PRIDES AND PREJUDICES OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FORCED MIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN THE BAMENDA GRASSLANDS OF CAMEROON

The Bamenda Grassfield locale is an assembly of social, political and economic entities constituted by/with people of mixed origins who are products of push and pull migratory trends. Their organizations and forms of power tenure vary in form and content but roughly correspond to centralized and decentralized systems of power structures. As mixed by-product of this settlement pattern, no socio-political group can lay claim of aboriginal rights and perceptions since all of them settled almost at the same time. However, there are a group of forced migrant communities notably, Bawock, Baforkum, Fungeih, Nsongwa, Bambili, and the Cattle Fulani (Mbororo) whose migratory history is not only recent but owe its origin to force or push factors. As forced migrant communities, their sojourn to their present sites as well as their survival provides an interesting migration scholarship. This paper is an attempt to use these communities as cases in point to underscore the pride and prejudice of the forced migrant communities vis-à-vis their early counterparts within the Bamenda Grasslands. After positioning the discourse of forced migrants within space and time by summoning and analyzing data from primary and secondary sources, the paper builds a portrait of this forced migrant communities and details their plight and fortunes in this ecological niche from the earliest settlements to the present. Besides enriching the discourse on missing or difficult to be assimilated migrant communities, it submits from the fertility of its thesis that their emigration from their different sites as well as their settlement and evolution within their host environments constitute an adventure of challenging but overwhelmingly fulfilling moments both to their host communities and the settlers