Settlements and Contrasting De-Indigenization Paths Among the Mbororo and Pygmy Indigenous People of Cameroon: The Consolidation of the Milestone of a New Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative analysis of the socio-political and legal implications of settlement on the indigenous Mbororo people (nomadic pastoralists) and the Baka Pygmies (hunter-gatherers) of Cameroon. Faced with changes in their traditional spatial lifestyles, these populations are going through a dynamic process of "de-indigenization", defined as the progressive disjunction between the identity or legal status of indigenous people and the actual practice of nomadism or hunting-gathering. Based on a comparative approach combining an empirical field survey of the Mbororos of Ngaoui (Adamawa), a meta-analysis of the contemporary anthropological literature on the Baka (Eastern Cameroon), the study mobilizes a theoretical framework articulating the sociology of mobilities and the geography of territorialities and demonstrates that settlement does not produce a uniform assimilation, but generates two asymmetrical paths of de-indigenization. On the one hand, the Mbororos accomplish a bottom-up and consolidated de-indigenization by converting their pastoral economic capital into political, municipal and land capital. On the other hand, the Baka Pygmies are undergoing a precarious and subaltern de-indigenization, marked by land dispossession, agricultural proletarianization and electoral subjugation to the Bantu elites. By integrating an explicit Popperian refutability clause, the article, thus, makes an original contribution to political sociology by offering a renewed conceptual grid of vulnerable categories in the face of the mutations of contemporary Africa.