The Depression and the Administration in South-Central Cameroun

Abstract

production patterns and local economic structures. Political historians, on the other hand, tend to periodize the interwar period differently, and point out that colonial policy hardly changed during the entire two decades.2 They suggest, as some colonial administrators themselves also claimed, that the Depression and the following years was a time of great strain between rapidly altering economic conditions and stagnation in policy from the metropolitan governments.3 Writing on the French colonial service, William Cohen calls the interwar years The Era of Lost Opportunities. At the local level, however, both the administrators and indigenous populations were forced to integrate economics with politics without directives and without control over the intruding forces of the world economy. Although some developments seem to have been general throughout rural west Africa-the extension of commodity production, for example--in many other respects the experience of African peoples in their relationship with both the state and the market differed from one locality to another and one commodity to another. In his history of postwar Camerounian politics, Richard Joseph therefore looks to the 1930s to explain the source of the political diversity that emerged after 1945.4 Victor Levine argues that the Camerounian colonial state came through the Depression in fine style, running up very few debts and quickly re-establishing solvency.5 A French administrator during that time observed that the people also survived; they returned to home-produced goods for consumption and suffered severe hardships mainly due to repressive measures to extort head taxes from them.6 But the sudden plunge in prices had a profound and long-term effect on particular groups, as each section of the population, from the French administration to the peasantry struggled to maintain their steadily eroding position. This paper discusses the confrontation of political exigencies and economic realities during the Depression in the