The Tombel Massacre of 1966: When Harry Porter Met The Lord of the Rings

Dibussi Tande

In his rumination about the significance of Cameroon's May 20th celebrations (the country's “national day”), Nfor Ngala Nfor the SCNC Vice Chair, cites "the Tombel Massacre of 1962" as an example of the atrocities committed by "La Republique du Cameroun" on territory of the ex British Southern Cameroons. At first glance, one gets the impression that Nfor is referring to the alleged massacre of citizens of the then English speaking federated state of West Cameroon - most likely by the marauding trigger-happy Gendarmes from the French speaking federated State of East Cameroon.

The 1966 events (not 1962 as Nfor Ngala states) in Tombel (which folklore describes as the "Bakossi-Bamileke war") have long been the subject of implausible Harry Porter-like tales of Bakossi witches and wizards concocting deadly magic potions used against the Bamileke; and of fearless broom-wielding Bakossi warriors wiping out the "mighty Bamileke" with  their modern weapons.

It was therefore quite intriguing to see this event on the Vice Chair's list of crimes against Southern Cameroons. If this was indeed a case of the Bakossi defeating the Bamileke in an ethnic war, how did that victory fit into the Southern Cameroons discourse of oppression and persecution? Also, could it be that this "war" was really a rather mundane incident in which Bakossi natives and Bamileke "strangers" clashed over increasingly scarce resources in the fast developing Tombel of 1962 - an incident which Bakossi oral tradition had appropriated, with the passage of time and the dimming of memories, to transform into an epic mystical battle that had nothing to envy from the battle of the Middle-earth in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

As I searched for facts about the Tombel incident, which is non-existent in Cameroonian history books, I stumbled across a brief but revealing narrative in Victor T. Levine's now out-of-print publication, The Cameroon Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).

Here is Levine's account of the Tombel Massacre (pp. 155-157) -- without the witches, the magic portions, the lethal brooms, and the invincible bullet-proof warriors:

On December 31, 1966, a mob of Bakossi in Tombel ran riot and slaughtered as many Bamileke as it could find. Tombel is located a short distance into West Cameroon on the Bamenda-Babadjou-Dschang road. First reports indicated that 68 people had been killed, but at the subsequent trial of the persons accused of participation in the massacre, the larger figure of 236 deaths was officially established. The government immediately rushed troops to the area, clamped down on movement and communication lest the Bamileke come across the state frontier to aid their ethnic brethren. Within two days tensions had abated and order was restored. One hundred and forty-three Bakossi were eventually brought to trial before a military court: 17 were condemned to die by a firing squad, 37 were sentenced to be detained for life, 38 to be imprisoned for life; 10 were jailed for ten years, and 4 were detained for twenty years; 36 were freed, and one man died during the trial (West Africa, May 20, 1967, p. 672).

The reasons for the massacre were complex but this much seems to have been established: the immediate catalyst for the violence was the robbery and murder of four Bakossi, including a schoolteacher, by a group of bandits shortly before Christmas. It was widely assumed that the bandits were Bamileke, and that this act represented a deliberate provocation of the Bamileke against the Bakossi. Tensions were already high in the area because of what many Bakossi styled a Bamileke “invasion” of their area: Bamileke had in fact come in numbers to settle and buy land in the Tombel-Bamenda area, and had begun to control commerce in the area as much as had the Nigerian Ibo the Kumba area to the South. In any case, it was the old “probleme Bamileke” in a new and more deadly guise.

This was the first serious mass violence involving Bamileke since early 1960, when in retribution for the death of some Bamun, an armed group of Bamun crossed the Noun River and killed over one hundred Bamileke. Unlike the later massacre, perpetrators of the 1960 killings were never brought to justice. One story I heard from a reliable source was that the raid had been sanctioned by the sultan of Bamun and that he had subsequently received several severed Bamileke heads as a token of success.

Comments

[Ebie]

Ha, ha, ha, this is a funny one! Bakossi folks used to drive us nuts in PSS Kumba back in the day with their outlandish stories about their "Broom stick warriors". I didn't even think this story was based on real events - always thought they were repeating an old wife's tale from the pre-colonial era. We definitely do not know anything about our history...

[Ndogmo Jean Pierre]

The Tombel incident was a violent precursor to the cam-no-go phenomenon which gripped Cameroon's coastal towns in the the 1990s. While it is alleged that security forces unleashed an orgy of violence and destruction in the wake of the massacre;and while there were legitimate complaints in West Cameroon at the time that the perpetrators were tried by a military court (a novelty in the region at the time) which did not generally go by the book, this has to be balanced by the scale of the atrocity in question; the slaughter of largely defenseless men, women and children in a progrom reminiscent of the sacking of Warsaw during WW II, the Bosnian ethnic cleansing of the 1990s, or the Rwandan genocide of 1994, albeit on a much reduced scale. This is one incident that should definitely not feature on the Southern Cameroons' list of atrocities committed by the "frogs" against the people of the region.

[Ma Mary]

I agree with Mr Ndongmo. That episode is a mixed bag, controversial and Dr LeVine's description above does not even touch the full extent of the troubles in that area. Those who are old enough will also recall that the Tombel area was also the focus of very intensive anti-maquisard operations in which a lot of Bamileke men, women and children were killed by the Camerounese army, often in joint operations with the West Cameroon mobile wing. This was not a period to be proud of. Children were taught to hate Bamileke. They are 3/4 maquisards according to Sadou Daudu, Ahidjos Army Minister in a public speech. There is no question that Camerounese government policy created the climate in Tombel that led to the massacre. In turn, they cracked down heavily on the population of Tombel, wantonly torturing and killing. The full extent of this shameful episode needs to be told.

During that period, the Camerounese Occupation Government clamped down on the Southern Cameroons and took away our civil liberties. These were the consequences of British negligence in not leaving Southern Cameroons with the means to defend itself.

Did you know that British Army troops were also involved in killing and torturing Bamileke "communists"in the Santa border area? It is laughable that anyone could consider the Bamileke as viable communists. They rank up there among the most entrepreneurial people on the planet. Their cardinal sin was that they provided viable competition to the French in la republique.

[Dibussi Tande]

I just found an interesting article about the Bamileke on Wikipedia which sheds more light about the Tombel incident and its context:

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

French administration and post-independence

Under French colonial rule, the Bamileke birthrate grew, and their small territory's capability to support a large population was put to the test. Thus, beginning In the 1940s, Bamileke migrants continued and expanded the trend begun by the Germans almost a hundred years earlier of moving to the Mungo region of the Littoral, Southwest, and Centre Provinces in order to work as labourers, open businesses, or start farms. These farmers mostly purchased their land from the region's historical inhabitants, the Duala and Bakossi peoples. By the 1950s, the Bamileke had come to outnumber the native Dualas and Bakossi of the area. The original inhabitants of the region were growing increasingly disenchanted with having given up their lands.

In 1955, the French banned a wing of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) political party, which they deemed to be a terrorist group. This party had much support among the Bamileke, so many of them fled to the Tombel region of British Cameroon (today part of the Southwest Province). When further attacks on the French colonial government originated from the region, the native Bakossi were quick to blame the Bamileke newcomers. The Bamileke counter-accused the Bakossi of perpetrating the acts in an effort to reclaim their lands. A spate of skirmishes between the two groups soon followed, and attacks, blamed on the UPC militants, continued.

The independence of French Cameroon on 1 January 1960 did not stop the tensions. Things finally came to a head in December of 1966. UPC militants attacked a Bakossi vehicle near the Bamileke settlement of Nken, at the edge of the Kupe Mountains of the Tombel region. The Bakossi blamed the Bamileke of the nearby villages of Ekonegbe and Nsoke for the murders, and the victims' families and other enraged Bakossi sacked the villages. The government of British Cameroon sent troops to quell the violence, but not before many Bamileke settlers had been killed.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamileke

[DANGO TUMMA]

BAMELEKE OR NOT IN THE INTERNATIONAL SCENE
IT WILL LOOK LIKE ATRIBAL STRUGGLE THAT SCNC IS WAGING.
OURS IN A DE COLONIZATION STRUGGLES AGAINST
AN AFRICAN COUNTRY OF THE REPUBLIC OF CAMEROUN.
SOUTHERN CAMEROONS/ANGLOPHONES IS NOT A TRIBE BUT A COUNTRY WITH 6.5M INHABITANTS.

[Nlatane]

What a phenomenal and formidable force of broom-riding witches and wizards my ancestors were!! If only we had kept these exoteric powers, we would be making the most effective use of it today. Barricading all those marauding aliens hell-bent on depriving us of our identities. Ah, the good old days, lost forever!

[Nlatane]

What a phenomenal and formidable force of broom-riding witches and wizards my ancestors were!! If only we had kept these exoteric powers, we would be making the most effective use of it today. Barricading all those marauding aliens hell-bent on depriving us of land and identities.
Ah, the good old days, lost forever!

[Joel Kalle]

Folks,
The power of the written word can never be mistaken. War mongers from that time till now continue to insinuate that there was a "Bakossi/Bamileke" war. There was no such thing. It was a "war" against terrorists! Many of them just happened to have been Bami. In fact some of them were "Bamenda people" many of whom had lived peacefully amongst the Bakossi but thought they could side with terrorists whose main aim appears to have been to strip the natives of their land. The Bakossi are a peaceful but hardy folk!
JK

[UnitedstatesofAfrica]

Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings? hmmmmm

[Nhon George N. Enongene]

The Bakossi are a peace loving and hospitable people. The mystic of the Bakossi broom is not totally lost. Today's generation is too hot tempered and for fear of their misuse of this treasure, it was well galvanised in the hands of specially forged individuals. The broom's vector agent works best in a just course and could calamitously backfire if used wrongfully reason for which it has been incarcerate.

[facter]

Nhon George. You really believe those stories? Anyway, I remember one of my Bakossi grandfathers was tortured by gendarmes in Kumba. They used to beat him and force him to look at the sun until he became blind. The daughter repeatedly went to Kumba to get his release from the BMM in 1967.

[esther]

this does not actually seems the right story. bakossi people too lost their life in their numbers. you need to actually do primary research data on this. writing such a thing and looking at it on one angle that just the bamilikes were killed in their numbers is a wrong thing. i am writing like a bakossi daughter who was brought up and groomed there.

[The Observer]

I would advise Esther to read a recent book by Piet Konings titled "Neoliberal Bandwagonism: Civil society and the politics of belonging in Anglophone Cameroon" which is available on Amazon.com [ http://www.amazon.com/Neoliberal-Bandwagonism-politics-belonging-Anglophone/dp/9956558230 ]

It has a chapter called "Autochtony and Ethnic Cleansing in the SW Province: The 1961 Tombel Disturbances" which traces the beginning of the Bamileke-Bakossi conflict from 1961 to the violent events of 1966 using primary sources, including official documents from the West Cameroon archives. She can also check the 2010 edition of the very reputable dictionary of Cameroon.

All of these sources actually add more weight to the version that Victor Levine narrates above.

From all indications, the Bakossi mythology built around this event is very far from the truth. But that mythology has served the Bakossi well by giving them a certain amount of confidence and fearlesslness in spite of the precarious situation of their tribe - demographic, political, economical, etc. - no different from the myths of European invincibility which were used to subjugate "colonial peoples" or even the myths of the Christian bible...

BTW, we would definitely like to read Esther's own version as told by her Pas and Grand Pas.