Marriage in the Church and State

The religious meaning-making of Christian marriage in southern Cameroon was directly linked to transformations in social relations between and within African families, and was also enmeshed in the rise of new local political authorities and, by extension, the passage of French colonial laws governing African family life and the use of wives and relatives as laborers. Even in the years leading up to the declaration of the French mandate in 1922, African Christian principals recognized that chiefs not only coordinated everyday men and women's village settlements and labor prerogatives, they also directly competed with laborers, commoner men, and family fathers for dominance in the family sphere and even within the realm of sexual intimacy. By the mid-tolate 1920s, conflicts between African chiefs and everyday men over women and laborers spurred religiously supported social mobilization on a broad scale.

Chiefs’ increasing interference in Africans’ family lives was in part a result of French administrative initiatives to reform polygamy and increase the birth rate. In the early 1920s, Governor Jules Carde and colonial minister Albert Sarraut envisioned that African chiefs would assist in increasing population rates (faire du noir), which would develop Cameroon's mise en valeur and export productivity. Later, Governor Robert Delavignette forwarded in his 1931 study, Paysans Noirs, that chiefs could remedy “injustices” in the family sphere that limited Africans’ “productive possibilities.” Believing polygamy to be a primary cause of syphilis and infertility, the French administration instituted new laws discouraging various ways of arranging marriage – never criminalizing polygamy outright, but rather shaping new boundaries for betrothal and espousal. The major flaw of the plan was that new marriage laws were to be enforced by chiefs, who were granted considerable powers to challenge rivals’ claims to women or children. Chiefs in southern Cameroon were appointed as judges or assesseurs in tribunaux indigènes and tribunals of first degree, where they ruled in matters that affected their subject populations’ intimate lives, and also wielded power through local police forces, who could take control of vulnerable local women. Chiefs could also counter any resistance to their judgments or authority with jail sentences or fines of one hundred francs without due process of law, employing the indigénat with the full support of the French administration.