Thaumaturgy in Contemporary Traditional Religion: the Case of Nso' in Mid-Century

Abstract

The kingdom (or Fondom as it is locally called) of Nso', once an independent polity, lies in the central high plateau of Cameroon: it is about the size of Luxemburg, contiguous with the larger kingdom of Bamum, and had a population of 150,000 in 1976, now larger.' This Fondom, which appears to have originated in a confederation of clans, one of them the dynastic one, is one of over a hundred in the mountainous region called the Grassfields; these varied considerably in the responsibilities accorded to the ruler and the means he had for exercising them. This long-settled region was drawn with increasing momentum into the currents of trade radiating from the Atlantic slave ports and into the Hausa-dominated trade of the Benue lands. By the 'sixties of the nineteenth century the peoples of the region had absorbed one set of invaders, the Chamba-led Ba'ni, and, except round its edges, had managed to resist or recover from the destructive and mercenary slave-raids into which the jihad of Othman dan Fodio had degenerated. This is no place to discuss the effects of defensive reconcentrations of population, the demand for Grassfields domestic slaves by the Southern oil-palm economy and the Fulani emirates, the import of guns and storable media of exchange, and the accumulation of wealth in old and new hands on the formation of embryo states, except to suggest that they must have been revolutionary (Rowlands, 1979; Nkwi and Warnier, 1982; Warnier, 1985). By the last decade of the nineteenth century eight sizeable political units had emerged in the north-western Grassfields, amongst them Nso', the largest in this area, which had been enriched by the kola