Economic Transition and Resourceful Churches

Part I of this book examined the social politics and religious feelings emergent in an era of scarcity and disrupted foreign imperial and missionary authority. In the first decade of French rule, from 1914 to 1925, African chiefs in the employ of the French administration claimed a steadily increasing share of wealth from land management, agricultural production, and government salaries. By contrast, during the next decade of French rule, which is examined in the following three chapters, African small farmers, traders, merchants, transporters, and other agents in the Abong Mbang, Nyong Valley, and Ebolowa regions, as well as some eastern regions including Doumé and Batouri enjoyed increasing wealth as a result of cash crop expansion and a growth in regional and international markets for their goods. Government statistics from 1927 to 1930 reported that African smallholder farmers around Yaoundé planted 80,000 cocoa plants and that “millions” of young palm oil and coffee seedlings had been distributed throughout southern and coastal Cameroon. Reports from 1927 to 1933 describe “hundreds of thousands” of groundnut, cocoa, and coffee plants bearing fruit in neighboring Mbalmayo and Akonolinga, coffee and cotton crop expansion in the western highlands, and copra, coconut, and kola nut in the southwest towards Edea. Cocoa exports grew from roughly 492 tons in 1910 and 2290 tons in 1920, to 10,000 tons in 1929 and 27,000 tons in 1939. In 1947 and 1948, the administration announced record harvests by the estimated 150,000 cocoa-producing household farms in Cameroon. Along with cocoa, harvests of coffee, palm oil, tobacco, and groundnut accounted for 75 percent of the 73 million francs worth of exports from Cameroon in 1930. Reports to the League of Nations detail the proliferation of palm plantations in Akonolinga, groundnut production in Nyong-et-Sanaga, and cocoa, coffee, and tobacco harvests from southern and western regions, which were produced by African small farmers as well as large plantation owners who created a lucrative trans-regional cash crop economy that also enriched those assisting in drying, fermenting, sorting, selling, and transporting crops to the port of Kribi. Government reports between 1925 and 1935 cheerfully announced southern Cameroon's burgeoning harvests and lauded Africans’ “infatuation” with cocoa, which generated considerable revenues.