Legal revolutions and evolutions: Law, chiefs, and colonial order in Cameroon, 1914-1955

This dissertation is an analysis of legal colonization in Cameroon and a chronicle of African individuals' and communities' efforts to uphold, reject, or transform colonial laws. The work affirms that law exists not only by shaping social action but as social action itself. It examines social, cultural, and political changes in African societies in Cameroon between the introduction of French imperial administration and late colonial rule as African societies incorporated European legal codes and the judiciary apparatus into local forms of governance. The main thesis is supported by evidence that Africans themselves actively engaged in the process of legal incorporation and in many ways set the terms in which the laws would affect them. In short, French law did not transform African societies; French law provided Africans with new opportunities to change their own societies, and they did so with remarkable energy.;This dissertation asserts that the greatest impact of French laws was their ability to radically reorder power dynamics between Africans. New laws imbued Africans with new powers, which they in turn employed to mold social, political, and economic structures of their villages and instill new mentalities regarding justice and morality. Social dynamics between individuals, classes, and ethnic groups radically changed as Africans of all social classes and genders sought advantage under the new political order.;The first three chapters examine changes in African societies from the introduction of imperial law in the late nineteenth century to the extension of French legal and judicial structures to the entirety of the colony by the late 1920s. Chapters four, five, and six chronicle the rise of African chiefs as representations of French law and the process of indigenization of the judiciary. They also describe the parallel decline of "customary" authorities and the emergence of strategies of judicial negotiation and legal manipulation in the lawmaking process. The last two chapters situate this changing legal system in the context of rural Cameroonian societies' cataclysmic upheavals and transformations due to the changes in African legal authority, worsening tensions between indigenous leaders and commoners, and the consequences of the rise in litigiousness among rural Africans.