Proceso de creación del conocimiento

This is guaranteed under articles 21 and 22 of the African Charter. Article 21 specifically states that ‘All peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resource. This right shall be exercised in the exclusive interest of the people. In no case shall a people be deprived of it.’ The article is not oblivious to the fact that occasionally a need arises for the state to employ its police power to claim private property in the interest of the greater good of society at large, but requires that dispossessed individuals or groups be adequately compensated.

Apart from the questionable payments made to some gullible chiefs during the earlier phase of the German colonial era, no compensation has ever been made for the large tracts of Bakweri ancestral lands expropriated over more than a century. It has already been established that the German colonial authorities forcibly expropriated and converted these lands into property of the colonial state. During their brief tenure as UN Trustees of the Mandate Territory of Southern Cameroons, the British attempted to reverse the egregious actions of the Germans, and the British colonial administration is on record for re-purchasing so-called Ex-Enemy lands and re-instating same as native property. As noted earlier, these lands were leased to the CDC in 1947 for a period of 60 years with the possibility of renewal for a further 60-year term. One confusing aspect of the afore- described transaction is the fact that CDC was established as a statutory body, and along with the repurchased ex-enemy lands, placed under the control of the Governor of colonial Nigeria. At the same time, the CDC was given the mandate to administer and develop the plantations which occupied said lands until such time as the Bakweri people were competent to manage them without assistance. One cannot but ponder whether this confusing language was inadvertent or a well calculated attempt on the part of the authors to convert Bakweri ancestral lands into property of the state.

It would appear that the Government of Cameroon interpreted the fact the land in question was under the control of the colonial governor to mean

that the land belonged to the government of Nigeria. Consequently, by inheriting Southern Cameroons from the colonial government of Nigeria, it inherited all of its property, including the Bakweri ancestral lands. To the extent that this is true, the Government can be said to have misrepresented the terms of the transaction involving the Bakweri lands to the Bakweri, which constitutes a breach of trust on the part of the Government. This was the finding in the landmark case of Guerin v the Queen, decided by the Supreme Court of Canada.56 In this case, an aboriginal group, the Musqueam Indians, held 416 acres (about 1.7 sq. km) of land in the Vancouver area. In 1958, the Canadian Government leased 162 acres (0.7 sq. km) of the lands to a private Golf Club, but misrepresented the details of the deal to the Musqueams, who sued the Government in a lower court for breach of trust. The Court ruled in favour of the Musqueams and awarded them $10 million, a ruling overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal, so the Musqueam took the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada, which as the lower Court, ruled in their favour.

Post-colonial authorities in Cameroon have been less tolerant of customary entitlements to land than their colonial predecessors. By so doing, these authorities have denied indigenous peoples such as the Bakweri the right to enjoy and celebrate their tradition and cultural heritage, a right implicitly guaranteed in article 22 of the African Charter. Sections 1 - 2 of this article states that,

All peoples shall have the right to their economic, social and cultural development with due regard to their freedom and identity and in the equal enjoyment of the common heritage of mankind. States shall have the duty, individually and collectively, to ensure the exercise of the right to development.

As stated at the outset of this chapter, African traditional ethos does not consider land as a commodity. In other words, land cannot be sold, exchanged or permanently transferred to anyone. No-one owns or can own land; the living have only use rights over land, and are seen merely as custodians of the land bequeathed them by their ancestors. Those alive are charged with the duty of guarding and protecting land for the generations to come. Any theory purporting that Bakweri ancestral land had been bought by colonial authorities, who in turn handed it to their post-colonial successors, must first seek to address the following question. How could the Bakweri alive at the time have sold land they did not own?

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Summary and conclusion

The state in Cameroon, dating back to the colonial era, has demonstrated a penchant for striving to usurp all other societal interests in the land domain. The country’s first colonial rulers, the Germans, proceeded early

during their brief colonial tenure in Cameroon to enact a series of laws designed to achieve this goal. Prominent in this regard, is the Act of 15 July 1896, which converted all so-called ‘unoccupied lands’ into property of the German colonial state. The converted lands were in turn, placed at the disposal of private German farmers who used it for plantation agriculture. Subsequent administrations, following the ousting of the Germans from the country after World War I, adhered to the aggressive land acquisition blue print left behind by the German colonial authorities. The French who controlled four-fifths of Cameroon as a Trust Territory of the League of Nations, enacted a law in 1932 – a facsimile of the 1896 German colonial government Act – classifying all vacant lands as ‘terres vacantes et sans maïtres’ and converting same into property of the French colonial state. On their part, the British enacted a law 1927 the Land and Native Rights Ordinance, classifying as ‘native land’ all land in the British Mandate Territory. This classification was deceptive because the so-called native lands were placed under the control of the colonial governor of Nigeria, who could in turn do as he chose with the land.

The actions of the post-colonial state in the land domain have mirrored those of its colonial predecessors. The country’s 1974 landmark land law was designed to consolidate the state’s power. According to Ordinance No 74-1 of the Law, not only is the state the guardian of all lands, it is also endowed with the powers to use the land as it sees fit in the interests of the nation at large. More importantly, the post-colonial governments have been less tolerant of, and even oblivious to, customary entitlements to land. The state recognises only formal instruments of land ownership, particularly a government-issued land certificate, and the concomitant registration of such title in the National Land Register. These and other requirements and behaviour of the government in the land domain has heightened land-related tensions, which manifest the continuing struggle over legitimacy and control over valuable resources between the state and society.57

Since the 1990s, and as part of efforts to fulfill its obligations under the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the Government of Cameroon has proceeded to unilaterally privatise the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) and its assets. This action has triggered a flurry of reactions especially from the Bakweri, whose ancestral lands are occupied by CDC’s estates. Thus, the Government decision to privatise the CDC fuelled the longstanding Bakweri land problem.

57 _{Njoh (n 13 above); Njoh (n 28 above); Z Ergas (ed) The African state in transition (1987);}

G Feder & R Noronha ‘Land rights systems and agricultural development in sub

This chapter has retraced the evolution of this problem from the German colonial era, through the creation of the CDC in 1946 to date. The Bakweri acted through their accredited agent, the Bakweri Land Claims Committee (BLCC), to thwart, at least temporarily, the Government’s effort to privatise the CDC. To accomplish this feat, the BLCC addressed a barrage of letters to national, regional and international entities asserting the customary land rights of the Bakweri over the lands in question, and protesting what it views as the state’s callous disregard of these rights. In October 2002, the BLCC filed a formal complaint against the Government of Cameroon at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) in Banjul. In its communication to the ACHPR under articles 55, 56,and 58 of the African Charter, the BLCC prayed the Commission to find that by refusing to affirm the rights of Bakweri people over the lands occupied by the CDC, the Government of Cameroon has violated some fundamental human rights of these people. The BLCC further urged the Commission to recommend that the Government makes a good faith effort to resolve the longstanding Bakweri land problem. Despite a motion for dismissal from the Government, the Commission not only entertained the case, but also found in favour of the BLCC.

This case has implications that transcend Cameroon’s frontiers, holding important lessons for indigenous groups whose lands have been expropriated by the state elsewhere. One can only hope that international organs such as the ACHPR are not toothless barking dogs, but, upon finding in favour of the Bakweri, the Commission did not lay down any mechanism to implement its recommendations. What authority does the Commission have over Cameroon as a sovereign nation? What if the Government were to invoke its police power to employ the land in question? The country’s landmark land law provides for such invocation of the police power of the state. Although the BLCC appears oblivious to this possibility, it recognises the apparent inability of the Commission to compel the Government of Cameroon to implement its recommendations, and is consoled by the fact that the Commission has confirmed the legitimacy of its case. Furthermore, as the BLCC notes, the Commission has the authority to forward the matter to the African Union Assembly should the Cameroonian Government fail to take the steps necessary to implement its recommendations.

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