In Nkoemvone, southern Cameroon, a vast site spanning over 300 hectares lies mostly abandoned, with only ten hectares under cultivation. A paved road cuts through the property, past dilapidated buildings and a sign identifying it as the ‘Nkoemvone polyvalent agricultural station’, under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Though badly deteriorated, the station remains active in agronomic research, mainly producing and distributing cocoa seedlings.
Created in 1944, this site stands as one of the great remnants of colonial modernity. The ‘Nkoemvone experimental cocoa station’ fits what historian Hélène Blais calls the ‘garden-object’ within the French colonial empire, especially during the 20th century when plant reproduction became the dominant activity. Less documented than other colonial stations like Bambey in Senegal, it nonetheless participated in moving, introducing and relocating plants—specifically cocoa varieties—with the aim of instigating change within colonised societies. Its history would ultimately be brief, and its ambitions would collide with the difficulties of an independent Cameroon.
The economic and social crisis of 1929, though softened in colonised Africa by the metropolitan buffer, caused a profound shift in French colonial policies. It condemned the trading economy and pushed the colonial state to take charge of infrastructure and export crops, while also forcing it to consider the living conditions of colonised populations. The colonial state thus became ‘developmentalist’. This shift was confirmed at the Brazzaville conference of 30 January to 8 February 1944, presided over by Charles de Gaulle, which pursued a dual goal: reviving the French economy and improving the lot of the colonised through planned development.
A colonial experiment takes root
On the agricultural front, a dominant narrative emerged: African societies were seen as essentially peasant communities, so improving their situation meant increasing yields through massive investment in agriculture. This logic led to the multiplication of agronomic research institutions across the French empire, with Cameroon serving as a privileged observation ground. By decree of 8 June 1944, the governor of French Cameroon, Eugène Paul Carras, abolished the Technical Council for Agriculture and Livestock and replaced it with three separate services: Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry.
This reorganisation aimed to give agriculture a dedicated service. According to agronomist Pierre Barthe, former head of Cameroon’s agriculture service, in a 1946 report, the new Agriculture Service was structured into several sub-services. One of these consisted primarily of agronomic research institutions, including three experimental stations at Dschang, Maroua and Nkoemvone. All were created during the interwar period, except the Nkoemvone cocoa station, founded in 1944 following the June reforms. It was therefore the quintessential product of the modernisation of colonialism that emerged between the wars.
The Nkoemvone cocoa station was set up gradually. According to agronomist Raymond Juliat, head of the agriculture service in 1944, it was not officially created by a text at first; its role was ‘the selection of cocoa trees in order to popularise only high-yielding subjects’. In 1947, 300 hectares were requisitioned to host it, but construction works stalled due to lack of labour and materials, and ‘the absence of an overall plan’. Despite these difficulties, the colonial administration confirmed in 1948 its vocation to encompass all research and experimentation, before officially instituting it by a regulatory text the following year. Construction then began, financed by the cocoa fund.
Forced labour and settlement
However, setting up the Nkoemvone experimental station faced major practical hurdles. As station director Jean Braudeau noted in his 1949 annual report, staff shortages prevented construction, road building, creation of a nursery and 15 hectares of plantations. He managed to recruit some temporary workers from a neighbouring village, often paid by the task. The question of whether this labour was voluntary or forced remains difficult to resolve: although High Commissioner René Hoffherr began banning forced recruitment upon his arrival in 1947, Cameroonian historian Léon Kaptué reminds us that the French administration continued to mobilise forced labour until 1949.
To attract workers from beyond the region, the colonial administration chose to build housing within the station—a common practice among colonial administrations, as historian Gwendolyn Wright notes. These workers were expected not only to help construct the station but also to take part in agronomic research activities.
Agronomist Achille Pacilly, who succeeded Jean Braudeau as head of the station in 1949, revealed that a labour camp was first established, consisting of twenty huts made from local materials. By 1956, 58 permanent homes were built, housing 130 to 140 families a few years later. The labour camp thus solved the workforce problem.
Alongside these homes, residences for managerial staff were also erected. Research laboratories, the provision of running water and electricity, a clinic, and many large-scale developments such as nurseries and gardens of cocoa variety collections were added. In short, the station was a site where living spaces and research spaces were closely intertwined. The station’s development was completed in 1959, on the eve of the country’s independence.
A propaganda tool
Beyond being a place of science, the Nkoemvone experimental station also functioned as an instrument of colonial propaganda for the French administration. This propaganda took place in a particular Cameroonian context—the 1950s, marked by violent repression by the French army against Cameroonian nationalists. During the first phase of this conflict, whose brutality was most evident in the Bassa country in cocoa-growing southern Cameroon, the Nkoemvone experimental station became a tool for winning hearts and minds.
André Boyer, a journalist and head of the propaganda service of the French administration in the country, circulated a film in 1958 among the population entitled ‘The Cocoa Centre of Nkoemvone’. This film was part of a general repertoire of techniques aimed, in his own words, ‘at bringing the strayed back to normal life and convincing the masses of the truly nationalist and sincere action of the Cameroonian government’.
The experimental station also served the French colonial administration to display its benefits in Cameroon. The Report of the United Nations Visiting Mission to Trust Territories in West Africa (1958) on Cameroon under French administration testifies to this. The UN writers and observers inspected the station on 19 November 1958 and stated: ‘The activities of this station consist essentially of selecting the best varieties of cocoa trees and producing cuttings for distribution to planters. It is hoped to replace the current low-yielding trees in plantations with elite plants. The station has already produced good results.’
This use of the station as a propaganda tool was taken up after independence by the government of Cameroon’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, this time in the service of international prestige. In the station’s report covering 1961–1962, we learn that the institution received visits from the US ambassador to Cameroon, the German ambassador, and three African heads of state: Madagascar’s Philibert Tsiranana, Gabon’s Léon Mba and Chad’s François Tombalbaye. Also came the director of the École nationale d’administration in Paris and the World Bank director for Africa, among others. However, this international visibility in service of the Cameroonian government also marked the beginning of a gradual decline.
From independence to decay
After the 1960 independence, the new states, including Cameroon, signed agreements with France providing that ‘for applied research, an agreement on programmes, mixed financing for operations, a quasi-commitment by France for investment financing and, within this general framework, the establishment of specific agreements specifying the terms of establishment and management of the specialised institutes whose presence would be deemed necessary’.
These agreements allowed France to continue administering the station through, for example, the appointment of former colonial agronomists such as Jacques Liabeuf as station director. As researchers Jean Gaillard, Hocine Khelfaoui and Jean Nya Ngatchou have pointed out, the new Cameroonian state found its own interest, concentrating its resources on higher education and training while leaving scientific research to France. French tutelage only ended in 1975.
In the following decades, the station entered a period of decline, worsened by the economic and social crisis of the 1980s, which severely hit Cameroonian agronomic research, which ‘experienced a serious financial situation and a change in the structure of its budget’, leading to stagnation in research within it.
The crisis affecting Cameroonian agricultural research extended to the entire scientific sector of the country. During its most acute phase, from 1990 to 1996, ‘research programmes funded nationally were stopped; only programmes and projects with external financial support continued more or less normally, due to delays in the payment of staff salaries’. This brought reduced funding, researcher discouragement due to salary devaluation, and abandonment of many programmes, including those on cocoa at the Nkoemvone station, where scientific activity nearly ground to a halt.
Around the turn of the 1990s, the station was transformed into a polyvalent agronomic research station, placed under the supervision of the Agricultural Research Institute for Development (Irad), created by presidential decree in 1996 and reorganised in 2002. This restructuring did not improve the institution’s situation; it continued to deteriorate. Added to the progressive decay caused by the economic crisis were natural causes, worsening the dilapidation of the Nkoemvone station. In March 2006, a violent storm destroyed spaces reserved for plant trials, damaged the administrative block and ravaged numerous homes. Since then, the situation has not improved.
Paradoxically, the very size of the site—inherited from the extractivist ambitions of the station as a place for producing knowledge about cocoa and transforming the environment—now constitutes an obstacle to its rehabilitation due to lack of sufficient means. This relative state of abandonment is not explained solely by state disengagement, justified by successive crises and natural hazards. It also reveals more profoundly the contradictions of a colonial modernity project whose excessive ambitions and extractivist imaginaries collide with the far more complex realities of the postcolonial period.
