghold that secured the survival of Dii traditions, a Dii way of life, was radically reduced. The Dii had been marginalised, they had been disconnected from the sources that empowered life materially and symbolically, and hence more open for alternative sources of power. The fact that key incidents where the missionaries were involved, regardless of the actual intention or results of these actions, were turned into myth-like stories of resistance

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highlights the importance of missionary interference within a specific historical-political context. Translatability The third element related to the Dii movement towards Christianity is the concept of translatability. If a message is to be understood and adopted into a new context it has to be translated. Without translation into context, real communication is unthinkable per se. We have already noted that the Norwegian missionaries did not speak the Dii language, nor did the first African teachers and catechists. Since the very beginning the missionaries struggled with translating the Christian message into the Mbum language, and Christianity was hence communicated with more or less success through Mbum among the Dii.6 I find it important to balance the effort of the missionaries in this field. From the Comaroffs on one extreme, who accuse the missionaries of colonising the language of the Tswana through poor ideological translation (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991),7 to Sanneh on the other, who puts much effort into presenting missionaries as vernacular agents who thus helped Africans become modernising agents (Sanneh 1989: 172–173). Among the Dii during this period, the vernacular agents were the Dii themselves, and conversion depended on their apprehension of the message and the way it was related to their context. I would argue that conversion is dependent on the translation of key theological terms that communicate intra-contextually. Far more than being a question of linguistics it is a question of cognition. Far more than being a question of understanding it is a question of practice. Among the key theological terms that were given a specific Dii meaning, rather different from the missionary intentions was, freedom. It was not related to diabolic sorcery or physical chains, but it was related to liberation from ignorance, from the oppression of possibilities, it was turned into a theological term of physical, moral, and spiritual self-esteem. The same could be said for the doceur the ‘gentleness’, attributed to the missionaries. Far from being interpreted as an act of pity, it became a

6 Sverre Fløttum, a devoted linguist, was responsible for the translation of the Bible into the Mbum language. One French archive source describes Fløttum by claiming that the success of an evangelisation tour was related to whether or not he had learned a new Mbum-word, not if any new souls had been saved . . . 7 Brian Stanley strongly criticise the Comaroffs on this point (Stanley 2003).

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theological notion of empathy and compassion, with roots in a biblical notion of ‘loving your next of kin’, but given specific content where the missionaries, black and white, showed a different attitude, based on moral conviction, than the other colonising powers. Attitude The last mark on the Dii path is related to the actual encounter between the mission and the Dii. It all started with a white person coming to ask questions, like white men for the last thirty years had come and gone. But the actions that followed this initial encounter were to colour the relationship between the Dii and the mission for years to come. My informants constantly emphasized the attitude of the first missionaries as opposed to the attitude of the Fulbe and the colonial administration. Included in this focus on attitude is the notion of accessibility, the fact that the missionaries, unlike the Fulbe and Dii religious elite, did not hide the secrets of religion. On the contrary they put much effort into giving everyone equal opportunity in terms of knowledge related to the decoding of the secret message. Communicating a message depends on mode, attitude and reliability. Not one single Norwegian missionary spoke the Dii language, and thus their abilities to communicate through actions became increasingly important. Stories about the first missionaries have turned into narratives about empathy and liberation, and they obviously made a good first impression. In addition, if, when reading the missionary reports, one is able to see through the black and white religious dichotomy and the moral condemnation of the civilising mission discourse, Norwegian missionaries were actually quite flexible. This flexibility was most visible through their decision to move the mission station from Ngaouyanga to Mbé. When rejection in one village was a realised fact, the tent pegs were loosened, and new direction was set towards the chief who welcomed them. The lack of mission economic power and material strength, often commented upon in the reports of the French administration, forced missionaries to negotiate the terms of their relationship with the Dii. It took for example 15 years of presence among the Dii (and 24 years of presence on the field) to build a mission station among the people who were the hope and inspiration of early missionary work in the Adamaoua. But this lack of personnel forced the mission to make young Dii pupils, far from ready in the missionaries’ eyes, responsible for schools and congregations among their own people, and this was

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interpreted as a sign of confidence by the Dii. Sometimes the result was a catastrophe, but more often than not these young men, and later women, became the pillars of Dii Christianity who soon made the encounter with Christianity a vernacular experience for most Dii. Conservation – African Mental Maps of the Universe Having looked into the complexity of intercultural communication of the Christian message between ‘enlightened’ Europeans and ‘traditional’ Africans, and having drawn a tentative conclusion as regards conversion among the Dii, the time has come to review some of the things which did not change among the Dii. And I agree with Andrew Walls when he claims that any attempt to survey the changes which Christianity worked in Africa following the arrival of the modern mission era must pose the following question: What happened to traditional religions in Africa? (Walls 2002: 119). Only a thorough discussion of the relationship between old religious practices and new beliefs can give insight into the complicated nature of religious conversion. Walls has argued elsewhere that conversion in Africa more than being about replacement was about transformation. Similarly, conversion implies the use of existing structures, the “turning” of those structures to new directions, the application of new material and standards to a system of thought and conduct already in place and functioning. It is not about substitution, the replacement of something old by something new, but about transformation, the turning of the already existing to new account. (Walls 1996: 28)

This takes us back to the preceding chapter where the emerging Dii Christianity was analysed according to the translatability of Christian concepts. It was argued that the future of Dii Christianity was shaped by the African past, that the image of a creator and a sustainer God, however vague, was shaped in the blending together of two transcendent narratives. It was also argued that there was no sharp break in African understandings of relationship with the transcendent world (Okorocha 1987: 294; Walls 2002: 120). Further, it was argued that Christianity to some extent inherited what Walls calls “the old goals of religion” (Walls 2002: 122), what he locates first of all as the association with protection and power. How was this visible in the Dii context? It was visible, first of all, through the theological approach already mentioned, through the focus on blessings and protection which the Christian

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religion provided in the eyes of the Dii; through the way in which freedom became a theological concept based on the questions asked by traditional Dii religion; through the way sacrifices to the gbaa and circumcision were read into the biblical narrative, and thus labelled old practices in transition; transformation more than substitution, continuity rather than radical change. But conservation was also linked to practical matters. In terms of health work, the mission experienced only limited success. Missionaries and my informants expressed that people were reluctant to accept Western medicine. And if it was accepted it was merely as a supplement, as one remedy among others in a mental universe related to diseases that were light-years away from the Norwegian enlightened medical worldview which included only a touch of religious interpretation according to traditional Lutheran Christianity. Even if Jesus was, as already mentioned, sovereign in the after-life department, his power was competing with many others in this-life. And even if a new moral regime was introduced, it was not necessarily accepted in terms of monogamy, restrictions related to alcoholic drinks, and traditional circumcision. Many Christians felt that circumcision at the hospital was void of meaning, and in areas where mission influence was strong, children were sent to more remote areas for a traditional circumcision. Many Dii differed from the missionaries in the view of circumcision and argued that the rite was merely tradition, not religion (Muller 2000).8 The same sense of conservation applied to the celebration of the ecclesiastical year and Christian worship. Even though new religious feasts like Christmas and Easter were introduced, the most important religious celebration was Harvest Festival, a transformation of the traditional harvest-feast that was celebrated in order to sacrifice the first ripe grains to Tayñii and to the ancestors. From now on it was the Christian God, through the practical organisation of the church, which received the first harvest. Some missionaries fought a short battle against the practical form of Christian celebration expressed by the Dii, but they soon had to give in, discouraged as they were by the fact that Africans did not seem to appreciate the Norwegian ‘psalm-treasure’. Other missionaries encouraged the dancing and drumming of the Dii even if such behaviour in the church was unthinkable in Lutheran congregations in Norway before

8

Interview informant 15.

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and following the Second World War. Regardless of missionary reactions, Dii Christianity conserved many aspects of cultural expression faced with a new religious content. We have earlier analysed these changes according to Hiebert’s worldview theory. Walls calls these changes application of the material from the Christian tradition to already existing African maps of the universe.9 It is true (. . .) that the relationships between the components of those maps – God, local divinities, ancestors, objects of power – have changed, and changed radically, as a result of the Christian impact; but as components in understanding the world and society, they remain in one guise or another. In order to have effect in Africa, the Christian tradition has thus had to be applied to these preexisting components; it has been placed on the available maps of the universe, and interpreted within existing categories. (Walls 2002: 122)

When my informants referred to long discussions in the newly established churches related to the practice of sorcery, even among Christians,10 it is but one example of how new Christians tried to establish strategies to face what was seen as reality according to an African map of the universe. No white missionary could convince the Dii that sorcerers or other spiritual dangers simply ceased to exist as a result of the arrival of Christianity. But missionaries, and the African missionaries in particular, could share biblical knowledge which the Dii used in creating strategies related to protection against these powers. This discussion about translatability, and also about the limits of the translatability of the Christian message among the Dii, raises fundamentally important questions related to communication between different cultural approaches towards reality. If the mission-African encounter shared no common cognitive and spiritual ground, if the missionaries were unable to communicate what they saw as religious truth in a relatively coherent way to the Africans they met, then the Comaroffs are right. Then mission in Africa, among the Tswana, the

9 Walls’ use of “available maps of the universe” (what I have preferred to call African mental maps), makes me think of the mappa mundi of the Middle Ages where kings drew imaginative maps of the physical world. Which again might give some weight to Berger and Luckmann’s ideas about reality as socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann 1967), or at least underscore that reality-construction is dependent on the limited knowledge of the physical world which restricts any historical period, and the priorities which different societies give to this-worldly and spiritual knowledge. 10 Interviews informant 4; informant 8.

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Yoruba, and the Dii, was, in fact, colonisation of consciousness. Then mission was about imitation only. If, however, the message of the missionaries, behind the civilising mask, communicated common spiritual experiences faced with some kind of ultimate reality, then mission was also something else. It might to some extent have been colonisation of consciousness, and it was always civilising, but more important is that in the Dii case this encounter was also the sharing of a message which the Dii had the moral and practical resources to either accept or reject. Dii consciousness was never that of a tabula rasa which through material practices gradually became colonised or missionised. It was rather an autonomous African consciousness that through a well-deliberated selection of spiritually and materially relevant elements changed its course due to changing times. It is my contention that the reason why the Dii accepted the establishing of mission work in villages on the Dii-plain was due to what the Dii interpreted as a dual communication from the missionaries, Europeans as well as Africans. It was first of all about physical liberation and material empowerment. But secondly, and more important historically, this physical liberation and material empowerment were interpreted as echoes of a cry for freedom that gave resonance in their own experiences in transcendental matters. This echo was vague, disturbed by the loud civilising enterprise and the way it was communicated through its strong and convincing media. But it was gradually recognised as an alternative manner of relating to life-as-experienced, as a message that partly answered questions that the Dii had already asked, and a common ground for understanding did thus exist. Upon this resonance did the Dii start the historical construction of a church. At first it was a reflection of Norwegian missionary ideas and practices. But it gradually became indigenous in terms of being Dii Christians who asked local questions and produced local answers with a local rhythm in a local language.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The Dii people have been presented in this study as an acephalous people, who in the early 19th century were reduced to vassals under the expanding Muslim Fulbe lamido in Rey-Bouba. Following what many Dii experienced as being oppressed by Baba Ray, several villages moved south and engaged in a more peaceful relationship with the Mbum and the Fulbe lamido in Ngaoundéré. With time, the Dii experienced, however, that both the lamido in Ngaoundéré and the German and French colonial administration took advantage of the Dii in terms of taxes and forced labour. Throughout this period the Dii continued to practise what I have called Dii traditional religion, a dynamic system of religious beliefs and practices in constant transformation due to spatial separation from the homeland and influence from the practices of other ethnic groups. Only people engaged in trade and a few village chiefs seem to have called themselves Muslims by imitating Fulbe prayers and dress when Norwegian missionaries arrived in the early second half of the 20th century. Since the Dii, contrary to many other ethnic groups in the region, engaged in a lasting relationship with the Norwegian mission, they must have considered the missionaries as useful allies in the power struggle in which they were already were engaged. The Dii discourse presents the mission as empowerment according to the following arguments: First of all literacy was interpreted as empowerment in terms of enabling the Dii to communicate with the colonial administration and in terms of mastering the skills of the Whites and of the Fulbe. The advantage for the Dii was increased self-esteem and increased involvement in political decisions that concerned their own future. Secondly the Dii also experienced empowerment in terms of physical liberation from taxes to the Fulbe in general, and reduced forced labour for the pupils in particular. Even if taxes were not entirely abandoned, the Dii interpreted missionary presence as a help to reduced tax burdens, and as a potential for improved living conditions as opposed to a sense of being exploited and disrespected by the Fulbe and the colonial administration. Thirdly the missionaries were accepted because they represented access to a world religion, and through literacy access to what were considered secrets in both Islam and traditional religion. Even if certain

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groups soon formed a new Christian elite, far from open to everyone, Christianity was in principal an open door to new spiritual insight and new social positions. The Dii discourse also shows that a Christian narrative had entered the Dii narrative and become part of the stories told around the fire at night in order to explain Dii history to future generations. In these stories Norwegian missionaries had become heroic liberators who fought for the Dii cause against the Fulbe and the colonial administration. It has also been shown that these stories served a purpose as legitimation for leaving behind and reinterpreting the tradition of the ancestors. It is, however, not to be forgotten that this development was a tradeoff. Old traditions and rituals were left behind by the entrepreneurs of Dii Christianity, and a new moral mission-regime had to be accepted, at least for those who sought to be employed by, or participate in, mission activities, and old authorities were disrespected by Dii youth. Norwegian missionaries arrived in Cameroon as representatives of a world-wide modern mission movement. The economic dominance of the Western world inspired lay Protestant Christians to spread not only the message of colonialism and capitalism, but also the Gospel to the end of the world. And this feeling of enlightenment-superiority influenced also the Norwegian missionary discourse. Analyses of twenty-six years of missionary writings have revealed that the path towards Christianity was seen as liberation from spiritual and social oppression, ignorance, sickness, and destructive behaviour. The Norwegians thus not only initiated an evangelising mission, it was to a large extent also a civilising mission. But the same writings also reveal that conversion was never interpreted as a divine lightning about to strike those who engaged in the Dii-mission encounter. Conversion was regarded as liberation and growth, a process where the indigenous population had to listen, read, live, and learn in order to discover the truth about God’s intention with his creation. The missionary writings also reveal that this was a process which changed (some of ) them. Presentation of the Gospel became negotiation over terms of the encounter, in terms of language, dogmatics, ethics, practice, and space. The lack of missionary resources, money and personnel, required them to depend on local leadership, and required them as well to engage in compromises rather far from their initial intentions. In terms of mission schools the local population influenced both the languages to be taught and the level of education, and in terms of space, the missionaries were drawn into the Dii chief ’s political project of making Mbé the ‘capital’ of the Dii-plain.

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But in order not to miss the central plot of the play, what brought the Dii and the missionaries together, the concluding remarks should not end here. The Dii-mission encounter was inevitably about material and symbolic empowerment, and it was definitively a civilising project, but the motivation behind this empowering and civilising encounter coloured it and shaped it from beginning to end. Missionaries sought to convince the Dii that they had seen glimpses of heaven, and that they wanted to share this insight with future brothers and sisters in the faith. They sought to convince the Dii that much in traditional Dii belief and practice was wrong according to the Bible, and that they were invited to read about these ‘hidden truths’ in Scripture. The fact that missionary preaching was followed by actions which corresponded at least to some extent with the message, caught the attention of the first Dii pupils. And these pupils were gradually convinced that the contact they nurtured with the vital forces of existence could be expressed through a different medium, easier to gain direct access to, as a consequence of missionary teachings. The Dii youth sought a way out of an unsatisfactory socio-political situation, and religion, through means of protections and blessings, was not isolated from this general picture. The first Dii Christians interpreted material empowerment through missionary presence also as spiritual empowerment through the message of the Bible. But the Dii never simply imitated Lutheran Christianity as practised by the missionaries. Through practical negotiations, the Dii came to practise Christianity according to Dii needs and Dii expectations, according to African perceptions of reality and African mental maps of the cosmic universe. I have introduced the image of a path in order to understand the Dii movement towards conversion, and I understand crisis, context, translatability, and attitude to be marks which made up this Dii path towards Christianity. But as anyone having travelled in Africa is well aware of, a decent path might turn into a muddy mess during the rainy season. And a seasonal and situational interplay between conversion and conservation came to colour the Christianity that was adapted, and continues to be adapted to everyday life on African soil by the Dii people in northern Cameroon.

APPENDIX A: THE FIRST DII CHURCH EMPLOYEES1 The First Catechists 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Bobbo Paul, Mbé 1937 Bobbo Etienne, Tagboum 1937 Abdou Daniel, Leunda 1938 Oumarou André, Karba-Kerwa 1938 Dourmani Belmont, Tagboum 1939 Bobbo Daniel, Karna Manga 1939 Mbarbela Paul, Mayo Sala 1939 The First Evangelists

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Bobbo Etienne, Ngaouyanga 1952 Abdou Daniel, Mbé 1952 Maïdawa Thomas, Tagboum 1952 Moussa (Martin?), 19522 Dadi David, Mbé 1955 The First Pastors

1. Maïdawa Thomas, ordained in Mbé December 16, 1956. 2. Bobbo Etienne, ordained in Ngaoundéré November 10, 1957. 3. Abdou Daniel, ordained in Ngaoundéré November 10, 1957.

1 Appendix A and Appendix B are based on the investigations and personal memory of Siroma André as presented in Siroma (2004: 63–65). No records of the first Dii workers are to be found in the NMS Archives. 2 Maïdawa and Moussa are not mentioned in Siroma’s lists, but in Conference Report, Cameroon 1952, p. 44.

APPENDIX B: THE BIBLE-SCHOOL IN NGAOUYANGA (1950–1951) Teachers 1. Sverre Fløttum 2. Ingrid Flakk 3. Siroma André Students 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Moussa Martin Aoudou Joseph Maman Joël Laouda Yoko Anaï Simon Djidéré Gaston Mbarbé Daniel Wadjiri Jacques Adamou Simon Yongo de Yoko Djouldé Daniel Aina Tagboung Nanaoua Vourgnié Koulagna Paul

APPENDIX C: NORWEGIAN MISSIONARIES ON THE DII-PLAIN (1934–1960)3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Johannes Thrana, Ngaouyanga 1948 (construction) Ingrid Flakk, Ngaouyanga 1948–1951, Mbé 1952 Marta Lofthus, Ngaouyanga 1948–1949 Anne Marie and Sverre I. O. Fløttum, Ngaouyanga 1949–1951, Mbé 1951–1952 Inga Botnen, Ngaouyanga 1950–1951 Olav N. and Ragna Toft, Mbé 1951–1955 Solveig Bjøru, Mbé 1952–1955 Ragna and Paul G. Harr, Mbé 1955–1956 Karen Ulland, Mbé 1955–1958 Ada Kopstad, Mbé 1955–1957 Ingeborg Mosand, Mbé 1956–1957 Kristine and Odd Dankel, Mbé 1956–1959 Guri Sola, Mbé 1957–1960 . . . Helene and Bernt S. Bjaanes, Mbé 1959–1960 Henny Waala, Mbé 1958–1959 Gudrun and Sigurd E. Knudsen, Mbé 1959–1960 . . . Else Strand, Mbé 1959–1960 . . .

3 Conference Reports, Cameroon 1949–1961, NMS Archives, Kamerun, box 37, file 22, Torbjørg Heimstad (Manus 21).

APPENDIX D: STATISTICS, MISSION WORK ON THE DII-PLAIN (1934–1960)4

Baptised Church attendance Congregations Catechists/evangelists Schools Teachers Pupils Missionaries

Baptised Church attendance Congregations Catechists/evangelists Schools Teachers Pupils Patients Medical consultations Missionaries

Baptised Church attendance Congregations Catechists/evangelists

4

1935

1936

1937

1938

1945

1947

1948

6 259 6 2 6 7 102

5 633 10 2 10 11 246

2 320 11 4 11 12 97

1 225 11 3 11 7 58

14 326 7 1 6 6 93

13 605 14 3 14 12 205

16 530 13 2 12 12 195 2

1949

1950

1951

1952 1953

1954

1955

10 840 21 8 20 20 354

16 802 21 6 16 16 249 800 3000 3

32 850 23 9 19 19 245 800 3000 6

31 45 650 923 20 18 7 21 20 18 22 5 364 383 760 849 7000 1960 5 3

55 1647 18 21 20 8 382 1165 7922 3

45 1839 22 21 20 5 410 1799 9096 4

4

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

25 971 22 25

102 1129 21 22

81 1511 31 30

93 1655 31 27

92 1600 31 28

From 1935 to 1949 the statistics show the numbers from the Ngaoundéré district. If we compare the Ngaoundéré statistics with the statistics from the plain in 1950 (the first year with independent statistics from the plain), we see that Ngaoundéré has contributed with approximately one third of the numbers in each category.

statistics, mission work on the dii-plain (1934–1960) 215 (cont.)

Pastors Schools Teachers Pupils Patients Medical consultations Missionaries

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

1 21 7 515 2506 13008 4

1 21 10 687 2972 17045 4

1 27 11 705 3746 16475 4

1 27 12 407 5083 20191 5

1 –5 11 413 4840 17336 4

5 The 1960 statistics only mention 5 schools, which is the number of certified schools. The total number of schools on the plain is not mentioned.

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INDEX Abba (lamido) 49 Abbo Emanuel 162 Abdou Daniel 147, 163 Abwa, Daniel 48, 110 accessibility 16, 97–98, 114, 168, 202 acephalous 69, 136, 207 Adama (Moddibo) 35, 37, 40–41, 44 Adamaoua Plateau 6, 20, 28, 31, 34–38, 40–41, 46–48, 51, 58, 61, 72, 74–75, 83, 97–98, 102–103, 105, 108, 110, 119, 166, 199, 202 Province 28, 31 région 20–21, 149, 155 Adji Marie 157, 159–160 African Traditional Religion 72, 85, 98, 115–118, 120, 129, 131, 184 Agadez 39 agency 71–72, 114, 164 Age of Confusion 196, 199 Ahmadou Ahidjo 44, 81, 142 Aix-en-Provence 21 alcohol 87, 163, 174, 204 alcoholism 87 traditional beer 33, 123, 125–126 Alsace 61 altar 33, 45, 47, 115, 121, 123–126, 128, 195 American American continent 45 American Leprosy Mission 161 American Lutheran Sudan Mission 5, 84, 166 American Presbytarian Mission 54, 60 Aminatou Martine 172 amulet 168, 183 ancestor 30, 33, 77, 87, 98, 115, 118, 121–124, 126–132, 170, 172, 174, 180–181, 183, 187–188, 195–197, 204–205, 208 ancestral spirit (yóÕóÕb) 122, 125, 128, 130–132, 168, 172–173, 176 anthropology 1–3, 5, 17, 79, 117, 195 anthropological history 2 anthropologist 2–3, 5, 7, 17, 25–26, 32, 116–117

apostle-belt 62 Arabic 16, 96, 116 Aray 36 archival material Affaires Coloniales (AC) 21 Affaires Politiques (AP) 21 Affaires Politiques et Administratives (APA) 21, 156 Agence de France Outre-Mer (AGEFOM) 21 American archival material 4 Archives Nationales de Yaoundé (ANY) 21 Archives Nationales Section d’Outre-Mer (ANSOM) 21 French archival material 4, 20, 50–52, 66, 103, 110, 138, 155 NMS Mission Archives ix, 4, 18, 20, 111, 138–139, 143, 148 attitude 10, 22, 26–27, 44, 50–55, 60, 66, 81, 83–84, 93, 104–106, 114, 138–139, 155–156, 160, 185, 189, 198, 199, 202, 209 Atuba 62, 139 Azande 116 Babute 82 Badje 36 Bakke, Odd Magne 80 Baptist Baptist World Congress 55 English Baptist Missionary Society 45 German Baptist missionaries 55 Jamaican Baptist Society 59 London Baptist Mission 59 baraka 35 Barley, Nigel 177 belief 8–9, 17, 32, 42, 98, 115–116, 119–120, 129, 148, 165–167, 177–179, 183–184, 189, 195, 203, 207, 209 behaviour 2, 17, 22, 58, 79, 86, 88, 101, 110, 113, 155, 165–166, 174, 178–179, 183–184, 189, 191, 204 destructive behaviour 86–89, 208 Berger, Peter 195, 197 Bertoua 38

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Beti 193–194 Bible 5, 15, 59, 71, 74, 82–83, 93, 96–97, 99, 101, 153, 163, 167, 172–173, 177, 184, 192, 199–200, 209 Bible-school 131, 144, 150, 153, 156 biblical image 72–73 Bismarck 46 Bitek, Okot p’ 118 Bjøru, Solveig 157, 159 blacksmith (nañ) 31, 33, 69, 98, 123, 123–124, 128, 134, 196 blessing traditional blessing 98, 115, 123–126, 128, 131–132, 137, 168, 170, 174, 177, 195, 203, 209 Christian blessing 79, 170, 171, 180 Islamic blessing 43 Bobbo Etienne 101, 141, 147, 163 Bohnhoff, Lee 23, 28 bondage 74–76, 79, 189 Bornu 34, 38 Botnen, Inga 156–157 Bru 49–50 Bundang 37 Burke, Peter 2–3 Burnham, Philip 6, 98, 166 Burr, Vivian 14 Cairo 39, 116 Calabar 59 Cameroon ix, 1, 4, 7–8, 18–22, 27, 31, 34, 45–46, 48, 50, 54–55, 57, 59–61, 72–73, 75, 79–81, 83–84, 88, 101, 142, 145, 150, 152, 192, 194, 200, 208 canton 49, 50, 51, 53, 66–67, 80, 110, 114, 139 catechist 24, 63, 80, 82, 93–94, 96, 98, 100–102, 104, 110, 114, 138, 142–144, 146–148, 153, 157–160, 162–163, 172–175, 185, 193, 195, 201 catechumen 63, 160, 162 Catholics Catholic mission on the Dii-plain 27–28, 63–64, 68, 150, 164 French Catholics 27, 54, 61, 64 German Catholics 60–61 Catholic informant 27 Catholic school 84 Roman Catholic administration 28 chain 10, 76–77, 81, 135, 185, 201 Chamba 35 chaos 74, 76, 131–132, 176, 196 chapel 45

charms 45, 85 chef de canton 52, 65–66, 69, 111, 139, 153 chef de région 21, 49, 58, 66, 142, 155 chef de subdivision 21, 49, 58, 65 Christ 16, 79, 140, 173 Christensen, Thomas G. ix, 7 Christianity 6–7, 15–17, 24, 30, 34, 44, 59, 61, 63, 70, 72, 74–75, 77–82, 85, 88–90, 95, 97–99, 104, 106–107, 114, 116, 118, 153, 159, 161–162, 165–167, 169–171, 173–175, 177, 179–184, 191, 194, 197–201, 203, 205, 208, 209 African Christianity 1, 88 Dii Christianity 15, 137, 165, 168, 172, 176–177, 181, 203, 205, 208 Lutheran Christianity 204, 209 Protestant Christianity 20 church 1, 4, 7, 24, 26–27, 55–56, 59–60, 63, 67, 69–70, 79, 83, 87, 100–102, 138–139, 149, 159–165, 170, 172, 175, 181–182, 191, 204–206 church attendance 106, 149, 152, 154, 163, 175 church history 7, 195 church growth 60, 158–159, 163 Coptic church 16 Lutheran church 5, 26, 28, 31, 80, 83, 166 national church 61 Norwegian Zulu church 7 Protestant church 60 circumcision 33, 34, 69, 98, 100, 124, 126–129, 171–172, 181, 191, 204 circumciser 33, 69, 123–124, 126–128 knives of circumcision 33, 45, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 196 civilisation 48, 83–84, 190, 192 civilised 118 civilising mission 9, 48, 51, 57, 82, 85, 89, 180–181, 186, 192, 194, 196–197, 202, 206, 208–209 civilising aspect of conversion 87 état civil 86 European civilisation 197 lack of civilisation 79, 88 mission civilisatrise 54, 102, 158, 162 uncivilised Africans 192 Western civilisation 54 clerk 48, 59, 83, 92–93, 100–101, 104, 147, 157 colonisation 90, 190, 193–194, 199, 201

index British colonial administration 46, 49, 116 colonial Africa 15 colonial clerks 59, 83, 93, 100, 157 colonial culture 191 colonial evangelism 1, 7, 9, 192 colonial mission 90 colonial oppression 177 colonial period 15 colonial reports 52–53, 56 colonial rule 141, 185, 193 colonialism 7, 193–194, 199, 208 colonisation of consciousness 8–9, 90, 192–194, 206 colonised 76, 182, 193, 206 colonisers/colonialists 76, 136, 193 colonising agents 189, 200 European colonisation 30, 45, 190 fight for colonial goodwill 63–64, 68 French colonial administration 5, 18, 20–21, 27, 32, 48–57, 59, 61, 61–69, 75, 80, 86, 92–93, 97, 100, 102–104, 106–107, 109–115, 137–139, 141–143, 146–149, 151, 153, 155–156, 158, 175, 186, 192, 194, 202, 209 Fulbe colonising power 136 German colonial administration 5, 32, 46–51, 59–61, 104, 109, 115, 136–137, 207 postcolonial narrative 182 postcolonial studies 8 Comaroff, Jean and John 8–9, 176, 190–193, 196, 200–201, 205 communication 2, 9–12, 18–19, 33, 83, 123, 185–187, 190, 201, 203, 205–206 Conference Reports 4, 18, 20, 77, 87, 93, 112, 138–139 congregation 68, 88, 145–147, 149, 152, 155, 202, 204 Conrad, Joseph 76 consciousness 8, 9, 79, 166, 170, 185, 189–190, 192–194, 206 conservation 2, 17–18, 185, 203–204, 209 context 8, 11, 13–15, 74, 78–79, 116, 174, 185, 187, 194, 197–201, 203, 209 contextualisation 73–74 Corisco 60 conversion 2, 8, 14, 18–19, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 79, 81, 83–90, 94–95, 107, 169–170, 185, 190–195, 197–201, 203, 208–209 consequences of conversion 17

227

conversion to Islam 6, 44, 63, 183 Dii discourse on conversion 24, 26, 90–91, 104, 161, 177 Dii conversion 197–198 female path towards conversion 157–161, 169, 175 material aspect of conversion 194 missionary discourse on conversion 71, 79, 81, 174 modern protestant conversion 192 psychology of conversion 194 religious conversion 5, 6, 9, 25, 76, 90, 95, 185, 190, 195, 198, 203 social conversion 89 sociology of conversion 193, 195 stories of conversion 74 convert 20, 24, 37, 38, 41, 43–45, 56, 71–72, 75, 81, 85–86, 88, 154, 175, 190, 197 Corinthians 78 cosmology 115, 119, 129, 131–132, 188 couscous 33, 123, 126 Cox, Jeffrey 182 Crus, R. 58 crisis 32, 64, 67, 115, 129, 134, 137, 185, 188, 198–200, 209 crisis in Duru 64, 67 culture 3, 11, 17, 26, 28, 33, 42, 48, 73–75, 78, 88, 128, 143, 178–179, 191, 205 Christian culture 71 cultural background 11, 77, 89 cultural context 11, 74, 78–79 cultural encounter 2, 185 cultural filter 11, 186 cultural history 2–3 cultural practices 88, 115, 118 cultural studies 52, 53, 195 culture filter model 11, 186 sub-culture 2 Western culture 74 curriculum 82, 101, 158 Dadi David 101, 157, 162 Dahl, Øyvind 11–12, 186–187 Dâma (Ndoro) 36 dance 87–88, 100, 125–126, 181, 204 Dâni 36 Dankel, Odd 163–164 darkness/light 14, 74–76, 177, 197 deconstruction 138 Delcroix 65–67 Denmark 62, 75, 195 devil 74, 76

228

index

dialogue 2, 9, 23, 106 Didi Marie 160 dignity 104, 114 Dii Dii language (y·ag dii ) 23, 28, 31, 93, 115, 153, 193, 201–202 Dii Muslims 32, 97, 207 Dii-plain 16, 20, 27–28, 31, 49, 51, 63, 65–68, 71, 82, 88, 92, 95, 109–110, 136, 138, 140–143, 146–147, 150–153, 156, 158–159, 162–163, 165, 184, 206, 208 Dii tradition/ traditional religion 5, 9, 17, 13, 32–34, 45, 52, 69, 74, 96, 98–100, 107, 114–115, 118–121, 123–124, 128–131, 136–138, 144, 156, 165, 167–177, 179–181, 183–184, 195, 197–200, 204, 207–209 Dijk, Teun A. van 13 Diké 46 disciple 106, 186 discourse 9, 10, 12–14, 51, 74–75, 77–78, 85, 113, 161, 176, 178–179, 182, 202 Dii discourse 14, 24, 26, 80, 95, 105–107, 110–111, 113–114, 170, 176, 182, 189–190, 207–208 discourse analysis 12–14 discourse on conversion (see conversion) missionary discourse 14, 18, 72–81, 84–85, 176, 186, 189, 197, 208 dispensary 31, 51, 107, 156, 161–162, 181, 183 divinity 33, 127, 195, 205 Djamâ’a (lamido Bouba) 52 Djesa, Rachel Issa 5 Djingui Mahmoudou ix, 6 Djoda (Bouba) 35 Djouroum (Ardo Bouba) 44 doggaries 1, 65, 110, 163 dormitory 95, 157, 160, 166 Douala 47, 59–60 Douglas, Mary 178 Dourmani Belmont 144 drum 87–88, 181, 204 Duru/Dourou 28, 31, 51, 64, 67, 139, 140, 141, 154, 164 Easter 100, 204 economy 18, 20, 34, 37, 48, 56, 179, 192 economic 16, 28, 41, 49, 55, 97, 101–102, 109, 129, 138, 145, 178, 182, 187, 200, 202, 208

Edinburgh 62 education 23, 31, 53, 60, 63, 81, 94, 98, 100, 102, 105, 158, 186, 191, 194, 208 Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne du Cameroun (EELC)/Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon 4–6, 27–28, 31–32, 80, 83, 163, 166 Egypt 116, 171 Ekollo Joseph 60 elder 33, 83, 120, 122, 127, 131 employment 148, 161, 164, 186 African employees 20, 88, 109, 142–143, 146–147 Dii employees 143–144, 147 employees 59 encounter (Dii-mission) 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 20, 23–24, 28, 65, 72, 92, 185–189, 192–193, 198, 202, 208, 209 Endresen, Halfdan 4, 22, 55, 64–65, 67–68, 80–81, 110, 112–113, 141, 143, 145–147, 151 enlightenment 86, 180, 185–186, 197, 208 eschatology 173–174, 176 ethnic (ethnicity) 6, 25, 28–29, 36, 40–42, 44, 66–67, 69, 70, 73, 100, 112, 114, 118, 124, 128–129, 133, 166, 168, 183, 207 evangelist 62–63, 69–70, 88, 98, 139, 154, 186, 192 Evans-Pritchard 116 exclusive 177, 184, 190, 192 Fairclough, Norman 14 family structure 99, 175 Fanso, Verkijika 46 feast 48, 87, 99–100, 120, 123–126, 181, 204 Femmes pour Christ 27 fertility 33, 77, 123, 128, 170 fetish 76, 78, 154 FIDES 160 Flakk, Ingrid 150, 157–158, 160 Flatland, Karl 61 Fløttum, Sverre 20, 66, 106–107, 111–113, 142, 150–154, 156, 159 forced labour 52, 70, 102–103, 109, 112, 114, 136–137, 151, 189, 207 force vitale 115, 131 Foubarka 107, 161, 162 Foucault, Michel 13

index freedom 1, 38, 55, 57, 74–75, 79–80, 83, 105–106, 110, 112, 136, 176, 187, 189, 193, 201, 204, 206 freedom of religion 44, 55, 105–106 French French (language) 16, 23, 48, 82–83, 93, 96, 101, 158 French missionaries 60 Frobenius, Leo 5, 120–121, 123–124, 130, 133 Fulbe 6, 14, 16, 21, 28–30, 32, 34–39, 41–44, 47–51, 56–57, 61–65, 67, 69, 73, 75, 80–81, 90, 96–97, 99–100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112–116, 134–136, 168, 171, 176–177, 182–183, 187, 189, 192, 199, 202, 207–208 Fulbeisation 100 Fulfulde 52, 82 functionalism 117 funeral 131, 174 Futa Toro 34, 39 Gabana (arnado) 52, 139 Gabon 60 Gamba 24, 28, 69–70, 163 Garoua 24, 31, 40, 44, 50, 52, 92, 97, 103 Gausset, Quentin 6, 41 gbaa 98, 121–122, 129, 154, 168, 170–171, 181, 196, 204 gbanaa 33, 98 Gbaya 6, 7, 37, 38, 44, 49, 61, 69, 73, 136, 166, 168, 176, 183 Geertz, Clifford 17, 117, 131–132, 178–179 gender 97, 129, 161, 170, 191, 193 female path towards conversion (see conversion) Genesis 59 gentleness 201 German German (language) 59–60 German Basler Mission 55, 59 German missionaries 60–61 Gobir 39 God Christianity 80–81, 85, 92–93, 96, 98, 100–101, 117, 131, 167–170, 172, 175, 180, 182, 184, 188–189, 196, 204–205, 208 Islam 39–40 African tradition (Dii, see also Tayíí ) 15, 32–33, 78, 98, 108, 115, 117–118, 121–124, 126, 128–134, 167–168, 171–172, 188, 203, 205

229

Godi 36 Gonom Paul 147 Gop Nock 52 Gospel 14, 16, 54, 59, 62, 73–74, 78–81, 83–84, 88, 93, 98, 100, 106, 152, 157, 160, 161, 166, 170, 186–188, 193, 208 guardians of tradition (dóÕñ naa) 98, 100, 124, 196, 199 Gullestad, Marianne ix, 7, 19 Gunderson, Adolphus Eugene 61 Gurin 35 Ham 79 Hamadou Adama 6 Haman 110 Hammadou (Ardo) 38 Hansen, Ketil Fred ix, 6, 42, 48, 50, 66, 97, 110 Harr 27, 160 harvest 30, 33, 65–66, 72–74, 100, 124–126, 128–129, 181, 204 Hastings, Adrian 161 Hausa 36, 38, 40, 100 Hausaland 39, 42 Hawa 159 health 33, 105, 142 health work 24, 107, 156, 161–162, 204 health care 180 heathendom 71, 74, 76–79, 81, 87, 154, 176, 189 hen lúgúd 123 hero 109, 112–113, 208 Hewett, Edward 45, 46 High Commissioner for northern Cameroon 21, 58, 65–66, 110, 113 Hiebert, Paul G. 17, 165, 178–181, 183, 205 Hiskett, Mervyn 39, 42 Hogben, S. J. 41 holistic 17, 84, 115, 137 Holtedahl, Lisbet ix, 6 Horton, Robin 97 hospital 31, 84, 86, 106, 169, 186, 204 identity 5, 8, 28, 34, 36, 44, 69–70, 91, 118, 129, 131, 165–166, 177, 195 idol 45, 77–78, 121 Idowu, E. Bolaji 117, 119, 131 ignorance 76, 81, 83, 89, 171, 176, 183, 189–190, 201, 208 Iheanyi Mbaekwe 77 illiteracy 81, 83 immoral 71, 88, 126

230

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immanent 17, 33, 129–130, 176, 197 inclusive 168, 184 independence 7, 27, 35, 37, 44, 48, 60, 69, 134, 161, 163, 164, 199 political independence 35, 134, 161, 163–164, 199 indigenous population 7, 45, 54, 72–75, 81, 84, 88, 190, 208 informant 20, 23–27, 52, 69, 91–93, 96–98, 101–107, 110–112, 121, 124–125, 128–131, 133–136, 152–153, 160–161, 166–175, 177, 179–180, 182, 184, 195, 197, 200, 202, 204–205 initiation 33, 126, 190, 191 intercultural communication 11, 187, 203 intercultural encounter 2, 9, 11–12 interview 4, 22–27, 91, 93–95, 99, 103, 106–107, 109, 119, 130–131, 138, 147, 157, 167, 169, 171, 175, 181, 183, 197 invocation 33, 122–124, 126, 129 Isichei, Elizabeth 198 Islam 6, 15–16, 30, 34, 36–45, 62, 68, 97, 116, 120, 130, 148–149, 175, 182–183, 200, 207 Islamisation 34, 37, 44–45, 100, 183 Islamised 40, 53, 56, 62, 152, 171 Issa (Ardo/lamido) 38, 48 Isubu 59 Jacob 60 Jamaica 59 jar 30, 34, 124–125, 127 Jaubert 66–68, 142 Jesus 73–74, 85, 95–96, 169, 172–173, 175, 180, 184, 204 Jibril bin ‘Umar 39 jihad 35–43, 45, 134, 136 Johnson, Mark 74 judgement day 96, 188 Kaka 38, 49 Kamptz von 47 Karna (Manga) 24, 27–28, 62–63, 139 key theological terms 189, 201 kirdi 6, 16, 44, 50–51, 75 Kjørup, Søren 14 Koran 39, 41, 97, 168, 183, 200 Koran schools 84 Koyia (Bellaka) 37–38 Kraft, Charles H. 17 Kribi 60 Kuhn, Thomas 16

Kuoh Joseph 60 Kwa Mbange 60 Kwanja 6 Laburthe-Tolra, Philippe 193–194 Lacroix 42 Laka 136, 176, 183 Lakoff, George 74 Lamé 36 lamido (pl. lamibbe) 1, 6, 7, 28, 31, 35, 40, 41, 44, 47–53, 55, 64–70, 80, 90, 102–103, 107, 109–113, 135–139, 141–142, 149, 152–153, 155, 163, 207 Larsen, Erik 4 Leopoldville 80 leprosy 85–86, 107, 161 letter 20, 22, 38, 58, 66, 93–94, 101, 112, 138, 151, 156–157, 164 liberation social liberation 49, 51, 57, 67, 80, 102, 107, 112–114, 176–177, 202, 206–208 spiritual liberation 54, 72, 75–76, 79, 81, 84, 86, 89, 102, 176–177, 189–190, 201–202, 208 Liberia 60 Lienhardt, Godfrey 117 Liporo 36 literacy 15–16, 68, 83–84, 93, 97, 167–168, 171, 180, 182, 190, 207 living conditions 180, 184, 207 Lode, Kåre 4, 7, 65, 69–70, 113, 149 Lode, Lars 23 Lofthus, Marta 150 Lord’s Supper 87, 148, 159 Lotin 60 Luke (Gospel) 73 Luneau, René 131, 134, 195 Madagascar 8, 11, 84 Magesa, Laurenti 118 magic 119, 132 Mahdi 39 Maïdawa Thomas 5, 101, 153, 163 Maidouki 141 Maître 55, 58 Malinowski, Bronislaw 108 Mambé 44 mandate 27, 48, 54, 57, 60–61, 149, 156 Mara (I and II) 52 Marangu 80 Marc (Gospel) 73 Martin 62, 139

index mask 125–126, 206 Matthew (Gospel) 59, 73 Mbang Sii 133, 136–137 Mbé 1, 24, 27–28, 30–31, 51–52, 62–63, 69–70, 107, 109, 111, 139–140, 151–153, 156–157, 159–162, 164, 166, 183, 193, 202, 208 Mbéré 37, 44 Mbéré region 61 Mbiti, John S. 32, 117–118, 129, 131 Mboula 61 Mbum 37, 38, 44, 49, 62, 73, 93, 134, 135, 152, 168, 187, 207 Mbum language 82, 93, 96, 99, 101, 158, 163, 188, 192, 201 media 10, 95–96, 98–99, 165, 200, 206 medium 132, 209 medicine-man 85–86 mád yaga 126 Meiganga 5, 22, 49 Meng 163 mental image 11, 15, 186, 188 Merrick, Joseph 59 Messina, Jean-Paul 7, 60 metaphor 3, 72–76 method 2–3, 13–14, 22–23, 25, 54, 63, 83, 91 Middleton, J. 117 mission missionary conference 18, 27, 62–64, 139–143, 147–148, 150–152, 156, 158, 162–164 mission school 16, 20, 59, 65, 67, 69, 81–82, 84, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–103, 140–141, 144, 150, 153, 157–158, 164–166, 171, 192, 208 mission station 53, 55–57, 59–60, 62–64, 67, 81, 88, 95, 113, 140, 142, 148–153, 164, 193, 202 Norwegian missionaries 1, 7–11, 14, 18,20, 22, 24–28, 32, 49, 51, 53, 55–58, 61–63, 66, 68–69, 71–75, 78, 84, 88–92, 101, 104, 108–109, 114, 120, 139, 142, 144, 149, 153, 155–156, 158, 162, 164, 167, 174, 176–177, 182, 185–187, 189–190, 192–193, 196, 199, 201–202, 207–208 Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) ix, 4, 18–19, 151 Mission des Pères du Saint-Esprit 54 modernity 5, 34, 97, 180, 182, 192, 194 Modi Din 60 Mohammadou, Eldridge 6, 40–41, 97, 134

231

Mono Dori 36 monotheism 97, 171, 182 mood 50, 132, 178, 181–182, 199 moral 19, 47, 54, 79, 86, 101–102, 109, 113, 132, 143, 165, 174–179, 183–184, 188, 191–194, 199, 201–202, 204, 206, 208 moral behaviour 79, 86, 165, 174, 179, 183–184 moral regime 101, 109, 174–175, 191, 193, 204 mosque 28, 36, 39, 45, 148, 153 Möwe 46 Mudimbe, V. Y. 7, 90 Muhammad (Prophet) 39, 41–43 Muhammad (lamido) 47 Müller, Fredrik 62 Muller, Jean-Claude 5, 23, 26, 30, 32–33, 43–44, 65, 69, 91, 98, 112, 133–134 Mundang 6, 95, 99, 182 music 178, 181, 182 myth 5, 25, 30, 107–109, 113, 115, 129, 133–134, 136–137, 187, 200 narrative 9, 91, 108, 136, 167, 172, 182–183, 194, 196–197, 202–204, 208 self-narration 91, 104, 118, 137, 170 nationalism 54 negotiation 8, 29, 70, 72, 77, 81, 83, 89, 109, 187, 189, 192–193, 208–209 New World 98, 186 Ndjobdi (Ardo) 37, 38, 134 Ngambe 47 Ngangha 163 Ngaoubela 86 Ngau’hora 37 Ngau’kor 37 Ngaoundéré ix, 5–6, 22, 24, 26–28, 31, 37–38, 41, 44, 48, 51–53, 55–56, 58, 61–62, 65, 67, 69, 92, 97, 102–103, 106–107, 109–110, 112, 134–137, 139, 141, 144–145, 148, 151, 153, 162–163, 169, 172, 175, 207 church district 140–141, 147, 149, 152 subdivision 21, 52, 53, 110 Ngaouyanga 24, 28, 95, 102, 111, 133, 142, 144, 150–152, 156–157, 160, 166, 170, 193, 202 Ngaw-a-ndére 37 Nigeria 34, 94 Nikolaisen, Jens Daniel 4, 61, 145

232

index

Nishioka, Y. B. 179 Njemba, Pierre 62, 147–148 Njeuma, Martin Z. 6, 36, 42, 134 Njidda (Ardo/Bouba) 35–37, 134–135 Norsk Misjonstidende (NMt) 18–19, 20, 72–73, 77, 85, 87–88, 138 Norwegian Missionary Tidings 154 Norway 8, 18–19, 62, 73–75, 78–79, 85, 88, 106, 110, 112, 138, 141–142, 145–146, 204 Norwegian Missionary Society (see mission) Notary 66–67, 142 Nuer 116 Nyandou 159 Officer of the Black Star of Benin 48 Omarou 147 oral tradition 39, 43–44, 97, 107–108, 134, 136–137 orphan 77, 145 Oseland, Sverre 61 Palestine 95 Pallottin missionaries 60–61 panther (zág) 33, 127–128 Paul 78, 130, 167, 192 Parrinder, Geoffrey 116 pastor 1, 5, 24, 55, 58, 60, 80, 101, 107, 111, 159, 162–164, 166 Peel, J. D. Y. 9, 79, 94, 101, 172, 194, 196, 198, 200 Pels, Peter 190–191 Peyron 49 Pere 77 Person, Yves 120 Platvoet, Jan 116–118 plausibility structure 31, 95, 118–119, 172, 194–197 political independence (see independence) polygamy 86–87, 175, 184 prayer 19, 33, 41, 45, 97, 99, 153, 168–170, 180, 207 Presbytarian mission 54, 60, 142–143 protection 45–47, 85, 98–100, 115, 123, 125, 128, 131–132, 135, 137, 168–170, 173–174, 177, 180, 183, 186, 195, 203, 205, 209 Protestant-Catholic ‘race for souls’ 63, 68, 164 proverb 74 pulaaku 42

Qadiriyya

39

Ranger, Terence 9, 138, 198 rational 87, 169, 180–181, 190, 197 rationality 193–194 Ray, Benjamin C. 130–131 reconstruction 91, 138–139, 150, 166 resistance 14, 44, 64, 72–73, 112, 114, 134, 136, 141, 153, 200 Rey-Bouba 1, 30–32, 35–37, 40, 43–44, 51–52, 62, 68–69, 109, 133–135, 137, 142, 155, 163, 207 Ray 35–37, 40–41, 43–44, 69, 135, 155, 163 rhombe 127–128, 131 Ricoeur, Paul 108–109 rite 1, 5, 33–34, 69, 77, 98, 100, 108–109, 115, 119–121, 123–129, 131–132, 169, 171, 174, 181, 192, 200, 204 sacred 108, 134, 137, 195–196 sacrifice 33, 123, 125–126, 128, 170–171, 174, 180, 181, 196, 204 sad 30, 121–122, 125–126 Sahara (sub-Sahara) 32, 62, 129, 185, 190 Saker, Alfred 45, 59 salvation 71, 167, 173–174, 190 saviour 78, 85, 96, 172–173, 175, 188, 197 Sambo (Ardo) 37, 134 Sanneh, Lamin 7, 15–16, 138, 167, 201 Sassa-Mbersi 160 Satan 78 Saudi-Arabia 39 Saussure, Ferdinand de 12–13, 187–189 Schilder, Kees 6, 95, 99, 182 school (see mission school) school attendance 95, 140, 161 secrets of religion 97, 191, 202 Selbe Pierre 162 self-esteem 104, 171, 178, 182, 190, 200–201, 207 semantics 13, 130 semiotics 3, 10 servant (see slavery) sickness 84, 86, 89, 122, 124, 128, 168–169, 180, 183–184, 186, 197, 208 sign (semiotic) 11–13, 15, 134, 188–189

index sin 34, 76, 86, 95, 188 Sinda 144 Sinderud, Marte Bogen 6, 7 Siroma André 85, 143–144, 157 situatedness 25–26, 91 Skauge, Johannes 151–152 Skeie, Karina Hestad 7, 8, 19 Skulberg, Kristian 156 skull 33, 77, 125, 128 Slageren, Jaap van 7, 59–60 slavery 38, 43, 44, 55, 57–58, 68, 76, 80–81, 90, 109, 112–114, 155–156, 163, 175, 189 enslave 42, 49, 51, 112 servant 21, 44, 51, 56–59, 75, 81, 113 slave 7, 21, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 57, 59, 65, 75, 80–81, 90, 112–114, 155–156, 163, 175, 189 slave raid 37–38, 44, 49–50, 176, 194 slave trade 41, 45, 48, 57 transatlantic slave trade 45, 57 Smart, Ninian 16–17 Smith, M. G. 42–43 social change 6, 67, 95, 99, 101, 113, 115, 160–161, 174, 177, 198 social condition 137, 177 social structure 54, 109, 128–129, 132, 165–166 Société des Missions Evangéliques de Paris 60 Society of Nations 48, 50, 57 sociology 3, 116 sociology of conversion 193, 195 Sokoto 35–7, 40, 42 Sola Scriptura 81 solok 168 sorcery 77, 132, 168, 176, 183, 189, 201, 205 sorghum 31, 33, 94, 102, 106, 110–113, 123–124, 151, 170, 186 Soucadaux 58 South Africa 84, 145, 192 Spindler, Marc 195 spirit 33, 43, 71, 74, 78, 85, 87, 122, 125, 127–128, 130–131, 168, 172–174, 176, 188 ancestral spirit (yóÕóÕb) (see ancestor) spiritual 8–10, 14, 17, 23, 31, 38, 43, 54, 68, 71, 77–81, 83, 85–86, 89, 95, 99, 101, 109, 113, 164–170, 173, 176–177, 179, 183, 186–189, 192–201, 205–206, 208–209

233

Sudan 4, 39, 62, 116, 143 Sudanmisjonen 62 Sufi (sufism) 39, 44 Súkáñ 168 Sundkler, Bengt 138 superstition 77, 79 structuralism 117, 128 Strümpell, Kurt 36 Swiss missionaries 60 symbol 2, 11, 15, 107, 117, 120, 131–132, 134 symbolic 1–3, 17, 26, 30, 113, 128, 132–133, 178–179, 200, 209 taboo 77, 170, 191 Tagboum 141, 154, 160, 163–164 tax 44, 47, 49, 65, 69, 98, 102, 106–107, 109–111, 114, 135–137, 189, 207 Tayíí 32, 129, 130, 131, 167–168, 204 Tcholliré 109, 134 teacher 20, 22, 24, 26, 39–40, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 82, 88, 93–95, 99–102, 105, 110, 138–144, 146, 150, 154–155, 157–159, 164, 192, 201 Tempels, Placide 116 tenderness 104–107 Testament New Testament 59 Old testament 59, 87, 171 Thierno Mouctar Bah 41, 43 Thomas, Louis-Vincent 131, 134, 195 Thrana, Johannes 61–62, 141, 145, 148, 150 Tibati 37–38, 47, 86, 134 Tignère 67 Tikar 73 Toft, Olav 159 tomb 39, 125 Tonkin, Elisabeth 108 Touareg 39 tradition 2, 35, 54, 58, 69, 76–78, 83, 85, 87, 89, 97–98, 108, 115, 151, 167–168 African tradition 1, 32, 78, 83, 106, 117, 119, 203 Christian (Lutheran) tradition 172–173, 186, 204–205 Fulbe tradition 36, 38, 40, 43–44, 97, 134, 149 Gbaya tradition 6 heathen tradition 1, 174 Islamic tradition 39, 43 Malagasy tradition 8 Missionary tradition 19, 84

234

index

Rey-Bouba tradition 35, 43 traditional chiefs 48–49, 156 traditional king 67 Tswana traditions 8–9 transcendent 2, 17–18, 33, 119, 128–129, 176, 179, 188, 194–195, 197, 203, 206 transition 99, 167, 173–174, 204 translatability 9–10, 15–16, 165, 167–168, 171, 185, 198–199, 201, 203, 205, 209 translation 5, 15–16, 23, 27, 59, 142, 153, 168, 192, 201 Trimingham, J. S. 41 Troullier 51 truck 20, 106–107, 111–113 Tswana 8–9, 176, 190–192, 201, 205 Turner, Victor 117 Turua 37 twins 77 Ulland, Karen 164 United Nations (UN) 27, 57–58, 156 Uthman dan Fodio (Shehu) 35, 38–43 Vansina, Jan 91 vernacular 16, 82–83, 192, 201, 203 Versailles 48, 50 Victoria 45 Vogt, François-Xavier 61 Voute-Adamaoua expedition 47 voyance (seers) 169–170

Waage, Trond 6 Waal Etienne 147, 154 Wack 24, 28, 51–52, 65, 93, 135, 139, 153, 156 Wahhabisme 39 wali 39 Walls, Andrew 7, 17, 76, 203, 205 Wawa 6 Weber, Max 166, 194 Wolarbe 37, 40 worldview 9–10, 16–17, 71, 76, 78–79, 85, 89, 119, 132–133, 154–155, 165, 177–184, 188, 204–205 affective assumptions 165, 178–181 cognitive assumptions 165, 178–181, 183–184 evaluative assumptions 165, 178–180, 183–184 World Wars First World War 27, 48, 55, 60 Second World War 18, 63, 139, 144 Yaoundé ix, 21, 58, 65, 67, 110, 155 Yillage 40 Yola 37, 47 Yoruba 9, 94, 172, 196, 206 yún 168 Zubeïru Kun Mbaa 69, 109, 111, 151, 153, 163 Zubeiru (emir) 47

STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN MISSION The Studies in Christian Mission publishes scholarly monographs in the history of the world-wide missionary movements, the dynamics of Christian witness and service in new environments, the transition from movements to churches, and the areas of cultural initiative or involvement of Christian bodies and individuals such as education, health, community development, press, literature and art. Special attention is given to local initiative and leadership and to Christian missions from the Third World. Studies in the theories and paradigms of mission in their respective contexts and contributions to missiology as a theological discipline are a second focus of the series. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Carmody s. j., B.P. Conversion and Jesuit Schooling in Zambia. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09428 8 Pirotte, J. & H. Derroite (eds.). Églises et santé dans le Tiers Monde. Hier et Aujourd’hui — Churches and Health Care in the Third World. Past and Present. 1991. ISBN 90 04 09470 9 Brent, A. Cultural Episcopacy and Ecumenism. Representative Ministry in Church History from the Age of Ignatius of Antioch to the Reformation, With Special Reference to Contemporary Ecumenism. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09432 6 Ruokanen, M. The Catholic Doctrine of Non-Christian Religions. According to the Second Vatican Council. 1992. ISBN 90 04 09517 9 T’ien Ju-K’ang. Peaks of Faith. Protestant Mission in Revolutionary China. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09723 6 Weber, Ch. W. International Influences and Baptist Mission in West Cameroon. German-American Missionary Endeavor under International Mandate and British Colonialism. 1993. ISBN 90 04 09765 1 Aritonang, J. S. Mission Schools in Batakland (Indonesia), 1861-1940. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09967 0 Doti Sanou, B. L’Émancipation des femmes Madare. L’impact du projet administratif et missionnaire sur une société africaine, 1900-1960. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09852 6 Lapointe, E. (éd.). Correspondance entre François Laydevant et Albert Perbal, 1927-1952. Dialogue du Missionnaire et du Missiologue. Avec annotations et introduction. 1994. ISBN 90 04 10171 3 Toullelan, P.-Y. Missionnaires au quotidien à Tahiti. Les Picpuciens en Poly-nésie au XIXe siècle. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10100 4 Johnson Black, N. The Frontier Mission and Social Transformation in Western Honduras. The Order of Our Lady of Mercy, 1525-1773. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10219 1 Thompson, T. J. Christianity in Northern Mala w ˆ i. Donald Fraser’s Missionary Methods and Ngoni Culture. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10208 6 Benedetto, R. (ed.). Translations by Winifred K. Vass. Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa. A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and the Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 1890-1918. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10239 6

17. Reed, C. Pastors, Partners and Paternalists. African Church Leaders and Wes-tern Missionaries in the Anglican Church in Kenya, 1850-1900. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10639 1 18. Cook, G. (ed.). Crosscurrents in Indigenous Spirituality. Interface of Maya, Catholic and Protestant Worldviews. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10622 7 19. Craig, T.L. The Missionary Lives. A Study in Canadian Missionary Biography and Autobiography. 1997. ISBN 90 04 10815 7 20. Wang, X. Christianity and Imperial Culture. Chinese Christian Apologetics in the Seventeenth Century and their Latin Patristic Equivalent. 1998. ISBN 90 04 10927 7 21. Denis, P. The Dominicans Friars in Southern Africa. A Social History (15771990). 1998. ISBN 90 04 11144 1 22. Eber, I. The Jewish Bishop and the Chinese Bible. S.I.J. Schereschewsky (1831-1906). 1999. ISBN 90 04 11266 9 23. Vähäkangas, M. In Search of Foundations for African Catholicism. Charles Nya-miti’s Theological Methodology. 1999. ISBN 90 04 11328 2 24. Railton, N.M. No North Sea. The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11573 0 25. Camps, A. Studies in Asian Mission History, 1956-1998. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11572 2 26. Joseph, J. The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East. Encounters with Western Christian missions, archaeologists, and colonial powers. 2000. ISBN 90 04 11641 9 27. Okkenhaug, I.M. The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavour and Adventure. Anglican Mission, Women and Education in Palestine, 18881948. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12673 2 28. Cheung, D. Christianity in Modern China. The Making of the First Native Protestant Church. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13143 4 29. Malek, R. Verschmelzung der Horizonte: Mozi und Jesus. Zur Hermeneutik der chinesisch-christlichen Begegnung nach Wu Leichuan (1869-1944). 2004. ISBN 90 04 13864 1 30. Komulainen, J. An Emerging Cosmotheandric Religion? Raimon Panikkar’s Pluralistic Theology of Religions. 2005. ISBN 978 90 04 13893 3 31. Brock, P. Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change. 2005. ISBN 90 04 13899 4 32. Murre-van den Berg, H. (ed.). New Faith in Ancient Lands. Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. 2006. ISBN 978 90 04 15471 1 33. Michaud, J. ‘Incidental’ Ethnographers. French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880-1930. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 13996 1 34. Höschele, S. Christian Remnant – African Folk Church. Seventh-Day Adventism in Tanzania, 1903-1980. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 16233 4 35. Aritonang, J.S. and Steenbrink, K. (eds.). A History of Christianity in Indonesia. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 17026 1 36. Sidenvall, E. The Making of Manhood among Swedish Missionaries in China and Mongolia, c.1890-c.1914. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17408 5 37. Drønen, T.S. Communication and Conversion in Northern Cameroon. The Dii people and Norwegian Missionaries, 1934-1960. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17754 3