Introduction

On February 12, 1930 Albert Tonye married Agnès Albertine Ngonsémél in the Catholic church of Eseka in southern Cameroon. Agnès was Albert's first wife and, according to Tonye's account, they were both devout Catholics and had entered into the marriage according to their own free will. Tonye's father, Chief Makasso Malipem of the village of Songlipem, had sent Tonye at the age of ten to the Catholic mission at N'Gowayang to be educated and baptized. Between 1927 and 1929, Tonye had trained to be part of the colonial government and was appointed as an écrivain auxiliare, or secretarial assistant, in the regions surrounding Eseka and Sangmélima. In their first few years together, Agnès and Albert had several children, and Agnès managed their home in Eseka. In 1932, however, Albert fell out of favor with the colonial service, who revoked his position in Eseka and transferred him to Ouesso in the French colony of Moyen Congo. This kind of professional banishment was made worse by the fact that the colonial service refused to also transfer Agnès and the couple's children to Ouesso, a situation Albert described in his letters as “stranding” him “in a foreign land without any affection or family comfort.”

Throughout the next six years, Albert Tonye's career disappointment and marital separation grew into a political predicament for the French colonial administration and a delicate matter of religious diplomacy for the French Catholic Church in Cameroon. Beginning in 1932 and extending through 1938, Tonye began writing a series of letters – several dozen in total – to district officers in Eseka, to Pierre Aubert, the Governor of Cameroon, to Léon Solomiac, the Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, to Bishops Mathurin le Mailloux and François-Xavier Vogt, and to Pope Pius XI in Rome, arguing that he had been married in the eyes of God and French law, and that the administration was violating a sacred bond in effectively terminating his marriage without his consent by separating him from his wife. For the next six years, Tonye condemned the French government, slandered his wife, aggravated his extended family, and tried to outsmart the Catholic clerical elite in his quest to reunite his family as well as expand his household by taking a second wife to replace Agnès in her absence.