Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 117
Mr Kershaw expresses the view that the 'affair' (meaning the killing of lawan Buba) had a
negative impact on all the other montagnard groups concerning the further recruitment of
settlers to the scheme. His reasoning is that he disagreed with the official policy of including
the 'Gidagal' and 'village councils' in the decision-making process of choosing prospective
candidates for resettlement. He adds that the 'bulamas' and 'chimas' often had 'not the same
official standing', and could therefore be easily sidelined by the elders. He implies that it
would have been better instead to let the chimas and bulamas be instructed by the district
head, concerning who should be chosen for resettlement. He believes that the 'councils of
elders' were continuously in a conflict of interest with the village youth when it came to who
among them should join the resettlement project. He therefore claims that the 'Gwoza Affair',
back in September/October, had been a negative example to the other groups, such as the
Gvoko, because they had been given too much choice via these 'councils'. He thought that the
incident in 'Johode' should have remained a 'Gwoza Affair' alone, and was 'very pessimistic'
as to whether they would now be able to recruit even up to 50 settlers as originally planned, to
start the pilot scheme with them. Mr Kershaw explicitly points out that this is his personal
view, and that he has no wish at all to object to the official policy.
Whatever the reason for the ongoing failure of the settlement scheme, Mr Kershaw
presumably had a valid point to make, though we might not agree with his indirect suggestion
that it would have been better to continue to recruit new settlers by 'earmarking' them from
Gwoza. We will see below that the situation was much more complex than Mr Kershaw
assumed. For example, at the end of 1954, after the killing of lawan Buba, a new plan had
been discussed in which the foothill populations were encouraged to settle further west, and
the hill populations move into the adjacent plains nearer to the hills once this was achieved.
The reason behind this was the realisation that the montagnards would not agree to settle far
beyond the foothills for fear of losing their links with the hills. We do not know whether this
proposal took off, since this would have meant that existing traditional land ownership along
the foothills would have to be renounced.9
However in November 1955 there were no more than 42 settlers recruited for the resettlement
scheme west of Limankara. The same report also mentions an incident in which the district
head of Gwoza had ordered 'mixed farmers at Limankara… to work for a day on the D.H.’s
farm… no payment in cash or kind was made for this work.' The new resettlement officer,
Richard Coofer, wrote that he decided not to cancel this order for the sake of the district
head’s prestige, but spoke to the district head about it. The district head complained about his
criticism and said that other district heads were not so closely supervised.
That the resettlement officer did not take this matter further indicates that the climate had
changed in Gwoza, and that the district head was no longer seen as a 'political agent' of the
touring officer, but that a new elite was about to take shape of which the montagnards were
likely to become the victims. In light of such a hypothesis, the killing of lawan Buba in
Ghwa’a could be interpreted as a violent rebellion against the ongoing process of ethnic
9
We do know now that the Dghweɗe of Korana Basa have their official resettlement area today near
the foothills, and that such a conflict actually still existed during my time, since people from Korana
Basa had moved beyond their delimitated area into Vile. By then, the people of Ghwa’a seemed to have
completely given up moving into the western plains, but had settled instead extensively in the eastern
adjacent plain. Unfortunately, land is very limited there due to the international boundary nearby, and
there were also ongoing conflicts with the Chikiɗe over boundaries in the eastern plain. In addition, the
Dghweɗe and Chikiɗe massif was still quite densely populated at that time, which would have defeated
the argument of the British in the 1930s that the hills might be depopulated after one generation. We
can assume that this idea was already defeated in the 1950s, when the hill population continued to grow
in number and made the resettlement scheme more urgent. However, uncontrolled downhill migration
remained the preferred option for the Montagnards, in particular their need to maintain close links with
their homeland in the hills.
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