The Destruction and End of Yee Village Settlement of Nso Fondom in Cameroon, 1975

This paper presents the destruction and abrupt end of the Yee village settlement of the Nso fondom in Cameroon in 1975. It argues that the event came as a consequence of the government’s effort to provide potable water to the entire Kumbo town and its neighborhood populace. The decision to get the inhabitants of Yee (Kumbo water catchment intake zone) displaced was taken by the Technical Commission placed in charge of the water supply scheme and was to be implemented by the Cameroon government. Efforts to get the inhabitants peacefully relocated, compensated, and resettled failed. They rejected all displacement offers and vowed to continue to inhabit the catchment basin. Forceful eviction came as the only option for the full implementation of the decision of the Technical Commission. This paper reveals that the refusal of the inhabitants to quit Yee was dictated by their attachment to their material investments and ancestral rights and that their eviction was done with impunity and then code-named “Ngwerong action.†The Fon gave the green light but stood with the Divisional Officer at a distance and watched masked Ngwerong elements supervising the action. There exists some literature on the circumstances that led to the accomplishment of the Kumbo Water Project, but little attention has been paid to the root causes that prompted the destruction and complete extermination of the once-flourishing Yee village. In researching this issue, we used both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. We contacted informants and had personal communication with them especially some of the victims including Nso elites and notables. To ensure credibility of information gathered through oral ninterviews, we used the quintodiamentional questioning approach. We equally gathered information related to the issue existing in isolated form from published works to complement information from primary sources. Primary data was collected using structured questionnaires. Some credible facts and figures were also collected from both private and public archives.