Encounter, Transformation, and Identity: Peoples of the Western Cameroon Borderlands, 1891-2000 9781845459345

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ENCOUNTER, TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY

Cameroon Studies General Editors: Shirley Ardener, E.M. Chilver and Ian Fowler, Associate Members of Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. Volume 1 Kingdom on Mount Cameroon: Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast 1500–1970 Edwin Ardener. Edited and with an Introduction by Shirley Ardener. Volume 2 African Crossroads: Intersections between History and Anthropology in Cameroon Edited by Ian Fowler and David Zeitlyn. Volume 3 Cameroon’s Tycoon: Max Esser’s Expedition and its Consequences Edited by E.M. Chilver and Ute Röschenthaler. Volume 4 Swedish Ventures in Cameroon, 1883–1923: Trade and Travel, People and Politics Edited and with Commentaries by Shirley Ardener. Volume 5 Memoirs of a Mbororo: The Life of Ndudi Umaru: Fulani Nomad of Cameroon Henri Bocquené, translated by Philip Burnham and Gordeen Gorder Volume 6 In Search of Salt: Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880–1960 F. Quinn. Volume 7 Lela in Bali: History through Ceremony in Cameroon Richard Fardon Volume 8 Encounter, Transformation and Identity: Peoples of the Western Cameroon Borderlands, 1891–2000 Edited by Ian Fowler and Verkijika G. Fanso

ENCOUNTER, TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY Peoples of the Western Cameroon Borderlands, 1891–2000

Edited by

IAN FOWLER AND VERKIJIKA G. FANSO

With a Preface by

MARTIN AND DOROTHY NJEUMA

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2009 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2009 Ian Fowler and Verkijika G. Fanso All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encounter, transformation and identity : peoples of the western Cameroon borderlands, 1891/2000 / edited by Ian Fowler and Verikijika G. Fanso, with a preface by Martin and Dorothy Njeuma. p. cm. -- (Cameroon studies ; v.8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-336-7 (alk. paper) 1. Ethnology--Cameroon--South-West Province. 2. First contact of aboriginal peoples with Westerners--Cameroon--South-West Province. 3. Ethnicity--Cameroon--South-West Province. 4. Oral tradition--Cameroon--South-West Province. 5. South-West Province (Cameroon)--Colonization. 6. South-West Province (Cameroon)--History--Sources. 7. South-West Province (Cameroon)--Social life and customs. I. Fowler, Ian. II. Fanso, Verkijika G. III. Njeuma, M. Z., 1940GN655.C3E53 2009 967.11--dc22 2009012808

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-84545-336-7 (hardback)

Frontispiece: Edwin Ardener’s handwritten (1966) map of Anglophone Cameroon © Shirley Ardener

For Shirley G. Ardener OBE ‘Iya Efosi’

Contents

List of Maps

ix

List of Figures

x

Foreword: Shirley Ardener: A Personal Note Verkijika G. Fanso

xi

Preface: Shirley Ardener: Fortifying Cameroon Studies Martin and Dorothy Njeuma

xiv

Acknowledgements

xxii

Abbreviations

xxiii

Contributors

xxiv

1 Voicing Identity Ian Fowler

1

2 Oral Traditions and Administrative Identities Edwin Ardener

16

3 Epitome of Extracts from Hermann Detzner, Im Lande Des Dju-Dju Sally Chilver

50

4 Von Gravenreuth and Buea as a Site of History: Early Colonial Violence on Mount Cameroon Peter Geschiere 5 Azi since Conrau: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives Michael Mbapndah Ndobegang and Fiona Bowie

69

93

6 The Submerged History of Nsanakang: A Glimpse into an Anglo-German Encounter Ute Röschenthaler

110

7 The Latent Struggle for Identity and Autonomy in the Southern Cameroons, 1916–1946 Verkijika G. Fanso

141

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CONTENTS

8 Titi Ikoli Revisited: Fetishism, Gender and Power in Transitional Forest Economies of the Upper Cross River Borderlands, 1920s–1990s 151 Caroline Ifeka 9 Commemorating Women in a Patrilineal Society Margaret Niger-Thomas 10 The Challenge of Multi-sited Ethnography Fiona Bowie 11 The Politics of Religious Essentialism: The Eucharistic Meal and Identity Discourses in Postcolonial African Catholicism Ludovic Lado 12 Making a Difference in North-South Relationships: Public and Private Spheres and the Role of the Human Seed in Networking for Local Development Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga

169

184

199

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Appendix: Extracts on the Widekum and the Tikar taken from Notes on the Pre-colonial History and Ethnography of the Bamenda Grassfields, composed and privately circulated by Sally Chilver and Phyllis Kaberry

231

Bibliography

237

Index

248

Maps

1.1. Cameroon-Nigeria Borderlands

1

2.1. The Peoples of the Assumbo Highlands

19

2.2. The Anyang and their neighbours

29

3.1. Gajama to Agara

52

3.2. Sonkwala to Baschu

64

4.1. Volckamer’s sketch map of the Battle of Buea

77

6.1. The Cross River Area around Nsanakang

111

Figures

5.1. Azi Palace, Preparations for the Cry-die of Efuctlefac Fontem

94

6.1. The njom Called Obasi Asam, at Nsanaragati

121

6.2. British/German Cemetery at Nsanakang

127

6.3. British/German Cemetery at Nsanakang

128

6.4. Gravestone of British Lieutenant A.C. Holme

129

6.5. Gravestone of Johann Carl Cecil Holling

130

6.6. Commemorative Stone Plate in Chief’s Compound in Nsanakang

131

6.7. Hippopotamuses with ‘Owners’ at the Cross River

133

9.1. Ma' Sem Ayuk Enow (right), died late 1930s. Egbekaw-Ossing

174

9.2. Ma' Agnes Eyere, ca. 1910–1980. Besongabang

175

9.3. Ma' Bessem Ebai-Enow, died 1975. Besongabang

176

9.4. Ma' Bessem Ako, died 1962. Ntenako

177

9.5. Ma' Bessem Enow, died late 1960s. Takpa-Ossing

178

9.6. Ma' Ebkoh Bessem, died early 1970s. Egbekaw-Ossing

179

9.7. Ma' Ebangba Obon, died 1985. Egbekaw-Ossing

180

9.8. Ma' Eyereta seated. Tombstone of Ma' Eneke Agbondip (died late 1960s). Ndekwai

181

10.1. Nekamin David Khumbah 1911–1991

196

Foreword Shirley Ardener: A Personal Note Verkijika G. Fanso

My earliest knowledge of Edwin and Shirley Ardener1 was through two of their publications, namely Plantation and Village in the Cameroons (1960) and Shirley’s Eye-witnesses to the Annexation of Cameroon, 1883–1887 (1968), which became invaluable sources to me in later years during my graduate studies in the United Kingdom. I had first come across these books when I was teaching at St Joseph’s College Sasse, near Buea. To be honest, what I liked about the books was their titles, not so very much their content. At that time not much was written about Cameroon or African history, which, I was to learn later, some Eurocentric scholars claimed did not exist. Our school and college syllabuses then were laden with English and European history. I began to read the works of the Ardeners with a lot more interest and understanding during my graduate studies at the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham, in 1973–1974. My interest in Cameroonian and African history was much heightened. I was able to acquire my own copies of Eyewitnesses, as well as Edwin’s Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons (1956) and E.M. Chilver and P.M. Kaberry’s Traditional Bamenda (1968). I read everything on Cameroonian history that I came across. I met Shirley and Edwin Ardener for the first time in 1982 at a Cameroon Grassfields Studies Conference held at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. It was then that I was able to discuss Eyewitnesses to the Annexation with Shirley and tell her how much the primary material in it had helped me with my MA dissertation in Birmingham and how it remained useful in my doctoral studies. I also learned from the Ardeners about their contributions to the creation of the Buea Archives. We all regretted the dilapidated condition in which the archives were kept. I spent about a month in Oxford researching at Rhodes House and other libraries and drafting the chapters of my doctoral thesis under Sally Chilver’s supervision. Once or twice I met Shirley at Sally’s house, and she would talk about Buea and the many people they knew there. My close contact with Shirley began in 1995 when I was appointed Director of Cultural Heritage in the Cameroon Ministry of Culture, with administrative Note for this section appears on page xiii.

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responsibilities over the services of archives, museums, monuments, national languages and historical sites and figures. I had gone to Buea to find out more about the archives and other services under my directorship and to report on the actual situation to the Ministry of Culture. It was there I met Shirley, who was visiting the University of Buea at the time and spending many extra hours at the Buea Archives with Primus Forgwe, Prince Henry Mbain (staff) and Pierre Djoumbissi (chief of service), trying to rescue the rotting files and repair the dehumidifiers, heaters and whatever else. She was delighted to discover that I was heading the Department of Cultural Heritage. That day we had lunch in Buea and discussed the condition of the archives. I told Shirley that because of the financial crises, which were hitting the Cameroon government very hard, there was nothing to hope or look for from the ministry for the archives. Shirley and I became determined to do everything possible to find means of rescuing the Buea Archives. Having considered the embassies and the high commissions in Yaoundé that were likely to sponsor a project or projects to rescue the Buea Archives, we decided to approach the Dutch, the British and the Germans. We then drafted a project, estimated costs for each item and decided that both Shirley and I should go to the Dutch embassy and talk with them before submitting our application. We were very well received at the Dutch embassy and listened to, thanks to Shirley’s great skill at negotiating, pleading and persuading. Within a week of our applying for a grant, someone was dispatched from the Dutch embassy to come to Buea, see and evaluate the project and report to the ambassador. Towards the end of that year I was invited to the Dutch embassy to sign a contract for their contributions towards the rehabilitation of the Buea Archives worth over CFA 7 million. We were able to repair the leaks in the roof, restore a room that had been damaged by fire, fix the heaters and humidifiers, rewire the building, build three of the six large shelves, install four metal doors and five iron window protectors, restore the plumbing system, acquire a new photocopier and commence with the treatment and shelving of the thousands of documents that lay heaped on the basement floor. In October 1995 Shirley and a number of us, including Primus Forgwe, Henry Mbain, Michael Cheke and Pierre Djoumbissi of the archives, Mike Rowlands of the University of London, and Peter Geschiere and Piet Konings of Leiden University, met in Buea and decided to form the Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC). This would take care of archives and antiquities and protect and promote Cameroon’s cultural heritage. I became the general president and Shirley the coordinator of the European and North American section. Under AFAAC, and again with Shirley’s help, we were able to get further grants from the British High Commission and the German embassy for the complete rehabilitation of the Buea Archives; a second grant from the Dutch embassy to run a three-day seminar for archives workers in the Municipal Councils of the Centre Province in Cameroon; and another German embassy grant to rehabilitate the historic Bismarck Fountain in Buea. In 1996, with the support of Shirley Ardener and Sally Chilver, I was awarded a Rhodes Chair Research Fellowship for four months at Oxford. Shirley and I have continued to work together as members of AFAAC, and as friends, to assist

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in the protection of the Buea Archives and other archives in Cameroon. Whenever Shirley visits she spends much of her personal resources and time assisting the AFAAC helpers at the archives, where there has been no governmental worker since 2004. We correspond regularly by email about the archives and other related and academic matters.

Note 1. A full bibliography of Shirley Ardener’s publications is to be found in Bryceson, Okely and Webber (2007: 279–283).

Preface Shirley Ardener: Fortifying Cameroon Studies Martin and Dorothy Njeuma

Scholars will never cease to tell and revise the story of the encounter between incoming Europeans and Black Africans. This is so because of increasing worldwide interest and improved conditions and techniques to pursue research, in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke, to the bottom of ideas and events that have transformed Africa and Africans into strong members of present world communities. Indeed, Africanists the world over have become deeply involved and committed and are not contented ‘merely to recount what has been, but to share in moulding what should be’, in line with the words of the renowned Cameroonian scholar Bernard Nsokika Fonlon.1 Accordingly, new dimensions in research and writing in African studies are taking, indeed have taken, shape as indigenous sources from within African societies constantly emerge from the doldrums of ignorance and neglect. Evidently this is so because Europeans deployed greater means of compulsion that in large measure explain the revolutionary nature of the European transformations on both sides of the European and African continents. In another sense, this means that the sources at the disposal of scholars for study of the various episodes of African history now have a tendency to be recycled into beefed-up interpretations that enrich the transcontinental flow and production of knowledge and individual self-consciousness. We seek here to recount one such case of improving understanding in the history of Cameroon, that of Shirley G. Ardener and the pathways she has followed to become a leading figure in Cameroon studies today.2 By destiny and, less so, by design, she and her husband, Edwin William Ardener (now of blessed memory) have projected the Bakweri onto the world stage. For more than half a century they have articulated and sustained research and publications, leading up to the 1996 volume Kingdom on Mount Cameroon: Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast, 1500–1970 by Edwin Ardener, edited and with an introduction by Shirley Ardener. In 2002 Shirley went on to publish Swedish Ventures in Cameroon 1883– 1923. Trade and Travel, People and Politics: The Memoir of Knut Knutson. This volume, published by Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford), reflects Shirley’s lifelong commitment to research in the region and follows her earlier (1968) EyeNotes for this section begin on page xxi.

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witnesses to the Annexation of Cameroon 1883–1887. Above all, it portrays the history and culture of the Bakweri at a period for which authentic documentary evidence is scarce, and it has revolutionized both oral and documentary-based research in Cameroon by privileging the ideas and activities of local actors. In this way, the book serves not only as a resource for academicians in schools and universities, but also as a literary confidence-building tool for those curious minds interested in knowing the stories of how naïve or clever their ancestors were in their dealings in cross-cultural settings.

Early Pioneers When one reflects on the emergence of Cameroon studies, practically all scholars (foreign and indigenous) who had research interests in Western Cameroon from around the 1960s interacted with four British scholars, either directly in person or indirectly, through their publications and third-party informants. We are referring to Phyllis Kaberry, Sally Chilver, and Shirley and Edwin Ardener. Their individual attitudes and approaches to scholarship exhibited shared traits of temerity, commitment and persistence throughout their association with Cameroon, its peoples, cultures and historical transformations. Chilver and Kaberry concentrated their attention on the Western Cameroon Grassfields. Chilver subsequently supported the creation of the Kaberry Resource Centre in Bamenda (Nwana 2004: 13–14). The Ardeners also carried out fieldwork in the Grassfields, in Esu, but their interests became focused more on the coastal regions of Cameroon from the precolonial to postcolonial periods. A befitting testimony is the degree to which they and their studies have served as references in Cameroon studies. What immediately comes to mind is their participation at major international conferences that concern Cameroon and have considerably advanced Cameroon’s historiography in the English and French traditions. The conference that took place in Paris in 1973 was amongst the foremost. The purpose was to investigate ‘the contributions of ethnographical research to the history of Cameroon cultures’ (Tardits 1981, 1996: 141–164). The conference provided an occasion for discussion of feedback and fieldwork methodologies between several older and younger scholars. Over thirty years have passed since then, and Shirley Ardener and Sally Chilver remain active in revisiting, and seeking to tie up loose ends between, disciplines in Cameroon studies. Presently they see the fruits of their labour in their students, in whom they instilled the same desire to make and remake knowledge in their fields of study.3 Our own activities as historians and ethnographers of Africa lead to the production of knowledge that has dual currency in academic and political realms … In her works, Sally incorporates processes of reanalysis and reflection not usually carried out by one individual. For a considerable period, her work has problematised the relationship between ethnographic knowledge and cultural and political representations of identity. (Fowler and Zeitlyn 1996: xix–xx)

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A Three-legged Race Shirley and Edwin Ardener started this long march when they met as two bright students at the London School of Economics in the second half of the 1940s. As soon as they were married, destiny whisked them off to Eastern Nigeria to begin a long career in research under the auspices of the famous Nigerian (formerly West African) Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), based at the then University College of Ibadan. This was in 1949, a time when Nigeria was experiencing radical changes and its Western-fabricated elite was experimenting with new strategies of integration into the colonial orbit of power. In British colonial circles, political think tanks thought that colonial policy guidelines should take into account impartial studies that focused on real local problems of the overseas countries and their peoples. This called for more applied or policy-oriented research involving grassroots fieldwork in Nigeria and the Cameroons. Therefore, recruiting agencies hunted for and appointed many young British graduates with solid academic training to the colonial administration, or recruited them to pursue careers in African research. The Ardener couple fitted this profile well. Financed by a series of research grants, through WAISER/NISER, Edwin’s research interests remained focussed on the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria. The creation of the Cameroon Development Corporation in 1947, the decision to make it an effective instrument for socioeconomic progress and the need to conduct policy-oriented research brought the Ardeners into the Cameroons, which at the time constituted part of the British political set-up of Nigeria. Shirley’s own career and research history, as distinct from Edwin’s, has two remarkable phases: (1) 1949–1987: working in partnership with Edwin up until his premature death in 1987. (2) 1988– present day: mobilization and creation of structures for sustainability, durability and perpetuation of their works and involvement of successors. We are here talking of fifty-five years of continuous commitment to research on the coast of West Africa. Sheer longevity in this field of studies, and the blessings of good health and memory, have made Shirley a true encyclopaedia of Cameroon studies. The relation between Shirley and Edwin, as two researchers, requires a brief comment. In the first phase, both of them conducted research as if by a Pact Concordia, turning their four legs into a three-legged machine by firmly strapping one left to one right leg to create a middle leg without distinction as to who was in control. They made and developed a common course of research, with both influencing the outcome and being a part of each other’s efforts. Malcolm Chapman, who knows the Ardeners well, refers to the combination of the dimensions of ‘simple assistance’ and ‘active collaboration’: ‘Much of Ardener’s work was assisted by his wife Shirley: in particular, a collaborative study of the social and economic effects of the plantation system in what was then the Southern Cameroons, which

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resulted in the volume co-authored by the Ardeners and W.A. Warmington, Plantation and Village in the Cameroons (1960)’ (Chapman 1989: viii). This remark further recognizes Shirley’s independent academic prowess, motivations and commitments, even while her husband was alive. Shirley could climb rocky volcanic hills and descend valleys without the aid of a walking stick, as long as there was need to reach a desired target. She and Edwin had the same objectives and worked in near-perfect partnership, Shirley participating in whatever Edwin did and vice versa. Furthermore, the sheer immensity, and the new and often unpredictable nature, of fieldwork in remote towns and villages was so demanding to this young couple that they could not afford to work separately. The local, and sometimes global, environment imposed, otherwise. It was very much a matter of getting on with the task at hand. One typical incident occurred at a top-level meeting in Buea just before the 1959 general election in the Southern Cameroons: ‘In 1959 (2nd January) the Secretary of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, stopped in Buea to meet separately members of the government, (Dr Foncha, S.T. Muna and A.N. Jua) and members of the two main opposition parties (Dr E.M.L. Endeley, P. [sic] Mbile and P. Motombi-Woleta) to ascertain their intentions. As the recording machines were not working properly, she (Shirley) was asked to take notes in the meeting.’4 The meeting was rather stormy as the main protagonists (the Kamerun National Democratic Party and the Cameroon People’s National Congress) were at daggers drawn and would not budge from their positions. It was therefore not at all easy to take down coherent minutes that would satisfy all sides. However, Shirley did make a difference. All sides approved her account of the proceedings as a true record of this crucial encounter in establishing a common stand on the political future of the Southern Cameroons. Peter M. Efange, Chief of Small Soppo until September 2006, and other Bakweri elite who were prominent in the government at the time, including the octogenarian Chief Liwonjo of Mapanja, confirmed these local perceptions of the nature of Shirley’s services.

Return to Britain Britain went on to grant independence to Nigeria on 1 October 1960, leading to the administration of the Cameroons under United Nations Trusteeship in its own right. Naturally, this influenced the research strategies of the Ardeners. It was also the case that the colonial fund for research, having lost its raison d’être, largely dried up, and the Ardeners had to return to Britain in the first few years following independence. Reluctantly, Edwin took a teaching assignment at the University of Oxford on the understanding that he was to spend his vacation periods continuing the numerous research projects that they had initiated, and whose outcomes they had felt so passionately involved with, while they lived in Cameroon. The primary concern now, it would seem, was to influence local Cameroonian intelligentsia to take up research as a career. In order to attain these goals, the Ardeners initiated seminars and group discussions in Bamenda and Buea. It was through their inspiration that many students of our generation, such as Elias

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Nwana, Simon J. Epale, David Atogho, Francis Nkwain, Benedicta Ngu, Tambi Eyong Mbuagbaw, Ben Simo, Gwen Burnley, Patrick Sine and Dan Akwo Mengot, developed the interest and appetite to pursue postgraduate degrees overseas, and then careers in research and teaching. Before then only European academics and some from Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana) had recognized the importance of such capacity building in research. Like a miracle, Cameroonians too were now emerging in the arena and an intellectual history was coming into place, whose details would themselves become the concern of future historians. What happened at these initiation seminars, or discussion get-togethers, was that the group asked a number of people to present a subject or a feature of their research findings on a given day. Discussions, comments and observations followed in such a way that every participant had an opportunity to talk. The principle was to encourage understanding of, rather than to defend, a point of view. Because those from England were usually only visiting and thus had a packed programme, the meetings were few. However, when they did take place they produced great moments of intellectual exchange and creative thinking, and above all they taught us how to take the floor in an academic forum, and how to become familiar with research terminologies. Sometimes the meetings happened spontaneously, when a few interested persons in regular attendance met at the Mountain Club in Buea for a drink. One can again testify, for the interest of specialists on the history of African students in Britain and the U.S., that when most of us eventually travelled to Britain and elsewhere for further studies, we easily integrated ourselves in the social and academic milieu because the prevailing atmosphere was quite familiar. The Ardeners have been prolific in their publications. We do not wish to address their publications here because Malcolm Chapman and Shirley herself have extensively done so in The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays and in the Cameroon Studies Series. Our intention is merely to mention some functional aspects of the publications. The publications, both joint and individual, are the best illustration of the nature of the intellectual partnership that Shirley and Edwin maintained and the approach that gave birth to their first major publication in 1960: Plantation and Village in the Cameroons. At the time of publication, it was a tremendous revelation, a reference study of the first order of the economic and social life in the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC). Edwin had already published Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons in the International African Institute series in 1956. Shirley also had earlier published a leading article in the same conference proceedings of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (Ibadan) entitled ‘Banana Co-operatives in the Southern Cameroons’. Though the methodology was predominantly sociological, the paper highlighted a major Bakweri entrepreneurial activity since the Second World War and shared the same research orientation as the Plantation volume. The joint nature of Shirley and Edwin’s efforts, rendered more effective by their strong linguistic competence5 in Bakweri, is exemplified in their writings by frequent references to ‘us’ rather than to the first person singular. Their activities reached far beyond sustainable capacity-building and publications of research findings, extending also to the arduous and technical tasks

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involved in founding the Cameroon National Archives at Buea. Evidently, the edifice of the archives and its contents, and what these represent, constitute the greatest legacy that the Ardeners have left for Cameroon as a joint effort. It all started as a simple idea that glowed from within them: that a people without memory of its past is doomed to live with mistakes forever. An authentic Cameroonian eyewitness to the efforts that the Ardeners deployed and the sort of risks they undertook to make a dream come true, the late Dr S.J. Epale, who held a PhD from Oxford University, recalled their accomplishments in getting the archives to function as follows: This couple (Shirley and Edwin) painstakingly gathered bits and pieces of weather beaten German and English files from the moth-infested attic of the old German-built Secretariat in Buea and set up the present provisional archives in Buea, which today [1987] is crowded with young Cameroonians either preparing for higher degrees at overseas and Yaoundé universities or trying to develop the history of their country in order to rediscover their cultural heritage and build up new values that are in keeping with the present realities of the country … The country owes the Ardeners a great debt for bequeathing this storehouse of information about its past. (Epale 1985: xviii).

Indeed, they carried out their actions within a rather specific context. In 1961–62, a powerful UNESCO delegation visited the newly created Federal Republic of Cameroon to survey possibilities of setting up a university, or universities, to respond to the bicultural educational systems that reunification had just created in Cameroon. A long-range vision expressed optimism in the imminent creation of the Anglo-Saxon University in West Cameroon (later the North West and South West Provinces). The founding of an archive would fortify the foundation of such an academic culture, which would be valid grounds for locating the future university in Buea. In this capacity, Iya Efosi and Mola Lyonga (aka Mola Ngombe) – respectively, the Bakweri names for Shirley and Edwin – were welcome in Cameroon any time and could visit the country as they liked. Their names figured in the State Protocol with all that this implied. In return, they conducted government business as it related to the archives and offered general and benevolent consultancy. It stands to their credit that the Rules and Regulations they drafted in the early 1960s on archives and the protection of antiquities are still in force. For example, the Guide for the identification and protection of antiquities and the export of prohibited artefacts6 enabled the Fon of Kom in the 1970s to demand the repatriation of the sacred Afo-a-kom statue from the Furman Art Gallery in New York.7

Striving to Attain: The Years of Mobilization When Edwin passed away unexpectedly in October 1987, Shirley had the choice either to retire early, or to strive bravely to finish their difficult but exalting work. Like a Bamum under spiritual inspiration to ‘pursue to attain’ (Tardits 1996: 141), i.e. to commit oneself totally to reach a target, Shirley put on the mantle of an intellectual crusader, pen and torchlight in hand, so that the world’s academic com-

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munity, particularly Cameroonian and Nigerian, could profit posthumously from nearly all of Edwin’s research materials. Two familiar proverbs reflect her guiding spirit: firstly, ‘one hand does not tie a bundle, many hands do’; and secondly, that ‘whenever a great man passes away, a new one springs up’. Such a spirit of optimism is an imbedded feature in Bakweri culture. Under the influence of Shirley, two significant groups were founded to tie up the loose ends of the bundle and face the challenges of Edwin’s disappearance. She could not do it all alone; she turned to friends and interested scholars around and about her immediate surroundings in Oxford. Thus, in 1996, a small but deeply committed group of indomitable scholars founded the Cameroon Study Series with Berghahn Books, a highly reputable publishing house in Oxford, in order to extend and expand understanding of the Ardener sources and Cameroon Studies in general. So far, the series has produced seven separate volumes; Swedish Ventures is the fourth in the series. This is thanks to the assiduity of the series editors, the indefatigable Sally Chilver, Shirley Ardener and Ian Fowler. The second initiative, which applied the same ‘bundle theory’ to generate collective action, was to found and render benevolent services to the Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC). The Association has its headquarters in Buea with a registered number from the Ministry of Territorial Administration.8 Its motto is ‘The Key to the Past.’ AFAAC took off rapidly. It drew up a constitution and internal regulations, and in quick succession held successful general assemblies at two prestigious locations in Buea and Yaoundé, respectively at the Alliance Franco-Camerounaise complex and the National Conference Centre, as well as at Oxford. Membership now stands at over 200, and the list is not closed. Under the able and selflessly devoted leadership of Founding President Verkijika G. Fanso, currently Professor of History, University of Yaoundé I, and formerly Director of Cultural Heritage overseeing National Archives and Museums with residence in Yaoundé, the association has received institutional support from many sources. These include the Cameroon Ministry of Culture, the British Council, the German and Dutch embassies, the British High Commission, Alliance Franco-Camerounaise in Buea, the universities and Fakoship Company Limited, Cameroon. The most recent initiative by Shirley’s friends at the University of Buea has been the creation of a research project entitled ‘Multidisciplinary Project on the Historical, Social, Psychological and Material Culture of Mount Cameroon Peoples’. Its significance is that it has created a forum for reflection between town and gown to perpetuate the scholarly traditions that have endeared the Ardeners in the region. The expected output includes research papers, public lectures and an exhibition of cultural artefacts, as well as a photographic exhibition of materials collected in Cameroon but now in overseas collections. By way of conclusion, it behoves us to mention that at the time of writing, Shirley’s strategies of tirelessly encouraging the coalescence of efforts and interests have succeeded in keeping the National Archives in Buea afloat and respected both inside and outside Cameroon. AFAAC already has a global affiliation and an NGO status, which will facilitate sponsorship for many proposed linked projects, such as the extension of the Reading Room to cope with the soaring flow of stu-

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dents from Cameroon’s six state universities and especially from the University of Buea. Systematic collection, coding and classification of documents from ministries and parastatals (especially the oldest, the Cameroons Development Corporation 1947–2004), recruitment and training of professional staff and purchase of equipment have been the priorities of the staff of the archives. AFAAC continues to have a solid base to stand by in the institutional framework of a copyright library and archival landscape.9

Notes 1. Note on inside page of all issues of ABBIA, Journal of Cameroon Cultural Review. 2. It is therefore not surprising that, whenever and wherever Shirley puts her feet in Bakweriland today, more than two generations of local people greet this soft-spoken heroine in ways that underline familiarity and well-earned affection. 3. See recent publications in the series Cameroon Studies, Berghahn Books, series editors Sally Chilver, Shirley Ardener and Ian Fowler, vols. 1–7. 4. National Archives, Buea, Comprehensive File S.S. 567 E. Ardener, Technical Cooperation Adviser on Archives and Antiquities: Report, May 1963, p. 12. For a more general appreciation, see Patience Tatah, The National Archives of Buea (NAB) and Nation Building in Cameroon, 1959–1996, long essay, Department of History, University of Buea, April 2004. 5. See Edwin’s Mòkpé (Bakweri) English Dictionary, based on his card index and notes on grammar, edited by Bruce Connell (1997). 6. Government Press, Buea, 1968, sponsored by the Ministry of Primary Education and West Cameroon Antiquities Commission. 7. For the ritual significance of the Afo-a-kom sacred statue and the story of its peregrinations to and from the U.S., see Walter Gam Nkwi (2004) and Isaac A. Ndambi (2004: 176). 8. Reference number 063/G.37/D 14/1/VOL. X11/946 (OAPP). 9. Tatah (2004) devotes a chapter to the history of AFAAC.

Acknowledgements

The editors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Sian Crisp, Gaynor Cohen and Shirley Ardener in the preparation of this volume. We also thank Berghahn Books’s anonymous reader for helpful comments and criticisms. We are indebted to Deborah Bryceson and Jonathan Webber for the suggestion that we take on this task.

Abbreviations

AFAAC

Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon

BLACOM

Bakweri language committee

CCCRW

Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women

CDC

Cameroon Development Corporation

CFA

Currency

CPDM

Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement

CPNC

Cameroon People’s National Congress

CWU

Cameroons Welfare Union

CYL

Cameroons Youth League

DKG

Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft

D.O.

District Officer

GNK

Gesellschaft Nordwest Kamerun

HEL

British Council Higher Education Link

IGS

International Gender Studies Centre

KNDP

Kamerun National Democratic Party

LECA-USA

Lebialem Cultural Association

NISER

Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research

NYM

Nigerian Youth Movement

SWEDA

Development Association of the South West

WAISER

West African Institute for Social and Economic Research

WGS

Department of Women and Gender Studies

UB

University of Buea

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

/UNITWIN

/University Twinning and Networking

Contributors

Edwin Ardener was, for a period spanning four decades, an inspirational influence on scholars in Cameroon and anthropology students at Oxford. He studied anthropology at LSE in Malinowski’s former department and later undertook substantial periods of fieldwork in Eastern Nigeria and West Cameroon with his wife, Shirley. Edwin’s work in Cameroon on history, politics, language and identity is still very highly regarded by local scholars and area specialists. A bibliography of all his writings can be found in The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays (Blackwell 1989; second edition Berghahn Books 2007); those just on Africa are listed in Kingdom on Mount Cameroon (Berghahn Books 1996). Edwin Ardener was also Advisor on Antiquities to the West Cameroon Government. Perhaps his greatest legacy to Cameroon was, in partnership with Shirley, to set up the Archives for West Cameroon – later to become the Cameroon National Archives – at Buea. In 1962 he was appointed to a lectureship at Oxford, where he helped to establish the Human Sciences degree and chaired the Institute of Social Anthropology, and where he held a Fellowship at St John’s College. Edwin died unexpectedly at the age of 59 in 1987. Fiona Bowie studied anthropology in Durham and Oxford. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol. She has conducted fieldwork in Wales and Cameroon, and with Cameroonians living in the U.S. and Europe. Her interests are mainly in the areas of religion, kinship (especially the circulation of children), Welsh language, ethnicity and identity. Publications include The Anthropology of Religion (Blackwell 2000/2006), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption (ed., Routledge 2004), The Coming Deliverer (ed., University of Wales Press 1997) and Women and Missions: Past and Present (ed., with D. Kirkwood and S. Ardener, Berg 1993). Sally Chilver undertook extensive ethnographic work in Cameroon in 1958, 1960 and 1963 together with the anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry. In 1964 Chilver was made Principal of Bedford College, London University, and then in 1971 she moved to Oxford to become Principal of Lady Margaret College, Oxford University. She has published widely on the history and ethnography of the Bamenda Grassfields and on Cameroonian history in general. In 2001 she published Cameroon’s Tycoon: Max Esser’s Expedition and its Consequences, vol. 3 in the Cameroon Studies Series, edited together with Ute Röschenthaler. Sally is known

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affectionately to the Cameroonist community as ‘Mama for Story’, and she has encouraged and promoted Cameroonian scholarship over two generations. Joyce Bayande Mbongo Endeley is Chair and Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Agricultural Extension Education in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Buea, Cameroon. She is also the Director of Academic Affairs. Her teaching, research and outreach activities have focused on gender/women and agriculture, empowerment, credit schemes and impact assessment of development programmes in and out of Cameroon. She has several publications to her credit, is joint editor of a new book series titled Issues in Gender and Development Volume One: New Gender Studies from Cameroon and the Caribbean, printed and distributed by the African Books Collective (ABC), and serves as a consultant with various international and national bodies. Verkijika G. Fanso is Professor of History at the University of Yaoundé I. He has played a key role in promoting the culture of Cameroon and supporting the Cameroon Archives at Buea. He is a member of the Nso’ History Society and the Cameroon Academy of Sciences, and is President of the Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC). His posts have included Vice Dean in the Faculty of Arts, Letters and Social Sciences, University of Yaoundé I, and Director of Cultural Heritage in the Cameroon Ministry of Culture. He received a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Scholarship in 1989 and a Rhodes Chair Committee Fellowship in 1996, and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar-in-Residence in 2005. He has published very widely in international journals on African political history and Cameroonian history and culture and is the author of the two-volume Macmillan series Cameroon History for Secondary Schools and Colleges. His current research interests include genetic history – specifically, using Y chromosomes of contemporary populations to determine paternal relationships and migrations – Nso’ landlordism and problems of multipartyism in sub-Saharan Africa. Ian Fowler is a lecturer in social anthropology at the Oxford Brookes University. He has carried out fieldwork in Cameroon over a thirty-year period. He is a general editor of the Cameroon Studies Series and has published on material culture, art, ethnicity, history and politics in Cameroon. His current research interests include material culture, ritual, death, witchcraft and twins in the Grassfields of Cameroon. Peter Geschiere is Professor of African Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (earlier at Leiden University). Since 1971 he has undertaken historicalanthropological fieldwork in various parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa. His publications include The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa; Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (with Birgit Meyer) and The Forging of Nationhood (with Gyan Pandey). He has also written numerous essays on various aspects of economy, society and culture in West Africa.

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Caroline Ifeka is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and has taught social anthropology at various higher education institutions. In the mid 1990s she established, with friends, a conservationist nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Cross River state, Nigeria, and carried out fieldwork on indigenous cosmologies, gender and land among the Anyang and Boki peoples of the Nigeria-Cameroon border. In 2006 she established an NGO to tackle pastoralists’ extreme vulnerability and abuse of their human rights by settled majority groups. Currently, she is investigating popular youth cultures in ‘hot spot’ areas in North and South Nigeria, where ‘restive’ (unemployed) herdless pastoralist and landless farmer youth engage in vigilantism, armed robbery and other informal cultures of force. Ludovic Lado is a Jesuit priest. He holds degrees in philosophy and theology. He has recently completed his PhD in social anthropology at ISCA (Oxford University) with a focus on the localization of charismatic renewal in African Catholicism. He has now taken up a teaching post in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Management of the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Nalova Lyonga is Professor of English specializing in African Literature and Gender Studies, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Academics at the University of Buea, Cameroon. Her areas of teaching and research cover feminist theories, African and African American women, especially the sources of empowerment in African women’s oral tradition and literary criticism on modern African literature. Other interests include distance education. Michael Mbapndah Ndobegang teaches history at the Ecole Normale Superieure of the University of Yaoundé I. He gained his Bachelors and Maitrise degrees from the then University of Yaoundé, and continued as a Fulbright Fellow at Boston University, where he obtained MA and PhD degrees in 1980 and 1985 respectively. His doctoral dissertation on the role of chiefs in Cameroonian politics was carried out with a grant from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 1997 to 2002 he served as an Opposition Member of Parliament in the Cameroon National Assembly. Margaret Niger-Thomas is a social anthropologist lecturing in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Buea, Cameroon. She is the Provincial Delegate of ‘Women’s Empowerment and the Family’ in the South West Province of Cameroon. She obtained her PhD in social sciences from Leiden University in 2000. She is Founding President of the Manyu Women’s Self-Reliance Foodstuff Co-operative, and Chairperson of the Women’s Information and Co-ordination Forum (WICOF), a provincial NGO based in Buea, Cameroon. Dorothy Njeuma is currently Rector of the University of Yaoundé I. She was formerly the pioneer Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buea, having previously served as Director General of the Buea University Centre and technical adviser to the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research. She is a graduate

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of Brown University and the University of London, where she gained her PhD in zoology. Dorothy Njeuma has published widely in the field of higher education, especially education policy in Cameroon. Martin Zac Njeuma gained his PhD in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and went on to teach at the University of Yaoundé. He took on the roles of Maitre de Conferences and Research Coordinator before becoming Head of the History Department and later Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences. He was the pioneer Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Anglophone University at Buea. He has published widely on African history and founded the Association of African Historians. Martin is currently Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Buea, Cameroon. Ute Röschenthaler lectures in anthropology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany. She has conducted field research in Cameroon, Nigeria and Mali. Her research interests are intellectual property, women’s and men’s associations, diffusion of culture and media anthropology. Her publications include Die Kunst der Frauen (Berlin 1993, with Jürg Schneider and Bernhard Gardi, eds.); Fotofieber. Bilder aus West- und Zentralafrika: Die Reisen von Carl Passavant 1883–1885 (Basel 2005); and ‘Translocal Cultures: The Slave Trade and Cultural Transfer in the Cross River Region’, in Social Anthropology 14(1) (2006). She is currently completing Purchasing Culture: The Dissemination of Associations in the Cross River Region.

Map 1.1: Cameroon-Nigeria Borderlands (adapted from Detzner 1923)

CHAPTER 1

Voicing Identity Ian Fowler

This volume presents key historical and innovative ethnographic essays that adopt critical and analytical approaches to the production of ethnic, political, religious and gendered identities for the peoples of the South West Province of Cameroon and the Nigerian borderlands (see Map 1.1). It draws together insider and outsider voices reflecting on these issues and is intended to honour the work and person of Shirley Ardener, a pre-eminent Cameroonist scholar and friend of Cameroon. Fittingly, we offer for the first time a major work by the late Edwin Ardener. His chapter presents a critical analysis of the axes of oral tradition and emergent administrative identities for a significant ethnographic region, the Mamfe ‘Overside’, which till now (see chapters in this volume by Ifeka, Röschenthaler and Niger-Thomas) has been relatively unlit. This region played a major role in the later slave trade and was crucial to the emergence of surrounding, broader ethnic groupings – Efik, Tiv and those of the Bamenda Grassfields. It is an example of Ardener’s meticulous handling of written and oral sources, enhanced by his linguistic competence and lightened by a gentle humour. This significant work provides a valuable basis for further ethnohistorical and ethnographic research. Originally it was to be part of a broader (sadly unrealized) extensive ethnographic project1 that would have included the work of Chilver and Kaberry (1968) on the adjacent Bamenda Grassfields2 and that of Claude Tardits (1980) on the Bamum. As a supplement and historical backdrop to Edwin’s chapter we include here previously unpublished selected extracts from Sally Chilver’s epitome of Hermann Detzner’s 1923 published account of the joint Anglo-German boundary commission that established the boundary between Nigeria and Kamerun, from the ‘Alantika Mountains to the Cross River’, between September 1912 and March 1913. The themes raised in the first part of this volume are picked up by contemporary insider and outsider, Cameroonian and Cameroonist voices. Martin and Dorothy Njeuma, Peter Geschiere, Ute Röschenthaler, Michael Ndobegang and Verkijika Fanso, in their various contributions, deal with historical, external enNotes for this chapter begin on page 14.

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counters and conflicts as well as the development of a distinctive wider political identity for Anglophone Cameroon. Issues of religion, personhood, gender, resistance and death are dealt with by Ludovic Lado, Caroline Ifeka and Margaret Niger-Thomas, while global issues – the networking of individuals and institutions, and also transnational families – are the subject of essays by Fiona Bowie, Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga.

The Past in the Present Edwin Ardener’s previously unpublished work ‘Oral Traditions and Administrative Identities’ undertakes a critical examination of oral tradition and colonial administrative enquiry and the production of ethnic identity for a region, the Mamfe ‘Overside’, which until very recently remained largely undocumented in the ethnographic literature. At the time of Ardener’s enquiries the Overside was an area physically remote from administrative centres.3 A current focus (see Nugent and Asiwaju 1996) on in-between areas and border zones4 as sites for the intense production of identity has roots deeply embedded in Edwin Ardener’s theoretical work on identity and ethnicity. Ardener stressed that, while physically remote, the Overside was also remote in the classificatory sense that those occupying these remote areas are conscious of being the intermittent object of the ‘defining processes of others that might absorb them’ (E. Ardener 2007: 223). In this specific sense, remote areas are the ‘very crucibles of the creation of identity’.5 Perhaps a key point that Ardener makes here has to do with consciousness. In his broader theoretical work Ardener developed the idea that all social entities are to a large extent self-defining systems. In a seminal paper published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO) in 1972 he questioned whether ethnicities or tribes might yield mensurable ‘population’. He made the key point that ‘“the population” … is not merely subject to a statistical determination on the part of the observer, it is dependent on the subjective definition of that population by the human beings concerned’. His area focus was the extreme north-western corner of the Bantu-speaking zone that overlaps the area covered in his chapter in this volume. Ardener suggested that ‘many of the divisions now in existence lean on classifications in which the scholar turned administrator or administrator turned scholar played a not insignificant part’. He notes too that feedback from interpreters and others led to further confusion. By the 1930s the impact of British colonial administration on the Nigerian side was to impart ‘a local reality to general classifications whose autochthonous basis was originally limited and contradictory’. Ardener underscores the significance of the taxonomic space in which identity work takes place. The German Kamerun colony included a small Ekoi-speaking area that the Germans administered under three ‘Bantu’ ethnic nominal divisions. When this came into British hands the entire group was classified together for administrative purposes. This was a reflection of the British experience of the broader Nigerian ethnic taxonomic scale of Yoruba, Hausa and Ibo groups. In his chapter in this volume Ardener playfully suggests that, whatever be the underlying foundations of identity when new entities emerge, they tend ‘to

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grow arms and legs’. Whatever the relationship between empirical truth and ‘the structuring processes of the human mind’, the emergent entities are experienced as a reality that generates further events. Such views are anathema to those of a ‘positivistic bent’6 and foreshadow more recent critical approaches to identity in Cameroon (see Fardon 1996: 17–45). Edwin Ardener makes direct reference to the work of Chilver and Kaberry on the adjacent Bamenda Grassfields. They contrasted British and German colonial policies of administrative delimitation. The former were concerned to delimit areas with existing economic links to create units convenient for administration; the latter sought ‘natural’ political units based on common origin and customs that were elicited through colonial Intelligence and Assessment Reports. Chilver and Kaberry emphasized that the administrative intentions were quite transparent to those being enquired about and their response was quite naturally to stress those aspects of local tradition and history that served local and contemporary interests and to suppress other aspects that did not. Chilver and Kaberry made the key point, also emphasized by Edwin Ardener, that the literary products of these colonial administrative investigations were fed back to, and were assimilated by, the local intelligentsia. What emerges from the wide sweep of oral tradition and administrative enquiry is a broad picture of Chamba, Tikar, Tiv and Widekum elements entering the Grassfields in wave migrations from the east, northeast, west and northwest. However, this broad picture is at odds with language distribution. Chilver and Kaberry account for this situation in terms of composite units, intrusive dynasties, conquest and slow movement into favourable areas or temporary agglomerations from attack. They do acknowledge that the Widekum oral tradition is the reverse of actual Widekum history. In other words, and contrary to the oral traditions, the movement is from the escarpment into the forest and not the other way around. It is likely that the highlands of both the Bamenda Grassfields and the Overside area dealt with in Ardener’s essay have been centres of population growth and dispersal for quite some time.7 Apart from the kingdom of Esu in the northwest corner of the Bamenda Grassfields and the colonial town of Mamfe and its surroundings, Edwin visited few of the peoples he so eloquently writes up in his chapter. His material was gathered directly from individuals drawn widely from ‘remote’ areas. Edwin Ardener’s work here emulates the much earlier endeavours of Clarke (1848) and Koelle (1854) who interviewed freed recaptive slaves in order to build up linguistic and/or tribal maps of the African interior. But in contrast to Clarke and Koelle, Ardener was better armed with linguistic and other research tools, and his quest had a much tighter focus. He was investigating a remote section of the African jigsaw puzzle; he was not attempting to rough out the entire puzzle. Detzner’s little known 1923 publication Im Lande des Dju-Dju was not available to Ardener when he undertook his researches on the peoples of the Overside. In his book Detzner presents an account of the land commission he led to demarcate the colonial boundary between Kamerun and Nigeria shortly before the colony was lost early on in the course of the First World War. His expedition sought to reinscribe the boundaries of the colonial state on the ground and, as

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far as possible, within existing ethnic territorial divisions. The borders of Cameroon historically have been labile, and the present configuration is not very like the boundaries depicted on the earliest German colonial maps. Borderlands may be peripheral and remote, and at the time of Detzner’s expedition the Kamerun colony was still young – its ‘skin’ barely dry. He recounts how women in these areas were escorted to and from their farms, where they were guarded; he describes fortified compounds within walled settlements. The slave trade was still going on, and in this region it seems clear that serious intervillage raiding continued. This border area was not empty virgin territory but highly contested – the more so because of its marginal status. It was (and remains, see Opio and Tah 2008)8 remote in the pragmatic sense that it was effectively distant from the centres of colonial administration. People here felt disconnected from the centre, and while some raised concerns about what would happen to them when the Germans left, others took the opportunity of the presence of the Boundary Commission to assert their own particular interests. In this light Detzner’s account illustrates very well the creative response of the local to the efforts of distant powers seeking to capture, contain or classify it. These passages reveal much about German preconceptions and concerns as well as those of the people on the ground. Detzner has the racialist eye of his time for distinctive physical features of individuals that set them into broad classificatory types: Sudanic and Bantu. He has a good eye for agriculture, architecture, bodily decoration, material culture and dietary distinctions. He shows respect for local technology and makes much of the material evidence of iron working. There are echoes here of the early German theory of the African as ‘Urfinder von Eisentechnik’, i.e. that iron working was a sub-Saharan African invention (Luschan, 1909). However, everywhere Detzner looks he sees evidence of savagery, cannibalism and superstition from which the native, to his mind, needs rescuing. Nor does he trust the Africans. He expects them to deceive or to be evasive in relation to German colonial administrative orders. But how did they view him? In one passage Detzner describes the ‘child-like’ attempts at deception by local people who hid guns and ostentatiously displayed cutlasses and spears in place of the prohibited firearms. It may be that Detzner is irked that the local people think he might be so easily and falsely mollified. He knows they are hiding guns and they know he knows this. From the local point of view perhaps it is Detzner who has ‘turned a blind eye’ and is childishly pretending there are no guns! It was not childish at all for the local people to conceal their guns and then grin at Detzner. It was evident to them that Detzner had no means to rectify the situation according to colonial law. He had come and he would go and then they could get on with their lives and their battles. The labile position of the local ‘subject’ is demonstrated very strongly by Detzner’s account of the sneaky withdrawal and hiding of supplies according to fluctuations in the state of play between the British and the Germans in allocating the communities to one or the other side of the boundary. Detzner was impressed by the skill and versatility of the African clerks and interpreters who worked for the British and German parties. At such a tense moment in the pre-War period all this raised deep undercurrents of suspicion in his mind – ‘just where did loyalties

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lie?’ His account also points up that individuals, as well as existing or potential groups, sought to place themselves vis-à-vis the two colonial powers and their own particular neighbours to their own best advantage. Men of strong character, such as the interpreter Audu, crop up frequently in the early colonial literature and play key roles in determining just what was visible to the colonial administration and what was not. Individuals were by no means fixed in their loyalties. The guide Madagalli, for instance, at one point in time is a senior guide for the Germans and four years later turns up doing the same job for the British. Their actions may be directly disruptive, as in the case of the British resident’s clerk stirring up the Aligetti. In the uncertain context of these remote and disconnected areas cannibalism and, perhaps more especially, the fear of cannibalism, were very powerful ideas. The peoples occupying these borderlands certainly had a reputation for cannibalism, and it emerges from Detzner’s text that the area had been troublesome with some ‘unpacified’ groups apparently still engaged in cannibalistic wars. Detzner recounts how on an earlier expedition his officer had been seized and killed and how he had found the head of the dead man in a juju hut. He takes this as material evidence of cannibalism. An alternative explanation might be that these were skulls taken from enemies defeated and decapitated in battle. Certainly this was the case for the adjacent Bamenda Grassfields, where early German visitors were greatly horrified by the sight of numerous human skulls hanging from the eaves of external palace buildings (Chem-Langhëë and Fanso 1996: 104). In the Bamenda Grassfields flesh of the defeated enemy was not consumed, but a morsel might be ingested to prevent the spirit of the deceased taking revenge.9 In the recent (2007–2008) conflict between the Yive and the Oliti, who straddle the present Cameroon-Nigerian border, it has been alleged in media accounts that when the Olitis kill somebody the head is removed and deposited in a shrine (Opio and Tah 2008). There is no suggestion of cannibalism. Cannibalism resembles witchcraft10 insofar as it is usually someone else who is accused, either a neighbouring or distant group. Detzner’s Gayama guides voiced their fears of the cannibals to the south of them; when news of a defeat of an Ituava village by the Agara came in to Detzner’s camp the immediate assumption was that the defeated villagers had been eaten. A vignette in Zintgraff’s 1895 volume Nord-Kamerun exemplifies this use of the accusation of cannibalism as a means of ‘othering’ those across the ‘border’. Zintgraff describes sitting with the Bali Fon, Galega, who while scraping shavings from a skull into his cup of palm wine tells Zintgraff how this was the skull of an enemy who belonged to a tribe of cannibals occupying neighbouring territory. At that point in time the ‘border’ lay at the extremities of Bali influence and power. A little over a decade on in time, the border in question had become the international border between the German and British colonial states where Detzner, on the ground, believed he saw evidence of cannibalistic wars driven by lust for human flesh. It is ironic that the very condition of this area as a borderland may well have exacerbated conflict between groups that straddled it and sought to meet new demands and opportunities engendered by the inscription (and reinscription) of colonial boundaries. Certainly it was unlikely there was much protein hunger here. Detzner’s descriptive passages

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(largely omitted in Chilver’s epitome) frequently mention much game fleeing out of range of their guns. Detzner’s appetite11 for cannibalism was evidently better satisfied in his next posting. He was promoted and went on to serve in a similar capacity in German New Guinea, where the outbreak of the First World War apparently caught him unawares while he was on yet another border commission. Four years later, and ten days after the hostilities of the First World War had ceased, he re-emerged in his white pristine officer’s uniform claiming to have penetrated the interior and to have spent the entire war living with the local cannibals and harassing the Australian forces. In 1921 he published his story under the title Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen: Von 1914 bis um Waffenstillstand unter deutscher Flagge im unerforschten Innern von Neuguinea. Much, if not all, of his story was a concoction. He was severely criticized by German missionaries and others and eventually in 1932 recanted a great deal of his account. Detzner’s 1923 Cameroon book presently is either ignored by or unknown to German scholars. Stephanie Michels, for instance, makes no mention of it in her 2004 volume ‘Imagined Power Contested: Germans and Africans in the Upper Cross River Area of Cameroon, 1887–1915. In her rich, detailed and very valuable work, which deals inter alia with border issues up till 1914, Michels makes no reference to Detzner’s 1923 volume on the 1912–1913 boundary commission led by him. It is perhaps not surprising that this should be so because publication came three years after the issue of his largely fabricated account of adventures with cannibals in New Guinea. It is probable that the 1923 volume was published on the back of the initial success of the earlier book, and because it had followed this publication it was necessarily undermined by the later exposure of the earlier volume as the concoction of a fabulist. All this brings to mind the earlier ‘Esser Affair’ in 1899, when the adventurer and merchant banker Max Esser was accused in the sceptical German press of exaggerating the extent of his travels in southern Angola. Esser’s account of his travels in Cameroon was not impugned, but he was accused of liberally borrowing his scientific descriptions from others (see Chilver and Röschenthaler 2001: 167). In my view we should take a similar approach to Detzner with the added rider that the more melodramatic episodes should be taken with a large dose of salt. For instance, Detzner’s account alludes to rising tension in Europe as a dramatic backdrop to what is evidently an enormously civilized joint British-German exercise in demarcating the boundary. There are suspicions about the British that Detzner attributes to the lower German ranks. At one point these suspicions almost disrupt the otherwise mutually respectful relations between the British and German parties. Detzner describes a dinner party where the German and British officers danced cake waltzes together while, unknown to them or at least to the British, a party of German soldiers had taken up firing positions in the trees surrounding the British camp in case of treachery. It is an extraordinary picture: European male officers waltzing together under the looming shadow of the Great War to come, whilst physically surrounded by German gunners hidden up trees! Perhaps Detzner made up this story or simply exaggerated what had actually taken

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place. It does, however, signal the absurdity and violence latent in such borderland encounters.

Present Voices In the preface to this volume the fulsome, powerful insider voices of Martin and Dorothy Njeuma, eminent figures in contemporary Cameroon Higher Education, recount Shirley Ardener’s role in revitalizing Cameroon history so that all Cameroonists might share in ‘moulding what should be’. The Njeumas trace the Ardeners’ joint role in the emergence of scholarly interest in the Bakweri and West Cameroon from the 1960s up to the present day, both in research and also in establishing the historical archives for West Cameroon in Buea. They go on to trace the path that Shirley Ardener later followed alone to become a leading contemporary figure in Cameroon studies and outline the support she has given to strengthen the local production of historical knowledge. Peter Geschiere picks up the theme of colonial violence and examines its role in the creation of Kamerun and the emergence of Buea as its administrative capital. He writes about Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a young, ambitious German commander of a German expedition who was dramatically defeated and killed in the first battle of Buea in 1891. This episode of early colonial violence was intended to mark the German presence on the ground. It was traumatic for both sides and typically clumsy, overly ambitious and poorly informed. Geschiere uses largely German sources to build on the publications and archival work of the Ardeners, and in particular Edwin Ardener (1996: 41–151), on Buea, the capital of the present-day South West Province of Cameroon. He remarks upon the intense local historical interest evident in Buea, its inhabitants and the students at Buea University and links this to the work of the Ardeners in rescuing and preserving the archives there (Bryceson et al. 2007: 273–75). Geschiere provides new, detailed biographical and other materials on von Gravenreuth, which serve to explain what led up to the famous battle that made Buea such an important historical site and accounts for its prominence today. He also touches upon themes picked up by others in this volume, such as the cavalier approaches to labour recruitment and the unintended consequences that ensued, also dealt with here in the case of Conrau in the chapter by Ndobegang and Bowie. Geschiere’s essay on von Gravenreuth’s death and the circumstances leading up to it provide a useful link between the periods covered by Shirley Ardener’s Swedish Ventures in Cameroon and Chilver and Röschenthaler’s Cameroon’s Tycoon – the latter dealing with Max Esser’s journey into the interior in 1896.12 Michael Ndobegang’s chapter, written together with Fiona Bowie, picks up the timeline in 1899 with the extraordinary events surrounding the dramatic death of the famous German trader Conrau following his difficulties in Bangwa over labour recruitment. Bowie’s outsider voice introduces and frames this paper with her own recollections of the past on the occasion of a major palace ceremony, which she sets alongside a novelistic account of a similar event. Ndobegang provides an

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insider’s perspective on the history of the Azi palace and Bangwa chiefship from the death of Conrau up to the present day. His account revisits some of the key themes raised in Geschiere’s story of the traumatic defeat of von Gravenreuth. Once again there is a death, perhaps heroic and sacrificial, of a German pioneer at the hands of the local population. This is followed by great violence to the community concerned and subsequent local adjustments and later incorporation into the colonial state. Ndobegang goes on to make the very significant point that the impact of the Conrau episode on Bangwa went further than merely leading to its incorporation into Kamerun. Both Conrau and the Bangwa king had seen possible gains for themselves in light of potential cooperation. Conrau would get his labourers, and the king would enhance his standing both within his community and with the neighbouring kingdoms. Yet the result of this was ‘a relocation of the centre of power in Lebang’ and a loss of power at the centre. Ndobegang is himself a Bangwa, an academic and politician, with connections to the palace and an intimate knowledge of Bangwa chiefly institutions. This is reflected in a well-rounded account, with its historical overview reaching from Conrau’s arrival to the present day to illuminate the contradictions and distortions of contemporary kingship and its relation to the state. Implicit in this account is the remarkable continuity in the Faustian nature of pacts struck between local chiefs and both colonial and postcolonial administrations.13 Ute Röschenthaler, an intrepid German anthropologist who has travelled extensively in the Ejagham and nearby areas on foot, bicycle and by canoe, has published widely in both German and English. Nsanakang is one of eighty-one Ejagham villages in which she collected village histories and studied the dissemination of associations and cult agencies. During the First World War, Nsanakang was the site of a great battle between German and British troops. Overgrown gravestones bear witness to this forgotten encounter close to the end of the period of German rule. Röschenthaler examines the wider history of Nsanakang village from three points of view – the history as told by the Ejagham people of Nsanakang, the colonial history as it is found in archives and early literature, and her own reflections on the development of the area – in order to show the differing interests expressed in the recollection and representation of history, politics, arts and identity. In the course of her exegesis Röschenthaler raises the themes of encounters and transformations, which are sustained throughout this volume. The stark violence of early encounters (if forced resettlement along roads was resisted, dwellings were burnt) resonates with Geschiere’s chapter. The movement of communities to and fro across the border with Nigeria according to fluctuating relations with nascent colonial administrations, or in response to trading opportunities, adds to Detzner’s account of relations in the border zones. The physical manifestation of the powers of animal transforms to defend local communities and acquire wealth and trading influence is a theme picked up later in this volume by Caroline Ifeka. Finally, the significance of the different perspectives of German and British colonial administrators seeking respectively to discover tribes or clans, already touched on in Edwin Ardener’s contribution to this volume, is also raised here. In dealing with these central themes Röschenthaler presents a rich and honest account of the circumstances of her ethnographic enquiries and in so doing

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unveils the underlying complexity and untidy details of local history that are so rarely exposed in the literature. The chapter by the renowned Cameroonian historian Professor Verkijika Fanso picks up the timeline from Röschenthaler to examine the emergence of Southern Cameroons nationalism following the demise of the German colony. Fanso argues that the protests, demonstrations, petitions and other manifestations that followed the Anglo-French invasion and partition of Kamerun in 1914–1916 and the absorption of British Cameroon into Nigeria (which continued throughout the entire interwar period) gave rise to the later nationalist developments of the 1940s and 1950s. The latter are seen by him as a continuation of the latent or proto-nationalism that originated shortly after the Anglo-French break up of Kamerun. Fanso builds closely on the early work of Shirley and Edwin Ardener to examine the production of an Anglophone political identity that, in its conflict with Francophonie, represents one of the most salient political divisions troubling contemporary Cameroon. He emphasizes the significant role of local agents, such as the paramounts of Bafut, Babungo and Bamum, who held very clear views as to whether their future should lie in the hands of this or that European power. It is striking that this is an insider voice pointing up the significance of a ‘colonial identity’ broken by partition in the emergence of contemporary political configurations. Caroline Ifeka is yet another intrepid anthropologist whose fieldwork courageously reaches physically extremely remote areas; in her case those regions straddling the Cameroon-Nigerian borderlands. In a characteristically complex and challenging essay, Ifeka builds on the earlier work of Shirley Ardener on female sexuality, gender and resistance amongst the Bakweri and applies, with verve, Edwin Ardener’s ideas regarding templates, paradigms and realien to her own ethnographic and topical areas of enquiry. Ifeka’s analysis is undertaken largely with respect to her field work among the Western Anyang peoples currently located in the Takamanda Forest Reserve (S.W. Cameroon) and the Cross River National Park (Nigeria). She describes rituals of resistance that fetishize the vulva, rendering it into a potent point of articulation not only between the genders, but also between the culturally dominant economy of ‘use values’ and the commodity economy of ‘exchange values’. She explores ways in which Anyang women’s fertility practices and twin rituals invert the Western proclivity for disconnecting the social from ‘nature’ in favour of practices of ‘doubling’ that enable people to experience the human and the metaphysical as simultaneously two and one. In so doing, shape-shifting transformations transcend and subvert a duality imposed by the penetration of modern global capitalism. In Ute Röschenthaler’s chapter we saw how similar transformations in the pre-capitalist period served to protect and enrich particular local communities; in Ifeka’s account we see the same principles serving to subvert the commodification of people and labour by global capitalism in the present day. Margaret Niger-Thomas maintains a frontline position in gender issues in contemporary Cameroon. She lectures in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Buea University and also holds a senior government post in women’s empowerment. In her contribution she expands on one of the women’s practices described in Ifeka’s chapter. Niger-Thomas focuses on the Ngboko-ndem, which

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are colourful life-size statues made from clay and other materials and erected over the graves of highly honoured women of the Ndem14 association of the Banyang and Ejagham peoples in the Manyu Division of the South West Province of Cameroon. Niger-Thomas aims to highlight the importance of these memorial statues, which are intended to serve to commemorate and honour women. These representations of idealized beauty echo those found in Eastern Nigeria in the early colonial periods and also the much earlier and more naturalistic Nok statuary. She describes the Ndem association, the role it played in status acquisition among women and its decline over the years. This chapter raises many questions about gender, death and identity and is intended to stimulate further study of these objects before the objects themselves and knowledge about them is lost altogether. It was Shirley Ardener who suggested this topic as fruitful for research some years ago and encouraged Margaret to take the striking photographs of the statuary included in her chapter here. Fiona Bowie’s essay analyses the negotiation of a Bangwa identity and the significance of nationality, professional aspirations, gender roles, language and religion by following five generations of one transnational Bangwa family. She had the co-operation of the family; such in-depth studies are rare. Bowie also examines the role of Bangwa contact with the international Focolare Movement established there since the 1960s. She draws on the methodology of Marcus and adopts a multi-sited ethnographic approach because her field – the Bangwa – has spread to Europe and the U.S. and is no longer distant, being brought ever closer by electronic communications. As a junior member of the Focolare and as an ethnographer of the Bangwa, Bowie was initially both insider and outsider. She makes the ironic point that while the Focolare were a little unsettled by her enquiries, the Bangwa, who had earlier been visited by the anthropologist Robert Brain, understood her activities very well. In light of all of this Bowie takes the view that ‘reflexivity’ is simply not enough anymore: we should acknowledge that our informants have become our colleagues, readers and critics and seek to collaborate as co-authors with them. The inclusion of insider and outsider voices in this volume is, perhaps, one example of the collaboration Bowie calls for. Ludovic Lado is a Jesuit priest and anthropologist. He hails from the Bamileke region of Cameroon; hence his voice is that of both insider and outsider and his aim, as he stresses, is to achieve a reflexive balance between scholarly and insider voices. His chapter, written during completion of his PhD at Oxford University, critically examines notions of identity, religion and inculturation through the example of the Eucharistic meal. He confronts the argument that to impose foreign substances on sub-Saharan Africans in a liturgical context amounts to religious imperialism. He acknowledges that symbols circulate across cultures and hence that meaning is not exclusively tied to indigenous symbols. Ludovic argues that the debate between local voices calling for an indigenization of the symbolic elements of the Eucharist and those arguing for the retention of traditional elements represents two conflicting essentializing strategies. He rejects the blinkered notion that African Christianity is merely an extension of the impact of the missions and emphasizes, on the contrary, that African Christianity is always developing and influenced, inter alia, by the creative agency of African Christians.

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Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga’s chapter examines the individual interventions and efforts of Shirley Ardener, seen as relatively invisible, but invincible. Her actions are described as effective in fostering local development with a human face. This chapter focuses directly on Shirley Ardener as an exemplar of effective networking between formal and informal spheres. It presents a critical and sophisticated analysis of a particular set of emerging networks and linkages between persons and institutions of the North and the South that have proved largely fruitful in building effective partnerships and collaborations. The authors demonstrate how these have revitalized the cultural, gendered and historical identities of the Bakweri and also helped to build capacity for institutions in the private and public spheres, in the Fako region specifically and in Cameroon as a whole. However, what also emerges from these contributions, with their strong insider voices, are resounding contemporary echoes of the lived and historical experience of violence and the inequalities of race and gender (and history) endured under colonial rule. The great colonial violence inflicted upon the Bakweri, described in rich detail by Geschiere in this volume, is developed here by Endeley and Lyonga. It led to the alienation of Bakweri land, expropriated for plantations, and to the arrival of such large numbers of migrant labourers to work on these plantations that the indigenous peoples soon perceived themselves to be swamped by this influx of immigrants (E. Ardener 1996: 228). The Bakweri felt overwhelmed and feared they would become a minority (E. Ardener 1962a). Presently this perception is expressed as a sense of being hemmed in or overrun by ‘come-no-goes’, migrants largely from the contiguous Anglophone North West Province. It is a perception more widely shared now by the general population of the South West Province. It has led to a stark South West versus North West Anglophone division that undermines calls by Anglophones for secession from the majority Francophone section of Cameroon. In other words, this divide in Anglophone identity is crucial to the overall integrity of the postcolonial state.

Insider, outsider voices? It is clear that strong Cameroonian voices resonate in this volume. They seek not merely to subvert epistemological imperialism but actively to reject it in their critical but positive approaches to Western-backed sources of historical and cultural data. What emerges so strongly from the words of Martin and Dorothea Njeuma and Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga is the huge encouragement given by Shirley Ardener’s publications, archive and personal support to the study of societies and histories in Cameroon. This support has enabled Cameroonian scholars to re-examine historical roots and relations with incoming Europeans, and it has provided the means for ‘confidence-building’15 in the face of the dominant historical and cultural stereotypes that have so greatly diminished the sub-Saharan African in the pages of history. Yet the relation between history and identity in the postcolonial state remains uneasy. Only a few histories not based on particular ethnic groups emerge. Far more common is for history to be set within specific ethnic parameters (or Anglophone/Francophone categories), so we have ‘histories’ for

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the Nso`, for the Bali Nyonga, etc. These histories are framed within units fixed, in part at least, as a product of the encounter with the colonial ‘gaze’. In other words, particular identities are co-constructed within the boundaries and categories of the colonial state. In the period of British rule this co-construction arose out of exchanges between ‘native voices’ and anthropologically trained British colonial administrators. Nevertheless, in living ‘who we are’, the conditions of the production of that identity knowledge tend to be forgotten. ‘Who we are’ becomes timeless, and indeed, reference to the conditions of its production is seen to undermine that sense of self in the world underpinned by identity knowledge. In his chapter here Edwin Ardener casts doubt on the empirical basis of the notion of the ‘Tikar Marchlands’. Chilver and Kaberry (1971) argued that a widespread Tikar identity emerged in the Grassfields in the British colonial period largely as a product of literary feedback from schoolteachers and other literati at that time. Fowler and Zeitlyn (1996) argued that these assumed shared origins had to do with association with the highly prestigious Bamum. All social ties are expressed in a familial metaphor that is uncritically assumed, so that those who are together ‘clearly came from one origin’. The metaphor is seen as the truth regardless of where folk actually come from. Indeed, the idea of a collective Tikar identity persists strongly among contemporary Grassfielders. What needs to be clearly understood is that ‘identity knowledge’ does not belong to outsiders, even though they may have influenced this knowledge. What people may have thought about their origins or common ties at an earlier point in time constituted local knowledge then; contemporary ideas concerning Tikar origins constitute local knowledge now. This is potentially hazardous ground. In Cameroon today much individual and collective labour and resources are invested in ‘identity work’ in the form of ‘cultural festivals’ or other public ceremonies attended by senior members of the local administration and other dignitaries and recorded on video for local consumption or filmed for public broadcast on CRTV. There is great emphasis on ethnic singularity, with everyone working very hard to be this or that and, if possible, to express this on a national stage. The danger is that, while people here are so actively and eagerly building up their own particular ethnic identities, we as outsiders may be seen to be subverting those identities in our musings and writings on the conditions that influenced how and in what form they came into being. Edward Said (1978) questioned the status of the anthropologist as interlocutor and underscored the unequal relations of academic power. He emphasized that Africanists from the West do not treat their sub-Saharan African academic colleagues as equals but read their texts as source materials for further research – the African academic becomes our informant. We may begin to subvert this inequality in the acknowledgement that we are mutually constituted; that anthropological and identity knowledge do not exist in a fixed state but are rather the constantly changing products of ongoing relations of intersubjectivity. From contact, the answer to the very question of who any of us are has been a product of the fecund interpenetration of indigenous and exogenous ideas and interests. We are all both colonizer and colonized.16 Identity knowledge and identity awareness emerge from

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an encounter with ‘an other’, not an encounter with a prefigured ‘other’. If both parties survive the encounter they grow on differently from what they each were, and the voices they find to speak of themselves speak from that earlier encounter and to further encounters with others. In this discussion it is important to note that the conditions under which a social entity comes to exist are not necessarily the conditions necessary for its persistence. In this broader view, and in the specific context of this volume with its insider and outsider voices, it is no longer helpful to talk simplistically of the imposition of ‘Western’ models of thought. This homogenizes an imagined ‘West’ versus the rest and assumes polarized relations between them; ignores common human issues; ignores shared origins; downplays the half-millennia of direct contact and interaction between sub-Saharan African and Europeans; and effectively posits the non-West ‘other’ as a passive entity to be acted upon, shaped and represented by the observer. In this introduction I have sought to emphasize that the so-called ‘native’ voice and Western scholar are mutually constituted.

The Divisions That Bind Late nineteenth-century European colonial interventions in Africa arose as European powers competed for influence and resources. However, these interventions also engendered a new and mediated relationship between Islam, as a religious, political and military force, and the southern populations of West Africa who were drawn into administratively demarcated missionary zones of influence. The German colonial state of Kamerun, relatively short-lived, was effectively partitioned between Britain and France as an outcome of the First World War. In the 1961 plebiscite the northern Islamic populations voted to remain with Anglophone Nigeria while Southern Cameroon – largely non-Islamic – voted for reunification with Francophone Cameroun.17 Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of so-called multi-partyism in sub-Saharan Africa, great hopes for fairer shares in the nation’s resources arose. Political divisions that emerged in the 1990s have generally followed post-partition Anglophone-Francophone lines (see Fanso in this volume). However, the postcolony in the years of the Cold War was dominated by the northern-centric and Muslim Ahidjo regime. His successor in 1982 was Paul Biya, a Christian from the south of Cameroon.18 In 1984 a countercoup against Biya failed. There remains an expectation amongst some Anglophone politicians19 that when serious political change does again occur in Cameroon, it is likely to be driven by Muslim revanchism. The wider political and economic context here may render such a scenario less likely. West Africa is expected to provide the U.S. with roughly 25 per cent of its oil requirements by 2013.20 There is little reason to think that the U.S. will not continue to extend its struggle against radical Islamicism in sub-Saharan Africa. Cameroon and Nigeria have already struggled over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula, now officially ceded to Cameroon. Across the border the crisis in the Niger Delta goes on, with repeated kidnapping of oil workers and expatriate staff. The kinds of environmental destruction that have been associated with the oil companies’

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activities in the Delta are now also being repeated in Cameroon along the ChadKribi oil pipeline. In the wider region and in the Cameroon postcolony we observe a series of paired oppositions at macro and micro levels: the U.S. in conflict with a Sahelian ‘Islamicism’ perceived to threaten global Western interests; Nigerian elements in conflict with Cameroon over resources in the Bakassi Peninsula; political tensions (and potential score-settling) between the Islamic northerners and the Christian southerners of Cameroon; Anglophone Southern Cameroonians seeking secession from the majority Francophones; within the Anglophone zone, tensions between South Westerner ‘sons of the soil’ and North Westerner ‘come no goes’; agricultural ‘autochthones’ in conflict with pastoral ‘newcomers’; men in conflict with women. This series of binary oppositions appears to form a binding web of prefigured and criss-crossing categories of friend and foe. For the present the postcolony remains bound up in these multiple and diverse divisions. This appears paradoxical but is evidently the case because, as with the South West– North West Anglophone divide, division at one level may serve to counter the effects of divisions at another.21 In this light the celebrated diversity of Cameroon may be viewed as a positive factor contributing to the resilience of the postcolony.

Notes 1. See Shirley Ardener’s note on Edwin’s chapter in this volume. 2. Extracts are included in the Appendix. 3. The Assumbo Highlands, included administratively under the South West Province, are clearly visible on the horizon from Bamenda, the capital of the North West Province, but remain largely unknown to the population there. 4. The Centre for International Borders Research has a general online bibliography at http://www .qub.ac.uk/cibr/BordersBiblio01.htm, and the African Borderlands Research Network posts a bibliography of recent publications on Africa at http://www.aborne.org/. See also Donnan and Wilson 2003; and the borderland e-journal: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/. 5. E. Ardener 2007: 223. 6. See Michael Herzfeld’s Foreword to E. Ardener 2007. 7. It is of interest that these counter-views to local histories have not engendered the ‘violent reactions’ (E. Ardener 2007: 217) that Edwin’s students, Malcom Chapman and Maryon McDonald, received in response to the publication of their work on identity amongst Gaels and Bretons. 8. At the end of 2007 fighting broke out between the Oliti of South West Cameroon and the Yive people of Benue State in Nigeria. Ten deaths had occurred by mid January 2008, and the MP for the area complained that the local District Officer had told the public to buy guns and register them because the government could not protect them. See Map 1.1 adapted from Ardener (see Frontispiece), which shows both the Oliti and the Yive situated on the Cameroonian side of the border. 9. Pers. comm. Sally Chilver. 10. See Geschiere in this volume for the local notion that a rumour that Kuva was about to hang two more witches led to the German attack on Buea. 11. Detzner’s interest in cannibalism appears to have formed part of a wider scientific ‘craze’. For instance, medical opinion on the Nigerian side amongst British doctors at the time took the view that goitres were caused by the consumption of human flesh. Detzner dismissed this theory in Im

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Lande Des Dju-Dju on the basis of his observation that those groups most strongly associated with cannibalism were not particularly afflicted with goitres. Cameroon Studies Series, Berghahn Books: volumes 4 and 3 respectively. See Argenti (2001, 2005). Rendered as ngbogha-ndem in Ifeka’s paper. See Foreword. As an undergraduate student of anthropology at UCL in the early 1970s I recall Mary Douglas commenting that to her mind, teaching anthropology was concerned with colonizing the minds of her students with her own anthropological ideas and paradigms. ‘Kamerun’ became a German protectorate in 1884. Under a League of Nations Mandate, Eastern Cameroon fell under French control, and Northern and Southern Cameroon under British rule, in 1919. In 1960 French ‘Cameroun’ became independent of France, and Ahmadou Ahidjo was elected president. In 1961, an UN-organized plebiscite gave the populations of British-administered Cameroon an opportunity to decide their future. In the plebiscite Northern Cameroon voted to join Nigeria and Southern Cameroon voted to join the newly independent Republic of Cameroon in the form of a Federal Republic. In 1972, following a referendum in Southern Cameroon, the Federation was dissolved and Cameroon became a unitary state, the United Republic of Cameroon. Ahidjo was Francophone, as is Biya. These views have been communicated to me in the course of regular visits to Cameroon between 1999 and 2005. ‘How important is African oil?’ 2003. BBC News (online), 9 July. Retrieved 23 March 2005 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3054948.stm Particular divisions may also become more generalized. For instance, semi-nomadic Fulani cattle herders arrived in the Grassfields of Cameroon in 1902, only five years or so after the construction of the German fort at Bamenda. These Fulani included Islamic elements and have since become more firmly islamicized (currently with strong Wahabite support from Saudi Arabia). Conflict between the autochthonous settled agriculturalist population and the incoming pastoralists has been going on ever since and increasingly so in the present day, as population increases and needs for more farming areas put pressure on grazing lands. Interestingly, what was originally cast in ethnic, economic and religious terms – Fulani versus Nso`, pastoralist versus farmer, Muslim versus Christian – is increasingly seen in terms of gender conflict as men from the settled communities have taken up cattle raising and find themselves in conflict with the women who do most of the subsistence agriculture work.

CHAPTER 2

Oral Traditions and Administrative Identities Edwin Ardener

Introduction For this essay, the knitting together of the oral traditions with the scientific evidence, on the one hand, and the documentary material, on the other, have presented some problems of arrangement. Since the traditional material is to some extent timeless it seems best to present it first with some critical examination, reserving attempts to place any of it in a broader time-scale until later. The documentation available is relatively rich.1 Anyone working in West Cameroon2 must take into account the considerable body that has been reduced already to manuscript form. It largely consists of a series of reports3 made by British administrators mainly between the years 1922 and 1933. These were usually termed ‘assessment’, ‘reassessment’ and ‘intelligence’ reports. The purpose of these reports was avowedly administrative: the assessment reports helped to determine the incidence of poll tax, and the intelligence reports formed the background to the reorganization of the Native Authority system (to a certain degree both these purposes overlapped). Owing, however, to the influence of Talbot and, later, Meek, large sections of these reports consisted of ethnographic and historical material, obtained from questioning on the spot. The material was collected primarily to determine what the ‘tribal units’ were, and who were the indigenous authorities within them. Six weeks or more were generally spent in each area by officers of varying degrees of enthusiasm, seniority and experience. As it happens, the Cameroons Province produced reports that were of unusual fullness, and it was even suggested that they should be brought to the notice of officers in other parts of the Southern Provinces as models to be followed. Rutherfoord’s Mbo Report received special mention.4 Nevertheless, the reports are not therefore of equal standard and some consideration of the quality of their evidence is required. They suffer from real deficiencies: (a) most were written under considerable pressure of time, (b) all were obtained through interpreters, (c) they are distorted Notes for this chapter begin on page 40.

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by preconceptions of the investigators, and (d) by those of the investigated. The later reports appear to be great improvements on the earlier ones; they had benefited from the spread of a sounder ethnological method that partly derived from the circulars of the government anthropologist (not all zealously read, to judge from the number disposed of in the attic of the Resident’s Office of Buea in the 1930s). In the ten years or more of development of the ethnological report, not only administrators but clerks, interpreters and headmen had become defter in their manipulation. The chief practical purpose of the reports was seen by the informants as the means whereby the government allocated and named Native Authorities and determined their membership, the sources of information were those status-holders who most stood to benefit from these institutions, and the information given was mediated by local clerks and interpreters who were not in all cases impartial – while these conditions reigned, then, we must regard much of this evidence as irrevocably tainted to some degree at the source.5 It is important to stress this point, despite the fact that no one entering an area for the first time has failed to find the relevant reports indispensable. The danger is rather that they will be uncritically accepted; some of the constructs of the intelligence reports have indeed been accepted back into tradition (the simple view of the Widekum ‘origin’ of so many Bamenda peoples is, I am inclined to believe, one of these). It is salutary to recall that few who have enquired of a tradition of origin in old Southern Nigeria (and this includes the old Cameroons Province), have been since, say, 1935, the first to enquire after it. Regardless of the status of oral tradition in pre-colonial times, it has certainly acquired an independent and special status during those times. We must beware of assuming too easily that the more detailed traditions of the second phase of reports are necessarily more ‘accurate’ than those of the first phase. We know that the use of the genealogy had acquired a firm footing: we do not know that the many ‘clans’ thereby constructed were real units. After their construction and inclusion in the Native Authority system, they were certainly fixed and have often grown organs, doubtless including traditions, by which they are perpetuated.6 The reports are therefore not oral tradition but oral tradition collected for a purpose, by acknowledged amateurs, who believed that there must be ‘tribes’, almost certainly ‘clans’, probably ‘clan-heads’, and certainly ‘village heads’, whose use of cultural material was rudimentary and who only in the rarest cases collected linguistic material to assist them.7 Having said this, we may put into the balance that the compilers themselves were, in the most outstanding cases, critical of the material they elicited; they were also, for much of our area, the first systematic enquirers into local tradition at a time when European administration had been established relatively recently. Their mode of compilation also inspires respect. Thus, as far as possible the tradition of origin of each village in each area visited was obtained: this added and still adds greatly to the internal checks possible. We should approach the manuscript recensions in this spirit before we seek to utilize their information today, for the problem of the intelligence report must affect every enquirer after oral tradition today. In my attempts to acquire independent versions, someone was always ready to interrupt with the official version. In other cases, while the report version as such had been forgotten, only something

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like the report version could account for the many modern variants. For certain of the traditions, the report versions seem, with all their faults, to be clearly the fullest that can now be obtained. Nevertheless, the new enquiries were always justified; new details emerged, and by, to some extent, blurring the edges of the report versions, they did to a large degree validate them. It should be borne in mind that the aim of this section is to determine what the pattern of history emerging from the traditions is. The exact details are not of real moment, because there are no exact details, as anyone who has heard three men tell the ‘same’ story knows.

The Benue–Upper Cross River Watershed The Assumbo Highland Peoples Probably the least-known area of West Cameroon is the spur of highlands stretching westwards from the main Bamenda Plateau and forming the watershed between the Upper Cross River basin and the Benue Valley. The Assumbo Highlands area reaches well over 4,000 feet, falling away to the east to the Sonkwala Hills, an extensive area mostly over 1,000 feet. The terrain is hard going even for the West Cameroon. The ascent from the Anyang border at the south to the pass above Atolo goes from a height of 600 feet to 3,500 feet within a few miles. O’Sullivan in 1923 describes progress on the march of less than a mile an hour.8 This hilly country forms the southern boundary of the Tiv people of Northern Nigeria. Tiv influences extend to the foot of the Assumbo Highlands, and the Tiv themselves are said to believe that they originated or dispersed from a place close to these very hills. In the less elevated Sonkwala area, Boki and other peoples such as the Obanliku predominate (see Map 2.1). These latter are said to have been under Tiv pressure at the time of the British occupation, a pressure that would have continued unchecked had not the boundary between Northern and Southern (subsequently Eastern) Nigeria been drawn in this region. Looking at the area of the Assumbo Highlands from a Tiv point of view, it is seen as occupied by ‘Tivlike’ peoples.9 From the point of view of the peoples of the Assumbo area, the Tiv appear as a people external to themselves, although one group, known administratively as the Ekol, are stated to be ‘pure Munshi’.10 Before considering some of the problems of the relationship to the Tiv, it will be best to deal directly with what we know of Assumbo tradition. The peoples so called have quite clear stories of the order of settlement of their present villages, the placing of which seems to represent an equilibrium reached after conflict among themselves and with various peoples to the north, west and south of the Assumbo Hills: certain groups of the Tiv, the ‘Bagongo’ and the ‘Mbeyi’. The Tiv are known to the Assumbo by forms of Ikurav, the name of the southernmost division.11 In the main manuscript account the Vitua are usually mentioned: this appears to be a form of the name Ityuav,12 a group of the Ikurav Mbashaya Tiv.13 The Bagongo now live at Bebi in Obudu Division of Eastern Nigeria, bounding the Tiv, and are to be identified with the people usually called

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Map 2.1: The Peoples of the Assumbo Highlands (adapted from Ardener 1966)

Bayongo. The Mbeyi were an active group of Boki and Anyang who appear to have made an effort to occupy the grassland area on the Assumbo Highlands. The name ‘Assumbo’ is not indigenous but is a term used by the Anyang to the south. Some say it referred only to the Okus branch of the people: certainly the Germans so applied it.14 The term is now generally applied to what would best be called the Ekor group of peoples, after their common ancestor Ekor Ngba. The many dialectal variants of this name have confused the pattern of tribal nomenclature. It seems quite clear that the administrative names of the groups known as Ekwot and Ekol are merely such variants. The administrative reports render the ancestral name itself as ‘Ekot Ngba’.15 The subdivisions of the Ekor as they occur in Cowan’s version of the founding legend are now generally accepted. According to ‘the late Inyam Atchue of Matene’ (in 1934), Ekot Ngba settled on the high mountains near Apwotcha (to the west of Tinta). He had five sons: Okus, Ochebe, Ovando, Oman and Otang, and one daughter, Ekure, who was ‘married’ without the passage of bridewealth and whose offspring were therefore of her father’s patrilineal group. The descendants of Okus, Ochebe and Ovando now form the main block of the ‘Assumbo group’ on the West Cameroon portion of their mountain ridge. To the east, in the gap between this and the northern Bamenda Plateau, lies the Ama group, descended

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from their sister Ekure. To the northwest, on the extension of the Assumbo Hills into the Obudu Division of Eastern Nigeria, are the groups descended from Oman and Otang. Ekot Ngba, on his death bed, is supposed to have given ‘laws’ that the descendants of one son were not to marry those of another. They might not sell each other into slavery, however, or shed each other’s blood. Versions of this story are still extant, although the designations of the sons of Ekor Ngba are subject to variation.16 Of especial interest is the inclusion of the ancestor for Yive, a settlement that was recorded by Cowan as part of a supposedly separate group called Ekwot; which we already have seen to be merely another rendering of Ekor. The position of the Ama people is also less certain than that of the others. My informants were ready to grant the relationship of Ama to the main Ekor groups, but what appears to be the ‘Ekure’ of Cowan was said to be the ancestor of the Tiv (Ekurav), which on the face of it is not implausible. Ama was attributed another ancestor, Mamɛ Ekɔr. The tribal names Okus, Ochebe, Ovando, Oman and Otang are strictly singular forms, but these and their conventional spellings will be retained here for simplicity. The laws of Ekor Ngba are still recalled, but again in variant forms. Thus the prescriptions not to intermarry, not to wound (together with a right to take wild products from any farm) are restricted to Okus, Ochebe, Oman and Olinge, and exclude Otang and Yive, according to some modern informants. The right to take wild products was, however, extended to Mame (Ama). The movement of the sons of Ekot Ngba is now said by some to be due to quarrelling over a woman, while the Ama moved because of a quarrel over a he-goat. Cowan’s informant from the Ovando group gave a legend that suggests some of the economic factors on the borders of the grasslands and forest. Ekot, on dividing the land among his sons, gave to Okus (there is some doubt whether he was the eldest) a bunch of cooked palm kernels, and to each of the other sons a bunch of raw kernels. ‘The cooked kernels symbolized that Okus was to inherit the land where oil-palms abounded, the raw kernels the intention that they should be planted in the grasslands, where at that time the oil-palm was unknown’.17 The son Ovando, however, was hungry and immediately exchanged his bunch of raw kernels for the cooked ones of Okus. Ekot was annoyed and gave Ovando land on which he said oil-palms would never grow, and if his descendants needed oil or seeds they must wait until the Okus had satisfied their own requirements and then beg for them in Ekot’s name from the Okus. Cowan was told that a ceremony was still carried out every four years, the Ovando assembling at the top of a pass on the border of the Okus for the purpose.18 The legend implies that the Okus were the only group of the Ekor who then occupied part of the forest edge of the Assumbo Hills. The Ovando subsequently expanded south from the grassy plateau of the high ridge into the dense forest at the foot of the southern escarpment. The Okus group appears then to have occupied the northerly slopes of the ridge, and to have suffered attacks from the Mbeyi group of Anyang already mentioned, but eventually an alliance of part of the Okus with the Ovando drove the Mbeyi back into the forest country to the south.19 Ovando relations with the Mbeyi (known usually as Basho from their main village) are a fruitful source of story, and the story of the occupation of the forest edge

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has a faintly epic ring. There are two main settlements now: Matene and Atolo.20 Matene left the grassland ridge because food would not grow well there, yams, cocoyams (colocasia), and plantains being mentioned. Atolo found themselves ‘at Okpana, near Basho. They had never heard the bird that goes ɔ́ɛ̀, ɔ́ɛ̀ [the hornbill?], so when they heard it, and the Basho people played drums, the Atolo people thought the ɔ́ɛ̀, ɔ́ɛ̀ was a war sound, and ran’. Atolo ran and went to Agwuaso. ‘They met the Basho people there. Atolo drummed in the night: tìntítí, tìntítí, tìntítí and the Basho people ran to where they are now’. Atolo settled there for a while, and later they moved down to Kasal, near their present site, the ‘Kalumo and Kazinga people’ (that is; the Ochebe) occupying the land they vacated. The scene of these elusive contacts places the Basho much farther north on the hills than they are now.21 The shortage of palm oil in the grasslands is mentioned in numerous contexts. A long period of conflict between Ovando and Basho began when Basho people went to visit Akwocia of Ovando, who was then living in grassland, taking a gift of palm oil and salt to him; they would receive in exchange fowls or a goat. An assault by one of the Basho men on a daughter of Akwocia at this occasion resulted in the seizure of the visitors, and their being sold as slaves (probably through other Anyang intermediaries, to the Boki). The fighting was placed by an elderly informant in the time of an ancestor four generations before. The other three main Ekor groups, the Ochebe, Oman and Otang22 occupied the northeastern stretch of the Assumbo ridge, from which they moved generally northwards, displacing the Bagongo (or Bebi) and ‘Vitua’. The Oman are said to have been nearly exterminated by the Bagongo shortly after occupying their new sites, but to have been helped by the Ovando to drive them to the north. The Oman group is now in Obudu Division of Eastern Nigeria, and appears on Cowan’s map and in Nigerian sources as Becheve.23 The Otang, ‘who had greatly increased in numbers’ now moved down from the high plateau and occupied country evacuated by the Bagongo, who were defeated and driven to their present position to the north and northeast of the Sonkwala Hills in Obudu Division of Eastern Nigeria. The ‘Batanga’, or Otang, are marked on Cowan’s map as ‘Utanga’; they are known to the Tiv as ‘Utange Ya’. The Ochebe group had lived in contact with the Bagongo, and because they were both suffering constant raids from the Vitua they had become blood brothers. On the defeat of the Bagongo in the Oman war, the Ochebe suffered considerably from the Vitua and were assisted by the Ovando. Later movements were made at the expense of the Bagongo and the Vitua with the help of the Ovando. After a defeat of the Mbeyi by the Okus and the people of Yive (the ‘Ekwot’ of Cowan), the Mbeyi, ‘with a view to obtaining land other than in the forest belt’, attacked the Ochebe ridge.24 Again with Ovando help, they were routed, and it was then (according to this story) that the Mbeyi Anyang settled finally on the lowland south of the escarpment of the Assumbo Hills, founding the present Basho and other villages. The pattern of Ochebe history given by Cowan is enlivened by the Ovando side given to me in 1963. This version says that the Ovando fought with the Ekurav, who as we have seen include the branch of the Tiv called here the Vitua. ‘The

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fight started at Ocɛvɛ. One Ovando man went to Ocɛvɛ and an Ekurav man also went there. The Ovando man killed the Ekurav man and the Ocɛvɛ became vexed and Ekurav fought the Ovando people. Ocɛvɛ could not fight Ovando as they were brothers.’ Cowan says that the movement of the Ochebe to the present site of Kalumo was at Ovando insistence after they had helped defeat the Bagongo attack. This movement, in the Ovando story already cited, was associated with the final movement of the Mbeyi. The Ovando version also mentions Okus fights specifically with the Ityuav group of Ekurav.25 The Ama, whatever their relationship to the Ekor group, are represented as moving eastwards from the main Assumbo ridge from the Amam mountain near the Okus border. They occupied the col linking it with the northern Bamenda Plateau, where the easternmost village (called Batanga) became involved in a long war with the Mongunu (Ngwo) people for the plateau-forest edge, and especially with the villages of Bassa and Bakpa.26 The people of Yive, we have seen, have been considered part of a people separate from the five main Ekor groups, under the name ‘Ekwot’. The group so called now occupies a few villages both to the north and south of the high ridge, divided by Okus territory. Cowan says that as a result of a locust plague and famine, part of them claim to have moved southwards over the ridge from the north at Miyel (now Okus). Two villages – Olulu and Badschama – were established, the latter below the southern escarpment in the dense forest of the Upper Cross River basin, where a small group (known to them as ‘Vakpe’) welcomed them as allies. ‘Years later’, the Mbeyi, after their retreat from the Ovando and others, attacked the Vakpe and another small group (the ‘Bakumisaw’) and almost exterminated both. The survivors fled to Badschama, whose people they joined and intermarried with. The ‘Ekwot’ of Olulu were attacked by another Anyang group (the Inchuo), who were defeated with the help of Badschama.27 Meanwhile, the original Ekwot group remaining near Miyel were involved with the Okus in the expulsion of the Mbeyi into the forest, but were themselves subsequently driven by the Okus to the lower land still further north, where lies their present village of Yive, which bounds Northern Nigeria and the Tiv.28 Yive29 is certainly closely associated with the Ekor group, as has been seen. Olulu and Badschama are less clearly associated with Yive nowadays.30 The status of this group has in any event been confused by the use of a variant version of Ekor to describe it. The same problem occurs with a group of acknowledged Tiv, the ‘pure Munshi’ of Cowan’s informants, who live to the east of the Yive ‘Ekwot’. These are the ‘Ekol clan’, three of whose villages are in Nigeria and only one, Njawbaw (Njobo), in Cameroon.31 They are said to have lived to the southeast of Olagola Hill (to the north of the present village of Vamana), in the area disputed by the Ochebe and the Bagongo. The latter, with the ‘Vitua’, are said to have driven them out by repeated and ferocious attacks. The Njawbaw group came into conflict with the Messaga to the east (of whom more hereafter) but later became their blood brothers. They also had conflicts with the Otongo village of the Okus, with whom they also became blood brothers.32 The relationship of Ekol to the Tiv may be left until that of ‘Assumbo’ as a whole is discussed. Moving now eastwards we come to the Messaga (Massaga)33 group on the edge of the main Bamenda Plateau, an area here dominated by Ngol Kedju, a moun-

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tain some 7,500 feet high. The versions of the Messaga tradition state that, after splitting at a point variously located but placed by Cowan to the north of the Ama group,34 the people moved in two directions to their present situation to the north and southwest of Ngol Kedju (the Ballin and Assaka areas respectively). Ballin moved northeastwards, fought with the Age (Esimbi) and the Ekol group of Tiv and was harassed by what appears to have been the main body of that people to the north. Assaka moved eastwards to the north of Ngol Kedju Mountain to the area of Motomo, in the Beba-Befang area, where they met considerable opposition from the Aghem of Wum. They were forced to retreat to their present position to the southwest of the mountain, where they absorbed a settlement called Ndem Angbe, inhabited by an unknown people.35 Hawkesworth36 notes that the Wum people claimed to have exacted tribute from Messaga in pre-European times, and occasionally to have acted as allies of the Age (Esimbi). The latter are now the neighbours of Messaga in the Wum Division. They have no traditions of origin and at the present time they merely repeat the vague Widekum story mentioned as his own conjecture by Cantle.37 Their language does not belong with the typical Plateau Bantoid languages such as are spoken by the so-called Widekum peoples, but shows affinities with the languages of Sonkwala and Assumbo Hills. They came under Wum domination and were required to pay a tribute of oil annually – or as the present-day phrase goes: ‘to make oil for Wum’.38 With the Esimbi we begin to approach the peculiar marchland of the northernmost extension of the alleged ‘Tikar invasion’ of the Bamenda Plateau.

The ‘Tikar’ Marchland For its bearing on the question of the Tiv in our area, something must be said briefly about this further area. According to the classical view developed by administrative officers in the 1920s, there was a ‘Tikar’ invasion of the Bamenda Plateau about 300 years ago whereby a people from the Ndobo area in the present East Cameroon established small state-like chiefdoms, thereby dispersing a pre-existing ‘Widekum’ group of peoples who supposedly survive on the western fringe of the plateau, or in pockets in the ‘Tikar’ territory.39 The most westerly part of the ‘Tikar’ invasion was supposedly the chiefdom of Bafut. In the north of the plateau a group of ‘Tikar’ are supposed to have dispersed from Ndiwom (Ndewum), a locality in the neighbourhood of Mme, and to the north of the important chiefdom of Kom. The Ndiwom group, as a whole, did not repeat in their dispersion the more complex state systems to the south of them. They spread fairly thinly over the area now usually known as Fungom Native Authority.40 The northernmost, and territorially most extensive, of the ‘Ndiwom’ settlements is now known as Esu, and its nominal control extended to the upper valley of the Katsina Ala River. Their neighbours to the west, the Aghem or ‘Wum’, speak a dialect of the same language and share some common institutions, but say they were not part of the Ndiwom group. The Aghem in their most westerly extension bordered the territory of Bafut, as well as the Beba (Mubadji), the socalled Befang, and the Esimbi on the edge of the Bamenda Plateau, who are the

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neighbours of our ‘Assumbo’ groups. The claim that the Aghem are not ‘Tikar’ (despite the fact that they have been the northwesterly vectors of that culture commonly associated with the ‘Tikar’) adds a further dimension to the over-simple migration legend of the Ndiwom group itself. The Aghem were reported early on to claim to have come from Tiv, these people usually being mentioned under the introduced northern name of ‘Munshi’. In actuality the Tiv boundary to the northwest was not, as we shall see, viewed in greatly different terms by the Aghem and the neighbouring ‘Tikar’ Esu.41 The Esu area seems to have been called by many names. It was known as Nyim, or the like, to most of the neighbouring peoples to the west and south. Esu call themselves Oso, their language and town Esu.42 They were known to the first German expedition of 1905 as Su, but we are told that they called themselves Ndum, and that they were known to Hausa traders by then as Bafum Katse, ‘Bafum of the murderers’.43 Esu tales speak of various small groups who were dispossessed by their own movements northwestwards, such as Dzam,44 a settlement formerly near to present Aghem territory. One ward (Okpɛ) of the Esu parent village immigrated from the same direction, perhaps bringing with them the so-called ‘native’ variety of maize (sáŋ íkpɛ), which replaced the traditional guinea-corn staple.45 They were soon in conflict with a people known to them as Afitsǝ, who were in occupation of the present sites of the Gayama, Menka and Menkep sub-villages of Esu.46 According to Esu tradition, they were driven out. In a version recorded by Jeffreys they were dispersed in the reign of Mitaŋ, after they had come from ‘Takum way’.47 In the legend of settlement of Gayama, the Afitsə are sometimes given the epithet of bəŋədzə (‘of the red mouths’), but today the term is the Esu name for the Tiv. In Wum, when it is said that their ancestors came from Tiv, it is, again, from Fitsə (Aghem: Fətsə) that they came. Once again it is the northern plateau borders to which this country is referred. Glauning in 1908 refers to the ‘Muntschilandschaft Witshé as several days’ march to the north-northwest of Wum.48 When Wum arrived, their western neighbours, the Esimbi, Beba and Befang, were thought to be already in existence. We hear again of the Okpɛ, who are said to have been driven from the site of Wum town by the Aghem, from whence some fled to Esu.49 The subsequent undoubtedly close relations of Wum with Babaji or Mubadji of the Beba-Befang area were such that a joint origin was mentioned early in the reports, and to this day stories of a Bábázǝ̀ origin still occur, in conflict with the received story. Both Esu and Wum retain traditions of an explosive irruption of the people known under various forms of the name Gainyi.50 The Aghem say that as a result of it they fled into the bush for two years,51 while some accounts ascribe the Ndiwom movements themselves to the attacks of the Gainyi.52 Several theories of their origin have been given. The present-day Esu identify them with the Jukun, but the balance of scientific opinion prefers the Chamba. Both are probably reflections of the same truth: both Chamba and Jukun would be likely to be involved. People of old Gainyi stock are supposed still to exist in Gayama and Memfoŋ sub-villages of Esu. The name is often linked with forms such as Diŋyim, Diŋi and Dima, from Diŋa, meaning the Chamba of Donga.53 It is more possibly an-

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other example of the tendency for foreign forms for the names of Chamba groups to contain the initial syllable ‘Ga’, the Chamba word for ‘chief’. This is attested for the whole area south of the Benue.54 We may probably include in this pattern ‘Gayama’, the home of the furthest subordinate settlement of the Esu, as well as the more famous Gayama in Northern Nigeria. The Tiv have their own tradition of the Gainyi invasion,55 while some echoes must have reached the Assumbo Highlands, for their name provides to this day there the word for ‘white man’.56 In modern Modelle (or Ide) (of Beba-Befang) the term Ganyi was said to mean the ‘European’ in such phrases as: ‘since the time of the European’. An association of the Gainyi with the Fulani would be quite natural, as they were later much mixed with the Chamba of Donga.57 There seems to be no Assumbo tradition of a Gainyi invasion as such. The Bagongo (Bayongo), and the Ekurav and Ituav Tiv, as we have seen, dominate their recollections.58 For Esimbi an elderly informant was only able to recall that there was a ‘panaple’ (folk-saying – from ‘parable’) that the Gainyi fought Esimbi in the days of Kum Aanə, a chief under whom, he said, Esimbi became tributary to Wum.59 The ‘Fitsə’ area was hardly peaceful throughout the nineteenth century, and we have evidence of several different peoples other than the Tiv in the area. While Esu traditions speak of an assimilation of these Fitsə elements, Wum speaks of an origin among them. Since both Wum and Esu now share a Plateau Bantoid language with the Ndiwom ‘Tikar’, contacts between Esu and Wum must have been much closer and continued for much longer than could be deduced from the relatively sparse traditions of their mutual contacts. In the Esu case, we retain the tradition of the assimilating group; in the Wum the tradition of the assimilated group. Presumably these traditions reflect the locus of political power, differently placed in essentially similar populations of mixed origin. The elements in this mixture may include Tiv, Chamba and Jukun, quite apart from that mixture that the so-called ‘Tikar’ groups themselves exhibit. For Wum at least some ‘Beba-Befang’ contribution is self-evident. The name of the ritual chief, the kə̀də̀n, of Wum (Dən kə Ghəm) is Befang in origin (cf. Idə language of Modelle: kùdə̀ŋ), while the ba′tum, who are semi-independent ward-heads, are shared with the northern ‘Tikar’. Dr Kaberry hazarded the opinion that the ‘Munshi’ tradition of the Aghem might refer to Jibu contacts.60 According to one Esu tradition a ‘Jibvu’ hamlet that had come from the direction of Takum was dispersed by them.61 As for the Esu themselves, whatever their own origin, their country has continued to be known as Nyim to groups to the west and south. Are we perhaps to believe that this was a vague geographical term meaning the country bordering on the Diŋyim Chamba? Such etymologies may (such are the many pitfalls) be disregarded but the simple Esu and Wum stories with their references to Tiv and Gainyi must be shadows of a much more complex reality.62

The Bearing of the Tiv Legends The Tiv traditions are recorded by Downes, Abraham, Akiga (in separate annotations by East and Bohannan) and Paul and Laura Bohannan.63 The various recensions show inconsistencies even within the work of single authors, but the general

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picture is that the Tiv were originally living in some hills with peoples (known as atɔatiɛv or ‘Bush Tribes’) with the names of Ugbe, Ukwese, Undir (Und’il, Ndir) and Iyon. They moved down to lower ground severely harassed by the Mbayongo and Uge, but were helped by the Utange, part of whom are settled among the Tiv. Besides these details, the Tiv or their editors tend to offer conflicting stories. Most of the peoples mentioned can be identified as living in the parts of Obudu Division of Eastern Nigeria or of West Cameroon that concern us here. Some identifications are clear: the Ukwese are our Okus, and the Utange are the people known to Assumbo as Otang. Undir is the Tiv name for Oliti, an important settlement of the Ochebe. Iyɔn (Okus) or Ejɔn (Ovando) are Assumbo names for the Messaga.64 The conflict with the Mbayongo is of interest: surely these are the Bagongo of the Assumbo legend. The Uge are the Obanliku and neighbouring peoples. The Otang group to whom the displacement of the Bagongo is attributed in the Assumbo story are clearly the helpful Utange of the Tiv. In the Assumbo tradition, however, as we have seen, the Tiv of Ityuav and Ikurav Mbashaya are an important enemy. There is also the problem of the ‘Ekol’ Tiv who also fought the Vitua. The events do not sound as if the Tiv were newly separating from the Assumbo area. It is probable that Mbayongo raids were a known feature of southern Tivland long after the establishment of Tiv to the north.65 The earlier part of the Tiv legend, before the Mbayongo harassings, is very difficult to pin down; indeed it is here that the chief conflicts among the recensions and their interpreters occur. There is, for instance, the whole question of ‘Swem’. This is a hill first mentioned by Akiga, who refers to it as a hill in the land of Ukwese and Ndir, but also says that people do not know where it is and that they say it is in Turan or Maav or Kurav divisions of the Tiv. Akiga says he visited it, but then says it was in Iyɔn, which we have seen to be Messaga. Akiga does not say that Swem was the home of the Tiv. In 1953 Laura and Paul Bohannan confirm this adding that the Tiv ‘passed by Swem’ on their way down from the hills. In 1954, however, Paul Bohannan wrote that Swem was the ‘original home’ of the Tiv.66 Whatever the truth about Swem (or ‘Swem Ikaragbe’), it is usually located in our area. Bohannan identifies it with Ngol Kedju, the high mountain already mentioned in Messaga: this would be in line with Akiga’s placing of Swem in ‘Iyon’. East’s map, which is somewhat diagrammatic, places Swem to the north of Ngol Kedju. Akiga’s own story, which East is illustrating, does not speak of Swem at all in this context, but mentions only that on their way down the Tiv passed ‘the hill of Yavwua, in the midst of the Bush Tribes’, before crossing the ‘Muanawuha’ and ‘Muan’ Rivers. Once more we hear the roll-call of the ‘Undir, Ukwese, Ugbe, Iyonov and Utange’, but the geography is not that of the Assumbo Hills but of the Esu chiefdom. Yabvə is the Esu name of a river just to the north of the capital. It is named on maps, in its lower stretches, Waboa, but the more correct version Yaboa is to be found on the Divisional maps. Its whole valley is, in fact, the scene of the Esu expansion at the expense of the Afitsə or Tiv. It sounds very much as though we are here in another play, with other actors. Finally, we may mention for the Tiv an origin ‘to the east of Takum’ that is suggested by East, who seems, however, to have thought wrongly that this was the

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location of the Undir, Ukwese and others. Bohannan mentions a point ‘near the present site of Takum’ that may merely be an echo of this. The earlier authorities place the ultimate origin of the Tiv at the Sonkwala Hills, the Nigerian extension of Assumbo (and indeed in one case among the Ekoi near the Cross River).67 Although this may appear the least exceptional direction, I cannot really feel that any of these stories relate to ‘ultimate’ origins. It seems very likely that the Tiv legends actually refer to a number of separate events in their southern history, which by some codifying requirement of their culture are placed in linear series, both in space and time. Another story of the Tiv, about ‘coming down’ with the Fulani, could thus refer to an association at any time in their history and indeed no earlier than the events of the mid nineteenth century.68 The connections with Assumbo-Sonkwala are undoubtedly the best documented. The ancestor Ekor Ngba of the hill people has been assimilated to the Tiv genealogy at the borders with the peoples of the south. Ikôr is taken by some to be the common ancestor of the Kparev Tiv, of the Uge and of the Utange.69 Others say that Ikor and Je or Ge (the supposed ancestor of the Uge) shared the ancestor of the Kparev, Ikor himself being the ancestor of the purely Tiv groups.70 These stories do not imply a true common origin, as the Tiv are accustomed to use their genealogy as a sort of map of all the social relationships they have. The connection with the Utange was, however, such that a northern group of them live deep in Tiv country and are assimilated to the Tiv.71 The Tiv also seem to have assimilated some of their old enemies, the Mbayongo, whose name appears as a border people of the Kunav clan. The Assumbo are not, however, in any simple sense linguistically Tiv. There are several Assumbo languages, of which that of Yive (‘Ekwot’) is closer to Tiv, while that of Tinta (Okus) is farther from it. All, however, show general affinities with Boki and the string of north Ogoja languages from Yakoro to Obanliku (the Udam and Uge of the Tiv), related to it. There is also much Anyang influence. It would be more accurate to say that the greatly expanded Tiv language is a member of the same linguistic group as those of Assumbo.72 To return to the traditions, however, if indeed we are to believe that the Tiv migrated from this area, it should be noted that their large population (some 760,000 or more in 1952) makes it unlikely that such a movement occurred at all recently. In the simplest form in which the Tiv legend is reported, ‘all Tiv lived in a single large community on top of a hill’:73 the population of all the present-day Assumbo communities, on hill or lowland, was less than 15,000 in 1953. The neighbouring Esimbi area numbered less than 6,000 in the same year.74 Tiv social organization shows signs (such as the high degree of rationalization of their territorial and lineage structure) that suggest a people long established in their present area. From what we know of African peoples of sizeable population, it would be conservative to guess that the Tiv have had several hundred years of common development. The Tiv represent themselves, as we saw, as being a small and relatively defenceless people, at the mercy of the Mbayongo and glad of Utange help. Even if we assume that the Tiv population doubled in every generation up to 1952, a rate of increase that has occurred under only the most favourable conditions in West Africa, it would have to take, by natural increase, a group of 1,000 about 350

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years, a group of 10,000 about 250 years, to reach 750,000. In fact, this rate of increase is quite impossibly high. Besides, it takes no account of the disruptions of the nineteenth century and even earlier. Perhaps the Tiv numbered 200,000 in 1800, and perhaps they had taken even several centuries to increase from 100,000 to this figure. Nothing is claimed for such guesses, but they do not overestimate the numbers of the Tiv. Perhaps there was much assimilation of foreign populations, but the Tiv certainly were not all living on Swem or any other hill at any time we can be concerned with. Their distinctive, while mainly homogeneous, language also points to a long period of establishment. We have had to devote especially detailed attention to the northern boundary of our region. One conclusion would seem to be that while the Tiv have played an important role on the northern side of the watershed, they showed no ability, or possibly no desire, to break over it where it is narrowest in the Assumbo area. On the plateau itself, further east, they were clearly involved in the population movements of the upper Katsina Ala, but lost ground in the conflicts of Jukun, Chamba and Ndiwom ‘Tikar’.75 The stories as a whole seem clearly to relate to a time when the Tiv were already in existence, although not in that strong position on their southern border that they had acquired at the colonial occupation. As far as the Upper Cross River basin is concerned, the miniscule Assumbo groups were moving out of their hills, being raided, dispersing and absorbing each other, while the large Benue-looking Tiv group provided a further buffer to penetration from the north, thus reinforcing the northern mountain rim of the Upper Cross River basin. This northern barrier is disappointingly strong, for it is here that we may have hoped to have ‘plugged in’ our traditions to a source of fixed chronology. For the Bamenda Plateau this is moderately possible.76 For the Assumbo area, and thus for the forest to the south, we are dependent on the dubious dating of the Tiv tradition – which may be a useful provisional hypothesis – that the oldest Assumbo memories, like those of the Tiv, date from the various disruptions following the break up of the Kwororafa Empire of the Jukun, and probably from the later period of this disruption. The Assumbo movements towards the forest are also associated with palm oil. We may hear echoes of the increased demand for the product at the coast, or possibly at the Benue after Baikie. Altogether, the middle of the nineteenth century is the most optimistic conservative dating that can be offered, with the end of the eighteenth as the rashest.

The Upper Cross River Basin The Upper Cross River basin may be compared to a sack with its mouth to the east. Two peoples occupy the ‘mouth’ itself: the Boki to the north of the river and the Ekoi people to the south. Both these groups are inadequately known, and their boundaries are obscure. It seems certain, however, that they have tended to move into the Upper Basin in what is now West Cameroon, generating pressures that have modified the ethnic structure and that finally transmitted movements out of the basin itself to the south. The northern movement is less clearly documented than the southern, and is linked with the question of the Anyang.

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The Anyang and their Neighbours (see Map 2.2) Talbot77 divides the Boki into Boki proper and certain groups along the north: the Yakoro, Bete, and Uge or Gayi. In language, he thinks Uge (Johnston’s Gayi) differs considerably from Boki proper, while Bete (Mbete) is ‘nearly a different language’.78 The Uge for him include the ‘Otanga’. These peoples are already familiar. Resemblances to the Boki linguistic group occur as far to the east as the Esimbi of the Bamenda Plateau edge. As we have seen, peoples that appear ‘Tivlike’ from the north appear ‘Boki-like’ from the south. In West Cameroon it is difficult to draw a clear ethnic distinction between the Boki and the Anyang, many of whom have traditions of origin among the former. There is, however, a small group of Boki ‘proper’ who have moved from the main body of the people, now in Eastern Nigeria, further up the Cross River to its confluence with the Oyi. The confusion of the two peoples is such that among the ‘Ekwe’ group of Cameroons Ejagham, the word ‘Boki’ subsumes Anyang.79 The Anyang picture is as vague, wherever one stands to view it. In the north of the area it is difficult to distinguish the so-called ‘Ekwot’ of Olulu and Badschama from the Anyang; in the south the Ejagham of Kembong make no distinction between ‘Anyang’ and ‘Banyang’; nor, for that matter, do the Anyang and Banyang make any terminological distinction, each regarding the other as a deviant branch of themselves. In the east the peoples of the plateau rim south of the Messaga and Ama areas call the Anyang ‘Biteku’, and make no distinction between the Anyang ‘proper’ and the so-called Biteku ‘proper’. The Anyang do form some kind of unit.80 One cannot escape the impression, however, that the term denoted ‘those Upper Cross River peoples who came to control the nineteenth-century trade routes to the north of the river’. The Anyang language,81 like the languages of the Banyang82 and Ejagham to the south of the river, is just another selection from the Cross River dialect pot. The Anyang language does not seem to have had Map 2.2: The Anyang and their neighbours (adapted from Ardener 1966)

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as long to establish itself in its area as have Ejagham and Kenyang to the south. All linguistic boundaries in the basin are blurred; between Kenyang and Ejagham the blurring is notorious: in Ruel’s phrase, a ‘mergence’ rather than a boundary.83 Nevertheless, there is a clear overlap of two languages: in the consciousness of the speakers they are using ‘Kenyang’ or ‘Ejagham’ words. In the Anyang area, the Anyang ‘language’ encroaches on what are already closely related dialects – part of a zone of shading-off of languages, which spreads, virtually without a break, onto the plateau and into the so-called ‘Widekum’ and ‘Tikar’ areas. North of the Cross River, therefore, a process is still at work that is much further advanced south of the river: the breaking of a fairly stable linguistic continuum, by the development of one part of it at the expense of other parts. The development of the Anyang as a people, and as we know them today, has, as has been suggested already, been dependent on the growth of the trade of the Upper Cross River, and it would appear to have occurred later in time than the firmer establishment of the Banyang and Ejagham to the south. The picture that emerges from the traditions – of a number of movements towards the routes joining the Cross River nucleus with the western and northern highland rim of the basin – is plausible enough, and is similar in type, as we shall see later, to the movements in the south. The area of the Upper Cross River basin to the north of the river demonstrates very clearly the isolating influences of the terrain, which are typical of the West Cameroon forest as a whole; the various streams that flow to the Cross become torrents in the rains. The population of the area we are considering was only small in 1953.84 In 1925, Mr Gregg, A.D.O., had been moved to write: ‘Only the heavy thud of overripe fruit falling from its parent tree breaks the silence of the luxuriant forest,’85 – a conceit intended to stress its loneliness rather than its minor dangers. In the area near the Takamanda and Obonye villages of Anyang, gorillas are even now still able to survive.86 It is surprising, indeed, that the ethnic fragmentation is not greater than it is: it does not compare in this respect with the Kumba Division. As we shall come to see, the Upper Cross River basin has tended to share many elements of a common culture, deriving, it is true, largely from outside it. In taking the north of the Basin before the south of it, I have been guided by several factors. It will be convenient to round off the story of the Assumbo border, and the links with the ‘Widekum’ and Eastern Bamenda Plateau peoples can also be touched upon in this chapter and our concern with the Bamenda part of the plateau can be for the time finished with. In addition, the consideration of the south of the basin leads naturally to the peoples of Rumpy, Manenguba and the coast. Nevertheless, the clue to much of the confusion of minor events told of north of the river and around the edge of the basin lies to the south. This will therefore be in part a preliminary sketch. It will appear to be rather detailed and complex, all the same, but some order in the material will, I hope, be visible later.

Anyang The Anyang87 are divided into groups of villages, administratively usually termed ‘clans’. It is probable that their structure resembles the groups similarly so called among the Banyang, and described by Ruel,88 who redefined them as ‘village-

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groups’. They are territorially based groups whose males claim common patrilineal ancestry. As we are given their traditions in the first official version,89 a number of clans claim to have originated in or about their present areas. Most of the Nchwo, the Belumbe, the Mesu-Ake and the groups inhabiting Kelua, Mbulo, Maku, Takuo, and especially the sites of their supposed centres of origin, are scattered along the valleys of the Mafi and North Munaya rivers90 in a long line, from the foothills of Manta, in the northeast, almost to the junction of the North Munaya with the Cross River in the southeast. This junction is under the control of Betime, a village now of Boki speech. The Anyang group lowest down the river, the Nchwo (the Bancho of the reports) also claim to be descended from the union of an ancestress ‘Mainyu’ with a Boki man of Kajifu (as will be seen later, Kajifu claims to be of the same origin as the Nchwo). Nchwo himself, the supposed father of Mainyu, came from near Ewisi,91 the point at which the river becomes navigable by canoe down to the Cross. The Elumbe, further up the valley, claim to have originated in the neighbourhood of Takpe.92 The Mesu-Ake are of Ambele origin, one village (Tabe) now being assimilated to the Anyang, the other to the Manta.93 Kelua (the only village of Clan-Awanti) came down to the river Mafi from the northern Anyang boundary, near the present Ote. Mbule (now usually known as Mbulu) tell a similar story. Possibly the Elumbe are situated at the centre of longest development of the Anyang on the North Munaya, although it may well be that the head of the Mafi Valley, where there are fewer traditions of movement, was an original home of the ‘core’ Anyang, close to the Okus Assumbo, the Ama and the Manta of the highland rim. Whatever the truth of this, in the west, Boki encroachment, whether by movement or intermarriage, has completely obscured the past situation there. We have already met the active group of Anyang known in the Assumbo area as Mbeyi.94 They claim to be of the same origin as Bashu Nebu and Okwa, Boki villages of Eastern Nigeria. The story, as we have it, is rather confused, because the eponymous ancestor in one version seems to appear twice: as Aye and Mbeye.95 He is, in any event, said to have settled near Tinta, now the chief village of the Okus, and from there his four sons pushed down into the forest and founded Basho (‘I’ and ‘II’), Mbiishe, Makwe and Tchemba. An elderly informant of Baje (in Nchwo group) knew no stories of the involvement of his people. He knew all about the Mbeyi, whom he called by their general name Aso (‘Basho’). According to him they fought with the Assumbo of Atolo; Akwoka of Atolo was very powerful. He started fighting with Aso and drove them away; then the Aso came down and ‘bought’ land from Takpe (of the Balumbi group) for seven slaves. He added that because the Aso were so powerful part of Takpe ran away and founded the present Ote in the uninhabited bush. The other part of Takpe escaped to near Baje. The war with Atolo was never closed until the arrival of the Germans (‘till this day not even a dog was killed to finish the war’).96 The Mbeyi seem to regard their fights with the Assumbo peoples as attempts to prevent the latter from gaining a foothold in the forest. The only story we are given in the official account is that the Assumbo, together with the villages of Olulu, Badchama and Biyue (the so-called ‘Ekwot’ of Cowan) were driven back to the hills. Biyue (Yive) fled almost to the present Nigerian boundary. This broadly

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confirms the stories given by the Okus and Ovando without their detail, but does not admit that the Mbeyi were driven from the grasslands. From the Assumbo versions already discussed, a whole range of other Anyang peoples were involved in the warfare of those days: the Nchwo attacking, and the people of Mfakwe and the Mesu-Ake fleeing from the Mbeyi.97 The story of Olulu, Badchama and Biyue from this side differs somewhat from the ‘Ekwot’ story.98 For the Anyang, their ancestor was not ‘Ekwot’ but ‘Dankwa’, who lived near the site of Olulu and Basho II before the Mbeyi moved east from Bashu Nebu, and who married a ‘Munshi’ woman. Sharwood-Smith sees the whole conflict of the Mbeyi with the Assumbo and the Ba-Dankwa as a chance synchronization of two separate movements from grassland to forest, not, as is perhaps more likely, as part of a clash between the Mbeyi and the Okus and Ovando concerning the oil palm–rich escarpment edge. As for Olulu and Badchama (with Biyue/Yive), what more we learn about them confirms the suspicion that they are of mixed origin. Taking all our information into this group together, they are probably a mixed bag of Anyang and Assumbo remnants. They were unfortunate enough to occupy the border between the Mbeyi and the Ovando-Okus.99 There are echoes of the Mbeyi wars all over Anyang country, but the original arrival of this group from Bashu Nebu may be connected with the movement of other Boki who founded, in the valley of the Oyi River, the Anyang villages of Obonyi ‘I’, ‘II’ and ‘III’, as they are now known – the clan ‘Ba-Enaw-Danchi’ or Enoranchi. They are said to be related to the Nigerian Boki villages of Bashu and Bonabi.100 Obonyi and the Mbeyi villages are now Anyang rather than Boki in speech. To the south of these, in the lower valley of the Oyi River, the Boki element is much stronger. From Danali, in present Eastern Nigeria, the ‘pure’ Boki villages of Dari, Bodam, Boka, Baje and Oyi were settled in the confluence area of the Oyi and Cross Rivers. Between the Oyi and the North Munaya rivers is a further stretch of country that is indeterminately designated as Anyang or Boki. The villages of Kajifu, Betime and Abonande speak Boki, but are said by Gregg and by my informants to be of a common origin with the Nchwo Anyang, and to have come from the present area of Ekokisam.101 The marriage of the supposed ancestress of part of the Nchwo clan with the man of Kajifu would then have occurred within the Nchwo group, which in its enlarged form Gregg renames Eba-Mbu. Ekokisam (or Ekugesam) lies between these villages and the ‘Anyangized’ Boki of Obonye, speaking Boki but related to both Boki and Anyang.102 For Gregg’s informants, the Boki language would appear to have encroached on Anyang in the border area. For those of Sharwood-Smith the picture is rather of Boki coming to speak Anyang. I heard that both views and both processes obviously occurred, but the Boki language dominated (significantly enough) at the junctions of the Oyi and the North Munaya (a river that was otherwise, as we have seen, the Anyang River par excellence) with the Cross River. Anyang trade was thus forced to pass through Boki middlemen on the whole western border. To the west of the belt of Boki influence in the Anyang area, the dominant people on the southern bank of the Cross River are the Banyang, and even on the northern bank the Banyang have become intermingled with the Anyang. The ‘Ba-Ayauna’ clan of the latter, at present represented only by the important vil-

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lage of Kesham, is said by Sharwood-Smith to have originated at a place called Bakum somewhere near the present Nchwo settlements of Ewisi and Baje on the North Munaya.103 Kesham itself is at present bilingual in the Anyang and Banyang languages. The neighbouring people to the east, on the north bank of the Cross River opposite Mamfe, are usually classified as Banyang, but the most northerly villages at least (Nyang and Mukonyong) are partially Anyang in origin. Indeed, the name Baku, of the north-bank clan of Banyang, recalls the ‘Bakum’ origin of their Kesham neighbours. This is unlikely to be the whole story of this part of the north bank.104 Once again, whatever the elements of the mixture, here as downstream, the control of the Cross River approaches fell to the non-Anyang part of the mixture. Kesham indeed is the only Anyang town with a frontage on the Cross. The map will show also that this northern extension of Banyang influence gave the latter a foothold on the Mawne tributary of the North Manyu, thus virtually monopolizing the outlets from the Biteku country to the west. The Biteku appear to be a specialized and, in the late pre-colonial period, commercially successful group of Anyang. Their name is the general name by which the Anyang are known to hill peoples above them.105 They occupy the Upper Mawne Valley with its route, already mentioned, into Anyang country, and more important, the valley of the Mu (or Mo) leading to the Cross River. Here again, control of the junction with the Manyu, a main headwater of the Cross River, is in the hands of the Banyang (the same Baku clan already mentioned). They are, however, probably as ‘Anyang’ as some of the other peoples so called (the BaMfo-Acha Anyang claim to originate, anyway, from the foothills of Ambele). The language of all the villages is said to be Anyang, although the village of Numba seems to be of common origin with the Kendem settlement of the Banyang. The whole Awanchi Clan of Banyang, of which Kendem is a part, is, in any event, itself of mixed origin.106 Once again, however, we find Banyang influence at the point where Biteku touches yet another trade route as it does at Numba. The claims of the Biteku in colonial times to be regarded as different from the main Anyang, are probably due to their success as traders in contact with an area of the Bamenda Plateau escarpment that both was populous, and had shorter communications to the Cross River than that with which their main Anyang neighbours were connected by the Mafi-Munaya route to the north. Further details of this subject will be left until we discuss the main Cross River trading nucleus. This description has virtually covered the whole of the Anyang area. Crowded in at the head of the Mafi Valley, some of the smaller ‘clans’ have been much influenced by the belt of hill peoples on the escarpment of the Bamenda Plateau at the eastern end of the Cross River basin. In attempting to compile my own data for the Anyang I was conscious not only of the influence of Sharwood-Smith, but of yet another overlaying influence – that of a later independent enquiry in 1940.107 This resulted in the combination into one Native Authority, at the request of the groups concerned, of the Manta people, the Mbeyi Anyang and these smaller Anyang groups. The federation took the name of ‘Mbulu’, after the village at which the headquarters was placed. The Anyang, as a result, do not have any unitary modern identity. Geographical convenience was undoubtedly the chief stimulus to the gathering together of these groups. The report is very sketchy compared

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with Sharwood-Smith’s, and the informants were less concerned to point up differences than to minimize them. Otɛ detached itself from the Balumbi clan (Alimbe of Dixon) in order to be grouped with its nearer neighbours on the Upper Mafi. The Ba-Mfo-Acha clan (Nfowcha of Dixon) added Nga village to itself. The villages of Mbulu, Kelua, Ashuwunda (Asehunda), Tambu, Takwo, Ntakwo and Taba combined under the name Bajo, by which they had been generally known from outside. From this report we learn a little more about the Mbeyi. The ancestor is now said to be Oyi, whose sons founded both Basonebo (Bashu Nebu) in the neighbouring Nigerian Ikom Division and the Mbeyi.108 ‘In the forests and mountains of Mamfe Division’, was the comment on the ‘Mbulu Federation’, ‘geographical propinquity is a stronger force than ancestral affinities’.109 Between 1925 and 1940 this had come to seem so. How many similar rearrangements occurred before that?

Manta, Otutu, Wetchu and Ambele Retracing our steps to the last section it will be recalled that our examination of the peoples of the mountain rim ceased at the level of the Messaga and Ama, where the enclosing edge of the Cross River basin turns south. The present boundary of the Bamenda and Mamfe Divisions runs along this edge. On the Bamenda side there lie from north to south, in the area we are here considering, the Ngwo (Ngono) and the Ngie (Mingi, Bamingi) peoples. On the Mamfe side lie the peoples known as the Manta, Otutu, Ambele and Wetschu. Between the Upper Mafi River and its watershed with the River Mo is a group of hills, forest-covered except for the summits. This is the home of the Manta; on the southern side of the watershed are the Ambele.110 Where the Manta bound the Ama and Otutu country the area belongs to the Plateau proper, and it is from hereabouts that the people traditionally originated.111 Sharwood-Smith suggests that the movement of the Manta into the Mafi Valley was due to Ngie pressure. While this is possible, this movement, like so many others, coincides with a general tendency to movements towards the forest-plateau edge and to the nearest trade route. The furthest Anyang settlement up the Mafi River, at Ntakwo, is of Manta (Alo) origin. From here trade followed the Anyang route down the Mafi and Mainyu.112 The ultimate affinities of the Manta, like those of the Otutu and Wetchu, have been thought to be with the Ngwo of the Bamenda Plateau. Cowan’s informants denied this, but linguistically there seems to be no doubt that this is true. The Otutu,113 whose founder was called Nkaw, lived, according to Biddulph’s informants, at the present site of Akanunkwo at the head of the Mu Valley. Their country is mostly grassland. There seem to be no remoter traditions of origin.114 The Wetchu to the south of them name a locality called Imi as their original home, which is within their present area. The naming of this people is confused. As pronounced it is better rendered Wuchu, but it is not certain that it is not a foreign name. The name Menka, which is often applied to this area, certainly is, deriving from the Anyang form of the name of a Wetchu village.115 Both Otutu and Wetchu were much harried by the Ngie. Biddulph is probably correct when he suggests that the Wetchu first spread north and south along the Mu Valley, and that they

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were driven to their present hilltops much later. Although one of the Chamba invasions – either that of the Bali or that of our ‘Ganyi’ – is said to have touched this area, there is no recollection of it today.116 The Ambele live on the high ground on the western side of the Mu River opposite the Otutu and Wetchu, a spur of the grassland plateau forming the watershed between the Rivers Mu, Mafi and Mawne. The unusual physical type of the Ambele has been noted by different observers:117 a lower stature than their neighbours with a marked female steatopygy is reported, which suggests a period of relative genetic isolation at the very least. Nevertheless, linguistically they are not especially to be differentiated from their neighbours. When the trade route down the Mafi Valley opened, the Ambele, as did other peoples, moved towards it. Taba was founded, according to Biddulph’s informants, on the site of an Ambele hunter’s post on the Mafi River, and during the period of the growth of Anyang influence on that route it became the outlet for the exchange of slaves from Ambele against Cross River products. In time Taba became assimilated to the Anyang.118 Baiyo was also established by purchase of land from the Manta, for the purpose of trade with the latter. There is a tradition of a war between Ambele and Wetchu. In one version119 the Wetchu village of Lamingi asked for the services of a noted hunter to kill an elephant that had been destroying their farms, but the elephant killed him instead. The Ambele said that it was a Wetchu elephant – that is, the animal double of a Wetchu man. Fighting broke out, which the Ambele are supposed to have won. Sharwood-Smith links together the upper ‘Manta’ groups of Nyimi and Nyaeyaw, the Otutu, Wetchu and Ambele, together with the Ngwo (Ngono) of Bamenda Division, as a group he calls ‘Bajam’, a nonce-word meaning ‘I say’ that has not survived in administrative usage.

Widekum To the south of the Wetchu we come to groups that have acquired a disproportionate fame because of their supposed role in providing a large part of the population of the Bamenda Plateau. Looked at in detail, the area, which is a further stretch of the forest escarpment of the Bamenda Plateau, consists of a number of villagegroups. To the north lie the [Mamfe Division] Befang. They have no clear traditions of origin, except a vague idea that their ancestor came from the hills near the present village of Eka. These Befang belong linguistically to the Ngwo group already mentioned.120 Further south again we come to the Widekum proper, which consists of a village area containing four main hamlets. Still further south is the village area of Deche and to the west of this the village of Deche. As far as the present Mamfe Division is concerned, these peoples, in common with most of those so far mentioned, have tended to move further into the forest. A report of 1923 by Sharwood-Smith and Williams speaks of Widekum and Deche as being ‘probably offshoots’ of the ‘Mogamaw’ (Moghamo) tribe of Bamenda Division. ‘They deny the relationship but are claimed by the Mogamaws as kin and the claim is supported by strong resemblances of custom and dialect’.121 In

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his full report of 1924 Sharwood-Smith refers again to the linguistic links between Widekum and ‘Mogamaw’. This is quite correct – from the vocabularies at our disposal ‘Widekum’ and Moghamo are indeed virtually identical. He then adds that the Widekum have no traditional links with any other tribe. He notes the general tradition of the Moghamo that they dispersed from Etat, a locality up on the escarpment, near to the present Batibo (or Aigui). He also notes that the Bafawchu (own name Mbu, once administratively classed as ‘Ngemba’) were reported to have been founded by a Widekum man. He then speculates whether the Widekum and Deche were founded from Etat. Because of the Bafawchu story, he says, ‘possibly’ they founded Etat. On the Bamenda side of the boundary, the common affinities of the Moghamo and Meta’ (or Menemo) were early recognized, and in a memorandum of 1922 Hunt said that the Meta’ derived their origin from Widekum, ‘as do the other clans on the western side of the Division, except Bali’.122 In Sharwood-Smith’s report of 1924 on the Moghamo and Ngemba, he has already assimilated this and embarked on romance: ‘This Report deals with certain families of presumed Congo origin who emigrated some 250 years ago from the great forests that fringe the upper waters of the Cross River and settled on the grasslands of the Bamenda Plateau … One of the main channels of this migration seems to have been the Mo Valley and from the neighbourhood of the present village of Widekum there set out a little army of adventurers which emerged on to the grasslands and spread fanwise across this new and pleasant land’ (etc.).123 Here, too, we learn in its first full recension the story of their clash with ‘a more warlike and stronger people moving down in their turn from the north-east’. These are the Tikar, who are stated to have ‘formed the fringes of a large Berber migration … many centuries ago from Bornu’. So seems to have begun a colourful story that was gilded and refurbished uncritically through the years by administrators and accepted back ready-made by the inhabitants of the Bamenda Plateau. Resident E. Arnett referred to the Sharwood-Smith report as ‘full and interesting’, although he asked: ‘In what sense can you speak of a Berber migration from Bornu?’124 He received the reply: ‘I erroneously connected the Berbers with the Beri-beris.’125 In the body of his report, Sharwood-Smith is much less sweeping. ‘As has been stated,’ he says, ‘Ta-Widekum (as the Mogamaws call it) is the legendary place of origin of the Tribe, but only two village-groups can be definitely traced back to that source, those of Bafawchu and Baminya.’126 For the remainder of the Moghamo and Ngemba villages the locality Etat was regarded as the centre of dispersion. Sharwood-Smith says that ‘no less than 50 villages sprang from Etat’.127 The two that came from Widekum are supposed to have left because of smallpox. From this beginning, it became general practice to include in the legend all peoples on the west of the plateau who were not of ‘Tikar’ culture. Hunt’s remarks on the Widekum origin of Meta' have been quoted. In 1933, after exhaustive enquiries, Croasdale says: ‘tradition vaguely mentions an origin from Ta-Widekum’, but he goes on to give an elaborate series of traditions of movement from ‘Tat’. The Ngie people had been reported on by Tweed in 1923: their ancestor lived at ‘Timben on the border of their present territory from which they spread westward’ (not, it will be noted, eastward). By 1934 the Ngie ‘appear originally to have formed part of a

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migration of forest peoples who settled in the neighbourhood of Widekum in the Mamfe Division. Local information on the matter is lacking’. Beba-Befang and Ngunu (Ngwo) were also added to the picture. Of the former, ‘Mubadji’ (Babaji) seem to have been pushed northwards from the Meta' area by the advance of the Bafut: this by 1933 had come to be stated to include a migration from Widekum.128 An attempt to include the Age (Esimbi) followed: ‘it can be but pure conjecture that Age formed one of the earliest of the migrations of the forest people of the Widekum region’. Hawkesworth may have told the late Chief Wachong of his conjecture, for in 1963 an elderly informant told me: ‘I hear say for King Wachong, Esimbi come for T`wələkum’.129 The Esimbi have, however, been slow to take to the story. By 1932 the process of ‘feed back’ to the putative centre of the migration was already under way. Biddulph says in a new report on Widekum that there is a ‘widespread vague tradition that from there also originated: Mogamaw, Meta', Ngemba, Ngie, Bamesse, Mubadji, Befang, and Mundane’. We then learn that ‘Befang, parts of Mogamaw, Ngie and parts of Ngemba have lost this tradition’.130 We have no indication of how the author knew that they had previously had it. The rest of the Moghamo and Ngemba and the village areas of Bonjo, Mubadji and Bamesse originated from Ntat, we are again told. By the 1940s and 1950s the ‘Widekum’ peoples had even become the ‘Widekum-speaking’ peoples. In the census of 1953, Widekum was a recognized ethnic classification. By 1960 by a final transformation the term ‘Widekum’, when used of ethnic origin, would in normal circumstances be taken to mean the Bamenda Plateau ‘Widekum’ rather than the supposed home area in Mamfe Division. It is surely time to look carefully at the Widekum story, for it has had a bad influence on the view of the past shared by the so-called Tikar, and the Bali, as well as by Moghamo, Menemo and others. It has suggested that the differences among the population of the plateau are greater than is probably so. It has, more seriously, encouraged pseudo-history of a type that is very hard to combat. The researches of Dr Kaberry and Mrs Chilver will deal in detail with the ‘Tikar problem’, and with the so-called Widekum peoples themselves.131 Here an attempt is made to deal with the specific question of the relations of these peoples with the Mamfe Division forest edge. In considering the Widekum story it is necessary to consider the following elements. The first is the degree of relationship among the ‘Widekum’ peoples themselves. The kernel of fact undoubtedly lies in the clear linguistic relationship between the Widekum of Mamfe, the Mogamaw and the Menemo. These three speak what are little more than dialects of the same language: indeed, the use of the term ‘Forest Mogamaws’ for the Widekum of Mamfe by Sharwood-Smith in his more objective Widekum report has something to commend it. Beside this affinity, it is the Moghamo and Meta' who have the most convincing traditional unity. The dispersion from Tat, Etat or Ntat is shared by these and the Ngemba. The latter are not a homogeneous people, and linguistically most of those so administratively classified are far closer to the distinctive language of Bafut than to Moghamo/Meta'. The dispersion from Etat is the most universal legend: it is no

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unnecessary quibble to point out that this is not the same place as Widekum, and is situated on the escarpment itself. The problem of Widekum itself also tells against the received story. No evidence was directly obtainable from there that they were the centre from which such a vast migration came. It is significant that their northern neighbours, the Befang of Mamfe Division, are not linguistically Moghamo as are the Widekum, but much more close to Ngwo. Besides the Moghamo/Meta' unity there is one of greater interest between the Wetchu, Manta and other Mamfe hill-groups, and the Ngwo. The Ngwo themselves were assimilated to the Widekum migration story early on. The Ngwo cluster are so close that what goes for the Ngwo must surely go for its Mamfe members also, and in the Mamfe context the derivation of the group from Widekum does not arise and never has done. The Ngwo cluster and the Moghamo cluster are, of course, ultimately related and, especially, Ngwo shows more Plateau Bantoid features than do the Mamfe members of its group. The association of Ngwo, and indeed of Ngie, with an origin from Widekum village has been based on no evidence. The association of the Beba element of Beba-Befang with the south, whence it was dislodged by Bafut, has again been interpreted by all concerned as, if not parlayed into, a migration from Widekum. It must be said that the language of that part of the ‘Beba-Befang’ area for which I have evidence is distinct from that of any of its neighbours. It is not in any event close to Moghamo. The essential identity of Widekum with Moghamo, and the undoubted expansion of the Moghamo group, while giving the original basis of the migration story, is indeed a critical point for weakness in the later structure built upon it. Ngwo, Ngie and ‘Beba-Befang’ have no such identity: if Moghamo came from Widekum, the others could not have done so. Since the essential unity of the Widekum and Moghamo was the reason for the original theory that Moghamo came from Widekum, it would thus not even be an adequate reply to suggest that the ancestral home has been occupied by Moghamo. There was, for Sharwood-Smith, in his Widekum report, as has already been seen, no special reason to suggest that Widekum founded Etat, except that two plateau villages claimed to come from Widekum. Since so many villages are said to have dispersed from Etat there seems no reason to believe that those that named Widekum must have come from the place that founded Etat. The sort of evidence on which the Widekum story was built up should be a standing lesson to all operating in this field. It is difficult, after forty years of confusion, to rethink the evidence. First of all, it is worth bearing in mind that the population of Widekum in 1953 was 747 people, while there were 23,000 Moghamo and nearly 16,000 Menemo or Meta', not to speak of 14,000 Ngie, 9,500 Ngwo (and 6,000 Wetchu and other congeners) and other groups, e.g. Ngemba (30,500) and Beba-Befang (9,500) assumed to be part of the ‘Widekum migration’. After all, Widekum is only one village; we are not required to believe this, on the kind of evidence we are given. Secondly, Widekum is a small enclave of Moghamo speech at the bottom of an escarpment that is dominated by it. Befang, their immediate neighbours, belong to the Ngwo cluster and the linguistic difference is quite sharp, much sharper than

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

39

at the boundary of Ngwo proper with Moghamo on the escarpment. We know that there was a general tendency to movement down from the foothills towards the trade routes, and the present Widekum is more likely to have moved west from the escarpment than the reverse. Indeed, the original evidence was, for Widekum proper, only in this direction. No damage is done to what facts we have by a reconstruction of the ancient situation something as follows. There would be three main long-established escarpment edge populations: Ngwo, Ngie and Moghamo. The legend of the dispersal of the last from Etat raises problems of its own. I would be inclined to see in its sweeping universality paradoxically a sign of a long-established occupation of the top of the escarpment. The Etat of the accounts may be an old shrine rather than a true centre of dispersal. Etat was probably not one spot but a belt of settlement.132 When the ‘Tikar invasions’ came, other populations of related, but distinctive, languages must have existed to the east of these three, to account for the linguistic forms of Beba-Befang, the substrata of Bafut and Ngemba, and indeed the eventual linguistic development over much of the area subsequently ruled by so-called ‘Tikar’ dynasties. Widekum of Mamfe was probably an outpost of the ‘Moghamo’ between the Ngwo cluster at Ambele and Befang and the trading zones of the Anyang and Banyang. Perhaps the Moghamo overlap into the forest was larger once and retreated. The foundation of Bafawchu and Baminya is attributed by some to smallpox at Widekum, by some to ‘mosquitoes’. Yet the Widekum movement in Mamfe is a forward movement and has, as has been said, every appearance of the occupation of a trade route. What had misled the British administrators of Bamenda was the belief that the grassland must be naturally a temptation to forest peoples, whereas in the Cameroons the forest edge appears rich compared to the savannah. It must be said that whatever the narrow range of people who originally named Widekum in their detailed traditions as a source of origin, the name was remarkably well-known for such a small forest settlement. The simplest hypothesis would be to relate this to the fact that the Widekum market was, in the nineteenth century at least, a main gateway to the products and slaves of the southwest plateau – in contact with the Biteku and with the upper Banyang outposts. Widekum would therefore be virtually the only locality off the escarpment known to the plateau in this direction. Being Moghamo-speaking, they would have enjoyed high economic prestige among their grassland compatriots. Another hypothesis would be that the name Tawidikum did not originate with the Mamfe Widekum. It may have been a general geographical name referring to precisely those Moghamo and Menemo who are now so clumsily named by words meaning ‘I say’. Like the name ‘Bafum’, it may have never been used of oneself but always of the next people. The Mamfe outpost may have taken on the name from its contact with Biteku and Banyang, to whom it would be the Widekum par excellence. The shattering of the distribution of the population in the southwest of the plateau by the Bali invasions may have added or even created vagueness concerning the exact reference of the term. As early as the 1850s, according to Consul Hutchinson, the form Mbrikum was in use at the coast to describe most of the belt of peoples on the Bamenda and Bamileke Plateaus.133 To Consul Johnston, ‘Mbudikum’ was another version,

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earlier reported by the Scottish missionaries at Calabar, under which he classified most of our Plateau Bantoid–speaking peoples. The question at issue is whether the name came from the small Moghamo settlement in Mamfe Division by the first hypothesis, or substantially the reverse by the second. Whatever was the truth, Sharwood-Smith’s ‘little army of adventurers’ setting out from Widekum village should be relegated to the realm of Alfred and the cakes. We are left the hypothesis of an essentially long-established belt of peoples along the escarpment edge, whose secondary movements may have occurred in either direction, and whose languages are not ultimately greatly different from those of peoples who became the subjects of those dynasts who increasingly came to claim a Tikar origin and who, on this assumption, must have donated their languages to their dynasties. The old picture of the empty plateau, with the advancing ‘Widekum’ clashing with the advancing ‘Tikar’ at some Mons Badonicus in the neighbourhood, as it may be, of Mankon, may be relinquished with some reluctance but also with some relief.

Notes 1. There was a plan, in the 1960s, for a grand survey of the history of the peoples of Cameroon, to be funded by UNESCO and coordinated by Professor Claude Tardits in France. Mrs E.M. (Sally) Chilver and Dr Phyllis Kaberry were to write the section on the Grassfields of what later became known as Anglophone Cameroon, and Edwin Ardener began writing on the area from the edge of the Grassfields down to the coast of what is now known as the South West Province of Cameroon. The original UNESCO plans did not come to fruition, but when Edwin was honorary Adviser on Archives and Antiquities in Cameroon, he included the text already prepared by Phyllis Kaberry and Sally Chilver in the series of short monographs that he issued from the Buea Archives Office under the title Traditional Bamenda (1968). This is now a much-treasured out-of-print resource. Edwin’s own incomplete text was laid aside. In 1973 Professor Tardits convened a conference for the CNRS in Paris, and in 1981 he edited the papers for a two-volume publication, Contribution de la Recherche Ethnologique a l’Histoire des Civilisations du Cameroun, which, although different from the original conception, may be regarded as its successor. Some time after Edwin’s death in 1987, I remembered the unfinished text and showed it to Mrs Chilver, who encouraged me to make two of the parts, those relating to the peoples broadly lying across the Cross River, available to researchers. Her own deep knowledge of the area was put at my disposal, and the MS was typed up with her annotation (here in square brackets). It was then I first met Dr Bruce Connell, who arranged for the phonetic renderings in Edwin’s MS to be typed into the text. Bruce was later to edit Edwin’s phonetic Bakweri (Mokpe), which was published in 1997 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. We are greatly indebted to Emma Connell and Nene Lionah, who skilfully typed in the phonetics texts from Edwin’s own handwriting. Ian Fowler has meticulously checked the text against Edwin’s original handwriting and overcome many difficulties of representing Edwin’s orthography. Things came to a halt for some years, as I tried by various means to provide copies from Edwin’s handwritten, now fragile, map of Anglophone Cameroon, on which he had attempted to place hundreds of villages, many taken from maps in old Intelligence and Assessment Reports in Cameroon District and National Archive holdings. Sally Chilver felt this map to be indispensable, but a really suitable solution was difficult to find. Apart from the problem of Edwin’s tiny lettering, the map was complicated by Edwin having coloured the back of the tracing paper to mark elevation.

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

41

A word should be said of the method by which Edwin compiled the text. We did not spend long periods of fieldwork in the Mamfe Overside, although over the years we made many visits to Mamfe and immediate surroundings on our way between the coast and Esu, where we had a mud and thatch house built in which we stayed for almost a year. We were living in Esu while doing research on the effects of local migration of labour to the coastal plantations. The kindness of the Ba'atum of Esu and his people has never been forgotten. I am pleased that I had the opportunity of visiting Esu in 2004, where I was warmly received by the Ba’atum and many friends; moreover the Ba'atum has been in touch with me by mobile phone since then. It is hoped that the chapters on Esu in Plantation and Village in the Cameroons (1960), which is long out of print (except for a few reprints made by Friends of the Buea Archives at Oxford), will be made available again together with some unpublished field notes on Esu. When in Mamfe, Edwin had long talks with individuals from the Overside and elsewhere, adding data thereby to what he had garnered from the archival reports. Having stayed in Esu and travelled around the Bamenda Grassfields, Edwin obviously had more firsthand knowledge of that area. Moreover, Edwin had Phyllis Kaberry and Sally Chilver to consult on wider matters relating to the Grassfields. The text was written partly in Cameroon, and there was little or no published material available to him. No doubt there is presently a wealth of relevant recent ethnographic and historical work by Cameroonians, including dissertations at their schools and universities, but these are not always widely distributed. It is urgent that copies should be deposited in local and national archives, and ways found for the best to be published. –Shirley Ardener, Oxford, December 2006 See Frontispiece: Edwin Ardener’s handwritten (1966) map of Anglophone Cameroon. See E.M. Chilver, ‘Native Administration in the West Central Cameroons, 1902–54’, in Robinson and Madden (eds), Essays in Imperial Government, Oxford: Blackwell, 1963. Secretary of Native Affairs (Grier) to Governor of Nigeria (Clifford), 27 November 1923, Buea Archives AF 33 (Lagos B.1469/23). The Secretary, Southern Provinces, regarded the comparison as invidious: overworked, with more people in a division than in the whole Cameroons Province, it seemed small wonder that officers in the Ibo areas had less time for ethnological reports. Part of a report of one Cameroons officer had in fact already been published for the guidance of others (H. Cadman, Report on Ancient Tribal Machinery in the Cameroons Province, Lagos, 1923). Cadman warned against this kind of problem but did not indicate how it could be avoided (Tribal Machinery, 10). For the Banyang see M. Ruel, The Banyang, unpub. PhD thesis, Oxford, 1959. [See also his Leopards and Leaders, London and New York: Tavistock, 1969, and its bibliography, which refers to his earlier publications; and his contribution to Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, New York: Tavistock, 1970.] Cadman appears to have been largely responsible for the extraordinary search for ‘clan-heads’ in the Cameroons (Tribal Machinery). His report, together with those of other Cameroons officers, showed exactly the organization that Grier was hoping to find in the Ibo areas. O’Sullivan, G.P., Assessment Report (AR) Assumbo District, Mamfe Division, 1923, Buea Archives. L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria, Ethnographic Survey of Africa, London: I.A.I., 1953. J.R.G. Cowan, AR Assumbo District, 1931, Buea, p. 13. Ovando dialect: Ekurav (v bilabial and lightly articulated); Okus dialect of Tinta: Ekuravi (E. Ardener, MS notes). Editor’s note: Edwin Ardener’s original phonology and use of italicisation and quotation marks has been retained here. Ovando: Etuav; Okus: Ìtúáv. The form Vitua was understood but not given by these informants. (E. Ardener, MS Notes). Ityuav, according to the 1952 census, in July of that year numbered 1,225, and the whole of Ikurav Mbashaya 14,954 (Northern Region, Bulletin No.2. Benue Province, Lagos, 1952). Cowan, AR Assumbo District, p. 13; E. Ardener, MS Notes; DKB, 1908, p. 343, 1148–51; M. Moisel, Ossidinge F.1. (Map), 1913.

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15. The Ovando forms of Atolo seem to contain most of the elements: Ékʷɔ̀r where e is close to I or i, where w appears to be an environmental product of the juxtaposition of a frontal k with the low-tone back vowel ɔ (this phenomenon may be related to the Tiv ‘law of palatalization’ of a consonant following i), and where r represents an allophone of a phoneme that varies over a range from l to unexploded t’. In Okus of Tinta the name approaches Ekɔl. Administrative Ekol, Ekwot, and Ekot Ngba all represent attempts at approximation. 16. Akanya Etemu of Atolo, Ovando (age c. 55) gave the following names for the sons of Ékwɔ̀r Ŋ̂gbâ: Vànd(ɔ) Ékwɔ̀ʳ (Ovando), Cɛ́v(ɛ̀) Ékwɔ̀r (Ocheve), Kúl(a) Ékwɔ̀r (Ekuraᵛ), Kûs Ékwɔ̀r (Okus), Gẅ(ɛ) Ékwɔ̀r (Yive, ‘Ekwot’), Táŋᵏ Ékwɔ̀r (Otang), Mán Ékwɔ̀r (Oman), Òlìŋgɛ́ Ékwɔ̀r (Balinge in the Ocheve of Nigeria), Màm(ɛ́) Ékwɔ̀r (Ama) – where v is bilabial, c (ts), s and w are highly palatalized, where l and r are environmental forms of the same phoneme, and where vowels in parentheses are elided. [A later version was collected by Dr P.C. Mafiamba from the agéd Tata Nyevi of Tinta: Abbia No. 14–15, 1966, p. 99–107. This gives four sons Okus, Ovande, Bechebe or Becheve, Omana, and a daughter Ama, and adds that the ‘Messaga Clan’ is composed of migrants from Ame in the Okus group, which is here described as ‘Assumbo proper’ and ‘the eldest branch’.] 17. Cowan, AR Assumbo District, 1931, p. 2. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Mɛtɛn. 21. Akanya Etemu, of Atolo [‘Batoro’ in some administrative renderings], (age c.55). Aguassɔ (Aguasso of Cowan) is a river which is named after the Vàsɔ́ (sing. ósɔ́) or Basho, on what is now the northern boundary of Ovando. Ɔkpana is a hill called by Cowan: Akwanna, also now on this border. Kalumo and Kazinga (Kajinga) are to the north of Ɔkpana. The Agwuassɔ area is in grassland, Ɔkpana and Kasal in forest. 22. Also referred to by Cowan as Batanga (AR Assumbo District, p. 4ff.) ‘Both names are correct’ (Sealy-King, D.O. Mamfe, Resident, Cameroons, 16 March 1936, Assumbo District Reassessment and Intelligence Reports – correspondence, Buea Archives AF 8, p. 61). 23. Ovando forms of the names of the five main Ekor groups are: Ovandɔ pl. Vavandɔ; Okus pl. Wokus; Ocɛvɛ pl.Vɛcɛvɛ; Otaŋᵏ pl. Wotaŋᵏ; Oman pl. Vaman. 24. AR Assumbo District, p. 6. 25. ‘The Otumbu people of Ituav’. Tombo are yet another Tiv ‘clan’. 26. Cowan. A Tinta (Okus) informant told me that after the quarrel over a he-goat they crossed a river to their present territory. The river would be the Kakura, a tributary of the Moane. ‘They still kill’, he added. 27. Inchuo must be the Bancho clan of Anyang (of the Ewisi-Takamanda-Biamesu area), although they live much further down the North Munaya Valley now. Vakpe may be the Anyang village of Mfakwe (despite the statements about extermination) in the Balumbi clan, not far at present from the Bancho. Bakumisaw sounds like a metathesis of the Anyang clan-name Ba-Mesu-Ake (Taba village). 28. Cowan, AR Assumbo District, 1931, p. 14–16. 29. Okus of Tinta: Oyivɛ, Ovando of Atolo: Gẅɛ. The administrative spelling ‘Iyue’ also occurs, which is an approximation to the last form. J.W.C. Rutherfoord, AR Manta-Anyang, correspondence, Buea Archives, AF 2 (1231\24), p. 10, fn. 6, 10 June 1925. 30. Olulu is said to be Okus, Badschama to be Vajɔ (an Anyang group). However, this refers primarily to language, not necessarily to origin. Exactly the same linguistic classification was made by Cowan, p. 58. Vajɔ (Badjo) is a synonym for the Bamesu-Ake clan of Anyang. 31. See Mafiamba, fn. 16 above, who describes them as ‘les seuls indigènes purs du groupe Tivi (Tiv) établis au Cameroun’. 32. Cowan, 1931, p. 13–14. 33. The name appears as Mesa bracketed after Bakenso (= Bakingjaw) on Moisel, F.1. Other forms have been Besak, Misa (J.H.H. Pollock, ‘Report on the Kentu and Wum Areas’, 1924, Buea AH 2; Bamenda Annual Report, 1924, Buea Archives), and Mesak (Bamenda Annual Report, 1925, Buea Archives). In Kasimbila they were known as Missa – Ibi Division Report, June–July 1926

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

43

(in Buea, AF 44 (12/1926) p. 26). See also for Messaga: Messaga Area Report and correspondence, Buea Archives, AF 43 (B.26/1926). ‘To the north of the Abusi mountain in the neighbourhood of Omerongu Hill’, Cowan, AR Assumbo District, p. 11. For variants, see B.E. Sharwood-Smith, A First Report on the Messaga Area, 15 March 1926, Buea AF 44 (12/1926): ‘at Nyomboru’; E.G. Hawkesworth, Report of the Messaga Area, 21 March 27 (ibid., p. 20ff.): ‘Echeka’. E.G. Hawkesworth, Messaga Village Assessment (Record Book) Buea Archives, AF 45; Messaga Area, Bamenda Division correspondence, Buea Archives AF 46 (EP 2019); Cowan, AR Assumbo District. Cowan, AR Assumbo District. Buea Archives, AF 41. Cantle, An Assessment Report of the Wum N.A. Area, Bamenda Division, 1932, Buea Archives AD 14 (772/22), p. 7. According to the Bamenda Annual Report, 1925, par. 30, the Age (Esimbi) were of Mingi (Ngie) origin and came originally from Ndifon. The Esimbi suffered a great deal from German expeditions, and the extreme dispersion of their settlements is due to this. This may have made their historical memories shorter, from the death of elders from privation in the bush, as suggested by R. Newton, ‘Report on the proposed reorganization of the Wum, Befang and Beba tribes in the Wum Native Authority Area of the Bamenda Division’, 1934, Buea Archives, AD 19, p. 12. Cantle, AR Wum N.A. Area, p. 10; E. Ardener, MS Notes: ‘The Esimbi are said to have got Daneguns fifty years before Cantle’s report, i.e. about 1880’. The work of Dr Kaberry and Mrs Chilver is already modifying the details of this picture. [For their final views see Chilver and Kaberry, ‘The Tikar Problem: A non-Problem’, Journal of African Languages, 10(2), 1971.] The best ‘official’ account of the Ndiwom migration is J.S. Smith, AR Fungom Native Court Area, 1929, Buea Archives, AD 8. See also: V.K. Johnson, Intelligence Report (IR) Fungom Area, 1936, Buea Archives, AD 11. Smith gives an inaccurate genealogy for the Esu chieftaincy. Comments on Smith’s report were made by C.K. Meek, AR Fungom District, correspondence Buea AD 9 (102/1929), p. 39–41. For the ‘Tikar invasion’ as a whole, see E.G. Hawkesworth, AR Bafut Area, 1926, Buea Archives, Ab 2 (EP 3325). The story of a ‘Munshi’ origin for Wum is characterized as ‘vague’ by L. Cantle, AR Wum N.A., Bamenda Division, 1932, Buea Archives, AD 17, p. 8. In Appendix A to this, E.G. Hawkesworth, is much more certain. He relies on Sharwood-Smith in Annual Report, Bamenda Division, 1925 (Buea Archives), who says that his investigations confirm an origin south of Ibi as part of the ‘Mbembi and Munshi’ migration. [For Mbembe oral traditions see E. Kähler-Meyer, ‘Sprachproben aus der Landschaft Mbembe im Bezirk Bamenda, Kamerun’, Afrika und Übersee, 37(3): 109–18, map, and (4): 151–82, 1953, and for a discussion of Aghem traditions, see I. Kopytoff, ‘Aghem ethnogenesis and the Grassfields ecumene’, in Tardits (ed.), Contribution de la Recherche Ethnologique à l’Histoire des Civilisations du Cameroun’, Coll. Int. du C.N.R.S (24–28 September 1973), vol. 2, 371–82, 1981.] Òsó: the people, wùsó: and Esu person, ághê òsó: Esu people, enà esu: Esu town, edzeŋ esu: Esu language, where the vowel changes follow from class agreement. Glauning, DKB, vol. 17, 8, 1906, p. 238. ‘Kalse’ [sic]. Puder, DKB, vol. 19, 23, 1908, p. 1149, ‘Katse’. Bafum, Mbafum is the general word used for the northern Bamenda Plateau peoples by the peoples to the north of them. Katse can mean ‘to tear’, ‘snap’, ‘cut off ’, ‘give up (including a trade route)’, ‘break promise’, ‘be finished’: A. Mischlich, Wörterbuch der Hausasprache, Berlin: S.O.S., vol. 20, p. 255. Glauning says several Hausa traders had been killed there. [For an earlier, almost idyllic, picture of Bafum Katse, ‘farming Bafum’, see L.H. Moseley, ‘Regions of the Benue’, Proc. R. Geog. Soc., 1899, p. 633, 634.] We should beware of folk-etymologies. Other varieties of ‘Bafum’ were named after specific localities: ‘Bafumbum’ (Bum), ‘Bafumen’ (Mmɛ), ‘Bafuwum’ (Wum). ‘Bafum Katse’ may therefore mean merely ‘Bafum of the Katsina Ala River’. Ndum is not now known. It cannot be a form of Ndiwom, as the Ndawum-Berg is separately mentioned by Glauning (DKB, vol. 17). Tessmann also refers to the Esu language as Osso (Ndum); see ‘Die Völker und Sprachen Kameruns’, Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen 78, 1932.

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44. They and a people called Ntsaŋ are identified by some Esu as Mədzəŋ or Zompere. Jeffreys [‘Tribal Notes’, n.d. (1942?) in Department of Sociology, University of Yaoundé] also mentions ‘Ntsaŋa’ and ‘Ajam’ as present when the Esu arrived. Dzam was, however, in existence long enough to provide the mother of Chief Kaŋa (d. c. 1905). 45. Sorghum: saŋ ikəbà (‘corn of foofoo’); maize, old variety: saŋ ikpɛ (the forest variety); maize, variety ‘from the north’: saŋ ibafum. The foreign word Bafum is not applied by Esu to themselves: it must have come through foreign intermediaries who themselves associated it with other ‘Bafum’. Okpɛ are thought of as coming from the Beba-Befang direction (Asəŋ). 46. Fitsə: the country; Wufitsə, plural Afitsə, refers to the people. According to Smith, AR Fungom Native Court Area, p. 6; Gayama was founded by one Ewe in the reign of Mitang. 47. Jeffreys renders the name: Vwitche. 48. DKB, vol. 19, 2, Berlin, 1908, p. 67. In DKB, vol. 17, 8, 1906, p. 238, he refers to a people directly to the west of Wum called Witschu in Iko country. Eko appears on Moisel F.1. as in the present Wetchu area of Mamfe Division. These are a different people. 49. Aghem: òkpà; cf. Cantle, AR Wum N.A., p. 9, where the form given is ‘Eukpa’. 50. Esu: Àgə́nyí. 51. In Wum the epithet ‘red mouth’ is applied to the Gainyi (Cantle, AR Wum N.A., p. 11, ‘Bangaju’) while the Esu apply it to the Fitsə. The term would seem to apply to eaters of kola nuts. 52. Smith, AR Fungom Native Court Area, p. 18. The Gainyi, he heard, came via Bum. Bafut was also attacked, but after a three-day battle, they are by their own account supposed to have driven the invaders back towards Wum. Our authority for this (E.G. Hawkesworth, AR Bafut Area, Buea Archives Ab 2 (EP 3325), p. 10) calls them Bali-Muti. He mentions their frequent confusion with the Fulani. [For the ethnogenesis, composition and raiding trajectories of the various Chambaled groups and their allies, including the Mudi (Muti, Peli, Pyere, Konntan), see the publications of Richard Fardon, in particular Raiders and Refugees, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1988, which, for the settled Grassfields Bali-Chamba, makes use of Chilver’s unpublished material augmented by his subsequent studies in Bali Gangsin; and for oral traditions in We, a neighbour of Aghem, see Christraud Geary, We: Die Genese eines Häuptlingtums im Grasland von Kamerun, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1976.] 53. C.K. Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, London, 1931, vol. 1, p. 329; D. Westermann and M.A. Bryan, Languages of West Africa, Oxford: I.A.I., 1952, p. 149. 54. Meek says that all towns that begin with ‘Ga’, ‘Gar’ or ‘Gan’ in the area were under Chamba domination, although the population may have been Jukun or Jibu (a branch of the Jukun). ‘Gashaka owes its name to the Chamba-Jibu chief Gashikara’ (Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, p. 501). Gankwe and Garike were mid nineteenth-century Chamba chiefs mentioned in documentary sources (ibid., p. 330). Compare Gawolbe the leader of the Chamba who founded Bali Nyonga (Chilver, ‘Notes on Bali History’, 1961b (TS), and comments thereon by Dr Kähler-Meyer, 1 March 1961). Chamba forms of the word for chief vary between very distinct dialects and between the Chamba Daka and Chamba Leko: gar, gara, gbana, gaŋ, ga. The final phoneme shows an alternance common in the area. There was a Chamba chief of Donga, Gargbanyi, whose name almost supplies our need, but he is not early enough as Donga was not founded by Gakie until after 1854. (Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, p. 332–33.) Gargbanyi intervened in the dispute to the succession of the Takum Chamba throne on the death of Galumje; the losing contender, Kachella, lived by banditry in alliance with Dzare, the leader of the Mbatura Tiv. The Vitua story of Assumbo may owe something to this. K. Dewar, IR Takum District, Benue Province 1936, Buea Archives, AH 6, 1839, p. 4. 55. L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria, p. 12. (‘Ugenyi’), S.W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana, Church Missionary House, London, 1854, (repr. 1968 Akademische Druck -u. Verlaganstalt, Graz, in facsimile), p. 20. 56. Okus of Tinta: ŋ́gâny, plural və̀ŋgâny. The word must clearly have meant ‘a northerner of pale skin’. An alternative, mèkara, plural mèkarara (a loan-word from Anyang, ultimately from Efik), which also exists for referring to ‘coastal European’, came later. 57. According to the Esu, the Àgə̀nyí came in the reign of Aki Ndom Bae, whose floruit may have been 1850–1870. Jeffreys’s version speaks of an invasion of ‘Fulani’ in the reign of ‘Ake’ (Jeffreys’s ‘Akinnumbe’ is in the hierarchical position correctly belonging to Kum a Kwini. The Esu

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

45

royal line must, because of the rotating system, be collected as a genealogy for the most accurate results.) According to the Aghem (Cantle, AR Wum N.A., p. 11) the invasion was in the lifetime of Tindum of Wum, whose genealogical position is about the same. It is puzzling that their word for chief also appears to be a Chamba loan-word: Okus of Tinta: èŋgàŋ, plural aŋgaŋ. Although strange in the area, and striking in the presence of the unique word for ‘white man’, this may still be a convergence from another vocabulary source. (For example, from ganga, proto-Bantu, ‘doctor’. Again in Basa (Mbene) of the northwest Bantu, ngwaŋ means ‘rich man’: G. Schürle, Die Sprache der Basa in Kamerun, Grammatik und Wörterbuch, Hamburg, 1912, p. 16; in Mambila ngwa. Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, vol. 1.) [In Munggaka of Bali-Nyonga, a dialectal form of Ti, ŋgaŋ, pl. gaŋ implies a person in a superior or proprietary position as in ŋgaŋ-tshubu, compound head, lit. owner of a gated settlement, ŋgaŋ-fu, healer, ŋgaŋ-ŋgam, earth-spider diviner.] Abanda of Benum, Benakumu (E. Ardener, MS Notes). How remote a historical figure Kum Aanə was is not clear. He seems to belong to the immediate ancestry of Wachang or Wachong, the most influential Esimbi of the British period. The Aghem say the Gainyi passed through Age on their departure into Kasimbila District (Cantle, AR Wum N.A, p. 11). [The passage of ‘Mudi’ followed by ‘Gadi’ (from whom Kasimbila – Garshimbila – is derived by Bali folk-etymologists) is dealt with in the booklet (n.d.) issued by Bitemya Garbosa, Gara of Donga, in Hausa: the writer was Meek’s assistant in Donga. For fuller references, see Fardon, Raiders and Refugees, bibliography.] Private communication. The Jibu (Jibawa, Jubawa) are a dispersed Jukun-speaking people who retain matrilineal institutions. According to Meek they formed scattered settlements from the Benue across to Banyo in the present East Cameroon, and according to one variant of their tradition, they were associated with the ‘Bafum’ and the ‘Tikare’. The Jibu were overwhelmed before 1850 by the Chamba under Gangkwol and, later, became modified by Chamba admixture. Later still they became subject to the Fulani. (Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, p. 499–502.) The Chamba of Takum had, in 1935, some 400 ‘Tikare’ among them who were ‘once subject to them’ (Dewar, IR Takum District, p. 4). ‘Tikare’ also shared in the Chamba subjection of the Zompere earlier in the century; these may well have been Esu, who still have Zumpere elements partially under their control. Meek, Tribal Studies in Northern Nigeria, vol. 2, p. 330; Dewar, IR Takum District, p. 12–14. [Now see Fardon, Raiders and Refugees, and Bitemya Garbosa for the various Ba`ni mixed bands who temporarily converged on the Takum area, and E.R. Flegel’s hearsay accounts of it, ‘Städtebilder aus West- und Central Africa’, Mitteilungen Geographische Gesellschaft, Hamburg, 1878/89, p. 317.] Jeffreys (Tribal Notes) says this was in the reign of ‘Akinnumbe’. As we have seen, this is phonetically Aki Ndom Bai but, in regnal position, Kum a Kwini. However, we are in the period at the middle of the nineteenth century. For a final modern example both of the confusion of the terminology of origin, and of the movement of small populations, we may take the example of Metaso or Mutaso, a village marked on some maps on the far western boundary of Wum Division. J.H.H. Pollock, in a report of 1924 on the Kentu and Wum areas (Buea Archives AH 2, p. 11) says that, while he was at Esu, ‘the Chief of Mutaso was interviewed. This village although shown as belonging to the Jukum [sic] tribe of Kentu is more probably of Takum origin’. The chief requested to be made a sub-chief of Esu because his male population had been reduced to seven by migration to Northern Nigeria. In 1930, Cantle was told by the chief of Esu that the inhabitants of ‘Metaso’ were ‘of Munshi origin’. (Buea Archives AD 9 (102/1929). In 1936, the Bamenda Divisional and League of Nations Report said: ‘The village of Metajong or Metaso near the boundary of Age, Esu and Kasimbila has ceased to exist’ (Buea Archives). Meanwhile, in 1935, in Nigeria, ‘Matazu’ had been recorded in Kasimbila District as ‘Tiv/Bafum’ (Dewar, IR Takum District, p. 34; supplement p. 7). We may doubt whether the tribal affiliations of older settlements have been any more accurately reported. R.M. Downes, The Tiv Tribe, Kaduna, 1933; R.C. Abraham, The Tiv People, Lagos, 1933; R. East, Akiga’s Story, Oxford, 1939; L. Bohannan, ‘A Genealogical Charter’, Africa 22(4), 1952, p. 301–15; L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria, London, 1953; P. Bohannan, ‘The Migration and Expansion of the Tiv’, Africa 24(1), 1954a, p. 2–16; Sai, B. Akiga, translated and annotated by P. Bohannan, ‘The “Descent” of the Tiv from Ibenda Hill’, Africa 24(4), 1954b, p.

46

64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

EDWIN ARDENER

296–309. I have also consulted one unpublished source: Dewar, K., IR Ukan District, Tiv Division, Benue Province, 1935, Buea Archives, AH 5 (1748). E. Ardener, MS Notes. For Undi’il cf. the rather peculiar Esimbi word for ‘person’: ondül. ‘Yono’ (some form of Tiv Iyonov) is named as a small ‘Missa’ (Messaga) village just inside Northern Nigeria in Ibi Division Report June/July 1926, Buea Archives, AF 44 (12/1926), p. 16. The Ugbe are not clearly identified. Said by L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria, 1953, to number about 200 in Mamfe Division, I can only suggest the Messaga group Mbegbe which has now dispersed. Or those elusive Okpe? Although Swem does not figure by name in Downes or Abraham, it was mentioned in the unpublished official material. Dewar, (IR Ukan District, p. 6) says ‘Suem’ was ‘their first known habitat and traditional place of origin’. Downes, The Tiv Tribe, p. 2; Abraham, The Tiv People, p. 20; Dewar, IR Ukan District, p. 6, who adds of the Ukan Tiv that ‘the majority of informants place [Suem, the original name] just south of the present southeasterly Tiv border in Ogoja Province’. The need to accommodate this story made East favour the ‘Takum’ thesis, in order that the Tiv should be about able to have met the Fulani as early as possible (Akiga’s Story, p. 24). See L. Bohannan, A Genealogical Charter, p. 302, 308; Akiga (Bohannan) 1954, The Migration and Expansion of the Tiv, p. 304. Dewar, IR Ukan District, p. 45. The Ukan version of the general Tiv genealogy differs considerably from the received accounts. Dewar adds: ‘there is a tradition that needs confirming that “Kpa” was the father of the Uge and Kparev Tiv. “Ge” murdered his father, and his brother Ikov or Kov, being the chief, expelled him.’ ‘Ikov’ in this context may be taken as a typing error for ‘Ikor’, as the sentence is a note to the genealogy already mentioned. Whether Ikor was son of Kpar (Kpa), or Kpar son of Ikor, by these variant accounts, may be cleared up if Ikor Kpar is equivalent to Ekɔ̀r Ngba. The Utange are of particular importance to the Tiv: the Obudu Utange are migrating rapidly into Tivland (particularly into Ikurav Ya), and other Utange have already migrated into Tiv Division, where they form a discrete territorial and social unit; the Utange provide an ‘origin’ for many beliefs and customs of the Tiv; finally, the Obudu Utange form a link through which the Tiv trace relationships, most of them in the nature of ‘treaties’ (ikul), ‘with the various small tribes to their south-east’: L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria. See also on the Utange treaties Downes, The Tiv Tribe, p. 73. Abraham, The Tiv People, says that the Utange treaties are restricted to the forbidding of intermarriage between Utange and Kunav, Mbagen, Tombo and Gav Tiv. The treaties are echoed in the laws of Ekɔ̀r Ngba and the blood-brotherhoods that occur in the traditions of our area. P.A. Talbot, The Peoples of Southern Nigeria, London: OUP, 1926, vol. 4, p. 92, classifies ‘AtschoOliti’ (Ochebe) as ‘Munshi’. ‘Assumbo’ (Okus) he ‘with some diffidence’ puts in his large Ekoi linguistic group (p. 94). The source of the term Atscho-Oliti goes back through O’Sullivan, 1923, p. 1, to Moisel F.1., and the reports of the German expeditions. Tessmann, ‘Die Völker und Sprachen Kameruns’, classifies all the Assumbo groups with the Anyang, seeming to mark as Tiv the ‘Ekol’ of Njawbaw, the Messaga and what may be the Esimbi. These classifications reflect the problem of attribution set forth here. Tessmann’s I prefer to Talbot’s on balance, with the exception of the uncertain attribution of Esimbi to Tiv. L. and P. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria. Utange-Becheve of Ogoja Province, 4,841, of which 3,853 were probably indigenous (Census Bulletins, Eastern Nigeria, No. 4, Ogoja Province). The names for the Tiv show great variation. They call themselves Tiv or Uti. A tendency for the t to be palatalized may account for forms such as Mitshi, Mbici. Esimbi Wotsi, plural Botsi, may even be linguistically cognate with Uti. The Wum and Esu Fitsə forms may have come via the Jukun forms – which does not argue an early direct contact with the Tiv alone. On the other hand, there is a remote possibility that we are dealing here with a form of Ityuav such as produced Vitua. See E.M. Chilver, ‘Nineteenth-Century Trade in the Bamenda Grassfields, Southern Cameroons’, Afrika und Übersee 45(4), 1961a, p. 233–58; P.M. Kaberry and E.M. Chilver, ‘An Outline of the Traditional Political System of Bali-Nyonga, Southern Cameroons’, Africa 31(4), 1961, p. 355–71.

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

47

Talbot, Peoples of Southern Nigeria, Vol. 4, 1926, p. 64, 88. Ibid., p. 94. Ejagham of Nsanaragati. We do not here endorse the judgement that ‘Anyang is the sink into which the refuse of the neighbouring tribes has passed’ (B.E. Sharwood-Smith, Buea Archives, AF 3 (1231/24), p. 3). Called Dénya. Called Kɛnyaŋ. M. Ruel, The Banyang of the Southern Cameroons, unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford, 1959, p. 7. Census Bulletins, S. Cameroons, Eastern Region, Nigeria, Lagos, 1953. Buea Archives, AF 24 (1068, 1592/26), p. 1. Mr J. Nana, a forester, wrote of an encounter, on 23 May 1963, near Obonye: ‘One Mr Enoh Teku, the son of the chief of Obonyi, accompanied me to a hill where he said they were both Chimpazee [sic] and Gorillas. On our arrival there travelled along the foot of rocky hill and at last, saw one big male of Gorilla eating the fruits of Pycnanthus angolensis tree. We stood behind one big flat stone which made it impossible for the animal to see us. What a wonderful creature it was. A broad face, wide open mouth, very big chest and swelling stomack [sic], very harish and looks like a human being. Fearful in appearance. We left the place without it seeing us. After some few yards, met with 4 of them again. 2 out of the 4 were carrying young ones on their back just as our socking [sic] mother at home use to do. When of the 2 that was carrying young ones saw us, it shouted, ‘WHO’ and barked like a dog on us. We ran for life for I was told that this animal is always wild when carrying a young one.’ Game Observation Report, communicated to me by Mr R. Mason, game warden, West Cameroon. Singular: Ménya, plural: Ánya, language: Denya. E. Ardener, MS Notes. The Banyang. B.E. Sharwood-Smith and L.L. Cantle, AR Anyang and Manta tribes, Mamfe Division, 1924, with a supplementary report on District and Village Administration by Capt. G.P. O’Sullivan, M.C., Buea AF 3 (1231/24); correspondence, Buea AF 2 (1231/24), and AF 4 (EP512). The ‘clans’ established by this report were: ‘Banchu’, ‘Bancho’ (Ewisi, Takamanda, Baje, Asam, Biamesu, Okpambe, Ewuri villages); ‘Ba-Enaw-Danchi’ (Obonye I, Obonye II); ‘Mbeye’ (Basho I, Basho II, Makwe, Tchemba, Mblishe); ‘Balumbi’ (Kekpani, Mfawkwe, Takpe, Ote); ‘Ba-Tabaw’ (Banji, Ntakwo); ‘Ba-Nga’ (Nga, and part of Kunku); ‘Ba-Mesu-Ake’ (Taba and Baiyo); ‘BaMfᴐ-Acha’ (Akwa, Isobi, Mbu, Balambi section of Manta village), ‘Ba-Daku-Use’ (Tambu, Asehunda), ‘Ba-Awanti’ (Kelua); ‘Ba-Abe’ (Mbulo); ‘Ba-Ane’ (Takwo); ‘Bayauna’ (Kesham). Additionally included was a clan Ba-Dankwa (Olulu and Badchama) who are the ‘Ekwot’ of Assumbo. These spellings are not consistent throughout the report. The prefix is not a plural but baˇ (sing. maˇ), ‘children’. In the text Anyang usage will be reflected by the omission of baˇ. The names of the first four are more correctly rendered as Ńcwɔ̀, Énɔ́ráncí, ɔ̀̀sɔ́ (sing. mɛ́sɔ́, pl. àsɔ) or Ŋ̀gbéyi, and Èlùmbè. The Mesu-Ake are usually known to their neighbours as Ájùɔ́́. The Ŋ̀gbéyì have already appeared as Mbeyi and as Basho. The Ájùɔ́ appear in various sources as Badjo or Bajo (Moisel F.1.; Menka AR, 1924). The report shows Cantle’s preoccupation with ‘clans’, but as Acting Resident W.E. Hunt commented: ‘The voice may be the voice of Jacob, but the hand throughout seems the hand of Esau’. Sharwood-Smith was young and, it was thought, overcolourful in style. Hunt was correct: Sharwood-Smith wrote the report; the fieldwork among the Anyang was done mainly by Cantle, that among the Manta mainly by Sharwood-Smith (Acting Resident to D.O. Mamfe, 14 August 1925, D.O. in reply 28 October 1925, Buea AF 2 (1231/24) fol. 11, 14). There are two rivers called Munaya: both join the Cross River, one from the north (this one) and one from the south. The southern is better known. The additions ‘North’ and ‘South’ will be used here to distinguish them. The spelling Munaiya is also found. Sharwood-Smith and Cantle, Anyang and Manta, p. 14. The ancestral name is correctly Ńcwɔ́. I was told by a Baje informant that he was Anyang. His wife was Mavayukuru. Takamanda is one of the Ncwɔ́ villages, and now it gives its name to a local government unit. The name is, however, the name of the founder: Tákò Mándà. There are two settlements: Ńkánje and Ánɛ̀yù, of which the first is the site of ‘Takamanda’. With Ewisi they form a group called Asomawa. The remaining Ncwɔ villages are called in Takamanda Ikpambe (this is also one of their number). These are

48

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107. 108.

109. 110. 111.

EDWIN ARDENER

the ones descended from Sharwood-Smith’s ‘Mainyu’. In Takamanda both Boki and Anyang are spoken, and I was told that Ncwɔ came from Boki (Kajifu). Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 24. The Anyang Ŋgbeyi is also spelt Mbeye, Baiyi and Mbayi in various administrative sources. Ŋ̀gbɛ́ìyí is an Assumbo form (Ovando). Sharwood-Smith and Cantle, Anyang and Manta, p. 27. Anyang: ɔ̀sɔ́, the country; mɛ̀sɔ́, a person; àsɔ́, the people. The villages called Basho I and II are really Mélɔ́yɔ́ and Kètúyà respectively. The Mesu-Ake (or at least their Taba members) were involved in a fight with Ote village of the Anyang, which tried to move down to the Mafi River and was driven away. This event, whatever its relation to the others mentioned, belongs to the foundation of the Mesu-Ake from the Ambele Hills. Ejua of Bace, born c. 1898, heard the story from his grandfather. He gave eight generations from himself back to Etande, son of Ncwɔ, in whose day the war started. Anyang names in his account: Basho or Mbeyi; Àsɔ́ or singular: mɛ̀sɔ́; Atolo: Vátòló. Bace is my realization of the name of the village usually spelled Baje. The marriage of the ancestor to a ‘Munshi’ is probably the Anyang way of trying to account for the subsequent disappearance of Yive to the Tiv border. The Anyang had no word for the Tiv. Ibid., p. 17. The three Obonyes are: I Òbwɔ̑nyì Óbɛ̀ (óbɛ̀ = ‘swampy land’), II Òbwɔ̑nyì Ǹjùàsù, III Òbwɔ̑nyì Àwáńcɔ́. The clan name is pronounced Énɔ́ráncí. C.J.A. Gregg, AR Boki, Eba-Mbu and Ekokisam clans, Mamfe Division, 1925, Buea, AF 24 (1068, 1592/26). My version from Kajifu confirms the story of an origin from Ekokisam (Èkúgesəm). The Ewisi Anyang (Boki Ébínsí) were said to have been driven from the site of the present Kajifu (Gàjífú). The etymology refers to an Òjífú tree (species not identified). Ibid. Eva Mbu was called an Anyang term by a Boki informant. Ekugesəm means ‘behind the back’ over the Oyi River. Cameroon Boki shares with the Anyang near the Cross River the tendency for k to be realized as g. Sharwood-Smith and Cantle, Anyang and Manta, p. 21. Bakum is there said to have been broken up by the Germans (it is not on Moisel F.1.). Bakum was in 1925 a hamlet of Ewisi, moved in January of that year to Ewisi itself (Buea AF 4 (EP 512), p. 11). I heard the name as Bàkú without final nasal (see note 106). Kesham (Késá or Gésá, with the loss of final nasal characteristics of all dialects of this part of the river, whether of Anyang, of Ejagham or of Kenyang): according to the Hon. S.E. Ncha, of Kesham, ‘The people of Kesa are known as Wòsó or Wùsú. They have other brothers who migrated to Mako … and Wuté … then Takpe … Mako (Maku) and Ote are Anyang villages near the head of the Mafi Valley’. Ote was, according to both Sharwood-Smith and my information, founded from Takpe (Anyang and Manta, p. 30). Kesam is the name by which the Manta people call themselves, so that connections with the Upper Mafi Valley are possible. Wòsó is probably yet another rendering of the name of the Basho or Mbeyi. Thus: Wetshu: Bètákú; Ambele: Bètàákó. Manta distinguish Ènyáŋ and Òtáákú. The Anyang proper call them (bɔ̆) Òtɛ̀ɛ́ku (sing. mɛ̀tɛ̀ɛ́ku). Their own usage is: Mwə̀tyĕku (sing.), Bètyĕku (plural), òtyĕku (the country), tétyĕku (the language). My material from the important Bakumba village shows a dialect of Anyang. It lacks the initial voicing of k found at the Cross River. The devoicing has spread to the prefix de- (pron. te). The language tétyĕku was regarded as part of Anyang (tə́nya). J. Dixon, Outline IR Mbulu Federation, Mamfe Division, 1940, Buea AF 35 (EP 18890/A). His phonology is better than Sharwood-Smith’s. The sons of Oyi were respectively Nebo and Mbeyi; ibid., p. 5. For Basho cf. Bace asɔ, Kesham woso, Ovando òsó pl. vaso, already cited. The present villages of Basho I and Basho II he states to have been formerly one, named Akagbe, the subdivision and the terminology being German. Chief Commissioner, Eastern Provinces, Minute, 28/6/1941, IR Mbulu correspondence Buea, AF 34 (EP18890), p. 13. Sharwood-Smith and Cantle, Anyang and Manta, p. 72. Ibid. The Manta ‘clans’ were Nyimi (Amasi and Aiyi), Nyaeyaw (Batebi, Aloenti, Alompha),

ORAL TRADITIONS AND ADMINISTRATIVE IDENTITIES

112. 113. 114.

115.

116.

117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133.

49

Bako-Ese (Tchikpe and Mussomowa), Banta-Dipa (Ewunja, Kenche, Bantakpa, Bantako and Banchu), Bangwo-Ano (Baka, Kumsu), Bapiegeli (Kunku, Tassomo, Baungu, Barambochi and Mbaya), Ba-Mampo (Baunde and Baundu) and Ba-Ani (Basume). Cowan, AR Assumbo District, p. 59. Own name Òtútú but my enquiries were slight. They are known to their neighbours by forms of their village name Àtɔ́́ŋ. R.G. Biddulph, A series of IR on clans composing the Menka-Widekum Group, Mamfe Division, 1932, Buea, AF 41, p. 338. An Akanunkwo (Akanenkwɔ) notable, Anza Ake, told me (1963) that the ancestor of the village was Tàjù Òwá, who came from Ndundɔ’, five miles away, because it was ‘too hilly’. Sharwood-Smith, in 1924, wrote that the original home was Enyi, said to be on the hilltops above the present Otutu settlements, and that old terraces were visible. B.E. Sharwood-Smith, AR Menka District, 1924, Buea, AF 38, p. 95. The various Wetchu forms are: Wútšù prefixed by word for person(s); the u is somewhat centralized. Menka village is called Ǹká, but another name, Emisɔŋ, may be original. The name Bándò is also used by the Wetchu of themselves or of some pre-existing people. Biddulph, IR Menka Widekum Group, p. 298, refers to ‘Bali or Bali Moti’. [This term Bali Moti is used in some Nggemba oral traditions to describe the precursors of Gawolbe’s Ba`ni. In Babungo they are referred to as Montə, cf. I. Fowler, “Babungo: A Study of Iron Production, Trade and Power in a Nineteenth Century Ndop Plain Chiefdom (Cameroons)’, PhD thesis, University of London (UCL), 1989. See Fardon, Raiders and Refugees, for possible identification with the Peli (Pyere, Pere) and Daga components of raiding groups under different leaders.] Biddulph, IR Menka-Widekum Group, p. 257. Ibid. p. 258. They were assimilated to the ‘Bajue clan’, i.e. the Bajo (Ajuɔ) or Mesu-Ake. See above. Sharwood-Smith, AR Menka District, 1924, Buea Archives AF 38, p. 13. [The reference here is to the Befang of Mamfe Division. The administratively constructed BebaBefang group of Wum (now Menchum) Division mentioned earlier included the village clusters of Mbelifang (‘Befang’), Modelle (or Ide), Batomo and Nkoremanjang. These, except Ide, are not ‘own names’. Their language falls outside the three main language groups of the highland Grassfields as, for example, does Esimbi. See L. Bouquiaux (ed.), L’Expansion Bantoue, Paris: SELAF, 1980, for a newer round of linguistic taxonomy, and B.M. Masquelier, Ide, a Polity of the Metchum Valley, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1978.] B.E. Sharwood-Smith and G.B. Williams, A Report on the Mamfe-Bamenda Divisional Boundary, 18 December 1923, Buea, AF 1 (21/16), p. 41. W.E. Hunt, Bameta, District and District Head, Creation of, 12 October 1922, Buea, Ab 18 (829/1922), p. 1. Ibid. p. 1. Arnett to Sharwood-Smith, 9 December 1926, Buea, Ab 20 (1454/1925), p. 13, 15, 17a. Buea, Ab 20 (1454/1925). Sharwood-Smith, Arnett to Sharwood-Smith, p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Hawkesworth, AD 14. Abanda of Ba’nam. R.G. Biddulph, A series of IR on clans composing the Menka-Widekum Native Authority Area, Mamfe Division, 1932, Buea Archives AF 41, para. 137. [These were, in fact, to be followed not long after by substantial studies by R.G. Dillon (on the Meta’), and J-P. Warnier (Mankon to begin with) and many others. The linguistic work of K. Williamson and J. Leroy was soon to establish the distinction between the ‘Widekum’ (Momo) subgroup of languages and those of the ‘Nggemba’: the latter belong to the same large, though subdivided, group as those of Bafut, Mankon, the Bamileke, Bamum and the Wimbum. Kaberry and Chilver privately concluded that in some cases the choice of origin myth to be presented was influenced by contemporary local political considerations, as in the case of the association of Babanki (Kejom Kegu) with the Bafut Native Authority.] The Ngwo call the Menemo Etyɛˈ. The glottal stop at the end is slight but perceptible. T.E. Hutchinson, Ten Years Wandering among the Ethiopians, London, 1861, p. 326–27.

CHAPTER 3

Epitome of Extracts from Hermann Detzner, Im Lande Des Dju-Dju Sally Chilver

Oberleutnant Hermann Detzner’s book on the Cameroon-Nigeria borderlands (see Map 1.1) is a description of work and travel undertaken in connection with the Anglo-German Boundary Commission expedition that established the boundary from the Alantika Mountains to the Cross River between September 1912 and March 1913. This is a rare and relatively unknown work, which, chapter by chapter, describes the step-by-step progress and encounters of the Boundary Commission. It will be useful to provide a brief epitome1 in English of the sections (pages 282–382) that deal with the far north and northwest of the present-day Menchum Division of Cameroon,2 for which little published information seems to exist.3 Detzner’s work, illustrated by his useful route-maps, talented sketches and photographs and published less than a decade after the loss of Kamerun to British and French forces, is naturally a little propagandist. To judge from the Annual Report of the Bamenda Bezirk, 1913–1914, the peoples of the western border were no more amenable to German than to British rule in its earlier years. For a rather drier account of the Border Commission’s work from a British perspective see W.V. Nugent’s report in the Geographical Journal (1914).4 Detzner’s text introduces us to some of the chiefs and peoples of this area as they engage in negotiations with the representatives of the German and British colonial administrations occupied with realigning and marking the national borders. His deep wish to preserve the goodwill of the inhabitants and his officer’s suspicions of the British, who were in fact, as Detzner makes clear, remarkably cooperative, is transparent. It is almost inevitable that a work such as this will say nearly as much about the views and stereotypes held by the author as it does about the peoples it describes. It is in this light that some of Detzner’s more rebarbative comments on those he meets have been left in the text even at risk of offending the contemporary ear. We take up Detzner’s story as his camp is approached by a party from Esu. Notes for this chapter begin on page 66.

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Chapter 14: A Meeting with the Bafum Pagans Sieh, the King of Esu, came up in the rear. He seemed dwarfish among his countrymen, whom he controlled by cunning and superior wits. He wore an overlong and too-big once-white Schutztruppe uniform jacket that Detzner thought had clearly never left his body during the four years since he had last seen him. His bearded head, as ever, was covered by a grubby postman’s cap, but one could say of his loincloth that it, at least, was clean. Whoever set eyes on him in this comic outfit for the first time might well take him for a fool. But this false idea would soon be given up after watching the little king among his influential big men, and noticing how these sharp-eyed giants approached their ruler with awe and obeyed his hints, orders and judgements with humility. Pleasure at meeting Detzner again shone out of the old man’s wrinkled face. It was not diminished when Detzner invited him to sit down on his simple folding stool so that he could carefully examine the beautifully carved stool that two stately ‘Ministers’ had taken from a slave and wanted to place respectfully under their chief. It was a Bafum5 masterpiece. Five squatting slaves with raised arms had been carved out of a single block of wood: these supported the saucer-shaped seat, which was highly decorated. The base was hollowed out into a ring on which their feet rested, the free figures with bent backs seeming to take the weight: it was not only attractive but light. Yes, these Bafum were artists. This was exemplified by their handling of angles and plumb straight lines in house-building and their decorated doorposts, as well as their manufacture of weapons and tools. They use the iron ore deposits of the high plateau to manufacture iron in a simple but accomplished technique to make spears, arrowheads, long swords, and short daggers with wonderfully carved handgrips, as well as the agricultural tools employed by this industrious people in their model hoe-culture. ‘Now you must have the King’s stool’, said Detzner, who had finished gazing at it. And with this remark he beckoned the chief to his throne and together with him organized the payments for the provisions delivered, and the wages of those who had helped to carry them. The male population of Gayama6 was assembled together with their neighbouring villages, the chiefs and men of the Dii tribe, who that afternoon had, at last, brought in the sacks of rice on their way from Katsena Allah (see Map 3.1). They were in the service of the British supply organization. They surrounded the king and greeted him honourably. Seeing the colourful picture presented by the border folk and the lively exchanges between the Bafum leaders and the Dii chiefs doubled Detzner’s regret that the head of Bamenda Station was prevented by other business from accepting his invitation to study this important area. The Dii boldly aired their unhappiness about the fact that some four years ago, Gasari and their other wealthy border villages were to be abandoned on the order of the British Resident and rebuilt further downstream. Apparently they had sympathized too freely with the German regime and in border quarrels had taken the side of their Gayama relatives. Only a few had dared to risk resisting the British order to resettle beyond Gayama before the evacuation of the old villages, overseen by British officials from Obudu, had taken place.

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Map 3.1: Gajama to Agara (adapted from Detzner 1923)

The presence of the head of Bamenda Station would certainly have given the unhappy Dii the opportunity, to which they were entitled, to choose their civic status within the next six months, and most would have resettled on the German side. So no advantage was taken of the presence of Mr Hives, the British Resident, to persuade or put pressure on him. Mr Hives must have viewed the dance of homage the Bafum folk put on next afternoon, in which the Dii men present took part, with mixed feelings. The ground shook as 200 men, bearing staves instead of spears, introduced the dance by a feint on the camp. With a terrifying war-howl, to overawe the enemy, the tall figures surrounded the camp in a phalanx, dashing round the tents, grass huts and narrow alleys and pretending to make spear-thrusts against imaginary enemies. They nimbly reformed behind the camp in rows that filed behind one another with rhythmic stamping and, stamping faster and faster and jerking their bodies

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backwards and forwards, returned to the front of the tent where the Esu King, his Ministers and Detzner awaited them. The accompanying cries gave place to a monotonous chorus, rising and falling like sea-waves. The king, in his grubby jacket, his cap on one side, now sprang up to dance in a small circle, greeted by ear-splitting applause from his people. He leapt to and fro, sometimes bending low with outstretched arms and clapping hands, swinging round on one foot and reverting to rapid leg movements and erotic body thrusts as applause died down. Dance fever attacked not only the Dii and Gayama people but got the soldiers and carriers skipping along to the same rhythm and competing with the others. Sweat ran profusely; some retired exhausted but returned again, panting and staring at the white man. The air became unbearably smelly, so Detzner had the bugle blown to assemble them and remind the carriers that much palm wine and many hartebeests, waterbucks and antelopes that Detzner had shot for them awaited them at Gayama. Thankfully, the payment in cash for their food and services went off rapidly and well. Only a few years ago the refusal to accept small silver coins was such that, in Bafum, the Germans were obliged to pay with barter goods. Detzner was pleased that the efforts he had made, in the course of his topographical survey in Esu, to explain the value and handling of coin had eventually paid off. Indeed, the preference for silver coin had meanwhile grown so strong that the Bali Mission had started a factory run by local clerks in Wum so that the pagans could exchange their cash for desirable treasures such as cloth, tobacco and beads. It became evident, in a rather striking manner, that the Wum store did not stock trousers. The king, having dismissed his satisfied men, came for a short while into the camp, intending to buy a pair of trousers with the money recently paid him. This would complete his uniform. He held out a roll of fifty-pfennig coins and pointed to Detzner’s long khaki trousers. The blue trim on the seam caught his attention, but it was not broad enough for his tastes. Detzner’s boy, Gottwald, brought one with a wider side-stripe. The king still shook his head. Detzner then took the trousers and turned them inside out; now the trim seemed much broader. The king was won over. Detzner made a long face, refusing the money, and pointed to the stool. The light dawned on the king: he called for the stool and made Detzner try it. A bargain was struck, each feeling that an advantageous exchange had been made.7 Detzner was plagued by a sense of uncertainty – would the king wear the trousers inside out or outside in?

Chapter 15: Unspoilt Hunting Grounds While awaiting the departure of the English party, Detzner decided to explore the valley of the Metschem [sic] up to the sources of its major tributary, the Mequer. He had the greatest difficulty in persuading his guides, Gayama hunters, to assist them without guarantees of safety. They warned him against the ‘cannibals’ to the south. Förstl had gone ahead, to set up camp. We are now at the end of February, 1913. The sporadic hunters’ paths they followed led through forested areas rich in wild rubber and crossed animal tracks in the burnt-off tongues of savannah.

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Detzner set off on his black stallion in the early morning with his houseboy at the head of his column, which included his soldiers’ chattering wives. A runner came in, via the British supply depot at Habe, with news that the District Officer (D.O.) of Ossidinge8 had been ordered to explore the most recently subjected highland areas. He reported that no hostility was encountered north of the watershed between the Benue and Cross Rivers, though the Atscho and Assumbo tribes were loath to make contact. The officer had not visited the Aligeti, whose status was still in doubt, and whose larger villages had been controlled from Obudu up to the present. Detzner hoped they would be open to peaceful relations with Europeans. He was glad to have made contact with Ossidinge, the expedition’s southern task-area, as he hoped to dismiss his Bamenda carriers, who had already served two months, at the Bascho post, and pick up food supplies there. The British party asked for supplies from the Germans and these were given. Detzner would have far preferred to explore the area between the Moan and Mequer Rivers, thickly settled by the Agara or Missa Munschi, instead of making a rapid march along the frontier. The morning bugle call had alarmed the Agara-Munschi chief and his elders, who took refuge in Detzner’s tent. The villages south of the Mequer could be heard spreading the news of his projected visit on their big war drums. Detzner mentions the story that the Para9 were once herders for the Fulani in Yola Province and sought freedom by migrating south. He is clearly extremely sceptical about there being a single ‘Munschi’ people, as well as about their cannibalism. The appellation is a Hausa nickname. Far more research is needed, and the Fulani should be questioned, he thinks. Detzner also mentions the careful hoe-cultivation of the ‘hill Munschi’, the abundance of iron ore in their hills, and the fact that they manufactured their own iron hoes and weaponry.

Chapter 16: Among the Munschi People in the Iron-rich Agara District A plateau some 430 m above sea level is reached by well-kept paths through thick woods interspersed with tongues of burnt-off grassland, and through a hilly, well watered landscape. A well-kept village on a hilltop – a crowded mass of round, mud huts – was reached. Women and children came in from the fields to watch the passage of the ‘governor’. They were guarded by warriors with spears and bows and arrows. The careful selection of farmlands on the laterite plateau demonstrated that the Agara, like all Munschi, were fine farmers. Here the harvest of maize, millet,10 bananas, makabo and also groundnuts – to which a large acreage was devoted – seemed more than sufficient for subsistence. Now everybody was bringing in the last of the harvest before the rains, or else clearing off weeds and bush growth and drawing long rows between heaped-up mounds with their shorthandled, locally made hoes.11 The crowd following them became larger and larger as they approached the head village of the Agara, where they were met by village heads with their big men, summoned by drums. Detzner remarks that though they were well-knit and more muscular than the Djumperi,12 they seemed small next to the Gayama who

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had accompanied them, as rather timorous guides, to this ‘cannibal’ country. Almost all of the Munschi had shaven heads, save for one or more carefully cut round tufts. All had tribal marks on both cheeks – tattoos in crescent shape enlarged by swollen scarification. Only a few appeared in their home-woven indigo-dyed cloths. They grinned in greeting to the newcomers, revealing front teeth filed into sharp points. Their well-formed, barbed spears shone in the sun, despite oxidization; their chisel-marked daggers were sheathed in wooden, leather or bast scabbards. All carried the typical Munschi cutlass, which has an elliptically curved iron handgrip, protecting the back of the hand, from which the blade sticks out straight. A few crossbows were seen, as well as the usual short bows with small arrows smeared with lethal poison. These were carried in smooth feather quivers. A little later they met men carrying both weapons and a broad-bladed heavy hoe; the hoe blade was securely fastened to a short, bent handle. The end of the path to the head village was strewn with limonite ore.13 In front of the thorn hedge surrounding the village lay an abandoned workshop where iron for the production of weapons and hoes was worked up.14 The cleanliness of the assembly place was surprising, reached as it was by a maze of village lanes winding through huts irregularly positioned, among which wandered fowls, miserablelooking dogs, and a goodly number of goats and pigs. This was in contrast to the Munschi tribes of the valleys, where cattle-rearing is practised; the Agara, Ituava and Iturubu Munschi, driven into the hills, keep small livestock only. As the warriors squatted around, Detzner noticed that some, instead of the usual tufts, had long tresses falling on both sides of the face, decorated with grassseed or trade beads. All had the same tribal marks and more or less the same build and look, which could only be due to their not intermarrying with neighbouring tribes. Women wearing indigo-blue hand-woven skirts hovered shyly round the edge of the group, but near enough for Detzner to see the familiar scarification and pointed teeth. To avoid getting relapsing fever, Detzner refused to sleep in the insect-ridden hut offered and ordered his men to build him a simple shelter large enough to take his camp bed and folding table. The villagers joined in the fun. Detzner found it hard to regard them as cannibals and brushed aside the memory of how his Ituava guide, three and a half years back, had absconded, leaving his sergeant unprotected. The following patrol had found some fresh bones, and then the sergeant’s head in the juju-house of the suspect village, which had fled fearing German vengeance. Detzner writes that even now he would only have had to go a few steps to the nearby juju-hut to find a number of skulls of slaughtered victims grinning out from its recesses, among other useless magical objects crowding this eerie place. Some of these objects were finely carved, and the black-white-red fetish figures were worth special study. There were such juju-huts in every corner of the place. Every kin-group (Sippe) seemed to have its own juju-hut, made with a grass roof and mats and usually flanked by tall bushes. More significantly, Detzner inspected the chief’s store, which had a conical roof supported on posts. He did this to test the truthfulness of the chief, who had told him that his people only stored seeds and planting material there, and therefore only small quantities of farm produce could be sold. When Detzner looked into the high-floored store it was clear the

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chief was being truthful – the store was nearly empty. He was told that the rainmaker had been at work for days and had been rewarded with the best food. The chief then declared: ‘The whites can do every thing, so let them make rain and save us from hunger. Ask that cloud, now, to make rain,’ he said pointing to a cloud formation to the southwest. Detzner wondered how long it would take to emancipate these people from ‘superstition’. At about midnight he heard singing. He asked the sentry what was happening and was told that the medicine man and the villagers had gone down the hill to ‘make rain’. Detzner went down to see and hid in the shadows behind a pawpaw bush. He saw a circle of men round a smoky, leaf-dampened fire. The rainmaker was first seen shaking his fist at the sky and then sinking into a heap, meanwhile lamenting monotonously. He repeated these actions. Finally the rainmaker pointed upwards, and eventually Detzner detected a bird in zigzag flight, which was greeted with a loud cry. He recognized it as the so-called ‘juju-bird’ which he had been told ‘despises the whites’. With very confused motives, he shot it. It was an African nightjar,15 a blackish-grey, slender bird with a 30 cm–long tail feather, noted for its zigzag flight. The Munschi came up; the medicine man had now disappeared and they dispersed silently to their huts. Next day, as the women were being escorted to the fields, Detzner was being washed by his boys, who were dowsing him with water and, unasked, scrubbing his back and armpits. The women had a good stare at him and then made off as the chief arrived with his worthies. Interpretation was useless, but finally gestures made it clear that the medicine man wanted the long feathers of the juju-bird to ensure rain. Detzner’s attempts to explain the foolishness of this fell on deaf ears. Finally, to cheer them up, he said he believed it would rain in a few days, to judge by the sky. This was taken as a promise, and there were yells of delight. Detzner felt he had been silly but consoled himself that the medicine man would probably not be further depleting the stores, and anyway, the cloud formations looked promising. More drumming was then heard from the southwest, which was taken up and repeated. The message was that an Agara village had successfully killed everybody in a nearby Ituava place. The worst consequences were not mentioned.16 Why, wondered Detzner, couldn’t the Germans and British work together in the border area to put down these cannibalistic wars? He considered this rapid march could only be a preparatory step. At least the Munschi no longer ran away from German approaches but stayed in their villages, and had not offered open or covert resistance. His cheerful mood now gone, Detzner made ready to visit hitherto unvisited settlements to the east of the village. Much argument arose among the lesser chiefs, who each wanted him to visit them. This would cost them nothing, because no supplies were being asked for, and they knew that small gifts of cloth, beads and other desirable things were to be made. Currency was still unknown thereabouts, while among the lowland Munschi it was a desired method of payment. Detzner then describes snuff-taking, also common further south, and, during the palavers, smoking from an earthenware pipe with a long brass stem. His route passed through varied country to a well-settled district. Most people were busy on the farms, getting them ready for planting. Some groups had led ir-

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rigation ditches from the streams into their tobacco and indigo plots. Sometimes the dye pits were unoccupied; elsewhere, at the approach of the expedition, the women ran away from their dyeing, leaving their well-woven cloths behind by the streams. If there was a small clay smelting furnace in one village, the next would probably have a smithy: clearly iron manufacture was not unsophisticated. Many questions remained unanswered about the producers and the places of manufacture, and about the raw material of the lethal arrow poison on the crude arrowheads of Detzner’s guides and companions. Nobody either knew or wanted to tell him from which plant or mixture of plants it was concocted. The juju-man made it in his secret kitchen, which lay away from the village in a patch of forest. Only the initiated could be present while it was being ‘cooked’, on pain of death. Detzner pointed out Strophantus and other highly poisonous plants; the reply was a shrug. In vain, Detzner offered large gifts for the secret. He sent people to summon medicine men to a meeting. None came. A drum message from the east put an end to this effort. Apparently it contained the news that the European hunting party had returned from the Mutasso17 uplands with plenty of meat. So, said Detzner, his hunters had been successful, and he hurried back to his camp. Detzner was carried across the Mequer to visit the British camp. The British were now ready to march. Compliments flowed, and a long hunting story was narrated in which Förstl’s prowess was praised and Kyngdom18 told his side of it. Back in the German camp the division of the meat was in progress – the Agara had carried in the carcasses. This was quite a hard task as excited anticipation was boundless. The robe worn by Audu, Detzner’s Hausa interpreter, was almost pulled to pieces as he sought to maintain order. Detzner was amazed at his linguistic ability: he had already picked up a Munschi phrase or two. Finally the well-rewarded and replete Africans went off, their homeward routes lit up for a long time by the torches they carried. Detzner went to bed dog-tired. All night the jackals, attracted by the smell of blood, howled round the camp. In the morning he had time to read the packet of newspapers that had arrived via the Nigerian post. The headlined leading article reported tense relations between the European powers. The Moan Valley, rich in wild rubber and game, provided the direction of the march. Audu was needed to take messages back to the Benue post but was nowhere to be found. His interpreter counterpart in the English camp explained why. Audu had gone back with the Agara folk to their villages to learn the Munschi language so that he could return to Detzner in a few days as an essential interpreter. Impressed and astonished, Detzner set off down the valley. In order to find a main path in the maze of hunters’ and farm paths, they needed several local guides, who were exchanged for new ones as they neared another settlement: these guides became more and more timid the closer they came to the junction of the Moan with the larger Ihi River. The Agara people, however, gathered in their hundreds at crossroads to get a gift or trade a pig or thin goat with the expedition. The hypothesis that goitre is associated with cannibalism19 was put in doubt here. Among the hundreds of Agara coming and going, only six goitre, or elephantiasis-like cases, were to be seen. Likewise, the plains Munschi who had been recruited as carriers for the English column showed almost no signs of these diseases.

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Despite their having the same kinds of facial tattoos, it seemed clear to Detzner that these were two distinct peoples, with the lowland Munschi both intellectually and physically superior to the hill folk. So was the difference between hill and lowland Munschi, as well as their deep enmity, to be looked for in the splitting-off of the Agara from the Ituava, of these from the Iturubu and Ininawa? And did the division of all of these hill Munschi from those of the valleys and plains occur much earlier, as the so-called Munschi experts claim? What about the lowland Munschi, called Para, who claimed to have left their Fulani masters 200 years ago? The thesis – that the Para once lived north of Yola as slave-herders of the Fulani and then, in search of freedom, migrated south to their present habitat – needed further inquiry and cross-checking against more reliable Fulani oral sources. The fact that they kept the same kind of humped cattle did support this idea. Why, then, did the hill Munschi not keep cattle in their pastorally suitable country, which was not divided by steep escarpments from the Benue-Katsena Valley but only by quite gentle slopes? Detzner was inclined to think that the Para, when they moved south with their cattle, drove the indigenous Agara, Iturubu, Ituava, etc., out from the valleys, and that these later took over certain of the Para invaders’ habits – among them adopting some crops and building styles. Detzner points to the analogy of the Chamba and Dakka pagans who had taken over some items from the Fulani, but not their cattle-herding.20 According to Detzner, ‘Munschi’ is not an ‘own name’. The principal lowland group called itself Para; the hill group Agara or Missa, Ituava, etc. ‘Munschi’ was a Hausa nickname meaning ‘We have eaten’. This was supposedly the answer given when the Fulani sent Hausa messengers to ask for their cows back. Plausible though this may be, it is just as likely that it was said by Hausa of supposed cannibals – who would say ‘We have eaten them’ when referring to the killing of prisoners of war. The gestures and remarks made by the Hausa, Dii and Gayama about the Munschi make this interpretation more plausible. The German and British columns had now reached the point where the natural frontier formed by the Moan Valley was abandoned, and a straight line had been drawn for 28 km through the hills to the Anube River. Neither Nugent nor Detzner had any intention that such a line should tear apart the big Iturubu and Olitti tribes. They both knew that their forerunners had done the best they could with the ethnographic information available without one side or the other sacrificing too much. Both had preferred natural river lines, understandable by the native people, wherever possible. After a rest, Detzner rode over to see the confluence of the Moan and Ihi Rivers and to await the following British officers who had started out from Habe on foot. He was astonished to find his interpreter Audu awaiting him at a crowded crossroads, very visible in a light-coloured robe and now armed with a useful store of Munschi expressions. Shortly before the day’s end they returned to the English supply dump near Habe, where Audu met his old friend Madagalli amid a shower of greetings and cheerful shouts. Four years earlier Madagalli had acted as interpreter to a member of the German expedition. He still knew some scraps of German, but now he spoke fluent English and was Mr Hives’ right-hand man

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in matters involving the Munschi. He was also handy with watch and compass in route-mapping, taught him by Lt Rothe. On 3 March the expedition began to mark the frontier line south-westwards, by tree-felling in dense woodland and the construction of stone pathways between the frequent frontier cairns and concrete posts, sufficiently cleared to be recognizable in future years. Habe, the southernmost Agara village, was finally put into the German section; this put an end to worrying uncertainty. An all-night celebratory feast followed, given by the Habe chief. Most of the Agara chiefs then made off, relieved that their southernmost village was not cut off. But the Habe chief and a few others hung around hoping to persuade Detzner to return to Habe, or to accompany him southwest. This was because on the other side of the hills of the Ihi section lived the Ituava and Iturubu, their sworn enemies, and also because their muzzle-loaders were acquired from over the border. The Agara kept very close behind the German column as they followed them, taking many precautions. The expedition reached a viewpoint from which it was possible to map the line more accurately and control the direction of the stone path being built under the control of Kyngdom and Sergeant Smith. These two officers seemed thoroughly fed up with the behaviour of their Dioptre compass. Nugent and Detzner knew the reason for the strange escapades of the magnetic needle and grinned privily. But what was really causing the crazy movements of the magnetic needle? It had behaved perfectly so far, and Kyngdom was inclined to think that the vagaries had something to do with the workmen leaving their iron tools and weapons lying close by. Would everything done so far have to be corrected by laborious astronomical azimuth readings? Four years ago the earlier German expedition had been equally surprised, but after careful research it was discovered that the hill country between the Ihi and Amiri Rivers was full of rich deposits of magnetic iron, making compass use impossible. It was decided that the expedition would have to rely on the triangulation points set up then, and this was done. While the labourers were catching up there was time to examine the landscape. The main watershed stretching south was dark green at its lower levels and contained rock forms in many extraordinary shapes – like fallen obelisks in the Assumbo hills, or irregular, cut-off pyramids in the Atscho group, or whitish-grey rounded forms to the west in the Sonkwala hills. To the north rose the grey-coloured outliers of the Bamenda Highlands that had forced some rivers to flow northwards. Detzner’s geological ruminations led him to the thought that competition for productive valley land must have been the reason why stronger tribes drove the weaker ones into the hills. The wind picked up and soon became a tornado. They returned to Habe and dug trenches round the huts and tents to prevent them from being flooded in the oncoming storm. A terrific lightning display over the magnetic hills was followed by a heavy downpour. The Agara were cheered by the rain, and next day they started sowing. The rainmaker’s prestige was restored, even increased, despite the fact that lightning had struck and burnt down the juju-hut. It had also struck one of the expedition’s lookout platforms, frightening the labourers considerably. The damage was soon repaired, and work went on faster in cooler weather. By 7 March work was so far advanced that the camp could be moved to the Mokamon River.

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Thanks to the cooperative attitude of the British not only Habe but the whole Agara tribe was now undivided, all on the German side. At the new camp hundreds of Ituava and Iturubu watched the work with hostile looks. To Detzner’s surprise, Audu addressed them in fluent Munschi, perhaps more to impress Detzner with his acquisition of a new language in ten days than to explain to them the impact of the frontier on their hunting area.

Chapter 17: The Mixed Munschi with the First Firearms Detzner held that if the Iturubu and Ituava were intellectually superior to the Agara, still they were a step below the plains Munschi whose tattoos they all carried. Forehead, breast and back had star-shaped or sometimes ring-shaped scarification. For show they carried bow, quiver with poisoned arrows and the well-made Munschi cutlasses. As Detzner very well knew, they had hidden away their firearms. In the first Ituava village doors were ostentatiously drawn aside and the interior of huts revealed. Detzner had never actually intended to search for flintlocks.21 There was no sign, either, of the associated powder horns, flints, tinder, ramrods, etc., which were also hidden. Other weapons were hung openly on the walls of the main rooms along with tools and cooking utensils. But there were one or two other rooms, used as stores and for sleeping too. When, in the past, the Germans had had a battle with them,22 every respectable man had owned a flintlock. When Detzner asked them about this they lied quite childishly. Their attitude stemmed from the strict German control of firearms. What also struck Detzner was the oval compound plan not found among the Agara – their oval outer walls, and the wall decorations of wood and clay – all carefully done, as was common to the Munschi of the plains and Sonkwala hills. Extensive yam cultivation was noticeable here, and it formed the main subsistence crop, as it did for the Para. Cattle-rearing, however, was absent, because, he thinks, of the hard, stringy grass that covered the iron-rich hills.23 Both features, i.e. yams and oval huts, were absent among the Agara. Detzner was unable to convince his English comrades that the Agara/Missa were quite distinct from the Para. Detzner conjectures that maybe the Para conquest was of short duration – enough for tattoos, but not enough for yams. Crowds of women with their farm gear came into the village, which was unfortified. A storm was in the offing, so Detzner’s party made for the new camp. Drums and dancing echoed from the English camp. Mr Hives had invited over a wedding party from a nearby Iturubu village.24 Boredom set in after watching 150 aged ladies, 40 of them the local chief’s wives, tripping around jerking their bottoms; all of them were pretty ugly. The plump head wife, hung with beads, some the size of an orange, took the lead. No pretty young dancers appeared. Attempts by the Europeans to ‘bring on the girls’ to cheer the soldiers up were met with a frosty response. A message by runner came for Detzner from Bascho. He was delighted to read that his requested carriers and food supplies would be at hand as soon as they could cross the Assumbo hills from the low-lying forest area. Moreover, a relay

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supply line would be set up to the northernmost Bascho villages, whose settlements stretched from the forest at c.190 m to 1000 m at the steep approach to the Benue-Cross watershed. All this was thanks to the Ossidinge Division’s administration.25 The letter also contained the worrying news of extreme diplomatic tension between England and Germany. Detzner’s attention strayed to the Obudu Resident Hives, who was still being amused by the caperings of the old ladies. A branch of the Niger-Benue telegraph line reached Obudu; Hives must surely know about the tense diplomatic situation. Detzner remembered his close observation of the German military detachment during the march. How would Captain Nugent behave if hostilities indeed broke out? Surely Nugent must have been forewarned of the situation much earlier than Detzner had been. Detzner told his Sergeant Förstl the news and urged him to be on the lookout for any change in British attitudes, but to maintain friendly contact with the British NCOs. So the work continued. By 12 April they were ready to leave the Mokamon River for the next point, the confluence of the Mahane and Amiri rivers. The promise of fine clothes plus good wages persuaded some of the braver Iturubu and Ituava men to guide them to the Jue26 and Aningi Munschi with whom, as with their northern neighbours, they had had endless cannibalistic wars. The land fell steeply down to the entry of the Amiri. The rain had brought up the new grass. Much game was seen, fleeing out of range of guns. Heralded by drum-signals, they now reached the settlements of the mixed Olitti Munschi, living in deep valleys running from south to north in the angle formed by the Anube and Amiri Rivers. The chief of Ngale, the largest Olitti settlement, came in with sub chiefs who proffered some starved fowls, one to Hives, one to Detzner and one to a British officer. Previously the old frontier had put most Olitti on the German side, but the British had claimed Ngale and some nearby villages. The chief, overjoyed to learn that all the Olitti would now be placed on the German side, soon returned with a pig for Detzner. The sly fellow had hidden it until he was sure of the outcome of the meeting. Mr Hives’s clerks, who had hoped for supplies from the Western Olitti, made long faces while the chief, no longer in fear of them, ostentatiously turned his back on them and brought his present to Detzner’s camp. Detzner wished to get news of the Atscho from the Olitti. He demanded two messengers from them to go to the leading Atscho chiefs and invite them to visit the German camp. Nobody wanted to go, as ambushes or fights with these neighbours were frequent. They refused a military escort as provocative, fearing Atscho reprisals after the column’s departure. That afternoon Detzner and Nugent agreed to mount a joint expedition against the warlike Sonkwala hill men. Four years earlier a similar joint exercise had taken place against this brave and numerous hill tribe. By the evening Nugent’s plan was dropped. A message had arrived from the governor of Southern Nigeria announcing that two companies had been sent up to protect the expedition’s flank against the rebellious Sonkwala. Now, it seemed, the English party was in heliographic communication with their flanking force. The discrepancy between the German and British fighting strength was now striking. Sergeant Förstl had also picked up the news, and Detzner was unable to

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persuade him that this new disposition was not necessarily anything to do with the bad diplomatic news. He became feverishly excited, his agitation added to by a bout of malaria. A noisy stir announced the arrival of another messenger, a black policeman from Bascho, who handed over the papers accompanying the carrier-transport promised from Bascho. He turned out to be a former soldier who had been in the fight at Assumbo, in the Bamenda Schutztruppe Company under Menzel. He was now leading the carrier column.27

Chapter 18: Förstl’s War Preparations Detzner29 observes the contrast between the tall and muscular ‘Sudanic’ carriers of the Grassfields and the ‘Bantu’ with their slight physique, different posture, different mode of carrying loads, ‘crumpled faces, sly eyes’, dirty cotton singlets and hats bought with wages or gains from palm kernel sales. The meeting between the two carrier parties is described. The Grassfielders were intrigued by the striped singlets and the variety of hats worn by the forest folk, while the Bascho party, through Pidgin interpreters, boasted that every man and woman in the forest had a cutlass. Detzner notes a striking difference in diet between the ‘races’, the preferred Bascho dish being plantains boiled in palm oil. Plantains, he says, were unknown among the savannah tribes, who only had the banana.28 The Grassfielders in return praised their grain porridge and spinach (njamajama), not so well liked by the forest folk. But both agreed that oxen – the last two now slaughtered because they were entering tsetse country and because they would have had to be driven over a high range – made for prime food. The soldiers recruited in forest areas gobbled up the palm oil chop, while their wives traded bits of meat for plantains and palm oil. While Detzner was dealing with the payment and travel papers of the Bamenda carriers (who were returning to the Kentu post) the Ngale chief appeared with the Olitti chief and two Atscho big men in tow. Detzner was especially pleased as he now had before him, gifts in hand, two representatives of this warlike hill tribe. The Germans had fought them, along with their Assumbo allies, four years ago and driven them into the mountains. The memorable Glauning29 had been shot through the head by them in a ‘cowardly ambush’ in 1908. Their visit might have had something to do with the tour of the Ossidinge D.O., the news through Olitti of the English force and the strength of Detzner’s escorting troops, as well as the memory of the punitive expedition of 1908. The chiefs were rewarded with plenty of meat. Next day the Bamenda carriers moved off cheerfully. The forest carriers now engaged in clearing the border path to the Amiri River, showing themselves competent with axe and cutlass. The last pillar of the stretch straight across the hilly land was set up, the line slightly bent to circumvent a rocky outcrop in the nowcombined Amiri and Mahane Valleys. The frontier here was formed by the east bank of the Amiri to its source. This was trouble-free. A message was sent to one

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of the Atscho chiefs saying that the villagers should stay put, and if they had provisions to sell, to come. Detzner was then invited to the English camp to lunch next day. His departure was put off. Förstl busied himself exercising and training his soldiers in military tactics even though he needed a rest to recover from his fever. He evidently thought that the invitation was a trap, and no amount of argument would convince him otherwise. Detzner was carried across the Amiri River in flood. A python suddenly crossed their path, and he lost his balance. The English camp was twenty minutes away in an idyllic clearing. A description of the party follows. Champagne cocktails loosened tongues. Detzner learned that the incoming officers had had news, of sorts, of European events: the situation had eased a little. The Border Commission had not had any news at all as the telegraph line had been down since the first bad storm, a frequent event. The gramophone played cake-walks, Scottish reels and waltzes, and the officers danced. Kyngdom and another young officer started a friendly boxing match. Finally the visiting officers rode off, and Detzner returned to make ready for next morning’s march. He then discovered that Förstl had sent out a party to ensure that Detzner was not taken prisoner: they were up trees and surrounding the English, ready to pounce. It took some time to recall the soldiers to camp. Fortunately, and to Detzner’s huge relief, the Sergeant’s efforts went unnoticed by the British.

Chapter 19: Across the Benue-Cross Watershed Detzner set out to find the source of the Amiri (or Anube), which was fed by numerous torrents and waterfalls (see Map 3.2). It was rich in tasty and large but bony fish, which were caught by the riverside villagers. The men of the Olitti village of Ndile (450 m elevation) had been sitting in rows in front of their mud-walled village, but they vanished when Detzner and his English companion appeared. Some gifts overcame their alarm. Like those of the Atscho further downriver, their huts had narrow stone entries. Not a flintlock or associated gear was to be seen here either – a show of spears and bows, etc., was put on to deceive them. Patches of yam cultivation stretched to the hunting boundary. The main Atscho cultivation areas were in upland patches of grassland, some 700 m up, and studded with small copses retained to protect springs. Yam and sweet-potato fields were well laid out and lined with plantains and oil-palms. The villages were stonewalled, and further protected by thorn bushes. Inside the perimeter walls were clusters of large stone huts, each cluster affording shelter for a family, each a fort in itself; all of the walls, inner and outer, were provided with embrasures for defensive gunfire. Only the juju-house was unfortified. Now the four Atscho villages were at peace. They were crowded with pigs and dogs. The men were strong and well-built, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed in small loincloths of Munschi type, obtained by trade from the valley people. The mountains of crops, not only those brought out for sale but also those stored in the highest village, showed that these farmers did not face shortages at the end of

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Map 3.2: Sonkwala to Baschu (adapted from Detzner 1923)

the dry season. Detzner noted the great change in their bearing towards Europeans, compared with 1908. Much the same negotiations as occurred earlier with the Olitti recurred when Detzner, with presents, persuaded the Atscho to send messengers to their old enemies the Aligeti and Matena. Detzner had heard from Hives that a party to buy food had been sent out to them without being harmed so far. They pitched camp at 1300 m, next to the deep-cut saddleback ridge where the Amiri and Magbe (the latter joining the Oji to flow into the Cross) rise at no great distance from each other – only a mountaineer could climb the concave spine dividing their springs; their steep north- and south-flowing courses formed ideal natural frontiers. A climb to 1400 m provided a complete panorama. The Atscho and Assumbo, the southernmost Sudanics [sic] in the frontier area, were proverbial enemies of the northernmost Bantu, represented by the Aligeti and Matena. A band of low cloud hid the Aligeti villages. The Atscho messengers had not returned, and their chief’s complaints and fears became louder. The English column’s supply seekers had gone through the Matena and returned with the news that the Aligeti had evacuated their villages, but they offered no news of the

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Atscho messengers. Not long after this the messengers appeared, with every sign of having been robbed and ill-treated. In the presence of Hives’s supply clerk, they said, their gifts were refused with contempt and they were robbed of the modest cloths and leather bags in which they kept needles, small knives and other useful items. That was not all: they were then bound and taken to a farm hamlet, where the women had been hidden, beaten and left without food. The chief was pleased to see his men again and tenderly stroked their sore backs and limbs, while Förstl washed and bandaged their wounds. They were compensated with tobacco and cloth. An immediate visit to Mr Hives and a confrontation with his clerk was called for but impossible, as the supply column had already marched on. Detzner sorely needed more supplies and guides. Bascho was too far to help. Detzner then decided they must go on without Aligeti guides.

Chapter 20: The Hostile Matena become Friends They set off, guided initially by Atscho, who were burning for revenge, and reached the Aligeti hiding place. There they spied a solitary man who turned out to have been a sub chief who had been involved in beating up the Atscho. He was taken prisoner. They quietly surrounded the farm huts. The prisoner was informed of their peaceful intentions, reassured and unbound. At daylight, when the people started to come out of the huts, they found themselves surrounded by armed men; the prisoner advised them to surrender. The men laid down their flintlocks. Their leaders were held; the rest were told to return to their villages with their women and children, allowed to take their weapons with them and instructed to tell the Matena to stay quietly in their villages. This was done to restore confidence, but more importantly to deal with the events unfolded by the main Aligeti speaker, who said that Hives’s African supply clerk had systematically urged the Aligeti and Matena not to cooperate with the Germans. Perhaps misunderstanding Hives’s rather unclear instructions, he may have believed that the villages hitherto seen by him as on the British side might be claimed for the German side. Naturally the propaganda fell on fertile ground, for these groups, hitherto administered in name only, feared that the stricter Germans would take away their firearms. Detzner then followed Förstl’s tracks and found that he, too, had surrounded another small Aligeti village’s refuge and had forty warriors under close surveillance. Neither he nor his soldiers could understand why Detzner now chose three leading men as hostages and sent the rest back to their villages with their weapons. When they reached their hill camp, Nugent was satisfied with the night’s events and ready to go, while Hives had already gone on. The Atscho messengers were rewarded with some pieces of cloth, tobacco and beads, and new leather satchels, and were persuaded to give up the idea of immediate revenge on the Aligeti. The hostage Aligeti chiefs, now certain that they were not to be handed over to their enemies, cheered up. They reached Kafri, a small street-village with facing houses, with a palaverhouse at the far end. Both humans and pigs fled indoors as they marched in. Mr

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Hives sat enthroned amid his clerks in front of the palaver-house, surrounded by piles of plantains, palm kernels and sweet potatoes, while the Aligeti and Matena sellers sat on one side awaiting payment. They had evidently not expected Detzner’s party so soon. He noticed some of the goods being secretly withdrawn into a big house. Glad cries greeted the returning hostages. Hives watched with surprise as the chiefs saw to it that all the supplies collected were taken to the German camp. He seemed astonished to be told by them of his clerk’s doings in the Aligeti and Matena area. The clerk, of course, lied: he had only praised the English ‘governor’, he said. The confrontation was enough for Detzner to make it clear to Hives that these men must not wander around on the German side, unless they wished to risk being sent under escort to the Bascho post. By next morning both Hives and his clerks had vanished. The locals had provided Detzner’s column with plentiful supplies and danced all night in front of their tents. The ‘hill Bantu’ seemed to have been won over. They lined the route along the Magbe River with supplies, part of which had to be returned for lack of carriers. Given German flags by Detzner, the chiefs had flown them in their villages, and crowds accompanied them to the Oji-Magbe confluence, where they were told that any agitators, if they reappeared, should be sent to Bascho. Detzner regretted having to give this order because he considered Nugent unlikely to have been party to such backstairs intrigues. The officer in charge of the Bascho post was advised to deal carefully with the hitherto independent Aligeti and Matena, who in the course of time would provide the Station with willing labour and carriers. On the far side of the Oji, the course of which was surveyed, lived the Okwa, like the Baschu a mixture of Aligeti, Matena and Anyang. The smuggling of firearms and gunpowder over the thinly settled frontier was centred here, another matter for the Bascho post to see to. ‘Our camp at the confluence was at 190 m. We were in another world,’ writes Detzner. Two days later (28 March 1913) they had parted from the last of the well-rewarded Aligeti and had reached the rim of the Ossidinge Basin. The only visitors to their tents were a couple of Boki, who came with a few baskets of food and disappeared again to herd their humpless dwarf cattle or collect the valued wild rubber. In poetic conclusion Detzner tells of the noises of the forest and stories told of it, such as the depredations of elephants, or the wizards who transform themselves into animals and in this guise may eat men. He mentions the last mountain he sees in the distance to the south, the peak of Guba.30 A different juju reigns here.

Notes 1. This is a descriptive summary of selected and translated extracts from the book. 2. Epitomes of chapters 12–14 dealing with the area between the Gamana and Katsena Rivers, Katsena Valley and Menchum confluence area have been previously circulated and deposited at University College London. 3. See Edwin Ardener in this volume. Also E. Ardener (1960, with S.G. Ardener and W.A. Warmington), Plantation and Village in the Cameroons. The anthropologist and photographer Gulla

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Pfeffer (1886–1967) travelled through the region in 1928 and subsequently published Die weisse Mah in 1929, ‘The Magic-Loving Zumperi’ in 1931 and also ‘World’s End: The Village of Esu, Where Life Has Its Own Peculiar Flavor’ (1930). On a lighter note see John Carlin’s Gulla the Tramp: An Ethnological Indiscretion (1937). For the Dii and further references see Jean-Claude Müller, Les Chefferies dii de l’Adamaoua (Nord-Cameroun) (2006). For an account of the earlier 1907 Boundary Commission in which Nugent also took part see G.F.A. Whitlock (1910) ‘The Yola-Cross River Boundary Commission, Southern Nigeria,’ in The Geographical Journal, 36(4):426–438. The term Bafum applies to the Grassfields seen from the north – see L. H. Moseley (1899) – but retains some currency as a museum term covering the arts of Wum, Esu, Kuk, Nyos, etc. Like Munschi, nowadays restricted to the Tiv, it is an early geographical rather than precise ethnic term reflecting the usage of Hausa, and possibly allied Jukun, traders. Gayama (Gajama) was the German customs-post south of the Katsena River. I have not found any illustration of the Esu stool acquired by Detzner in exchange for a pair of uniform trousers in the art books and catalogues I have – a longer search is needed. Since Detzner was to be found in New Guinea in June 1914 he is likely to have gone home to Germany with it before being reposted. The most famous, much illustrated Esu statue, said to be of the triumphant ‘Batum Bay Akiy’ holding a cutlass and severed head, duly made its appearance at the London commemorative Africa Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1996, but neither it nor the stool is mentioned in the descriptive catalogue, which, insofar as the Grassfields are concerned, contains some historical mistakes and moreover is useless for current locations. The more reliable P. Harter (1986) records the statue as ‘Collection Tishmann’ (p. 276) and the photographs (plates 2, 267–68) as by G.L. Thompson. (We know some German museum items made their way to the U.S. in the early 1920s.) This is the present Manyu Division. It appears from a later chapter (pp. 316–317) that the Germans lumped together the most important, ‘lowland Munschi’, the Para (who keep humped cattle), with their highland neighbours, the Agara and/or Missa, Ituava, Iturubu, Inju-Awa and their like, who have no cattle. This may be sorghum rather than millet. It is the other way around. It is the deep mounds for planting that were being constructed, not the rows between them. These are the Zumperi or Kutep north of the Katsena. Much of the material formerly thought to be limonite ore now is known to be goethite. It is unclear whether he means that, as one would expect, smelting and smithing were distinct occupations. Caprimulgus vexillarius. He means eating the dead. Metaso. An English officer. This was a theory of the English doctors. I think there is confusion here with the Pyarä (or Pere, Pyere, Peli, Kutin) a component of some Chamba-led (Samba-Leeko) raiding bands (who appear in Koelle’s Polyglotta [1854] as Adinyi or Ugeny). Some formed slave raiding/trading settlements in the Katsena basin and incorporated both Jukunoid and Tivoid peoples, and had imitators. Such mixed settlements were at Takum, Gayama, Ngadi and Kasimbila (or Garshimbila), for example. The provenance of humped zebu cattle may well be a separate question. The Bamenda component had lost their cattle as well as their horses, but one lot is recorded (1902) as having a few humped cattle. For a reconstruction of Chamba movements see Fardon (1988). These were imported from Belgium. 1908? Unsuitable for grazing. What follows is a very confused account as Detzner hadn’t quite grasped what was involved in an exchange marriage. Detzner was cross with the Bamenda one. Yue?

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27. For some reason, obscure to me, Ossidinge was a civil station and Bamenda a military one. 28. Is this true? Plantains sizzling in palm oil were the preferred birth-feast dish – de rigueur in many places in the 1940s. 29. Bamenda Station Commander, 1904–1908. He wrote a book on bush warfare and was killed in the ‘Munschi expedition’ of 1908. 30. Presumably this is Mt Kupe.

CHAPTER 4

Von Gravenreuth and Buea as a Site of History Early Colonial Violence on Mount Cameroon Peter Geschiere

Up till today Buea remains a place saturated with history. On my first visit in 1987 I was impressed to see a sign along the main road saying Halt! Für einen Gespräch – Stop! For a conversation – the implication being clearly that the owner of the house, Papa Lamba, could tell you all about the German history of the place. In 1957 locals gave Edwin Ardener a copy of a letter of 1894 by Mgr Vieter, then the apostolic prefect of the Catholic Pallotine Mission, with the help of which he was able to correct the official version printed in the Deutsches Kolonialblatt: two sentences had been omitted in the printed version. The more complete version had been kept till then by Mr Esasso Woleta’s family (E. Ardener 1996: 105, 146). This fascination with the German presence continues unabated: in 1997, after a lecture at the new University of Buea, several students came to tell me that their fathers had kept letters from the Germans to chief Motinda, the great rival of the Endeleys – the Buea ‘royal family’ – and to others.1 During the 1990s the old ‘German houses’ with their characteristic stilts were restored and once more inhabited by Germans – this time technical experts in the service of the large GTZ project for the conservation of Mount Cameroon. These events seemed to dovetail neatly with that historical consciousness. A crucial date for this ongoing preoccupation with history is no doubt 5 November 1891, when the men of Kuva, chief of Upper Buea, succeeded in killing Freiherr von Gravenreuth, the commander of a German expedition, and forcing his expedition into a desperate retreat. The event was traumatic, certainly to the German colonizers but later also to the Bakweri of Buea because it led to a largescale Straf-Expedition (punitive expedition) in 1894 that caused great distress to Kuva and his people. It was also a productive event, in the sense that it put Buea on the map of Cameroonian history. In 1901 it replaced Douala as the capital of German Cameroon, notably because of its healthy climate, high up the mountain. Notes for this chapter begin on page 86.

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These events stimulated an impressive production of history by Bakweri intellectuals.2 But it is clear that this production of local history has been strongly encouraged since the 1950s by the seminal work of Edwin and Shirley Ardener – not only through a continuing stream of publications but also by the building up of the Buea Archives, a true hotbed of history-writing.3 In the 1990s Shirley helped to organize a successful rescue operation for these archives, which no doubt will further stimulate the historical interest of Bakweri historians. The aim of this chapter is to return once more to this crucial 1891 event. Edwin and Shirley Ardener have already written so thoroughly on this event, also using German sources, that it is difficult to add anything. So my aim is quite modest: I will try to throw some more light on a central actor in it, Freiherr von Gravenreuth. His role has remained somewhat obscure – perhaps because it was largely a failure. After all, it was only through his death that he gave the Battle of Buea such an impact. To him, the Buea expedition seemed to be only a preliminary to the real thing: the Süd-Expedition that was to bring the Germans into the region of the mythical Lake Chad so as to assert their imperial claims, especially vis-à-vis the French. However, this minor digression up the mountain to Buea was to prove fatal to him. The German archives, both in Potsdam and Yaoundé, help to throw some further light on his role, which proves to have been quite a confused one. But in this, he was certainly not alone among the new colonizers who were groping to find their way in the early colonial confusion to establish control over new acquisitions with a minimum of costs. In a broader perspective, von Gravenreuth’s activities – which in retrospect may seem quite grotesque, especially the ways in which he tried to build up his expedition – might be characteristic of the haphazard ways in which violence was organized during the early colonial days. His misadventure may now seem almost pathetic, yet these clumsy forms of violence were to leave a deep imprint on the subsequent establishment of colonial control.

Preparing the Expedition: Slaves as Soldiers? The background to von Gravenreuth’s misadventure was clearly the reluctance of the German government to invest in the building up of a military apparatus in its new colonies. Economic interests – for Cameroon, especially the two commercial firms Woermann and Jantzen & Thormählen that had played such a central role in the annexation of the colony – were constantly pushing for a greater military effort to open up the interior. But the government was hesitant, and the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) in Berlin was constantly admonishing officials in the colony against military adventurism: the opening up of the interior should rather be accomplished by peaceful means such as constructing roads.4 Moreover, for reasons that are still not very clear, Kamerun was lagging behind in the building up of a Schutztruppe, at least compared to East Africa (where von Gravenreuth had had his first military experience), South West Africa and, according to some, even to the small Togo.5 In the early 1890s the funds available for this for Kamerun were clearly lower than in East and South West Africa. A formal Schutztruppe in East

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Africa had already been created in practice in 1889 and formally constituted in 1891, in South West Africa in 1891, while Kamerun followed only in 1894/5. Before this, the official viewpoint was that for Kamerun eine kleine Polizeitruppe would be sufficient for the opening up of the Hinterland (and a Polizeitruppe was seen as something clearly different from, and cheaper than, a Schutztruppe).6 Von Gravenreuth’s obvious exasperation about his expedition must be seen against this background. He certainly felt honoured to be chosen over others to lead the Süd-Expedition in Kamerun, but apparently his excitement soon turned sour. In the five months between his acceptance of this charge (July 1891) and his early death (November 1891), he twice submitted his resignation (first while en route to Kamerun in Tenerife, and the second time upon arrival there). Moreover, he constantly complained that the means put at his disposal were blatantly insufficient. He tried in all possible ways to acquire additional finance. And he experimented with quite unorthodox methods of recruiting people more cheaply, so as to be able to enlarge his expedition beyond his brief. This last move was to be his undoing. All reports on the ‘first battle of Buea’ agree that the wild firing of his inexperienced African auxiliaries contributed to a large extent to the disarray of the German expedition. Many of these auxiliaries deeply resented being used as soldiers because they believed they had been recruited solely as carriers. Edwin Ardener (1996: 87) no doubt had good reasons for his supposition that the second shot that wounded von Gravenreuth might have been fired by his own men. Freiherr Karl von Gravenreuth was born in 1858 in Augsburg, the son of a royal Bavarian Kämmerer (chamberlain). From 1879 till 1885 he served as officer in the 3rd Bayerisches Infanterie-Regiment. In 1885 he left for East Africa to join the Kilimanjaro expedition of the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, subsequently taking up a position as District Officer (D.O.) and distinguishing himself in all sorts of military exploits. On leave in Germany in 1888 he offered his services to von Wissmann, who was to become famous – and, later on, notorious – for the brutal way in which he subdued the Abushiri rebellion that threatened the German posts on the East African coast. Wissmann immediately accepted von Gravenreuth’s services because of his military accomplishments, and von Gravenreuth played a leading role in von Wissmann’s suppression of this rebellion. In 1890 he was back in Germany taking up a post in the Auswärtiges Amt.7 In June 1891 he was asked to lead the Süd-Expedition in Kamerun. Clearly this was indeed an honour because other officers of the newly established Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika had also shown interest in this position. By 5 July he was on the boat from Hamburg to Douala, in the company of Rolf von Schuckmann, the acting governor of Kamerun, who was to play his own, severely contested role in the Buea drama. However, even before his departure von Gravenreuth had complained in a letter to the Kolonial-Abteilung (Colonial Section) that it would be impossible to fulfil his task with the means put at his disposal. He insisted that in Kamerun, as elsewhere, a proper Schutztruppe should be founded instead of a mere Polizeimacht. But the Kolonial-Abteilung was clearly not impressed and answered by telegram to Tenerife that if he really did not want to carry out his instructions his only options were Verzicht und Rückkehr (resignation and return). At this, von Gravenreuth relented, and on 18 July he answered from Tenerife that

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he would ‘act according to instructions’.8 Yet this was certainly not the end of his often quite desperate attempts to enlarge his expedition. It is clear that von Gravenreuth’s discontent arose out of his East African experiences. Indeed, in comparison the means put at his disposal were quite meagre. In 1889 von Wissmann had received two million marks for his Abushiri expedition; in 1890 four million were added (Huijzendveld 1997: 113–131). For the Cameroonian Süd-Expedition only 400,000 marks were granted, and the Auswärtiges Amt stubbornly refused to add anything. Strikingly, in a letter to von Gravenreuth of 31 July 1891, the Kolonial-Abteilung reproached him for continuing to compare West African circumstances with East African ones: clearly it was of the opinion that things should be cheaper in West Africa.9 The plan for the Kamerun Süd-Expedition was nonetheless the consequence of a new financial injection: early in 1891 the Reichstag, after years of pressure from commercial firms, finally agreed to a special loan of one and a half million marks for the opening up of Kamerun’s interior. Premierleutnant Kurt Morgen, just back from Kamerun where he had completed several expeditions into the interior – up to the Upper Sanaga and even reaching Adamawa – was asked to draw up a plan on how best to make use of these funds. He sketched an ambitious scheme.10 The available resources would not be sufficient for the bringing to order of the strong Muslim societies further in the interior. The government should rather concentrate on the Nutzbarmachung (exploitation) of the coastal region and the immediate interior. Breaking through the trade monopoly of the coastal peoples – notably the Duala – was therefore a primary goal. This would have the additional advantage of solving the problem of the lack of manpower. Despite this modest point of departure, Morgen developed a two-pronged approach of quite an ambitious scale. He proposed to use nearly half of the available money for two expeditions: 150,000 marks for the Nord-Expedition that was to ensure once more the safety of the road Zintgraff had created along the Mungo towards the Grassfields; this expedition was especially to take revenge on the Bafut for the defeat they had earlier in the year inflicted upon Zintgraff. But he reserved a lot more money – 500,000 marks – for the Süd-Expedition that was to establish Kamerun’s eastern border, especially against the French, whose rapid advance up the Oubangi into the Lake Chad region was clearly followed with some anxiety in Germany.11 Morgen sketched quite a daunting trajectory for this expedition: up the Sanaga (which he erroneously thought to be navigable for a long stretch), from there to Yaoundé, then to ‘the knee’ of the ‘Wabangi’ (Oubangi), from there to the Schari and up to Lake Chad. The return could then be made by via Yola back to ‘Kamerun’ (= Douala). All this would take a year and a half and might be accomplished by 7 whites and 400 ‘blacks’. Morgen underlined that the expedition should be of a ‘political nature’: the leader should conclude treaties with the main Häuptlinge (chiefs) and should be satisfied with marking the German presence in these distant regions. Morgen’s plan was nonetheless an extremely ambitious one. Characteristic is his insistence that the expedition leader should also be provided with a Firman of the Turkish sultan, who might help him to establish good relations with the great Muslim empires (Reiche) in the North.12 It is also striking that he mainly seemed worried about the reactions of the muhamadanische Häuptlinge. The ‘wild tribes’ imme-

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diately behind the coast were apparently supposed to offer less of a problem. One of the more palpable outcomes of the Süd-Expedition – although, again, a rather negative one – would be to prove that this supposition was completely wrong.13 In view of the ambitious aims Morgen sketched for this expedition, one can understand von Gravenreuth’s exasperation about the limited means put at his disposal14 – all the more so because the Kolonial-Abteilung accepted Morgen’s proposal in its entirety, but without further justification reduced the available funds to 400,000 marks.15 Clearly von Gravenreuth was not going to accept this. Throughout his three-month journey along the coast – with long stops for recruiting people – he continued to devise new schemes to enlarge his expedition, but he met a depressing series of setbacks. First of all, the request he had submitted to the AntisklavereiLotterie for a grant of 100,000 marks was turned down. Moreover, the request itself earned him a severe reprimand from the Kolonial-Abteilung: how could he submit a plan of the Reichskanzler to a private institution? He was certainly not allowed to raise money on his own initiative; any further deviation from his instructions would put his whole expedition in jeopardy.16 In August a similar request by von Gravenreuth to the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) was rejected.17 Another way by which von Gravenreuth hoped to stretch his means was by recruiting people along the coast as cheaply as possible. Morgen had already ordered recruits on his behalf through the German consuls along the coast: 200 Nangos (?) in Lagos, 100 Neger in Little Popo and 100 Weyjüngen (Wey-boys) in Monrovia; von Gravenreuth’s instructions were to select the fittest.18 However, the recruitment was unexpectedly difficult. As the German consul in Monrovia, a certain Mr Hedler, writes: ‘To my regret it is absolutely impossible to recruit any Wey-boys for Kamerun, since they have become suspicious (kopfscheu) because of Zintgraff’s defeat against the Bafut earlier that year and all fear that they will be used for military purposes.’19 Indeed, this was to become a recurrent problem in the German effort to build up a military force in Kamerun: recruiting people along the West African coast to work as carriers was already quite difficult, but they would categorically refuse to be used as soldiers. In subsequent years it would even come to regular strikes by West Africans who claimed that they were recruited as labourers and not as soldiers, thus paralysing military expeditions.20 Apparently von Gravenreuth succeeded nonetheless in recruiting some 100 people in Togo and 100 more in Monrovia and Accra.21 But he believed he had accomplished a master stroke at the end of August when he bought 370 male and female slaves from King Behanzin of Dahomey. These Freigekauften (lit. ‘bought free’) had to sign a ‘labour contract’ that would have heavy consequences for Kamerun in the next few years. It stipulated that they agreed to be shipped to Kamerun, where for five years they would be fed and clad, but would be obliged to accept any work imposed upon them (as porter, soldier, farm labourer, etc). The money von Gravenreuth paid for them (320 marks for a man, 280 for a woman) was considered as a Vorschuss (advance) on their wages for this whole period. Moreover, at the end of this five-year period they were to remain in German service.22 Even von Gravenreuth’s German colleagues were quite confused by this ‘contract.’ Acting Governor von Schuckmann, Gravenreuth’s fellow-traveller who had arrived earlier in Douala, had already by 27 August 1891 sent a panicky message to Berlin that a German boat

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had landed 180 Neger, 100 schwarze Frauen and 20 Kinder whom von Gravenreuth apparently had bought in Weidah from the Dahomey king. From a ‘confused’ letter von Schuckmann had received from von Gravenreuth, he understood that 500 more were to follow! Von Gravenreuth’s letter suggests, moreover, that he wanted to create eine Ansiedlung (settlement) here. ‘What is his plan? When will he finally stick to his instructions?’ Von Schuckmann immediately sent a telegram to Lagos insisting that von Gravenreuth stop buying up any more people.23 However, the acting governor soon changed his opinion. On 17 September, von Gravenreuth finally arrived in Kamerun with another 120 ‘Dahomey’ people and 100 from Togo. On a following boat he was expecting another 50 Wey-boys and 50 persons from Accra to arrive. All in all his expedition would number 690 people (including 140 women) while he was supposed to have recruited only 400. Yet von Schuckmann does not seem to see this as a problem any longer. This is no surprise since the Arbeitermangel – labour shortage – had become one of the main problems of the new colony and was to remain so until the very end of German rule in the southern areas (1914). In his letter of 30 September, he shows himself a truly talented bookkeeper where human resources are involved – he had already understood that the ‘Dahomeans’ were indeed cheap labour. The Basler Mission had been eager to take over an unspecified number of ‘Dahomeans’, compensating von Gravenreuth for his costs (which apparently meant that they paid von Gravenreuth 320 or 280 marks per man or woman, thus taking control over their labour for the next five years). Meanwhile, 30 men and 20 women were to be taken over by the government for the formation of the new Polizeitruppe.24 Von Gravenreuth’s financial problems would thus be more or less solved. The acting governor closed his letter with a complicated calculation showing that the ‘Dahomeans’ were indeed cheaper than any other form of labour recruitment along the coast, especially because they were bound to serve for five years without any right to further compensation. Moreover, should they prove to make satisfactory soldiers they would be far less costly in view of the high prices now demanded all along the coast for military service.25 However, others did notice how close this form of labour contract was to the straightforward buying and selling of slaves. On 23 November 1891, the German consul in Lagos sent the Reichskanzler a brief article from The Lagos Weekly Record (14 November 1891): A large number of persons are reported to have been procured by purchase from Whydah and were recently conveyed to the Cameroons for the German Government. A large contingent of Yoruba was among the number, including persons captured in the recent raid of the Dahomeans on the Yoruba country. A woman who has two children in the Catholic mission at Abeokuta, and who was captured by the Dahomeans is reported to be now in the Cameroons, with several others who have relatives in this town, and to whom they have sent messages informing them of their whereabouts and condition.26

The consul added that this must concern the Anwerbung (recruitment) by von Gravenreuth in Weidah in August. Apparently the Reichskanzler was worried enough by all this to ask for clarification. In his letter of 4 December 1891, Acting Governor von Schuckmann hastened to declare: ‘[A]ll people recruited by von Graven-

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reuth have been explicitly declared free in front of themselves, officers and third parties.’ ([A]lle durch von Gravenreuth angeworbenen Leute sind sich selbst gegenüber, Offizieren und Dritten gegebüber ausdrücklich frei erklärt worden.) He added that ‘the people’ repeated how content they were. He had not made any special arrangements for paying a salary because most of them were either directly or indirectly in the service of the government, and so protected from exploitation by private persons [sic].27 The fierce rebellion by the ‘Dahomey’ Polizeisoldaten that was to shake the colony two years later showed that the ‘Dahomeans’ themselves were of a different opinion. Their main grievance was that they had never been paid any salary at all, i.e. that they were equal to slaves (see Rüger 1960).

Preparing for War, but with Hesitations Once in Douala, von Gravenreuth seems to have put considerable energy into transforming the motley crew he had recruited – or rather bought – along the coast into a true expeditionary force. On the first of October he reported to the Reichskanzler that he had already formed two companies, one including the persons from Togo and the other including the ‘Dahomeans.’28 As soon as the Accra and Wydah people arrived, he hoped to form a third company out of them. Women and weaker persons had been separated from the main corps in an Arbeitsabteilung (labour section). Together with his non-commissioned officers he had started to put the remainder, as best he could, through military training. The great question was, of course, how they would behave as carriers as well as in battle.29 On 16 October he reported considerable progress: there was now a clear separation between soldiers and labourers, as the former were no longer put to work as labourers.30 In a few days he hoped to be able to march against the Abo, who had shown themselves to be unbotmässig (disobedient). Acting Governor von Schuckmann was clearly impressed by all this energy. In a letter of 1 October, he describes von Gravenreuth as a peculiar fellow (eigenthümlicher Mann), who tends ‘to wander and has difficulties to fit in; restlessly busy and full of zeal … every morning full of new plans that seldom match his instructions’. But he also observed with clear surprise that in only a few days, von Gravenreuth had succeeded in drilling his 300 men in surprisingly well-executed military exercises.31 Indeed, within a few days von Schuckmann was to find out how restless von Gravenreuth was and how much difficulty he still had fitting in with the limitations of his mission. In a subsequent letter of 20 October to the Reichskanzler, von Schuckmann mentioned that von Gravenreuth had once again submitted his resignation (he had earlier done so on 5 October by telegram). Von Schuckmann was clearly upset by the fact that von Gravenreuth had done this behind his back, profiting from the departure of a German steamer. He emphasized that he had strongly dissuaded von Gravenreuth and that he was certainly not in favour of this resignation. On the contrary, he considered von Gravenreuth an eminently suitable expedition leader.32 Attached to von Schuckmann’s letter was a copy of a long letter by von Gravenreuth himself (dated 9 October, i.e. four days after his resignation telegram) in which the latter elaborated upon the reasons for his res-

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ignation. Von Gravenreuth stated that he had not been able to fully inform himself concerning his instructions because he had received these only one hour before the train (to Hamburg?) was leaving. The means put at his disposal were not sufficient to fulfil his task; therefore he insisted on offering his resignation, though he was prepared to stay until a replacement arrived.33 However, only two weeks later, von Gravenreuth seemed to be in a completely different mood when he wrote his report on his ‘successful’ expedition against the Abo. Located just behind Douala, they had been blocking the passage up the Abo River, a tributary of the Wuri.34 Clearly he had enjoyed his first expedition on Kamerun soil. He relates in detail how he organized the attack on Miang, the main enemy town, and how, with gusto, he led his own intrepid charge against hostile salvos and succeeded in breaking through the town’s defences. However, the short Abo expedition – only two days in duration – must have left him, again, with mixed feelings. This was a relatively large expedition: von Gravenreuth brought his newly formed three companies of 100 men each. In addition, he was strongly supported by armed naval personnel (the only ones with military experience) from two ships – the Habicht and the Hyäne – and no less than three Maxim guns.35 But the results of the expedition may not have been as successful as von Gravenreuth and von Schuckmann claimed. Despite this show of force only one Abo village was taken (the Häuptling of the other village that was targeted disappeared into the bush); fighting had been unexpectedly fierce and the two marine contingents (which were not to form part of the subsequent Süd-Expedition) had been crucial in taking Miang. It could therefore hardly be seen as a successful rehearsal for von Gravenreuth’s improvised companies, with which he soon had to start his bigger task, the passage that Morgen had sketched for the Süd-Expedition all the way up to Lake Chad. This might also be one of the reasons why the subsequent attack on Buea, this time with a much smaller expedition, was planned as some sort of second rehearsal – it was, again, a clear detour from the route from Edea up along the Sanaga that Morgen had laid out for the Süd-Expedition. Von Gravenreuth’s second resignation must have still been on his mind when he took ship on 3 November for Victoria at the foot of the huge Mount Cameroon, from where he would lead the expedition against Buea, halfway up the mountain. In view of the stern tone of the earlier reprimand he received from the KolonialAbteilung – admonishing him to finally accept remaining within the limits of his Aufgabe and not to continue to press for additional resources – submitting his resignation a second time was quite a daring step. And the Abo adventure could hardly have put his worries about his limited means at rest. Furthermore, it is not clear from the archives whether he had yet received any formal response to his renewed resignation. It must have been with mixed feelings that he led his corps up the steep slopes of the mountain.36

The Buea Disaster: Disagreements among the Germans Von Gravenreuth’s defeat at the hands of Kuva and the Buea people has been described elsewhere in much detail, notably by Edwin Ardener in his masterful

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Kingdom on Mount Cameroon (1996). Here a brief summary can suffice, to be supplemented on a few intriguing points by data from additional sources from the German archives.37 On 3 November von Gravenreuth’s expedition, comprising 150 men from his own people, supplemented by ten Kru policemen, one Maxim gun and six German officers, was transported by boat from Douala to nearby Victoria. Early the next morning, the expedition began the journey up the mountain. But even on the first day most of von Gravenreuth’s people proved to be unfit as carriers in this difficult terrain, and the expedition became a straggling and ever longer line.38 They camped in Boana. The next day it became clear that the expedition could not expect a friendly reception because at several spots the road was blocked by recently felled trees. At three o’clock, after a sharp bend in the road, they suddenly saw Buea below, only about a kilometre and a half away. The Buea people clearly saw them as well and uttered – in von Stetten’s description – a deafening clamour (ohrenzerreissendes Geschrei), accompanied by war-drums and horns. At this von Gravenreuth had the flag unrolled and waved as sign of his peaceful (?) intentions, but he also had the Maxim gun prepared.39 A few hundred metres further on the expedition stumbled upon a barricade of stakes and stones (see Map 4.1).40 The Buea people fired salvo after salvo from behind this fortification. The Germans tried to fire the Maxim gun but it was jammed. Most of the black soldiers started to fire wildly in all directions.41 Von Gravenreuth ordered von Stetten to make a flanking movement and led a direct charge himself. He was hit in the chest and collapsed just in front of the barricade. Then he was hit by another shot in the back.42 Von Schuckmann, in his report, claimed that it was he who dragged von Map 4.1: Volckamer’s sketch map of the Battle of Buea (Archives of Reichskolonialamt, Deutscher Zentralarchiv, Berlin)

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Gravenreuth to the side and that by that time he was already dead. In the meantime, von Stetten managed to outflank the barricade and attack it from behind. Soon after, von Volckamer, who had led the rearguard, arrived on the scene and rushed forward with his men, overrunning the boma. After this bloody confrontation, von Stetten and Dr Richter having also suffered wounds, the Germans reached the Mission House and started burning the surrounding houses of the Buea people.43 Von Gravenreuth’s body was carried to the Mission House. The next day the whole of the town was captured without much resistance, although an isolated shot wounded von Stetten a second time. Other Buea houses, including the ‘two royal compounds’, were burned down, and significant quantities of cattle,44 gunpowder and other supplies seized. However, after these heroic deeds are recounted, the victorious tone of von Schuckmann’s report seems to become somewhat shaken.45 On 7 November the Germans had already begun to deliberate on how to return. Von Gravenreuth had left a good part of the ammunition at the coast in Victoria. According to von Schuckmann this was because von Gravenreuth expected the expedition to be a peaceful one. It is more probable that von Gravenreuth had counted on a quick victory. He may also not have foreseen that his men would use up most of their ammunition by shooting wildly in all directions. Only sixty rounds per man were left; returning via the road they had come by was therefore considered too dangerous. Moreover, according to von Schuckmann, ‘after the behaviour of the Dahomeans in the battle, the loss of other white men on the way back might endanger an organized return’.46 The road via Soppo was also considered to be too dangerous, so it was finally decided to return via the mountain. It was clear that the journey would be a difficult one, and thus it would be impossible to take von Gravenreuth’s body along. According to von Schuckmann, ‘we took the head and the heart with us and buried the trunk deep under the cellar of the Mission’.47 Early on 8 November they started their climb up through the forest to the grass higher up on the mountain. That night they camped at 2300 metres. For another two days they were still high in the mountains trying to go down via Mapanja, but they could not find the road. On 11 November they went even higher up the mountain to the Levinsquelle (Levin Springs, a.k.a. Mann’s Springs) and started an adventurous descent from there along the almost uninhabited western side of the mountain. The next day they again reached the forest and had to hack their way through, spending the night disturbed by a tornado. Only on 13 November, exhausted, did they reach Bibundi on the coast (about 30 km to the west of Victoria). On the following day they were brought back by boat to Kamerun (Douala). After this somewhat shaky intermezzo, von Schuckmann continues his report in his earlier triumphant tone. Until then, no punishment in the Schutzgebiet had been so thorough. The fact that the very powerful Buea people had been punished, their stronghold taken and their royal compounds reduced to ashes, would certainly inspire more respect for the government amongst other Bakweri. However, the hardships of the return journey leave another impression. The Buea people, for their part, still remember the whole von Gravenreuth episode as their victory. Edwin Ardener (1996: 90, 94) analyses the German version as that of ‘the defeated’ and the Buea one as that of ‘the victors’.48

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A confirmation of this view comes from an unexpected side, that is, from the Germans themselves. Two subsequent letters by Dr Richter and von Volckamer contradict the official German version as summarized above, on several points – one of which suggests a somewhat different reason for the panicky retreat over the mountain. Both letters were written on 1 March 1892 from the expedition camp at Mangambe on the Sanaga, where the Süd-Expedition (taken over by von Ramsay following von Gravenreuth’s death) was camping on its way up the Sanaga to Yaoundé.49 Both were addressed directly to the Reichskanzler in Berlin because both authors felt that their personal honour, and in von Volckamer’s case even his ‘soldier’s honour’, had been impugned, and both ascribed this to the same cause – namely, a version of the events in Buea, disseminated by the newspapers, that was becoming the official version. This version had clearly been propagated by Acting Governor von Schuckmann’s very extensive report, published in the Deutsche Kolonialblatt, quoted above. There seem to be three noteworthy points of difference. The first one is quite personal. Dr Richter felt that his role during the last moments of von Gravenreuth’s campaign was much more important than von Schuckmann’s. He claimed it was he who had struggled to get the Maxim gun working again and that von Schuckmann had not been near the gun. He had even succeeded for a moment, but then the cartridges jammed again. Moreover, von Gravenreuth had died in his arms (and not with von Schuckmann) without uttering any last words, and certainly not ordering that von Stetten should take over the command as von Schuckmann seemed to pretend. The second point is of more importance in the present context. It seems that a few days after the Buea debacle, von Schuckmann had boasted over dinner at the officials’ mess (Beamtenmesse) in Douala that after all, even if ‘they had encountered resistance at Mapanja, they would have fought themselves simply through’ (uns einfach durchgeschlagen haben) – that is, they would not have had to make their rather ignominious detour over the savage western slope of the mountain. Von Volckamer was deeply insulted by this. He stressed that he alone had insisted that they should descend via Mapanja, simply because ‘it was the shortest way and because it was against military sentiments (meinen soldatischen Gefühle) to turn aside again’. This ‘again’ is quite interesting, all the more so because it is explained in the rest of his letter, where von Volckamer, clearly stung by von Schuckmann’s suggestion, takes it upon himself to explain the real reasons for the dramatic journey back across the mountain. He explains that on the third day in Buea, probably 7 November, after the German expedition had destroyed both the western and the eastern part of Buea, one of ‘Dr Preuss’s Way-boys’ came with the message that the Buea people had again occupied the boma (that is, the fortified place to the west of the town where von Gravenreuth had been killed). Von Schuckmann had first ordered him (von Volckamer) to attack the boma once more. But on second thought they had all agreed – especially because several of the Germans were wounded – not to take that risk. Thus the retreat over the mountain had seemed to be the best choice. Von Volckamer’s version, confirmed by Dr Richter’s letter, which also mentions that hard fighting would have been necessary to pass through the boma, throws a very different light on the retreat. It seems, therefore, that the Germans, having

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destroyed the town, discovered that their way back was blocked and that they were more or less trapped. Indeed, only such a daunting realization could explain the dramatic decision to return over a scarcely known and very inhospitable part of the mountain. The German retreat must have been even more of a flight than has been realized by the Buea historians. The third point of difference concerns a quite intriguing point of detail. Dr Richter insisted that whereas he had taken the head from von Gravenreuth’s body, he had not taken the heart, as von Schuckmann maintained in his report and, apparently, in various newspaper articles. Dr Richter is quite adamant on this point. At von Schuckmann’s request he had indeed cut the head from the body, ‘which took … more energy and moral strength than any fight’, but he did not take the heart.50 This anatomical quibble may illustrate how shocking it was for the Germans to leave the body of one of their heroes behind in such a savage area. As the more or less official biography of von Gravenreuth puts it: ‘[He] died the beautiful soldiers’ death (schönen Soldatentod) for his country and the noble cause (gute Sache) to which he had dedicated his life, a shining example for his German brothers-in-arms (Waffenbrüder)’ (Weidmann 1894: 47). In such a lofty vision it might be difficult to accept that the hero’s body was left in enemy territory and might even have been desecrated by adversaries. Indeed, strong rumours began to circulate that the Buea people played dice with von Gravenreuth’s bones. In 1894, a second German expedition finally succeeded in subduing Kuva and his Buea people, this time with surprisingly little effort.51 It was with clear relief that von Stetten, now first in command, could refute these humiliating rumours. He reported in detail – clearly the matter was of great importance – that they found the temporary grave untouched, how his men first dug up the Maxim gun and then found von Gravenreuth’s remains still there, with his leather army boots intact – a tribute to German manufacture even in such macabre circumstances.52 In 1895 it was, therefore, finally possible to bury von Gravenreuth in Douala, in a way that was appropriate to a ‘guten Soldatentod.’ But the impressive monument over his grave still seemed to express the irony of his fate: it was crowned by a statue of a sizeable lion that clearly referred to his East African epithet, ‘lion of the coast’ (simba ya mrima – see Weidmann 1894). In the part of Cameroon that the Germans knew at the time, no lions were to be found. Thus, von Gravenreuth’s grave still seems to reflect his nostalgia for East Africa,53 more propitious to the acquisition of military honours than the treacherous circumstances in West Africa, as the pathetic motley crew of ‘soldiers’ he had recruited himself during his journey along the coast seems to illustrate. Another irony of the official German story is that it superbly ignores what, according to local history, was the direct occasion for the German attack: Kuva’s practice of hanging ‘witches’. According to all Buea historians, a catechist of the Baptists in Victoria, already for some time active in Buea, would have warned the Germans that Kuva was on the point of hanging two more witches.54 The German archives, however, do not mention this at all. They refer only to more direct political and socioeconomic aims: Kuva had to be subdued because of his attacks on neighbouring groups, because he refused to have his people judged by the Victoria court of law, because his independence blocked any possibility of creating a con-

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valescent home higher up the mountain, but most of all because it would never be possible to create a plantation complex on the mountain’s slopes as long as Buea was not ‘pacified’ (S. Ardener 2002). It is striking, however, that the witchcraft issue does get ample attention in other German archives, those of the Basler Mission, which was in the process of taking over the much older Baptist missions (founded in 1845 by Englishman Alfred Saker, with strong British support). Yet here the witchcraft issue is raised in a special context.55 At the time, the Basler missionaries still had problems with the independent Victoria Baptists. They clearly saw the Bakweri up the mountain as a purer and therefore more promising mission field. However, Kuva’s barbarism, as exemplified by his hanging of witches, was an obvious stumbling block to this. So both the Victorian Baptists and the Basler missionaries had their own reasons for highlighting Kuva’s practice of hanging witches. To the Buea people it seems to have been obvious that this was what brought in the Germans. But the German archives do not give any reason to suppose the German officials were interested in the issue. Ironically enough, the idea that the colonial conquerors were pushed by some sort of civilizing mission seems to come in this case from the colonized and not from the colonizers!

Aftermath: The ‘Dahomeans’ as a Fifth Column Pathetic as von Gravenreuth’s death in Buea may seem in retrospect, it certainly did have its consequences. Edwin Ardener (1996: 89) is right that it significantly slowed the German push into the interior.56 The Kolonial-Abteilung in Berlin was little interested in Dr Richter’s and von Volckamer’s wounded ‘soldiers’ honour’: their complaints received a very noncommittal answer and no further action was taken by Berlin on the issues they raised.57 But von Schuckmann, back in Douala, did receive a most stern letter that rebuked him with the admonition that rather than giving in to military adventurism, he should strive for the peaceful opening up of the interior: ‘It seems as if the conception has gained ground that our colonial policy should be mainly oriented towards the acquisition of military honours against wild tribes, while on the contrary a Governor will mainly contribute to the flourishing (Aufschwung) of his territory when he knows how to maintain peace, calm and security.’58 Instead, Von Schuckmann is sternly advised to concentrate on the construction ‘of a road easily practicable for beasts of burden’ between the port of Victoria and Buea, so that trade can develop. Apparently, Berlin was still hesitating over whether more peaceful ways of colonizing the Schutzgebiet would not be cheaper and therefore preferable. But it was especially through his unconventional recruitment of ‘Dahomeans’ that von Gravenreuth was to leave an ill-fated legacy to the young colony. Apparently von Ramsay, his successor as leader of the Süd-Expedition, did not manage to discipline them either. Early in 1892 Ramsay finally undertook to follow the route sketched by Morgen in his original plan for the expedition, from Edea up along the Sanaga in the direction of Yaoundé, in the hope of pushing through to the Chad basin from there. But the first stretch of this long itinerary, between

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Edea and Yaoundé, proved to be full of obstacles. He blamed his problems notably on the miserable quality of his ‘army’ – mainly consisting of von Gravenreuth’s ‘Dahomeans’, the women still included. The picture he sketches is indeed appalling: ‘I can only repeat that I have never seen such miserable riffraff. The march through the land with these cripples and old women is simply a disgrace and a spectacle. We Europeans should be deeply ashamed before the natives who see this troop pass with both pity and derision.’59 It is no wonder, then, that this expedition came to an untimely end. Von Ramsay succeeded with great difficulty in reaching Yaoundé, where Zenker had earlier founded a research station. But by the end of May he was back in Douala and formally notified the Reichskanzler that he had given up the idea of continuing towards Lake Chad. In July the Süd-Expedition, Morgen’s proud dream, was formally disbanded without having accomplished much.60 However, towards the end of the same year (1892), the Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin decided to make a last effort to penetrate into the Muslim area in the North.61 Heavily supported by the British – who saw it as in their interest to support German claims in the area against the French – von Stetten succeeded in leading an expedition along the Sanaga via Ngila and Tibati to Yola in British territory, where he arrived only at the end of August 1893. From there the British helped him to descend the Benue and the Niger to the coast. Yet despite this eventual breakthrough into the savannah area, the legacy of von Gravenreuth’s unfortunate expedition was still not erased. In December 1893 his ‘Dahomeans’ again made their presence felt in the Schutzgebiet, but this time in a quite unexpected way. Von Ramsay’s low opinion of their military capacities may have been too hasty, after all. About fifty-five of them had been incorporated into the first Polizeitruppe of the Schutzgebiet, and they were considered to be the core of the Truppe.62 However, they were still bound by the special arrangement von Gravenreuth had made upon buying them from the king of Dahomey, under which they had to serve the Germans for five years without a salary in order to redeem the money paid for them. It was this special statute that led them to start a rebellion that brought the colonial government to the verge of complete collapse. Adolf Rüger’s detailed study (1960) of this dramatic episode clearly shows that the German government was completely taken by surprise.63 The trigger event occurred on 15 December 1893 when Kanzler Leist, then acting governor in Douala (who had earlier spread the rumour that ‘the Blacks’ were playing dice with von Gravenreuth’s bones), had the ‘Dahomean’ women flogged in front of their men because some of them had refused to join in the obligatory work in the governor’s garden. But the deeper cause was that the ‘Dahomeans’ felt they were still being treated like slaves. Particularly grievous to them was that, as experienced soldiers, they had to train new recruits who received payment while they themselves, under their five-year contract, received no pay but only a meagre ration to feed themselves and their wives. As they put it in March 1893 in an address to the Kaiserlichen Kanzler des Schutzgebietes von Kamerun, written in German with the help of Alfred Bell,64 a son of one of the Duala kings: ‘[W]e are owned by you … we have no parents here and we are two years here now and we never received any pocket money … we are as useful as the other Govern-

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ment’s soldiers and we have given our hearts and our hands for the German fatherland like any German soldier … so we ask you most obediently for some pocket money.’65 Acting Governor Leist showed no intention of offering any substantial concession. To the contrary, both Alfred Bell and Mamadu, the leader of the ‘Dahomeans’, who had drafted the address, were severely reprimanded. This made the situation ever tenser.66 Just how tense the situation became can be guessed from a subsequent report by Leist, in which he tried to justify the meagre rations of the ‘Dahomeans’. He argued that because the government had given them wives from among those whom von Gravenreuth had bought from the king of Dahomey, it had in fact provided them with an extra source of income. A ‘Dahomean’ could ‘earn extra income by offering his wife to soldiers without a woman’. (durch Überlassung seines Weibes an weiberlosen Soldaten sich ein Verdienst … schaffen).67 The flogging of the women in front of their men was the final blow. That same evening the ‘Dahomeans’, who lived together in their own barracks, decided to rebel and at the very least to kill Leist himself. They plundered the ammunition store and stormed the ‘First Mess’, shooting at the head of the table where the highest officials were having their meal. Unfortunately (at least for the Dahomeans) Leist was not yet there. They killed Assessor Riebow, who that evening was seated in Leist’s place, but the others escaped. Leist himself appeared a few minutes later on the scene but managed to escape and barricaded himself in the Gouvernmentshaus with the other Germans, traders included, and some Wey-soldiers. During the night and the next morning they were so strongly attacked there that they decided to withdraw to the harbour in order to take refuge on two government ships. But what was meant to be an orderly withdrawal turned into a chaotic flight, and the Germans ran for their lives. As Rüger (1960: 126) concludes with clear schadenfreude: ‘Thus the official representatives of German colonialism in Kamerun were chased from the seat of Government authority – the German colonial regime was toppled in the colony’s capital.’ The ‘Dahomeans’ had planned their move at a strategic moment when the Hyäne, the main German warship, was away on a trip to Sao Tomé. The ship returned on 20 December and immediately started to bombard the government buildings, now occupied by the ‘Dahomeans’. But the latter kept up their resistance, and only on 23 December did the Germans dare to organize a landing party. After fierce fighting the ‘Dahomeans’ were forced to retreat, but the Germans still felt too weak to pursue them. It was not until 5 March 1894 that all the ‘Dahomeans’ were taken captive. In the meantime further reinforcements had arrived from Germany and the local population had been encouraged by all sorts of rewards to capture the fugitives. Most were summarily executed. With this bloody episode the role of von Gravenreuth’s ‘Dahomeans’ in Kamerun seemed to have finally come to an end. But the whole affair, triggered by his unconventional methods of recruitment, was to have even longer-lasting consequences. On the one hand, it made the Germans finally decide to take the military challenges of their Schutzgebiet more seriously. From 1894 onwards they started to build up real Schutztruppe for Kamerun. Clearly the ‘simple Polizeitruppe’ that the KolonialAbteilung had considered sufficient for this particular colony in 1891 was now deemed insufficient.68 On the other hand, German colonialism was to be haunted by this particular affair. It was used to great effect by the anti-colonial lobby in the

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Reichstag, especially by Bebel and his social democrats. He was so successful in his denouncing of the whipping of women and the use of ‘Dahomeans’ as slavesoldiers that even parliamentarians from the Catholic Zentrumspartei tended to follow him. In the end, Leist and two other officials were dismissed (Rüger 1960: 141–146). But all this made the ‘Dahomeans’ affair such a well-known colonial scandal that it could be raised twenty-five years later at the peace negotiations of Versailles as an argument for the appropriation of the German colonies by the Allies. As Edwin Ardener concludes (1996: 102), ‘thus finally ended the curse of the grotesque Gravenreuth Expedition.’ The whole affair raises the question as to whether von Gravenreuth’s uneasy approach was so exceptional. Was the chaotic violence he unleashed in buying up the Dahomean slaves in order to complement the sparse means put at his disposal – leading to their wild shooting in their first military encounter at Buea, their rapacious behaviour as ‘soldiers’ under von Ramsay, and their determined rebellion against their German masters one year later – rather characteristic of the early colonial period that so deeply marked the equation of colonialism with violence in subsequent years?

Conclusions In his seminal study of colonial resistance in South Cameroon, the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe (1996) highlights, with his usual visionary insight accompanied by an avalanche of historical detail, the central role of violence in colonial processes of accumulation. Crucial to the colonial project is therefore the regulation of violence: ‘The commandement of the natives and the mise en valeur of the dominated territories can therefore be interpreted as particular forms of the mise en oeuvre of violence, its domestication or its intensification, its “circulation” within the conquered societies and its legitimation according to the norms and the values of the time.’69 The state’s involvement in the mise en valeur of the colony occurs ‘while gradually replacing “private” violence by a public and bureaucratized violence’ (Mbembe 1996: 163). It is, therefore, significant that the violence organized by von Gravenreuth at the very beginning of the colonial ‘pacification’ could in all sorts of respect still be termed ‘private’. He constantly takes initiatives of his own – in his efforts to mobilize extra funding, in his unorthodox methods of recruitment – and he is constantly reminded in no uncertain terms by his superiors that he has to stick to his instructions. Moreover, the colonial section in Berlin still stuck officially to its dream of a friedliche (peaceful) opening up of the interior so that military adventures such as von Gravenreuth’s, which it sponsored nonetheless (albeit with a certain reluctance), might always be blamed on personal initiative. It is clear that this half-private, half-public character of military expeditions in the early colonial years led to particularly clumsy forms of violence: the fierce plundering of Buea combined with a chaotic retreat over a hardly inhabited part of the mountain, and later on the desperate violence of the Dahomean ‘policemen’ in Douala. Von Gravenreuth’s expedition was certainly not exceptional in this re-

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spect. Only eight years later, the French expedition under Voulet and Chanoine (which has received curiously little attention in the more recent literature) triggered similar forms of more or less private violence (but on a much larger scale) in the frontier regions of present-day Mali, Niger and Nigeria on its ill-fated passage to Lake Chad.70 However, it is precisely these clumsy forms of violence, characteristic of the early years of colonialism, that must have left an enormous impression on the local populations. It is clear that von Gravenreuth’s expedition – even though, or maybe precisely because it failed – has become a watershed in Buea history.71 Such events set the stage for a seemingly omnipresent colonial violence, which – as Mbembe shows – even penetrated ‘jusque dans le sommeil de l’autochtone’.72 Von Gravenreuth’s pathetic expedition highlights, therefore, that violence is productive as well: it certainly produced both history and its complement, community. In his challenging study of the partition of India in 1948, Gyanendra Pandey (2001: 3f.) shows with particular force how ‘violence and community constitute each other’, and he adds, most importantly, that ‘they do so in many different ways’. His book shows how the violence of the Indian partition has become a historical ‘language’ with its own specificities. Clearly the very different forms of violence described above marked, here as well, the shaping of Buea as a subject of history. But one can wonder which special traits were developed by the memory of violence, also in its consequences for community-building in this case. It seems to have been marked by an utter lack of knowledge about the adversary – on both sides, in the case of von Gravenreuth’s defeat; for the ‘Dahomean’ rebellion at least on the German side. This may be typical of early colonial forms of violence, explaining why this violence unleashes such wild misunderstandings and uncertain practices: the German astonishment over the fierce Buea resistance at the boma and von Gravenreuth’s all-too-rash charge against hostile fire; the idea that ‘the Blacks’ were playing dice with von Gravenreuth’s bones; the flogging of the ‘Dahomean’ women for a minor offence; the suggestion that the ‘Dahomeans’ should not complain about not receiving a salary because they could earn a little on the side by prostituting the women they had received from the government. But it seems also that precisely the shock of the confrontation with an adversary who was almost a complete stranger provides a particularly strong trope for community-building. The special link of Buea and the Bakweri in general with the Germans may have been initially rather negative, but it soon acquired, somewhat miraculously, a much more positive tenor. Especially in more recent days it has been turned into a powerful memory for mobilizing community feeling and for excluding the ever more numerous ‘strangers’, immigrants from other parts of Anglophone Cameroon by whom the Bakweri feel swamped in their own homeland.73 Von Gravenreuth’s sad death played a crucial role in the construction of this link between Buea and the Germans.74 His tomb in Douala and its proud lion monument have completely disappeared. In this dynamic city, remains from the German period are scarce and hidden. But Buea still has its Bismarck Brunnen (Bismarck fountain), its graves of German soldiers, its striking German houses, etc. It is especially this strong memory of the Germans that makes Buea, as stated in the introduction, a place saturated with history. This violent death occurred more than

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100 years before Shirley Ardener undertook her courageous rescue operation for the Buea archives, which she had earlier helped to build up with so much effort together with her husband Edwin. She put into it all the energy for which she is so well known. The staff of the archives told me – still quite nervously – how on one of her visits ‘Mum’, exasperated that the vacuum cleaner she had arranged for was not used, started to hoover the deposits herself. They certainly needed it. It is precisely such patient labour that can help to put the violent events of a century and their implications for present-day problems in a broader perspective The above may have shown that von Gravenreuth’s story was an even sadder tale than is generally realized. Not only did he die before his Süd-Expedition had even started, but also, during the preparation of his expedition, he seemed to have been in a desperate mood with dark forebodings following his false starts and idiosyncratic initiatives. These dark forebodings, moreover, proved to be right. His clumsy defeat may seem highly pathetic in retrospect, yet in a broader view it becomes clear that even this little act, almost a farce, was an inherent part of the broad colonial drama that was to mark this area particularly deeply. It is in order to construe such links and to clarify what they mean for present-day tensions that continuous encouragement of the study of history – now ever more under siege in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa – is so important. Maintaining the rich archives of Buea and – why not be ambitious? – extending them with a set of copies from the relevant German files is an urgent task to ensure that historians from the area itself will continue the work of Edwin and Shirley Ardener. BMA = Basle Mission Archives (Basel) RKA = Archives of Reichskolonialamt, Deutscher Zentralarchiv, Berlin (Lichterfelde), formerly in Posdam.

Notes 1. See Geschiere 1993. 2. In his 1996 study, Edwin Ardener quoted extensively from P.M. Kale’s Brief History of Bakweri (1939), but he indicated also that many more manuscripts were present in Buea/Soppo. It seems that with time the local production has only augmented. 3. See S. Ardener 1996. 4. See for instance, a letter from the Kolonial-Abtheilung (Colonial Section) of the Auswärtiges Amt to the acting governor in Cameroon of 3 January 1892, just after the news of von Gravenreuth’s defeat had reached Berlin (Archives of Reichskolonialamt, Deutscher Zentralarchiv, Berlin (Lichterfelde), formerly in Potsdam (RKA, henceforth), 3286, p. 38; see also Heidebach 1961 Die militärische Eroberung des Hinterlandes von Kamerun, 1885–1893. Berlin: Humboldt University.). 5. See Stoecker (1977: 32 and 84); Hausen (1970). On East Africa, Loth (1977) and Huijzendveld (1997: 113); on South-West Africa, Drechsler (1977) and Gewald (1996). On Togo see Morgen (1891) in RKA 3284: 25. 6. See RKA 3285, p. 56, letter from Acting Governor von Schuckmann. It is quite striking that Kamerun was lagging behind other German colonies in Africa in military expenditure – at least

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

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in the early 1890s – because by the 1890s it seems to have become the most profitable one (Stoecker 1997: 59). A direct reason might have been that in East and South West Africa the Germans were, in the late 1880s, already confronted with clear opponents (Abushiri in East Africa; Hendrik Witbooy and the Herero chiefs in South West Africa), while in Cameroon the societies just behind the coast seemed to be too unorganized to offer much of a resistance. It was only in 1891, with the defeat of Zintgraff by the Bafut in the Grassfields (present-day North West Cameroon) and the subsequent defeat of von Gravenreuth against Buea – much closer to the coast – that the Germans were confronted with serious setbacks in Kamerun. Weidmann (1894: 47) and E. Ardener (1996: 145). RKA 3284, p. 33, 47, 71, 80 and 81; see also pp. 49–57 for von Gravenreuth’s instructions from the Kolonial-Abtheilung. RKA 3284, p. 105, letter Kolonial-Abtheilung 31 July 1891. Morgen 28 May 1891, RKA 3284, pp. 20–25. The same file contains copies of an article from Affaires coloniales (13 July 1891) announcing that two French expeditions (via the Sangha and via the Chari) were approaching Lake Chad, and an article from the Kölnische Zeitung (15 July 1891) that reports, with some consternation, this rapid advance by the French – they would even reach Baguirmi. According to the second article this is precisely the region that made the Kamerun colony so valuable; therefore it would be unacceptable – all the more because several German explorers had visited it – for it to be claimed by the French (RKA 3284, p. 78 and 79). Interestingly, the German article is another indication of how little idea people had at the time of where the future riches of the colony would come from (namely from the rich resources of wild rubber in the southern forests and the large-scale plantation complex between Victoria and Buea – and certainly not from the semi-arid regions of the North). The Auswärtiges Amt was to take this idea of a Firman by the Turkish Sultan very seriously, clearly hoping to profit from the German-Turkish entente in their dealings with Muslim empires in the Lake Chad basin. After a long correspondence in June and July 1891 (see RKA 3284, pp. 45–47), the German Embassy explained to the Kolonial-Abtheilung, in a letter of 13 August, why this had taken so long: they had endlessly raised the issue with the Sultan but he had been equally insistent about dodging the subject. Finally the Gross-Vizir explained that the spiritual leaders in the Sultan’s entourage were against the German request, because as Khalifa they should not damage the interest of the Islam in the area. However, the Gross-Vizir himself now accepted to write to the Firman in the name of The Porte. Moreover, he also wrote a letter of recommendation for von Gravenreuth, addressed to the Sultan of Bornu, that was translated into Arabic (RKA 3282, p. 134). On 6 October 1891 the governor in Kamerun informed the Auswärtiges Amt that the Firman – with a German translation – had been delivered to von Gravenreuth (RKA 3285, p. 77). The same file contains a note dated 22 November 1891 that the Sultan’s Firman was to be passed on to von Ramsay, von Gravenreuth’s successor as leader of the Sud-Expedition (RKA 3285, p. 111). However, von Ramsay was not to bring the whole expedition further than Yaoundé, so it is hardly probable that the Firman was of any help to him. Morgen proposed to use the rest of the 1.5 million–mark grant as follows: 300,000 marks for the construction of a Landungsbrücken (pier) for the Douala port; 200,000 for the creation, for a five-year period, of a Haussa-Schutztruppe (with one white subaltern and fifty men, preferably Hausa from other areas) following the example of Togo; and 200,000 as reserve. Originally it was the idea that Morgen himself would lead this expedition. The enthusiasm that shines through in the latter’s descriptions of the Aufgabe of the Süd-Expedition suggests that he indeed saw himself as its leader. However, by early June he seems to have withdrawn from the post, ‘im Folge des von ihm geschlossenen Verlobnisses’ (because of his engagement – letter of 8 June 1891 from Kolonial-Abteilung, RKA 3284, p. 33). One may wonder why he changed his mind so abruptly. Engagements were certainly not always a reason for a German officer to turn down the leadership of an expedition that promised to bring success and fame. Maybe Morgen himself was a bit taken aback by the programme he had sketched for this expedition? He subsequently advised negatively on all requests by von Gravenreuth for additional resources (even though the Kolonial-Abteilung allotted his successor considerably less than he had proposed for himself – see RKA 3284, p. 102).

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15. Moreover, it was characteristic that, as von Gravenreuth was to find out only upon his arrival in Douala (in September 1891), the Kolonial-Abteilung had also accepted Morgen’s idea for a Haussa-Schutztruppe for Kamerun but insisted that it should remain a smaller Polizeitruppe (RKA 3285, p. 56, letter from Acting Governor von Schuckmann, 30 September 1891). On 16 October 1891, this proposal was finally accepted by the Reichstag (Rüger 1960: 103). 16. RKA 3284, p. 105, letter by Kolonial-Abteilung, 31 July 1891 to von Gravenreuth (the letter was addressed to von Gravenreuth in Kamerun, but it is highly probably that he received a copy at least during his journey). See also the comment by Morgen on von Gravenreuth’s request, 30 July 1891, RKA 3284, p. 102). There is, of course, quite a bit of irony in von Gravenreuth addressing himself to an anti-slavery lottery in view of his subsequent buying up of slaves from the king of Dahomey and the way in which he had them integrated into his expedition – with quite fateful consequences both for himself and for developments in the colony. 17. RKA 3285, p. 5, letter from President of the DKG Fürst von Hohenlohe, 21 August 1891. 18. RKA 3284, p. 50, instructions to von Gravenreuth, Berlin, 3 July 1891. 19. RKA 3287, p. 92, 28 July 1891; see also Heidebach (1961: 71). 20. See Heidebach (1961: 73); RKA 3289, p. 40; Rüger 1960. Indeed, von Gravenreuth’s fellow-traveller, Acting Governor von Schuckmann, who arrived in Douala before him, complained that all along the west coast it had become impossible to recruit soldiers for less than 25 marks a month; labourers were still a lot cheaper (RKA 3285, p. 56, 30 September 1891). 21. Von Schuckmann to Reichkanzler, 22 September 1891, RKA 3285, p. 49. 22. See Rüger (1960: 103–4); RKA 4018, p. 49; RKA 4021, p. 21 (report Rose, 21 February 1894, on the disastrous rebellion of the Dahomey soldiers of the Polizeitruppen in Douala 1893, which was to be the direct outcome of this contract, as detailed below). Rudin (1938: 193) asserts that the Dahomey court had destined these slaves for ‘sacrificial slaughter’ but does not give any source for this claim. I did not find any mention of it in the German archives, though the Germans might have had good reasons to mention it in view of the subsequent indignation about von Gravenreuth buying up slaves. 23. RKA 3285, p. 41 and 43, von Schuckmann 27 August 1891. 24. The inclusion of women in this Polizeitruppe may be surprising, but von Schuckmann adds that these people can serve as Polizeisoldaten, -arbeiter oder -arbeiterinnen (RKA 3285, p. 56; see also below about the role of women in the Süd-Expedition). 25. RKA 3285, p. 56 (von Schuckmann, 30 September 1891). An appendix to this letter contains a detailed contract between von Gravenreuth and the government for taking charge of 30 ‘strong men and 20 women’; the price was now higher – 400 marks for a man and 360 for a woman – in view of the cost of transport to Douala and in view of the eingetretenen Todesfällen (the cases of death) up to 1 October. 26. RKA 3285, p. 128. See also on the same page a letter to the editor of this Nigerian journal (21 November 1891, p. 5) by ‘A Native’ who concludes that ‘the German government is reviving the slave trade and that the king of Dahomey will be most happy to have found a new market for his slaves. No doubt the price will have been lower, in view the lack of other marketing possibilities … What is especially shocking is that these people have been used … to wage war and kill their brethren.’ 27. RKA 3286, p. 45, von Schuckmann to Reichskanzler, 4 December 1891. Clearly von Schuckmann foresees some difficulty in identifying the Dahomey ‘recruits’. He notes that von Gravenreuth gave persons a number when their name was not known. Deceased persons were crossed off from a list with these numbers. 28. The German archives invariably refer to these ‘recruits’ as Dahomey-Leute. However, because they were slaves of the Dahomey king, many (most?) of them must have come from elsewhere – for instance from the Yoruba region. Therefore, I prefer to refer to them as ‘Dahomeans’ between quotation marks. 29. RKA 3285, p. 54, von Gravenreuth to Reichskanzler, 1 October 1891 30. RKA 3285, p. 87, von Gravenreuth to Kolonial-Abteilung, 16 October 1891. 31. RKA 3285, p. 56, von Schuckmann to Reichskanzler, 30 September 1891. 32. RKA 3285, p. 71, von Schuckmann to Reichskanzler, 20 October 1891. 33. RKA 3285, pp. 73–75, von Gravenreuth to Reichskanzler, 9 October 1891.

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34. RKA 3355, p. 46, report by von Gravenreuth, 21 October 1891. 35. In 1884 a certain Hiram Maxim (who was born in the U.S. but in 1881 emigrated to England) invented the first automatic gun and founded the Maxim Gun Company; in 1901 he became ennobled for this by Queen Victoria. One of these guns was to play a fatal role in the German defeat before Buea in 1891. 36. I did not find any clear, formal reaction from Berlin to von Gravenreuth’s second resignation. But it is striking that by 19 November – only one day after Berlin had the news of von Gravenreuth’s death – two officers from the East African Schutztruppe had already applied for his post (see RKA 3285, p. 79). Had this vacancy been announced earlier? 37. The official version of the disastrous Buea expedition of 1891 is based on three reports, all from 27 December 1891; see RKA 3286, pp. 6–21, by Acting Governor von Schuckmann (who joined the expedition), Premierleutnant von Stetten (the second in command, after von Gravenreuth) and Premierleutnant von Volckamer. All three were published in the Deutsches Kolonialblatt (hereafter DKB) 3 (1892): 14–18. Edwin Ardener’s version is based on these reports, but enriched by elements from the local history (oral and written). We will see below that von Volckamer, together with Dr Richter (another participant), later added a few points that differed strikingly from the official German version. 38. Von Stetten notes that it required ‘the use of extreme measures to make people go on … one man remained lying on the road’, DKB 3 (1892): 16. 39. The same file (3286, p. 48) contains a copy of an article from the Fränkische Kurier (4 March 1892) that expresses some doubts as whether die Schwarzen would recognize waving the flag as a sign of peace. Dr Richter – a participant of the expedition – refers in his letter simply to a Kriegsflägge (flag of war – RKA 3286, p. 58, 3, letter from 1-3-1892). 40. RKA 3286. Interestingly, both von Stetten and von Volckamer in their reports called this the boma (a Swahili term, apparently taken over from German military experiences in East Africa). However, this term might raise some confusion because in East Africa it normally refers to the centre of a (fortified) village/town. However, in this case the barricade was at some distance from the centre of Buea town. 41. Von Stetten (RKA 3286, p. 15) notes that the failure of the Maxim gun had a ‘very depressing’ effect on ‘our Blacks’, who had learned to value this new weapon in the earlier Abo expedition. 42. Edwin Ardener (1996: 87) supposes on good grounds that the second shot might have been fired by von Gravenreuth’s own people (indeed, all reports emphasize the panicky firing of his Africans – no wonder, because they had been recruited as carriers and not as soldiers). But it is clear – as Ardener emphasizes also – that the first bullet came from the Buea side. 43. By 1891 the Basler Mission had already built a house in Buea, which was meant to serve not only as an outpost for the conversion of the mountain people but also as a health resort (Buea, situated at an altitude of 1200 m, is relatively free from malaria). Indeed, one of the reasons the German government was also interested in Buea was that a convalescent home might be established there. No missionary was present at the time of von Gravenreuth’s expedition, but a German researcher, Dr Preuss (in service of the colonial government), had been staying in the Mission House for several months. On hearing the shooting at the barricade, he came up to see what was going on and met von Volckamer halfway between the Mission House and the boma. His presence in Buea (from where he regularly sent reports to the Germans in Victoria) was apparently tolerated by ‘kingue’ Kuva and his people. This shows that relations with the Germans remained quite ambivalent up till von Gravenreuth’s attack. 44. It is claimed that the Bakweri on the mountain still have a special kind of cattle (quite small) that is resistant to sleeping sickness, but there may be none left now. 45. Von Stetten’s and von Volckamer’s reports stop at the taking of Buea and do not refer to the Germans’ panicky journey back. 46. Von Schuckmann’s report, RKA 3286, p. 10. 47. The precariousness of the journey back is clear from von Schuckmann’s remark (RKA 3286, p. 11) that ‘every white man had to carry a light load’. 48. Edwin Ardener (1996: 92) quotes a very interesting passage from P.M. Kale’s A Brief History of Bakweri (1939: 18–21). Especially striking is the following passage, where Kale seems to emphasize von Gravenreuth’s naivety: ‘[T]he Germans got ready, for the first time in their lives

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49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

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perhaps, to meet African warriors … Quite ignorant of what was before them, the Germans marched up to meet the mountain tribe.’ In contrast, Germans sources emphasize von Gravenreuth’s impressive successes in East Africa and see him as a victim of treacherous West Africa: ‘Unfortunately von Gravenreuth had not taken into account that the troops of Dahomé and Kru people he commanded were not equal to the courageous and loyal Sudanese of the East African Schutztruppen’ (Conrad Weidmann 1894: 47). Placing the blame on the panicky reactions of the ‘Dahomeans’ (though there is also the possibility that von Gravenreuth was shot in the back by his own people) makes it all the more ironic that von Gravenreuth only a few months earlier seemed convinced that he had pulled off a master stroke by buying up slaves from the Dahomey king. However, one can wonder whether blaming the ‘Dahomeans’ in particular is fair: they were mainly in von Volckamer’s rearguard and must have appeared on the battlefield only after von Gravenreuth was shot. Moreover, only two years later their famous mutiny against the Germans in Douala showed that at least in the meantime they had become really good soldiers – almost too good, for the Germans. See RKA 3286, pp. 58–67. RKA 3286, p. 58 [10]. See the report by von Stetten, RKA 3355, pp. 81–85, 28 January 1895: ‘Es schien mir Anfangs unbegreiflich dass die Stamm welche uns 1891 so empfindliche Verlüste zugefugt hatte uns diesmal so geringe geschlossene Widerstand entgegensetzte und schreibe diesen Zustand in erster Linie der völlige Überraschung, ausserdem aber der Buschgewandheit der Sierra Leon und Way Soldaten zu.’ (In the beginning it seemed hard to understand that this tribe that had inflicted such heavy losses upon us in 1891 offered, this time, such limited and little coherent resistance. I ascribe this state of affairs first of all to the complete surprise but secondly to the Sierra Leone and Way soldiers’ experience in the bush’.) So in contrast to von Gravenreuth, von Stetten is no longer longing for soldiers from the grasslands of East Africa; on the contrary, he puts his faith in the forest experience of soldiers from the coastal region of West Africa. See report of von Stetten quoted above p. 84: ‘Am 25.Dezember habe ich im Beisein des Leutnants Dominik, Dr Preuss und Polizeimeisters Biernatzky im Keller des früheren Missionsgebäude Nachgrabungen nach der Leiche des verstorbenen Hauptmanns Frh. von Gravenreuth veranstaltet. Da in Kamerun verschiedene unkontrolierbare Gerüchte circulierten, laut welchen die Bueas die Leiche ausgegraben hätten, ausserdem aber in allerletzter Zeit Kanzler Leist einem Interviewer erklärt haben soll, er hätte die Schwarzen mit den Gebeinen des verstorbenen Gravenreuths Würfel schieben sehen, wollte ich die Thatsache feststellen. Die Gebeine würden vollkommen unversehrt, die Füsse noch in den fast intakten Schuhen steckend in derselben Lage, in welcher der Leichnam beerdigt worden war, neben dem Maxim-Geschütz aufgefunden und kann ich alle oben erwählten Gerüchte als erfunden bezeichnen. Ich habe die Gebeine gesammelt um sie mit den in Kamerun beerdigten Nebenresten des Verstorbenen zu vereinigen.’ (On 25 December I arranged, in the presence of Leutnant Dominik, Dr Preuss and police-master Biernatzky, excavations for the body of the deceased Freiherr von Gravenreuth in the cellar of the former Mission House. Since in Kamerun [Douala] various rumours circulated that were hard to control, according to which the Buea people had dug up the body, and since moreover Chancellor Leist recently had declared to an interviewer that he had seen blacks playing dice with the bones of the deceased von Gravenreuth, I wanted to check this fact. The bones found were not at all corroded, the feet still in the shoes that were almost completely intact, in the same position in which the body had been buried, next to the Maxim gun and so I can declare all the rumours mentioned above as completely invented. I have collected the bones in order to reunite them with the remains that were already buried in Kamerun [Douala]’.) In a letter to the Kolonial-Abteilung of 29 June 1891 (RKA 90 Ka2) – even before he had received his orders – von Gravenreuth was already asking for a contingent ‘von Sudanesen der Schutztruppen Ostafrika’s’ as the only solution that would offer at least a certain chance for success in view of what he had heard about Kamerun. See E. Ardener (1996: 91) and his lengthy quote from P.M. Kale (1939). Indeed, the Baptists seem to have been constantly engaged in saving such ‘witches’ from execution. In 1987, old people in Buea still referred to Victoria/Limbe as fõ and explained this term as ‘the place where we used to send our witches’.

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55. See Basle Mission Archives (Basel) (BMA, henceforth), Heidenbote 1890, p. 70; 1892, p. 46; 1894; file E-2-5, p. 186, quarterly report by Graf, 30 April 1892; and file E-2-6, p. 59, annual report 1893 by Stolz, 9 February 1894). 56. Indeed, as Edwin Ardener suggests, this may have had direct consequences for negotiations with the French on the eastern border of the Schutzgebiet. In practice, little came of Morgen’s dream that the Süd-Expedition should march up to the Chari and follow this river down to Lake Chad. The French were already considerably ahead of the Germans in this area, and the latter’s reluctance, reinforced for some years after von Gravenreuth’s debacle and the subsequent failure of the Süd-Expedition, to invest in larger military expeditions made their arrears even larger. In the 1894 arrangement the French-German border was fixed much more to the west (see also Heidebach 1961: 82). 57. RKA 3286, p. 65, letter from Kolonial-Abtheilung, 4 July 1892. However, both gentlemen did subsequently also run into trouble with von Ramsay (von Gravenreuth’s successor as the commander of the Süd-Expedition), complaining again that von Ramsay’s treatment of them had lacked Offizierswürdig (the respect due to an officer). Von Ramsay, from his side, complained about their overly brutal treatment of the blacks. In his report von Schuckmann (still acting governor) clearly sees his chance to get even with them; he completely agrees with von Ramsay (RKA 3289, p. 114, report of von Schuckmann, 25 May 1892). 58. ‘Es scheint, als ob die Auffassung Platz gegriffen habe, dass der Schwerpunkt unserer Kolonialpolitik an den Erwerb kriegerischer Ehren gegen wilde Stämme liegt, während gerade umgekehrt derjenige Gouverneur am meisten für den Aufschwung des Gebietes sorgt, der den Frieden, die Ruhe und Sicherheit zu wahren versteht.’ RKA 3286, p. 38, letter from Kolonial-Abtheilung to von Schuckmann, 3 March 1892 (see also Heidebach 1961: 73). Of course, this emphasis on peaceful colonization constantly collided with the fear of being outpaced by other colonizing nations, notably the French (see Heidebach 1961: 77; and, for instance, RKA 3292, p. 12, letter by Governor von Zimmerer, 19 November 1892). However, the awareness of the French expeditions could also have the opposite effect. Early in August 1891 – only a few months before von Gravenreuth’s death in Buea – the Kolonial-Abtheilung explicitly warned him to be careful and to avoid ‘kriegerische Verwicklungen’ (warlike confrontations), because they had just had news that the French expedition led by Crampel on its way to Lake Chad had been completely annihilated on its way to Lake Chad. This should be another warning to von Gravenreuth of how dangerous it was to try and fight his way through while not enough ‘kriegerische Mittel’ (means of war) were available: ‘Es handelt sich für Sie … nicht um einen Kriegszug’ (your expedition is not a military one); the aim should rather be to conclude treaties as von Nachtigal and Flegel (two famous German explorers in the area) had done (RKA 3284, p. 118, letter of KolonialAbtheilung to von Gravenreuth, 9 August 1991). Clearly Berlin was still very reluctant during those years to launch more ambitious expeditions in this area. 59. ‘Ich wiederhole dass ich ein derartig erbärmliches Gesindel noch niet gesehen habe. Der Marsch durch das Land mit diesen Krüppeln und mit diesen alten Weiber ist einfach eine Schande und ein Spektakel. Wir Europäer müssen uns mehrhaftig vor den Eingeborenen die teils mitleidig, teils spottend diesen Zug passieren lassen, schämen.’ Von R. adds that as soon as they arrive in a village, they start to steal, causing further problems with the villagers. Moreover, he feels obliged to contradict a quite surprising suggestion: ‘... [I] have been told that I could also arm the women – but there is no question of this because even the men are not strong enough to carry a gun next to their load’ (report by von Ramsay to Kolonial-Abtheilung, Berlin, 30-4-1892, RKA 3286, p. 54). See also Heidebach (1961: 73, 123) who confirms that about one-third of von Ramsay’s Truppe consisted of women. 60. See RKA 3286, p. 66, 112ff. 61. RKA 3292, p. 9, letter to Governor von Zimmerer, 19 November 1892. 62. RKA 4017, p. 16, letter by Kanzler Kleist to Reichskanzler, 21 February 1894; see also Rüger 1960. 63. See also RKA 4016–4023. Rüger was one of the East German historians who, under the aegis of Professor Helmuth Stoecker, published a series of collective works on the history of German colonies, based exclusively on a detailed study of the rich German colonial archives (which at the time were in Potsdam, in former East Germany), apparently without the possibility of ever

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64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

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visiting the areas concerned and, of course, dominated by a very outspoken Marxist-Leninist perspective. Apparently the ‘Dahomeans’ themselves used mainly pidgin English, even in the contacts with their German superiors. ‘… wir alle Dammeleute [Dahomeans] sind Ihrer Eigenthum, wir haben keine Eltern und kein Verwandten hier, und wir sind seit 2 Jahren hier und haben niemals etwas Taschengeld bekommen, so bitten wir alle Eurer Hochwohlgeboren aufrichtig zu sagen, dass wir sind Ihrer Eigenthum, und deshalb bitten wir Ihnen ganz gehorsamst, ob Sie uns nicht mitleiden können und uns etwas Taschengeld geben. Da wir aber auch etwas Vergnügen gerne mitmachen möchten, wir aber können es nicht, weil wir kein Taschengeld haben, wir sind eben so brauchbar wie die anderen Gouvernement Soldaten und wir haben eben so gut unseren Herzen und Hände für deutsches Vaterland ergeben wie jeder deutsche Soldat.…’ (Rüger 1960: 113; RKA 4022, p. 15, submission by Mamadu, ‘Dammeheadman’ before Leist, 9 March 1893). It is striking is that the Dahomeans insisted on their soldiers’ honour (just as their German colleagues did constantly). In November Leist finally offered monthly wages of 1 to 5 marks for only fourteen members of their group. But Mamadu (their leader) is reported to have refused with the words: ‘I am a big soldier; this is no reward for me’ (Rüger 1960: 115; RKA 4021, p. 85). Apparently at least some among the haphazard crowd that von Gravenreuth had bought from the Dahomey king – and about whom both he and von Ramsay reported in such condescending tones – had developed a military spirit. See report by Komissar Rose, who had to look into the whole affair and reported on this view without contradicting it: RKA 4018, p. 71, report by Rose, 21 February 1894; see also Rüger (1960: 107). However, the Polizieitruppe was maintained and so continued to exist side by side with the new Schutztruppe. Both organizations had their own uniforms and training. Interestingly, Rudin (1938: 194) mentions that soldiers from the Schutztruppe used to call their colleagues from the Polizieitruppe ‘Weibersoldaten’ (female soldiers) – is there a reference here to the striking role of ‘Dahomey’ women in the first years of existence of the Polizeitruppe? ‘Le “commandement” des indigènes et la ”mise en valeur” des territoires dominés peuvent par conséquent être interprétées comme des formes particulières de mise en oeuvre de la violence, de sa domestication ou de son intensification, de sa ”circulation” au sein des sociétés conquises, et de sa légitimation dans les normes et les valeurs de l’époque’ (Mbembe 1996: 161). See also Mbembe 1990 and 2001. See Suret-Canale 1973: 296. Rumours about the scale on which Voulet and Chanoine were slaughtering the local population made the French government send Colonel Klobb, who was supposed to take over the expedition. But when Klobb finally caught up with the expedition, Voulet had him shot. Frightened by Voulet’s dream of establishing himself as an African chief – some sort of lesser-known Kurtz – his own men rebelled and murdered both him and Chanoine. There is a striking parallel here with the intentions of a later Strafexpedition (1910) by Dominik against the Maka – because supposedly a German trader had been ‘eaten’ in the area – as, again, still a turning point in people’s historical consciousness (Geschiere: forthcoming). ‘Even into the sleep of the autochthon’ (1996: 388). It is one of the sad ironies of history that it was again the Germans who started to attract labourers from elsewhere for their burgeoning plantation complex, thus saddling the Bakweri – in Buea and elsewhere – with the ‘stranger’ problem. Especially recently, with the upsurge of the ‘politics of belonging’ in the area, this has led to ever more violent attempts towards excluding these deeply resented came-no-goes (see Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000, also Chilver and Röschenthaler 2001). For instance, in 1987 people in Buea were still appalled that on a visit to Cameroon, German Prime Minister Kohl did not come to Buea. He went everywhere, ‘even to Ngaoundere’, but not to Buea. How could he forget that this place had a special meaning to the Germans?

CHAPTER 5

Azi since Conrau Anthropological and Historical Perspectives Michael Mbapndah Ndobegang and Fiona Bowie

The Anthropologist’s Voice On 19 December 2003 I1 set off to walk to the Fon of Fontem’s palace in Azi. I had no trouble remembering the short cut I used to take to Azi’s weekly market when I lived in Fontem in the early 1980s, although in the intervening decades the landscape had changed considerably. Deforestation was continuing apace, with views both distant and near opening up where before there was only forest. New concrete houses, empty or half finished, built by remittances from Bangwa in America and Europe, were appearing – strangely out of place among the red mudbrick houses that have replaced most of the older, wooden structures. Some children accompanied me politely and curiously, for part of the journey, but otherwise I was alone with my thoughts, interrupted only by the dust clouds thrown up by the occasional passing motor vehicle. The reason for my trek was to pay my respects to Efuctlefac Fontem, the first wife or Ngwikongoh (‘love wife’) of the late Fontem Defang. The first wife of a polygynist, particularly a powerful chief, is a respected figure with responsibility for the smooth running of the compound. The ‘cry-die’ or death celebration takes place some time after the death and requires a considerable financial outlay. Relatives are expected to attend and will return from overseas if necessary. Masquerades form a central part of the public spectacle and include dancers hired from neighbouring groups as well as local palace societies. Some costumes are hired, but others are preserved for generations and only brought out on such occasions. As I crossed the marketplace and made my way down into the palace compound (Fig. 5.1) it was apparent that preparations were still at an early stage. A sound system was being strung up along the central dancing area, and children were being instructed to sweep and water the area to reduce the dust. A simple and Notes for this chapter begin on page 107.

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Figure 5.1: Azi Palace, Preparations for the Cry-die of Efuctlefac Fontem (Fiona Bowie, December 2003)

rather rickety awning, lined with leopard skins to signify royal status, was being set up in front of the palace for the Fon and Mafwa (his sister or ‘queen’), visiting chiefs and the most distinguished guests. Women were busy cooking in their individual houses in the terraces that line the sides of the compound. Most of those present wore colourful trade-cloth or Grassfield-style Bamenda shirts with plain or beaded robes and hats. Close relatives of the deceased were distinguishable by the ‘uniform’ dress or shirt of yellow and white stripes bearing a photograph of the deceased. I greeted a few guests sitting outside the women’s houses, and was offered a seat before being invited inside for a meal of chicken and plantain. One thing that I have learnt doing fieldwork is the value of just being somewhere, and in the hours spent waiting for something to happen I adopt what my husband refers to as my ‘fieldwork mode’ – a kind of suspension of active time and a state of alert passivity, in which one lets events unfold without worrying about schedules, bodily functions or what might or might not happen next. During this waiting period my mind turned to events a hundred years earlier, when the noted German explorer and trader Gustav Conrau visited Azi Palace and was held under a kind of house arrest in the lefem copse to my right before being killed while trying to make his escape.

An Anthropologist’s Account of History Robert Brain, an anthropologist who lived with the Bangwa in the 1960s, wrote a novelistic account of Conrau’s first visit to Fontem, Kolonialagent, in which Conrau records in his diary:

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At the river below the palace, I was met by a welcoming committee of Bangwa noblemen, led by Mafwa, the queen, and most of the high-ranking princes of the land with their retinue of pages, slaves and retainers … I was amazed at these splendid figures: the handsome nobles in their pleated, billowing loincloths of local stuff, tight-fitting ‘Turkish’ jackets, feathered headgear; servants in special caps, leopard’-teeth necklaces, and leggings studded all over with brass bells; small pages, naked but rubbed with a fine red powder and wearing elaborate brass ornaments. (1977: 15–16)

Most if not all the elements of clothing and forms of greeting observed by Conrau were still present at the end of 2003, although no one went naked any longer. Finally, the king appeared from the palace gate, bare to the waist, wearing an enormous pleated loincloth of locally made blue-and-white velvet, which hung down in heavy folds to the ground. Adorning his chest was a weighty brass necklace, and in his hands he flourished a cutlass and an elaborately ornamented ivory fly-whisk, strung with amulets. He danced, in a graceful, loping, animal-like way towards us, surrounded by more servants, wearing leopard-skins attached to their foreheads and hanging down their backs, while Focha [the ‘prime minister’] crouched low beside his master, hooting through cupped hands, like a sick cow. Asunganyi, the spitting image of his sister, danced towards me and Wingert, then to his wives, who ululated like weird birds, and finally towards his chiefs, who gave a roar of appreciation. Guns went off, spears rattled the air, the crown shouted. I looked on in amazement, my head pounding with the noise and the heat, dreadfully afraid of fainting. (1977: 17–18)2

Brain imaginatively and skilfully uses his knowledge of the Bangwa, both contemporary and historical, to recreate a moment in Bangwa and colonial history. Like most of the accounts of European penetration into Africa, it is a history written from a European perspective. There has been a move within anthropology to deconstruct the hegemony of a privileged Western viewpoint, first by making it visible and including the position of the observing, writing subject within the discourse, and secondly by inviting alternative voices to find expression alongside those of the Western observer.3 There are, however, significant constraints upon such an endeavour. One is language, and another is the formal tools of academic discourse that largely exclude those who have not been subject to (benefited from?) a Western education. The Bangwa, like many other peoples studied by anthropologists and historians, are beginning to promote their own version of their history and culture precisely because so many of their number have completed their education in Europe or North America. They are part of the international academic community and speak the same language, literally and figuratively, as their Western counterparts. Does this mean that they have little to add to the voices of Western scholars and have merely become well-trained research assistants? I think not. Michael Ndobegang’s fluency in the Nweh language and intimate knowledge of the history of Azi Palace, for instance, provide a different perspective from that of a Euro-American scholar. The fact that a generation of Bangwa children are growing up outside Lebang with little or no first-hand knowledge of Nweh language and traditions is a powerful incentive for Bangwa scholars to record aspects of their culture, and English is generally the favoured lingua franca.

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The View from Inside: The Historian Gustav Conrau, a German colonial and commercial agent, arrived in Azi in February 1898.4 He had travelled inland in search of commodities, notably rubber, ivory, artworks, and labourers for the plantations on the coast (Chilver 1967: 155).5 At the 1884 Berlin Conference, European countries had apportioned much of Africa among themselves for occupation and exploitation. European industries needed raw materials as well as markets for manufactured goods, which brought together societies and peoples with different world views and forms of state organization, and with widely divergent levels of material development. Conrau’s first impressions of Azi were favourable, and he clearly regarded the Bangwa as superior to their Banyang neighbours. He expressed great admiration for several aspects of Lebang material civilization, even if he was repelled by others. The people he met, the style and organization of the state, the material culture and the Bangwa outlook on life were of interest to Conrau. Following his death the people suffered harsh reprisals at the hands of the Germans, beginning the irreversible process of opening up Azi, Lebang and Nwehland to European influence. This chapter is about Azi. Using historical and anthropological insights, the essay describes the transformations that Azi has undergone in the century since Conrau’s arrival and premature death. Specifically it looks at Azi Palace, the seat of Lebang traditional institutions, and describes the changes that have occurred in palace organization and the structures of power in Lebang since the nineteenth century. It suggests that Conrau’s arrival did more than bring Lebang under colonial rule: there was a relocation of the centre of power in Lebang, with an attendant dilution in the authority of the traditional ruler and the importance of Azi Palace.

A Note on Names and Places Azi is the traditional headquarters of Lebang, one of the seven independent Bangwa or Nweh kingdoms (Atem 2000), which consist of a cluster of centralized states found in the present-day Lebialem Division of the South West Province of Cameroon. The name Bangwa is derived from Ba nwe. The prefix Ba (‘the people of’) is likely to have arisen from the use of Bali Nyonga interpreters by the Germans, and became attached to most Cameroonian Grassfields communities (see Greenberg 1963). The suffix nwe (pronounced Nwa in the northern dialect) is used to refer to both the country and the language Nweh. ‘Bangwa’ therefore refers to the people who inhabit Nweh (the country) and speak Nweh (the language). Of the seven Nweh polities, Lebang is the largest and the most densely populated.6 Fontem is the name of the ruling dynasty in Lebang (Nzefeh 1990), with its headquarters in Azi, where the king’s palace and the main market in Lebang are situated.7 Because of the reputation that Fontem Asonganyi gained throughout Bangwaland (Lebialem) as a result of his tenacious defence against German penetration, colonial and postcolonial usage has erroneously but consistently used the name Fontem to refer to political, administrative and judicial units in which

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Lebang Kingdom is included. This explains why the areas of jurisdiction of the Fontem Native Authority, the Fontem Native Court in the colonial period, and the Fontem subdivision (formed in 1966) extended way beyond Lebang frontiers.8 In 1992 Fontem Subdivision obtained full divisional status as Lebialem Division, made up of three subdivisions, Alou, Fontem and Wabane. Lebang falls under Fontem Subdivision, together with the Kingdoms of Essoattah and Njoagwi.

Azi at the Time of Conrau Azi is located in the neighbourhood of the Bego’eh River in the heart of Lebang. Up to the early nineteenth century the River Bego’eh separated the Mbo people from Lebang. Oral sources are agreed that Fontem Asonganyi (ca. 1870–1951) chased the Mbo from the position they occupied close to Azi Palace. The Mbo then settled over the River Betso in present day Nkongho-Mbo (Ndobegang, 1981; Nzefeh, 1990; Atem, 2000). It is not easy to say when Azi was founded or when the first people settled there, although it is likely to have been three or four hundred years ago (Alemanji 2006). Much of what is known comes from oral sources or the reports of colonial agents and early missionaries.9

Azi Palace (Mmah-Azi) The palace of Fontem was referred to in pidgin English as the ‘king place’, and has been described in part as ‘a collection of large, ornate meeting houses, surrounded by the huts of his wives his servants and slaves’ (Brain 1977: 6). The king’s dwelling was in an inner part of the palace, out of bounds to most people. Some parts of the palace were separated by fences made from large ferns known locally as affina. While the palace at Azi was the largest and most populous compound in Lebang, the basic structure of a central house for the compound head, houses for wives and children on either side, and perhaps a meeting house or courtyard area in the middle, was replicated by chiefs and, on a much more modest scale, by notables and commoners.10 The palace reflected the way power and authority were structured in Lebang, and an informed visitor to Azi could see how many component chiefdoms made up Lebang kingdom as well its social and political organization. He, or she, could also observe the intricate web of arrangements that existed between the numerous persons of different categories who lived in the palace, the size and number of houses for individual habitation and for the king’s various associations.

People, Associations and Palace Organization In addition to the king and his wives, children and servants, there were also a number of other people in residence at any one time, who came for a variety of purposes including meetings of palace associations and organizations, local liti-

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gation, and religious and witchcraft matters, or who were present as emissaries, visitors and guests of the king. The king’s wives were drawn from the constituent chiefdoms of Lebang, and from the families of his most revered notables. There was also a system of reverse alliances whereby the king promoted and encouraged the marriage of royal daughters to ‘subordinate’ or ‘subordinated’ chiefs.11 The king’s wives served informally as ambassadors, and their houses in the palace as embassies for their respective areas of origin. Marriage alliances and related arrangements provided an avenue for the cementing of relationships, the building of trust and the development of subservience. In fact, subservience and loyalty to the king by any of his wives increased the chances that such a wife, and by extension her village of origin, might provide the next king. A king could select any of his sons (and a powerful chief like Asonganyi could have over a hundred from which to choose) to succeed him. Becoming the mother of a new king was the biggest reward for loyalty, and its significance cannot be underestimated. Royal wives apart, there were princes and princesses, servants, retainers and slaves in and around the palace. As direct descendants of the reigning or previous king, royal princes lived in the palace when young, but later moved to build their own compounds away from the palace. Although there are only two known stories about attempted royal usurpations in Azi Palace, it is widely known that princes could be a source of destabilization, especially during dynastic transitions and/or vacancies. The category of persons classified as servants included the sons of other friendly monarchs who were sent to be raised in the palace. Some were widely tipped to be successors to their parents but were sent to Azi to learn palace etiquette, diplomacy and other subjects related to traditional governance. It is known that many future monarchs of the Nweh area grew up at Azi Palace. There were also children who came to live with relatives who were royal wives, and who mingled almost freely and on equal terms with other palace children.12 Retainers performed a variety of functions and served in palace associations under the direct orders of the king or other competent officials of the respective palace associations. The servility that was implied in the nomenclature, notably the cheuh fua (meaning ‘the chief’s servant’), was indicative of origins (often as captured or purchased slaves) but was also deceptive in terms of the importance of the functions they carried out. The role played by palace retainers within organizations such as the troh and lefem was very important. The troh, which Brain referred to as the ‘Night Society’ (1971, 1972), was the highest regulatory society in the Nwehland. It was the institution responsible for maintaining law and order, and each village in Lebang had its troh that met in the village chief’s palace. At that level, it acted in near total independence because its decisions and actions did not necessarily require the approval of the troh-Azi except in cases of capital punishment. The troh and its accompanying traditional society, called the lefem, were an important means of maintaining social and political control over the kingdom but at the same time provided a check on the power of the king. The troh was organized and structured in such a way that chiefs and the king were not only members but were totally subject to it. Thus the troh was the institution used to enthrone the king, the chiefs and notables. By virtue of the authority that it held, the troh could dethrone, banish or even execute a recalcitrant

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or bad chief.13 The troh meeting house in the palace (ndia-troh) was out of bounds to non-members and its deliberations secret. The most visible demonstration of members’ secrecy and anonymity was their hooded presence when they appeared in public, talking in deformed esoteric voices and defying all attempts to identify them individually, although during major ceremonial public appearances the leaders of the troh were not hooded. The palace was also the place where matters of witchcraft were settled. Until relatively recently, all illness, misfortune and death in Nweh were linked to witchcraft. Anyone who was accused of bewitching another person was under obligation to publicly deny the charge by going through a witch-proving rite, frequently held in the palace though not necessarily presided over by the king. To satisfactorily demonstrate innocence following an accusation of witchcraft, the accused was led to such places or symbols as were reserved for the occasion. Swearing an oath could be done on the lekat, a human-figured fetish that was presumed to cause dropsy. The punishment in case of perjury was irreversible.14 Azi Palace occupied a consensual hierarchical position within Lebang, yet the same shrines for witch-proving and other rites were found at all levels of the traditional political hierarchy. Those at Azi Palace were the most dreaded because they were considered the most effective, and were also often the last resort. People’s trust in these symbols and their belief in the unbiased dispensation of justice at Azi Palace has diminished significantly in recent years. This is because there has gradually emerged a very mercantile use and manipulation of each of the symbols alongside a visible lack of evidence that they are still effective. More importantly, some relatively less traumatizing methods for the establishment of guilt or innocence came with colonial rule.

The Azi Market The main market in Lebang was found at the entrance to Azi Palace. This market was held every eighth day of the week, on Amina.15 In the centre of the market was a huge fig tree, said to have been large enough to provide shade for a hundred people. By the mid 1800s, the Azi market was the largest in the region and served as a centre of trade and exchange for a wide area. There were found commodities as varied as slaves, foodstuffs, livestock, and arts and crafts. Its location at the forest-savannah edge gave it added importance as a place to exchange products from two ecological zones, as well as a centre for the exchange of ideas and for social interaction. On market days the king would make important announcements by convening an assembly using the big drum (a ‘slit gong’), known as nkiangeh. When Conrau arrived in Azi, Fontem Asonganyi was on the throne of Lebang. He has been described as a very sophisticated monarch who had become accepted as king of Lebang through the use of ruse. To some people, Asonganyi was an example of a bloodthirsty tyrant. To others he was an astute ruler a master of governance and administration who won the admiration of people in Lebang, Nweh and beyond (Brain 1972: 21; Nzefeh 1990: 20). Conrau’s visit to Azi and his subsequent death in Lebang precipitated the establishment of European rule in Nweh,

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one consequence of which was that Azi underwent a change in status, becoming a sub regional colonial capital.16

Conrau in Azi Palace Gustav Conrau arrived in Azi in February 1898. Throughout his trip, but more especially at Tali, an important market village on the cultural and geographical boundary between Upper Banyang and Bangwa territory, he was told about the wealth and influence of Asonganyi, the king of Lebang. It is said that when Conrau got to Azi, he quickly developed a friendly relationship with Asonganyi. It is easy to understand why Conrau and Asonganyi would have had a need (or was it a liking?) for one another. For Conrau, it was very important to have an important and influential local ally of the calibre of Asonganyi, and the Azi market would have given Conrau access to such trade items as works of art, notably the carved masks and statues for which the Nweh people are rightly famous. Also, he would be able to take advantage of the extensive influence of Asonganyi to acquire labour for the southern plantations for which he was a recruiting agent. For his part, Asonganyi was happy that the Germans would build their factory at Azi (Brain 1967: 7), as it would reinforce and enhance his influence and prestige. This was particularly significant for Asonganyi because the presence, friendship and support of the strange ‘white’ man would most certainly confirm his paramountcy in Lebang and in the region as a whole. Thus each of the partners in this relationship was looking forward to reaping profit. Although Asonganyi had heard about plantations in the south, direct demands for labour had not reached Nwehland. Conrau asked for and obtained eighty-eight men who accompanied him as porters, carrying the merchandise he had acquired in Lebang. It was widely expected that these ‘porters’ would return after depositing their cargo at the coast. Lebang people were therefore very surprised that when Conrau returned without the people the following year, he had the audacity to ask for a further supply of men without accounting for the earlier consignment (Atem 2000: 77; Nzefeh 1990: 60).17 Upon arrival, Conrau was provided lodging in the vicinity of the palace. Although he was civilly treated by his friend and bloodbrother, the ‘prime minister’ Focha (who was married to the mafwa or ‘queen’), he was kept waiting to see Asonganyi, who, unbeknown to Conrau, was under pressure from his subjects concerning the non-return of the plantation workers. The visible outward display of power and authority by a traditional ruler in Nweh conceals the fact of consensual decision-making by the leader, palace organizations and other structures of traditional governance. It was enough for the injunction to be handed to Asonganyi in the lefem with instructions not to let Conrau go until the labourers had returned. Asonganyi had no choice but to stay away from Conrau. It did not take long for Conrau to discover that he was being very closely watched. He was ‘free’ to go about in Lebang as long as some locals accompanied him, and was repeatedly told that the non-return of the people he had gone away with was a major cause of the prejudice that he was suffering. When he realized how ominous the situation had become, Conrau’s main concern was how to get

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away. Initially he sent word to the coast informing them of the danger looming over his head, asking that some money be sent in lieu of the labourers so as to enable him secure the right to leave Azi. For several months Conrau waited in vain for a reply. Increasingly worried and frustrated, he thought about other strategies, such as stirring up some palace confrontation that he could exploit to get away, or simply engaging his ‘captors’ in an all-out fight. The latter was a perilous alternative, given that his non-Nweh servants amounted to his Bali interpreters and a few Dahomean soldiers, none of whom could be trusted in the circumstances. During Conrau’s first stay at Azi, he had obtained some useful insights into the organization and functioning of the palace. He also learnt of the grudge that the chief of Nwenchen village bore Asonganyi. Simply stated, the chief of Nwenchen (a direct descendant of Azi Palace who was called Fuasong à Nwenchen) had served as a regent upon the death of Asonganyi’s father, Fontem Achemabo. Because Asonganyi was still quite young, Fuasong à Nwenchen attempted to usurp the throne. He failed and was forced to retire to his village at Nwenchen. Fuasong continued, however, to eye the Azi throne from afar. Conrau decided to revive the longstanding though dormant grudge that Fuasong à Nwenchen bore Asonganyi, even though Asonganyi had assumed full control by the time of Conrau’s visit. If such an exercise in destabilization succeeded, Fuasong would take over the Azi Palace throne and in exchange Conrau would gain his freedom, obtain more labourers and return to the coast. Provocative and attractive as this option was to Fuasong, it did not materialize. Fuasong was aware of the consequences that could befall him if the coup failed and he backed out. The option of fomenting a palace coup came to nothing. Exasperated by the long wait, and not sure if or when a rescue team would arrive, Conrau made a desperate attempt to escape. It is not clear how he died. Some sources say he shot himself to avoid capture and torture once he had been successfully trailed to a hideout in flight. Others say that his pursuers killed him (Dunstan 1965; Nzefeh 1990: 62–63). Whichever was the case, the death of Conrau precipitated the establishment of German rule not only in Azi and Lebang, but also in the rest of Nweh country, and after 1899 things were never to be the same again (Bowie 1985: 74).18

Conrau’s Death and its Consequences When news of Conrau’s death was received at the coast, an expeditionary force was sent to punish his killers. In typical colonial German punitive tradition, the recriminations were harsh and severe. Houses were burnt and the palace at Azi suffered serious damage. Asonganyi escaped to a hideout but eventually surrendered, if only to halt the pain being inflicted on his people (Atem 2000). The king of Lebang was exiled to Garoua in 1911, and his son Ajongako was installed in his place. Seen simply, the defeat of Lebang, the sacking of Azi Palace, and the surrender, capture and exile of Fontem Asonganyi emerge as the logical consequence of a defeat in battle, but retrospectively the outcome for the Nweh people went beyond mere capitulation, capture and exile.19

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For a long time Asonganyi had exerted his influence over his neighbours. He had planned and successfully executed wars against the Mbo and captured large tracts of land. His reputation had spread beyond the limits of Lebang. Asonganyi maintained trading relations with his neighbours: the Bayang to the southwest, the Mbe’lekii to the east, and the Mbo to the south. To all intents and purposes Azi had acquired the status of a sub regional economic and political capital. Seen from this perspective, the burning down of part of the Azi Palace was tantamount to a desecration of what was hitherto a unique and sacred place. The forceful penetration of the palace, with its attendant access to hitherto reserved areas, was the beginning of a long process whereby the palace precincts were to have few or no restrictions. The Germans set up their station at Azi, which they referred to as Fontemdorf. In this new context, the palace would assume a much more limited role, and so too the king. There began a process of questioning of the way people perceived Fontem and Azi Palace, leading to a redefinition of its roles and competences.

Azi since Conrau Since Conrau’s arrival, there have been four rulers at Azi Palace. These include Asonganyi, up until his exile in 1911, Ajongako (1911–1916), Asonganyi again (1916–1951), Defang (1951–1982) and Njifua, who succeeded to the throne in 1982. It has not been customary to include Ajongako when discussing the Fontem dynasty in Lebang. Brain noted that ‘[t]here is a curious lack of interest in Ajongake [sic] among contemporary Bangwa: his character has been so blackened that few people can mention him in a favourable light, fearing perhaps that a kind word said of this unfortunate chief would detract from his father, Asunganyi [sic]’ (1967: 8). Most sources are agreed that Ajongako did not come to power through a usurpation of his father’s throne. Given the circumstances of his exile, Asonganyi conceded to his son’s taking over. When Asonganyi returned he is said to have initially taken up residence away from Azi, and he did not immediately reassume the throne. (Nzefeh 1990: 74; Atem 2000: 83). Dynastic history tends to downplay instances of power feuds and usurpations, with preference given to smooth transitions as they reinforce efforts at dynastic consolidation. Ajongako came to power at a time when the demands of the new authority in the land (the German colonial administration) were not only different but also quite exacting. The fact that he acceded to German demands without any resistance and the nature of the services he had to render, which including supplying labour for the plantations – the reason Asonganyi and Lebang had gone to war in the first place – could only damage his reputation. Ajongako’s rule must have been quite traumatizing even for himself. African traditional authorities were thenceforth called upon to play new roles, some of which undoubtedly put them in conflict with their people. In some ways, however, the Bangwa world in which Conrau arrived at the turn of the nineteenth century was not very different by the middle of the twentieth. A

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combination of geographical remoteness and the policy of indirect rule applied by the British under their League of Nations Mandate meant that in matters that affected people’s daily lives, the palace and role of the king carried on much as before. The local population continued to look to the king and the palace for arbitration in certain local traditional matters, notably adjudication in land disputes, witchcraft, marriage and divorce settlements (Akepu 1981). One difference lay in the severity of sanctions that could be meted out to people, which no longer included capital punishment. Asonganyi did not fail to take advantage of his role within the Native Administration system. He carried out projects that in many ways enhanced the visibility of Azi Palace and his own prestige. Mention should be made here of the enormous amount of labour he used to erect two huge buildings in the palace in the 1940s. Requisitioned and penal labour were used to head-load large quantities of building materials from Nkongsamba to Azi for the construction of the buildings, which still stand in the palace today (Atem 2000: 91–93). In the Nweh area, Asonganyi and traditional leaders actually benefited from the backing of the British colonial administration, although the support and protection given to traditional leaders later led to conflict between the traditional authorities and the small but growing number of people who attended Western schools. The so-called ‘elite’, the products of Western education, would present the first open political challenge to the chiefs for political control.20 The early politicians in Nweh continued to show respect for traditional leaders while at the same time denouncing some of their administrative excesses. Martin Forju and, later, Peter Mboya Kemcha, who were amongst the first politicians in Lebang, were well aware of people’s inherent respect for their traditional leaders and made use of it. With the inception of national politics the palace came to assume a new role. Peter M. Kemcha, the first and only Bangwa son to hold a full ministerial portfolio, belonged to the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP). He stayed close to the chiefs, who in turn supported the party to the detriment of the political opposition. The tendency in Lebang and much of Nweh was and has been for traditional rulers to ally with the political party in government, whose members are well placed to offer favours to their loyal supporters. The palace gradually but steadily developed a culture of political intolerance for the opposition. It was subtle in the 1950s and 1960s but gained notoriety after 1990, when multi-party politics was reintroduced (although not accompanied by any change from the one-party mentality). Many chiefs and traditional rulers in Lebang have turned their palaces into bastions of the ruling party, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM. They have recourse to all sorts of strategies, among them outright blackmail, intimidation and the misuse of traditional symbols to ensure adherence to the ruling party. In the eyes of the opposition, Azi Palace has in recent years become the symbol of political intolerance in Lebang. Some of the gatherings that have taken place in the Lemoh did not bring the people together for traditional or country-related issues, but were intended to ensure allegiance to, and unconditional support for, the ruling CPDM.

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Azi Palace in the Present Context The new and changing roles that the king of Lebang has played in contemporary Cameroonian politics have affected Azi Palace and the people’s perception of it. When the West Cameroon House of Chiefs was set up in 1960, the representative from the Mamfe East constituency (of which Lebang was part) had to be selected from amongst several traditional leaders in the area.21 In the running were chiefs of Nweh, Mmuock, Mundani and Mbo areas. Their choice fell on Fontem Defang of Lebang. The Fon of Fontem, as he came to be called, had certain advantages over his peers, which included the history of Lebang’s expansion and its reputation of resistance to German encroachment. Most people today speak in very romantic and nostalgic ways about the humility and selflessness of Defang, attributes that endeared him to other chiefs and made for his election. As a manifestation of their trust in the Fon, many Lebang people kept their money and valuable articles such as guns in the palace under his custody. The palace precincts became the people’s safe and bank. Fontem Defang is widely known to have been a very competent and reliable custodian of the people’s valuables. As one informant put it: When you had some money to save, the ideal place to store it was the palace. You go to the palace with your money. When the Fon receives you in audience, you state your intention. The Fon will ask you how much was to be saved. He, the Fon, will then ask you to count the money in his presence. The counting over, the man who wanted to save the money would wrap the money in some cloth or put it in some container. The Fon would then proceed to put on an identification tag on the container before keeping the money away. To retrieve money that was saved or any valuables stored in the palace, the owner simply went to the palace and made his intentions known. Those who took advantage of this trust mechanism got back their deeds intact.22

There was indeed reason to place trust in the Fon and the palace, which retained many of its traditional functions. Because the king was at the centre of many social activities and ceremonies, most events of social significance and importance for the entire kingdom were carried out in the palace. The skinning of a leopard, the ‘cleansing’ of the land or the request for bumper harvests were all done in or around the palace. At other times unwelcome events such as epidemics, drought, poor or bad harvests, or low fecundity, which were attributed to witchcraft, or to some punishment or retribution from the gods, also called the king into action. The king was at the centre of cleansing rites and led the initiative in mobilizing people and resources in order to cope with any threats. In short, the world of Lebang, even after the establishment of colonial administrative structures, continued to revolve around Azi Palace in a system that was founded on trust, protection, mutual respect and reciprocity, even if on a reduced scale. In the early 1960s a high rate of infant mortality threatened the future of Lebang. In search of a solution, Fontem Defang met with the bishop of Buea Diocese, Mgr Jules Peeters, to request help. The bishop in turn appealed to Chiara Lubich, founder of an ecclesial lay movement known as the Work of Mary or Focolare, for assistance.23 The Focolare Movement’s timely response of sending medical

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and other personnel to ‘Fontem’ was the start of what has come to be described as ‘the Miracle in the Forest’.24 The leadership role that Fontem Defang played in initiating the contacts that brought Chiara’s movement to Fontem reinforced his position. Thus, unlike in many other parts of Africa where colonial rule had rendered traditional leadership redundant, Fontem Defang continued to serve as a central uniting and mobilizing force, with Azi Palace maintaining a unifying role in the lives of Lebang people. It was in recognition of the role played by Fontem Defang in the arrival, implantation and subsequent expansion of the structures of the Focolare Movement in Fontem that his son and successor, Fontem Njifua, was awarded the Luminosa Award in New York in 2001. It would, however, be improper to give the impression that there has been a reinforcement of the role and influence of traditional rulers in the postcolonial period. There is no doubt that African traditional leadership has to a large extent become an appendage of the administration. In Cameroon, chiefs are ridiculously referred to as ‘auxiliaries of the administration’. They are often the objects of ridicule because of their involvement in partisan politics, and even more so because of the declining economic basis of chieftaincy.25 One hears in Lebang today that in the past, the chief was the chief for all, above party politics. Quarrelling factions or parties usually expected arbitration and reconciliation in the Lemoh or meeting house in the palace. The king was supposed to be above party politics. Citizens in Lebang belonged to the political parties of their choice and the king was expected to serve as a referee to ensure harmony between his people. If that was the perception, then Azi has not fared so well, and the fact that traditional rulers have come to openly identify with certain political parties has eroded their influence and discredited them in the eyes of many of their people.

Conclusion A visitor to Azi Palace today would see many changes to the sight that greeted Gustav Conrau. Once again it is undergoing remodelling and renovation, with a new concrete meeting house. There are fewer houses now, and the bamboo, wood and thatched conical huts have been replaced by mud brick and corrugated iron sheets. There are fewer wives and children in the palace today, and a much reduced flow of daily visitors. Access to the palace precincts is less solemn, the sacred lefem copse looks smaller, and one can hardly point to any specific houses reserved for particular palace associations. The Azi market is in terrible decay and decline, its significance having changed over the years as a result of development, growth and urbanization. The big drum (nkiangeh) no longer attracts a crowd, and hardly anyone attends the market anyway as people are increasingly able to purchase their goods in the stores springing up in Menji and Mveh nearer the government offices and the Focolare mission, or even in their neighbourhoods. This change in physical appearance has equally been accompanied by some internal reordering. One hundred years ago, Azi Palace reflected the sociocultural, political and economic organization and functioning of a country whose system was orderly and intricate. It was more than the dwelling place of the king of Leb-

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ang: it brought together the people of Lebang and their neighbours of Nweh, Mbo, Bamileke and Banyang stock in an isolated world, secure in its own traditions. This security broke down following the coming of the first white man. Traditional authorities, in spite of colonial and postcolonial rule, continued to play certain roles that affected the daily lives of the people, but such roles were limited to traditional and customary matters. Partly as a result of their ability to use and manipulate certain traditional symbols, chiefs have continued to wield considerable influence over the rural population.

An Outsider’s View While Conrau’s visits to Azi marked a turning point in Nweh history, they were also part of a much longer process of interaction between Europe and Africa involving the long-distance trade in slaves and other goods. We have used Conrau as a focus for our exploration of the momentous changes that have taken place over the last hundred years, most notably the decline of the palace and its power, while recognizing that the institution of kingship retains respect as a symbolic focus for the people of Lebang. Ndobegang has looked at the role of the chiefs in national and local politics, something he is well placed to do, as a historian with first-hand experience as a former parliamentary representative for Lebialem. Bowie, in a later chapter in this volume, looks at the relationship between the Bangwa and the Focolare Movement, and the role the chiefs have played in this encounter. The Nweh people have survived the last century with pride in their traditional institutions intact, but they look towards a future that embraces the past without being tied by its demands.

Michael Mbapndah Ndobegang’s Interviewees On Fontem Asonganyi and Fontem Defang 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Chief Fombindia Mbeacha, Mbindia, Dec. 1997, Jan. 1998. Pa Nicholas Mbapndah Nkemnju, Njenbetui, Fontem, 1982, 1986. Mbe Nkemnji Atuteng, Atuteng, Fontem, Dec. 1983, Dec. 2001. Chief Futabonganche Ngomeoh, Nchebelule, Fontem, Dec. 1999. Chief Fobellah D. Nkeng, Nellah Ngeh, Dec. 1983, Jan. 1996. Chief Barrister Fuatabong Lekeanju, Mutengene, Jan. 1998.

On Chiefs and Politics 1. 2. 3. 4. 4.

Mrs Mary Khumbah, Mveh, Fontem, 1983, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004. Mr Manfred Ashu, in Kumba, and in Yaoundé and Fontem on several occasions. Mr M.W. Nkeze, Kumba, 1983, 1997, 2000. Mr Ayuk Forchap William, Fontem, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002. Mr Charles Asaba, Fontem, 1998, 2001.

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I should add that I owe a special debt of gratitude to all the above and many others (too many to mention here), who shared their knowledge and experiences with me, especially when I was the Member of Parliament for Lebialem Constituency from 1997 to 2002.

Notes 1. Fiona Bowie. 2. Asonganyi is a name commonly given to twins (anyi means ‘mother of twins’), and Asonganyi was himself a twin. His sister, the queen or mafwa, was indeed very like him in appearance. The current chief, Fontem Lucas Njifua, is an accomplished dancer like his father, Fontem Defang, and grandfather, Fontem Asonganyi. 3. The editors of a recent volume on what they term ‘world anthropologies’ (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006) are enthusiastic about the possibilities for an exchange of knowledge between scholars from different parts of the world, including those who have previously been the object of study with little voice in how they were represented by others. 4. In addition to the published sources, information is from interviews conducted by Ndobegang (see References). 5. Chilver records that ‘Gustav Conrau explored the north-west hinterland of Kamerun as an agent of the firm Jantzen and Thormählen, and he was leader, after the death of Nehber in the Bande war of 1891, of the Kamerun Hinterland Handels-Expedition. At the time of his death he had been appointed as an officer of the concession company, the Gesellschaft Nordwest-Kamerun’. 6. Until now, it has generally been held that Nweh or Bangwa has nine kingdoms. Increasingly however, Bangwa scholars are promoting the view that two of the nine, namely Mmuockmbie and Mmuockngie, belong to the Mmuock group because of the close geographical, historical and linguistic ties they have with other Mmuock kingdoms in the West and South West Province of Cameroon. For our purposes, Bangwa and Nweh will be used interchangeably to mean the people and the land of the seven kingdoms of Njoagwi, Essoattah, Lebang, Lewoh, Ndungatet, Nwangong and Nwametaw. 7. Since the 1970s, and increasingly in the 1990s, the main focus of commercial, religious and political activity has shifted steadily from Azi to Mveh and Menji, where the Focolare Movement have their headquarters. Menji market, near the impressive, Italian architect–designed parish church, is now the largest market in Lebang, and permanent shops, bars and guest houses have opened along the road that leads from the mission hospital and school to the church. The government tends to locate its institutions, such as the post office, police post, schools and so on, near a mission station, as it serves as a focus for the scattered population and already possesses a rudimentary infrastructure. 8. The Focolare Movement uses the term ‘Fontem’ to refer to the Mariapolis or mission at Mveh, as well as more generally, if somewhat imprecisely, to refer to the whole of Lebang, or sometimes Bangwaland (Lebialem) as a whole. According to Ruel (1974: 5–7), the name Fontem is taken from the ‘great leader and ancestral hero’ of Kembong, a Banyang village to the southwest of Mamfe. The story goes that a former Fon of Fontem, who as a child had been sold as a slave, reached Kembong, where he was freed by the village leader of another Banyang village, Tali, whose founding ancestor is believed to have come from Kembong. The boy returned to Lebang, and when he succeeded his father as Fon took the name Fontem (and paid a regular tribute to the Tali chief). 9. In 1963 Elizabeth Dunstan recorded the following conversation with Fontem Defang regarding his family’s Beketche origins. The lack of an established orthography, together with the range of dialectical variations in pronunciation in Nweh and the use of various names and titles, acquired at different stages of life, mean that spellings and forms of name in the written record can vary

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widely. Note the stress on a local origin by a leading family, clan or ethnic group, which is a common way in which peoples or individual families claim rights to a territory. The people who began this country started from a place called Beketche. The first person who started in Beketche was called Njinkeng. Njinkeng died and left a certain child in Beketche called Menkemkang. Menkemkang died and the child that remained was called Leteratu. Leteratu left Beketche and went to Menkem and died there. He left a child called Njaung. Njaung died and left a child called Azongakoh. Azongakoh died and left me, Lefang, who have remained Foantem Lefang. All these places I have spoken about are in Lebang (Fontem). We did not come from any other place but here. (Dunstan 1965: 407)

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Brain (1972: 13–14) gives another account of the Bangwa ‘origin myth’ in which a group of lowland hunters climbed the mountains and intermarried with the small race they found there, who they referred to as the ‘owners of the land’ (Beketche). Differences in status determined the number of doors the meeting house or Lemoh possessed. That of Asonganyi had four doors, whereas other chiefs were permitted a maximum of three. The status of each chief was also signalled by their seating within the Azi Lemoh ((Alemanji 2006: 59). These are subtle distinctions that differentiate between chiefs and tell the story of how someone became chief in Nweh. See contributions by Fon Fonjumetaw and Fuankem Achankeng I in Nkemnji and Tazi (2004). The very common practice among many peoples in Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa of sending children to be brought up and educated by relatives, or being ‘claimed’ by certain categories of kin, is outlined by Alber and Notermans in Bowie (2004). The role of the troh in the enthronement of a chief is vividly and accurately described by Robert Brain (1971, 1972). Swearing could also be done on other sacred items and symbols, notably mua-njor, or at the alemte. Lebang, like all the Nwehland, has an eight-day week, which is also characteristic of much of the Grassfields of Cameroon. Under the British Mandate, which began operating in 1916, the area was administered by the resident in Buea, who was answerable to an even more distant secretary of the Southern Provinces in Enugu, Nigeria. The area was visited periodically by district officers, who provided some detailed ethnographic descriptions of the area and its peoples. (Bowie 1985; Brain 1972, personal communication). See E. Ardener (1960) on the history and social practices of the coastal plantations of Cameroon. Bowie outlines several sources for the events surrounding Conrau’s death, in addition to the more recent oral and written accounts obtained by Ndobegang and other Nweh historians. These include Chilver (1967), who made use of the Kolonialblatt and Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten for contemporary German official sources concerning contacts between the Bangwa and the Germans. Dunstan (1965: 403–13) records an account of the events surrounding Conrau’s death as dictated by Fontem Defang, Asonganyi’s successor, in 1963, which Chilver (1967: 159) observes is excellent on personalities but cannot be used to accurately date events. Dunstan also refers to a Deutsche Kolonialzeitung article of February 1900 and District Officer Cadman’s assessment report of the Bangwa, written in 1922. This latter report contradicts much of the earlier German material and the Fon’s own account. The charges levelled against Asonganyi, which were used by the Germans to justify the punitive raids on the Bangwa, were: (i) depriving Conrau of his freedom and causing him to commit suicide, and (ii) tough resistance to the expeditions of von Besser in 1900 and von Pavel in 1901, followed by his betrayal of his agreement of peace with fierce attacks against a column (led by Lt. von Gellhorn, von Pavel’s adjutant) sent to conduct negotiations, followed by (iii) a war, lasting five months, waged against an expedition led by Lt. Scholosser, during which he had put about the rumour of his death and sent his son to sue for peace (Chilver 1967: 158). Nyamnjoh and Rowlands (1998) note how the development of elite associations, which increasingly identify with their villages of origin, has been one of the results of multiparty politics and the weakening of centralised state control in the 1990s. This is true of the Bangwa who have

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22. 23. 24.

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several such associations. Elite associations serve many functions, economic, cultural and political, and aid the flow of ideas, money and goods between Bangwa living in Western Europe and North America and Cameroon. On the West Cameroon House of Chiefs, see Fomin (1979). As of 1960, but more especially since the late 1980s, it has become fashionable to refer to Nweh kings as fons. The term is borrowed from the Bamenda Grassfields and entered Nweh vocabulary and use at the time when Fontem Defang was in the West Cameroon House of Chiefs. For a seasoned appraisal of this borrowing, see Fuankem (2004: 59–68). Interview by Ndobegang. Welcome Address by his Majesty the Fon of Fontem, Azi, 6 May 2000; Chiara Lubich’s address to the Nweh-Mundani People Azi, 6 May 2000; see also Bowie (1985). The story of the transformations that have occurred in Nwehland as a result of the presence of the Focolare Movement have been captured in a film entitled Miracle in the Forest, Anu mbong à mbi. The search for added or alternative means of survival in an era when traditional sources of royal income, such as bridewealth payments (see Brain 1972), have been significantly reduced has led to the popularization of chiefly titles through their sale. One Lebialem chief has lamented this ‘decline of Lefua’ in a thoughtful article (Fuankem Achankeng I, The Decline of Lefua in Nkemnji and Tazi (2004). Available on the Lebialem.info web site).

CHAPTER 6

The Submerged History of Nsanakang A Glimpse into an Anglo-German Encounter Ute Röschenthaler

Nsanakang is a small Ejagham village on the left bank of the Cross River (see Map 6.1). It was bigger and more influential in the past, when one of the salt wells of the area was in its possession. Its owners compared it with a farm that endlessly produced wealth. Nsanakang also participated in the slave trade and the traffic of associations and cult agencies. About a century ago, colonial history started to impact on the village, and Nsanakang became a toll station. White traders of the Gesellschaft Nordwest Kamerun arrived, and their first factory was opened at Nsanakang. During the First World War, Nsanakang became the site of a terrible battle between German and British troops whose overgrown gravestones still bear witness to this forgotten encounter. Nsanakang is one of the eighty-one Ejagham villages in which I took down village histories and studied the dissemination of their associations and cult agencies. In this chapter I will focus on the history of Nsanakang village from three points of view: the history as told by the Ejagham of Nsanakang, the colonial history as it is found in archives and early books, and my own reflections on the developments of the area, so as to show the differing interests in the recollection and representation of history, politics, arts and identity.

Facing ‘The Overside’ In February 1999 my research assistant and I reached Nsanakang by a local motorboat on the Cross River. Moving downriver, to our left we spotted the first houses of Nsanakang on top of a rocky hill, surrounded by some big trees immediately above a marvellous white sand beach. Small and compact, this village reminded me of what I thought was a typical Ekwe-Ejagham village. Nsan-Akang, the ‘nsan trees of the salt’, or the ‘salt at the iroko trees’, was the meaning of the toponym. Notes for this chapter begin on page 136.

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Map 6.1: The Cross River Area around Nsanakang (Ute Röschenthaler)

Mansfeld (1908: 13) called it ‘salt town’, and Nsanakang was well known for its salt production. When we reached the beach, we saw a group of cheerful male youths standing by the rocks and loudly singing pop songs, accompanied by a ghetto blaster, into the evening air. The houses of Nsanakang faced Njemaya or the Mamfe Overside, as the Cameroonian area of the Anyang and Boki country on the northern bank of the Cross River was called locally. From there to a village called Ekok, the river forms the border of Cameroon and Nigeria. It then enters Nigeria and passes through Ikom, Okuni, Obubra (Mbembe), Ediba (in the neighbourhood of the Yakö), Agwagune and Old Calabar to the Atlantic. Locally it was simply called Aya, ‘water’, and further upriver Manyu (which gave the present Division its name). Nineteenthcentury European travellers and traders, who explored the hinterland from the Atlantic coast, expected the Cross River to be within their reach. From Calabar, Bellington and Casement had reached as far as Okuri in 1893 but not farther (von Besser 1898: 179). Neither Rogozinsky (1884) nor the Swedes (Valdau 1886, 1890; S. Ardener 2002) reached that far. Valdau told von Besser that north of Lobe was a river called ‘Tyoa’ not too far from the Cross River. But Valdau had no idea how many days it would take him to get there, and he also doubted whether the local population would have allowed him to pass through (von Besser 1885: 184). Valdau (1886: 120) reported that the Calabar traders regarded the Swedes with suspicion because the former feared that the latter would be in competition for trading opportunities. For probably the same reason Bernhard Schwarz (with Valdau), who had hoped to reach the Cross River, felt threatened and returned

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with his expedition to the coast (Schwarz 1886). At that time trading spheres were still well marked. Local polities did everything to prevent foreign traders from passing through their villages. Due to the high profits, competition was fierce in the trade in slaves and other commodities.1 In fact, the limit of the trading spheres of the Efik and Duala traders met around Kumba.2 For the same reason, explorers and missionaries from Calabar did not reach the Upper Cross River much sooner. One exception was Captain Beecroft, who in 1842 managed to get up the river as far as the rapids, which forced him to return. He usefully mentions some villages such as Icoom (Ikom), Isabang (now a quarter of Ikom) and Abocoom (Agborkem Waterfall) right before the rapids. The next European reached upriver about forty years later, at about the time the first British government station was established at Ikom in 1884, and the British protectorate was extended to the Cross River country. By this time, local trading spheres were gradually breaking up.3 After the boundary had been drawn at the Berlin Africa Conference, more Europeans frequented the Cross River rapids near present-day Ekok. At that time the Cross River was known to be navigable only as far as its rapids. In 1895 von Besser and Arden-Close undertook the first boat trip beyond the rapids to Ajassor, only a few miles from Nsanakang. They did not go further but fulfilled their mission and marked a ‘workable frontier’ from the Cross River to the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the Germans went up the Mungo River by boat to Mundame and then on foot; a few also took the way directly from Rio del Rey. The first European to reach the Cross River on foot was von Besser, in February 1900. He was sent on a punitive expedition with the task of dealing with both the murderers of Conrau at Fontem (Bangwa), and those of von Queiss, who was killed before he even reached Nsakpe (Moisel 1903: 2–3). Von Besser’s mission was to subdue the ‘recalcitrant Keaka and Ekoi’. He opened the military station at Nsakpe. From then on, Europeans arrived more frequently. Only four months later, in September 1900, the German explorer Hans von Ramsay travelled from Douala up the Mungo and through Keaka country to Nsakpe. From there he reached Nsanakang after a one-day march. Von Ramsay was the first explorer to cross the Cross River and continue on to Bali, and later in 1902 to Bamum. Von Ramsay went finally to Nsanakang because the GNK (Gesellschaft Nordwest Kamerun) had in 1900 been assigned the concession of the large forested area extending from around Bamenda to the Cross River by the German government. He founded the first trading post in Nsanakang. The early Europeans mentioned the existence of salt wells in the area and the production of salt at Nsanakang (Moisel 1903: 5; von Ramsay 1904: 27). Von Ramsay (1901: 235) emphasized that Nsanakang would be an important trading place for the Germans for this reason. He also visited the wells of Mbenyan and Nsakpe and commented that the commercial exploitation of the salt would not be difficult if the local population did not oppose the idea. In the rainy season the wells were submerged, and the local population sank huge earthen pots tied with ropes into the water. They then waited for some minutes and drew up the pots full of the precious saline water. By boiling off this water pure white salt was produced, to be traded in small packets. The local population worked only small

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farms because they could import subsistence goods in exchange for salt. Mansfeld later recorded twenty salt wells in the vicinity of Lake Ejagham.4 The salt well of Nsanakang was well known even as far as the Mbo country and was said to have provoked a number of attacks by the Mbo5 (Fobia 1985; Rutherfoord n.d.).6 These were, however, successfully repulsed by the combined efforts of Chief Mfontem of Kembong and a number of Ejagham villages that lay in between the Mbo and the salt area (abhek).7

Research by Boat Nsanakang is one of the five Ejagham villages in Cameroon that are situated on the banks of the Cross River. The other four villages are Esagem, another very small place that some years ago moved eastwards along the bank beyond the Elisa Falls nearer to Mamfe; Agborkem, called Agborkem-Jaman, a name given after the former German government station of Ossidinge; Ndop, a quarter of Agborkem with a high percentage of Boki from the other side of the river (shortly after we left in 1999 Ndop succeeded in being officially accepted as an independent village); and Nsanaragati, situated on the border with Nigeria and said to have common ancestry with Nsanakang. Travelling on the river was troublesome in the dry season as the water level was low. After we had taken down the history at Esagem, the boat we caught was loaded with bundles of special sticks8 from the forest. When we reached Elisa Falls, the entire boat had to be unloaded, dragged over the rapids and then loaded once more. This was repeated. The passengers had to disembark and wade through water with their baggage on their heads (on mine were my notebooks, camera and video camera, tape recorder, tapes and films). The sticks were shipped to Nigeria and sold to Hausa traders in large bundles; others said the Hausa then sold them as far as Mali. The procedure took so long that we had to spend the night in Beteme in Boki, where the chief’s wife told me about a courageous English-speaking lady9 who worked far inside the Takamanda forest. We reached Agborkem the next morning and met Chief Ekuri, who told us the history of the place. This meeting was boycotted by two of the quarters of Agborkem, because they were of the opinion that Chief Ekuri had been installed without their consent. Chief Ekuri gave us his version of this history, which could not be contradicted because of his feared temper. Our friend Leo then showed us around. We visited the site where the government station once stood. It had been replaced by a large, newly built and well-kept school compound. Chief Ekuri also showed us excavations behind his compound allegedly dug in the First World War. We eventually arrived at the Nsanakang beach and climbed the steep hill, reaching the village after we had passed the singing youths. Compared to Agborkem and Nsanaragati (the latter still ahead of us), Nsanakang was a small, shabby village. In both other places most houses were large and built of brick, and many people increasingly preferred to construct larger houses with money earned in town, building a small distance away inside the bush to escape the confines of the village street. A few of the 130 localities that we visited even had two-storey

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houses, especially nearer to the coast. These were reminders of the Calabar traders who were distinguished by their architectural style and extravagant dress. Valdau (1886: 128) described such a house in 1885 in Balundu where he met the trader or ‘Calabar-König’ Yellow Duke in a fire-red shirt. In 1988 there remained one two-storey house in Okurikang. Nsanakang had no such splendid houses. The few houses were small and, except for one or two, had thatched roofs and mud walls. We counted 27 houses plus a Catholic Church house and an Ekpe Hall. In 1926 the British officer Cantle came upon 72 houses with a taxable population of 261, but Swabey in 1937 counted only 57 houses and a population of 112.10 We started searching for the chief’s house, which turned out to be a solid horseshoe-shaped compound, built of brick. The chief ’s sons received us and inquired who we were and what we wanted. They said the chief was taking his bath. A minute later the chief himself came in to greet us; then he said, ‘You will go to your room now’. One of chief’s sons showed us to our room. (The chief did not show up again until it was late in the night.) Later, we sat down in the yard and wondered what was going on. The women ate, the children ate, and the sons of the chief went to eat around the corner of the house to escape our hungry gaze. We sent a child to bring us two bottles of beer from an off-licence. These were the last two bottles available. Just as we began to think that we might have to leave the next morning with empty stomachs, somebody came to tell us that food was being cooked for us only now because the men’s Ngbe, supreme leopard society, was having a meeting to celebrate the installation of the new iyamba. Soon we were served rice and fish and the chief came and explained that they would meet us the next morning. Finally, a merry group of men came in to the chief’s compound, among them the newly installed iyamba.

The History of Nsanakang in Local Focus In the morning, the three chiefs of Nsanakang assembled with other elders, some youths and women in the courtyard of the compound of Ntuifam John Ebam. These chiefs included the ntuifam okarara, the administrative or ‘white man chief’, who is elected on the basis of his abilities to represent the interests of the community to the administration; the ntuifam etek, the village chief and oldest person in the village, who pours libations for the ancestors on behalf of the village (etek); and the newly honoured iyamba, the Chief of Ngbe, who is appointed to this title that rotates around the families who originally bought Ngbe. He must have the necessary means to initiate himself into the highest grades and perform the sacrifice (formerly a slave) to the etae ngbe, the Ngbe stone. The Ngbe of Nsanakang had not had an iyamba for more than a decade, as no one from the founding families had possessed the wherewithal to perform the initiations and rituals. In this case they had accepted a related man who did have the necessary means. We explained the purpose of our visit, stating that we wished to take down the village history. The iyamba was a wonderful speaker, and after consulting the other chiefs and elders he translated his findings into English, which he pronounced

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with a distinguished Anglophone accent. After some discussion, they agreed that Nsanakang had, more or less, always been at that place, and at certain times their brothers had left to found their own independent villages. The foremost ancestor was known as Egemene. He founded the original settlement, Nsan, where he found an iroko tree (nsan) and not far from it a salt well (akang) that gave Nsanakang its name, which means ‘an iroko tree near a salt well’. The iyamba emphasized that the iroko tree had positive connotations such as strength; it was used for medicines, and therefore the founder thought it was a good place to stay. Mansfeld (1908: 13) emphasized this meaning too, adding that the iroko tree had hard wood and was good for making canoes. They were not completely sure whether Egemene, the founder of all Nsan people, had four or seven children. If he had four children, these were the founders of the four related villages of Nsanaragati, Eyumojock, Nsan Okem Isughi and Nsanakang. The first, Nta Ojong Mfong, founded Nsanaragati; the second, Tambrunkem, founded Eyumojock; the third, Ma Atop, founded Nsan Okem Isughi. This last group moved to Nigeria (to the Akpamkpa Local Government area) and took the big slit drum away with them to keep it there (were they senior?). Finally, Osaw, the fourth son, founded Nsanakang. If Egemene had seven children, then the three in addition to these four could have founded the other three quarters of Nsanakang, which were located not far inside the forest before they came together to settle in the village of Nsanakang. Osaw had founded Nsan (the first quarter), Ntu Awa founded Njemakang, Enaw Ofibi founded Okoroba and Nta Akum founded Nsikafone. If we consider the local histories offered by other villages in the vicinity, we get no clearer picture. The elders of Nsanakang, Eyumojock and Nsanaragati concur on the meaning of the toponyms and agree that they are descended from an ancestor. This particular ancestry is also noted by Cantle in his Assessment Report on the Ekwe (1926).11 The points of difference can be grouped around several open questions: Who were the founders, and where was the original place? Why did they scatter? Which other villages belonged to that group? According to Cantle (1926), the clan Abon Egemene (which in Ejagham means ‘the children of Egemene’) was one of the largest clans and belonged to the Abuk (abhek) group of clans owning the salt wells. The original home of the clan was between Nsanarati (Nsanaragati) and Nsanakang, from where the descendents dispersed to their present villages. The village elders of Nsanaragati and Eyumojock confirmed that their original settlement before they separated was called Egboghonne (which means ‘let’s meet somebody’, a name that was not put forward by Nsanakang). According to Nsanaragati elders, Egboghonne occupied a territory between Nsanaragati and Eyumojock that is now used as a cocoa farm. Their father was Ogo.12 This is to say, Tambrunkem gave birth to Egemene who gave birth to Ogo (the first and the last were not mentioned by Nsanakang), three of whose sons grew up together and then separated to found Nsanaragati, Nsanakang and Eyumojock. Nsan Okem Isughi later migrated from Nsanaragati. Emat was the name of the place where they formerly lived together.13 Cantle, however, writes that a fourth village, Emat, situated between Eyumojock and Nsanaragati, also once belonged to the clan, but there remained only one survivor from Emat, who lived

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at Ndebaya. In a similar way, Cantle recorded that Egemene bore Ogo, who had the three sons Ntuawa (the Ntui Awah of the Njemakang quarter of Nsanakang), Oiyak (Oyak, as stated also by Nsanaragati, and whom Nsanakang seems to have mixed up with Tambrunkem) and Ojong Efom (Ojong Mfong of Nsanakang and Ojong Efim of Nsanaragati). I do not think that Nsanaragati and Eyumojock have read Cantle or Mansfeld. Mansfeld did not say much about village histories, but wrote that Nsanakang was formerly united with Nsanaragati in a place called Nsan, which was situated between both villages (1908: 13). Eyumojock elders added that this former site of settlement was situated in the forest between the present Nsanakang and Eyumojock, along the former trade route. Nsanaragati explained that because of ‘intertribal wars’ they dispersed to these four places (Nsanakang, Nsanaragati, Eyumojock, Nsan Okem Isughi) and maybe more, claiming that it was at that time that Nsan Okem Isughi left for Nigeria. Eyumojock chiefs gave some details of what they understood to be ‘intertribal wars’. They said that all the old towns were inside this forest on the old trade route between Nsanakang and Eyumojock. The reasons for leaving were constant attacks from the neighbouring villages in Nigeria. I quote these chiefs from my notebook: It was tribal war which caused the people to leave this place. We have neighbouring people there across the border in Nigeria. It was their practice to use the human skull of a person to make their traditional juju. So after they crossed the river, they attacked the brave men of our village when they were outside, and killed them. They killed us and carried our skulls. They put it about that we were the people who intended to come and attack their village. They came with small canoes. When our people went after them towards the bank, they entered their canoes and ran away. They were the people of Ajassor, Effraya and Etome and all the neighbouring Ejagham villages. Our ancestors said: ‘No, if we remain here, this will continue for many years. We think there must be a solution.’ So one Pa took his family to this place, after a hunter had discovered the salt here. He took his family to Nsanakang. The founder of Nsanaragati took his family and his children to an area across a stream where there was a big tree called nsan. They crossed the stream over that tree – nsan aragati. The father of this place [Eyumojock] took his family and went to another area. Seeking good water, they migrated from place to place. The people left the [first] place which was about 2.5 km from here. Eyumojock then stayed near to the Lake Ejagham. They moved out of the forest to the road during the 1950s after the English had built the road. As there was no village between Ekok and Mamfe we came to the road. The British sent messages to the people to settle by the roadside, because a road cannot stay without villages. Our people were afraid because of an earlier incident in German times [recounted below]. They came gradually, one by one, up to about nineteen something.

Emmanuel Ita (1981: 21) from Eyumojock, who is at present the Ministry of Culture’s delegate for the North West Province at Bamenda, wrote in his history dissertation that Eyumojock elders told him that the people had scattered because at that time chiefs or warriors were combing the land in search of slaves. Therefore the villages that formerly had stayed together in large towns such as Nsan of Ogo dispersed to the settlements of Eyumojock, Nsan Okem Isughi and Nsanaragati. They settled by the river in order to have more control and to better defend themselves against the attacks that originated from the other bank of the river.

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A number of other villages insisted that they themselves originally came from Emat. Meanwhile, the Nsan villages do not mention the name of Emat in their own oral histories. Emat, i.e. ‘Lake Ejagham’, was clearly a place from whence many villages claim origin: Esagem and Agborkem said that they stayed in a place called Ejagham before the German war. According to Esagem elders ‘they’ were Mbakem, Agborkem, Akwen, Esagem, Tabo, Nsanakang and Nsanaragati. According to Chief Ekuri of Agborkem the villages of Agborkem-Jaman, Agborkem Waterfall, Ajasor, Nsanakang, Etome, Abia, Effraya, Ekimaya and Egbontai had a common ancestor and originated from Lake Ejagham. Okarara village, for example, recalled that they were related to Mbakang but left their former place (Emat), which was situated between Ndebaya and Mbakang, because they were looking for English salt (okarara), which they could acquire nearer to the coast. Emmanuel Ita mentions in his history that the descendants of Ogo existed long before the Europeans came and had quarrelled over a piece of crocodile meat. Eventually they scattered and founded the villages of Eyumojock, Nsanakang and Nsanaragati, Nsan Okem Isughi and Mfunum (1981: 21). Other villages, too, claimed origin from Nsanakang or Nsanaragati. According to Onor (1994: 45, 48) the Ekajuk (Bakor Ejagham) and the Nkim villages went first to Nkim Ntal and then to Ekajuk, which he estimates occurred between 1720 and 1810. According to Sealy-King (1932), a British administrator, the villages of Aningeje, Okorada (Okarara?) and Nehe (Neghe) belonged to the Emat group who once lived on the right bank of the Cross River and migrated at the same time as the Oban group.14 It is of interest that so many villages remember Emat, clearly a well-known place. One wonders whether all these villages did not belong to the abhek group of clans (those who owned sources of salt)? On Moisel’s (1903) map and on Puttkamer’s (1901), Emat is still marked and situated between Ndebaya and Mbenyan. Could they have scattered so late that Cantle met the last inhabitant of Emat still at Ndebaya? I conclude from these village histories that there was a group of villages situated near to each other, from whence they scattered. This did not necessarily happen all at once. These histories relate the dispersal of villages to a number of different causes. These include headhunting, the slave trade, the so-called Ekoi war, the First World War, the forcible movement of settlement to the road in Mansfeld’s time after 1904 and the construction of the pan-African highway in the 1950s. Even the Qua-Ejagham of Calabar had claimed to come from the salt wells of Mbakang, though in the seventeenth century or earlier (Röschenthaler 2002). Nsanakang had argued that after the children of the founder of Eyumojock, Nsanaragati, and Nsan Okem Isughi had left, the remaining villages moved closer together. Another argument was rather that the colonial government had brought them together to one village. Eyumojock claimed that a German came and found them there at Egboghonne, where all of them were staying. But at the same time, other people argued that the First World War (it is possible that they are referring to the 1904 uprising?) made them scatter, and that they were later told to consolidate settlement. Nevertheless, the departure of the villages of Eyumojock, Nsanaragati and Nsan Okem Isughi was believed by Nsanakang to have occurred before the German period. It is of interest that the historical narrative conflates the various encounters with the Whites: the First and Second World War, German and British periods.

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Village Associations and Cult Agencies The oldest institutions of Nsanakang are said to be the Egyuk ritual and the Ncebe society. The Ncebe society set apart the freeborn from slaves, who could not be initiated nor participate. The royal dance, Egyuk, was performed at night before the egyuk, the sacred military slit gong of the community. Families with a strong warrior tradition were associated with its origin. It reminded people of their brave deeds and successful battles. War captives were killed in front of the egyuk to show the warrior’s bravery. Even today, as we were told in Nsanakang, when they recall the past, they perform the drumming out of the praise songs. This was considered to be a highly skilful art. Members alone could interpret their meaning. In the daytime, Ncebe performed in public in a mask with small jingle bells, and Agborenokpe appeared. Nsanakang owned one Ncebe society, but Nsanaragati had two Ncebe societies, which indicates that the latter had come from two different places (one part from Nsan, the other from Osaw Eguii near to Ayaoke).15 Each of the two Ncebe masks were shoulder masks with two faces, the male facing forward and the female facing backwards. In Eyumojock the society was called Okum Tambrunkem, the society of Tambrunkem, the founder of the place, who was the grandson or son of Ta Egemene, the founder of Egboghonne. Among the performers was Agborenokpe, who originally was a soldier of Ta Egemene. His dress was compared with that of a ‘Zulu warrior’ said to perform at celebrations for the New Year. While Tambrunkem came out for some minutes, Agborenokpe paraded around the streets for longer. In former times many of these masks were covered with antelope skin. Other associations that Nsanakang owned were Ngbe, Obhon, Angbu, Nsugui, Moninyo, Bembembe (or Bubumbe), Itibiakana, Achensìnsì, Abiankpo and Ekpu. The ekpu was a mask (not a society) that most villages owned and that originated around Calabar. Its role was to herald the entry of other masks. By contrast, among the Ibibio Ekpu was the major society, which in its performance represented various deceased persons (Offiong 1984). Abiankpo, Nsugui, Ncokanda and Moninyo were societies that were intended for youths. Before the Ngbe society arrived in the area, they had a more important role to play. Now they, as well as Obhon and other societies, are seen as ‘the children of Ngbe’, which became the most important society in the entire region. Each village had its own portfolio of associations. In principle the youths were expected to initiate themselves into these societies before they were allowed to become a member of Ngbe.16 The introduction of the men’s association Ngbe was indeed an innovation because it attempted to build up a network covering the area. Nsanakang, like most villages, did not remember where its minor associations had derived from. Many villages claimed that Obhon came from the direction of Calabar, if not from Calabar itself. Obhon was usually acquired later than Ngbe. In Njemaya (Ekwe), the Obhon dance was more of a youths’ dance meant to demonstrate youthful prowess (see Röschenthaler forthcoming) In most villages the Angbu society performed frequently. It burned the corpses of deceased persons whose ghosts had been seen, and it applied sanctions against social misdeeds and chased evil spirits and troublesome strangers from the com-

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munity. Most villages remembered that they had bought their Angbu from Awaghawogha, the ancient place of Babong, Babi and Mbobui (who moved to Nigeria during German colonial time). Oddly enough, and unlike other villages, Nsanakang did not recall where their Angbu society came from. Nsanaragati and Eyumojock claimed to have acquired their Angbu from Awaghawogha. The chiefs of Etome, for example, recalled that Nsanakang had sold them their Angbu, which they eventually abolished in 1992. Usually villages who maintained some trade and marriage relationships also traded their associations. Abia, for example, was the last village (of the Nyoaya clan) to cross the Cross River from their settlement near Nsanakang (some people from Abia even moved to Nsanakang instead). The clan head of Abia emphasized that intermarriage between them and Nsanakang continued. The villagers of Etome and Bendeghe Ekiem (the other two villages of the Nyoaya clan) confirmed the close relationship with Nsanakang. They claimed to have got not only Angbu from Nsanakang, but also one part of Ngbe that was peculiar to Nsanakang. The Ngbe society was the executive arm of the local village government and was especially effective in debt recovery. It was often called the ‘traditional’ government, even though it had not always existed there. Over the course of time, Ngbe became the governing society in all Ejagham villages and in many more beyond. Nsanakang itself acquired its Ngbe through the initiative of Nsikafone quarter, but could not recall from where exactly. They later sold it to the two Etung villages of Abia and Bendeghe. The first Ngbe of Bendeghe Ekiem was brought by a group of other villages (Ekoneman, Mbenyan, Eyumojock, Ndebaya, Ekok, Ayaoke) who came together to sell Ngbe to Bendeghe once they had settled at their present place. This first Ngbe contained, among others, the grades of mboko, egbe efik, bikundi and ekot egbe. Later, Nsanakang sold Bendeghe their arenge ngbe, another grade or branch of Ngbe.17 The oldest established women’s society was Ekpa Atu. This was the only association of the Nsanakang women at the time of my research. It concerned an ancient ritual that the women performed naked at night for purposes similar to those Shirley Ardener has amply described in her essay on ‘Female Militancy and Colonial Revolt’ in her volume Perceiving Women (1975). Some people said Ekpa was a ritual, others said it was an association (okum, pl. akum). In the course of the twentieth century, most western Ejagham villages acquired another society called Njom Ekpa, which incorporated parts of Ekpa Atu. At one time, the women of Nsanakang tried collectively to acquire the Njom Ekpa, but in the final outcome the group was not strong enough, so they abandoned the idea. Nsanakang did not have a contemporary dance group either, whereas the many youths of Nsanaragati had founded or acquired several dance associations such as Ngungu and recently Nkrubak. I am not even sure whether Nsanakang had one of the ‘Njangi’ or cooperative farming groups that had become so prominent in most of the villages. Nsanakang had never specialized in farming; it was more oriented towards the river trade. Consequently in 1994, the youths had formed the Union of Monaya Boat Owners. Its activities included the establishment of a checkpoint at Nsanakang, stopping the illegal exploitation of the forest and the water right up to Akwen village at the

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Monaya, and the control of the loading and offloading of the canoes. They were particularly interested in controlling the trade in the above mentioned sticks, and each canoe that passed had to pay a toll. Members also had to contribute to the development of the area, to help other members in times of need, and to settle disputes between members.18 The youths of Nsanakang and Nsanaragati fought over a particular problem to do with control over river transport and the collection of tolls. The fact that the activities of the union were disputed was reflected in the difficulties they encountered in renewing their licence to operate. Apart from the associations (akum), Nsanakang owned four cult agencies (ajom, sg. njom): Obasinjom, Monentae, Obasi Asam and Ekem. The functions of these agencies were to uncover witchcraft and deal with theft and sorcery. Nsanakang was well known for its cult agencies and had sold them several times. They sold Obasinjom with its entertaining masked performance to Bendeghe Ekiem, Abia, Nkum and the Banyang villages of Bakebe and Mbinjong. Abia acquired Obasinjom before the Arengengbe (sometime in the twentieth century) and passed it on to the Boki village of Abontakon. In the 1950s Obasinjom reached as far as the Bakweri, where the use of the cult has been fully described by Edwin Ardener (1970/1996; see Röschenthaler 2004). The remaining cult agencies were also acquired: Nsanakang got Obasi Asam from a small place near Okuni, and sold it to Nsanaragati. They bought Monentae from Mbakang, and sold it to Mkpot Akangkang, Otu and Ekok, and Ekoneman Awa. Otu in turn sold it to Ako (Nigeria). Nsanaragati recalled having bought Obasi Asam from Nsanakang between 1950 and 1951, when a terrible smallpox epidemic afflicted their village, and they credit Obasi Asam with saving them. It hung across the road on the gate-like poles at the village entrances and was linked to the earth by liana chains (Fig. 6.1). Nsanakang bought Ekem from Effraya but never sold it. Not only associations and cult agencies but also other institutions were adopted. After Bendeghe, Abia and some of the Etung Ejagham villages were established on the other side of the river in what is Nigeria today, they acquired the ntui emang institution, the sacred ‘chiefship of the knife’, from the neighbouring Bakor villages. The settlements on the Cross River, particularly those on its southern bank, such as Nsanakang, never acquired this institution. After his investiture, such a chief was allowed to leave his house only for specific ritual occasions and was not supposed to travel outside (see Onor 1994; Byström 1954). Obviously, not all points of a village history could be covered in the course of one morning. It was nonetheless a lively conversation and yielded many useful historical materials and open questions that would be helpful in the reconstruction of the history of the dissemination of their institutions in the region. What mostly concerned the people in the various villages was that I write down their history, from their founding ancestor to the present time. Other historical issues, such as the colonial period, were usually not something they were especially interested in recalling. Years of turbulence began when the first whites came and lasted until the end of the First World War. During this time, the whole country was restructured by colonial powers. The National Archives of Buea, so well supported by the Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC), were for me the starting point from which to find more details about the past. Edwin

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Figure 6.1: The njom Called Obasi Asam, at Nsanaragati (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

Ardener thoughtfully characterized the colonial reports not just as ‘oral tradition’ but as ‘oral tradition collected for a special purpose’.19

Pre-war History around Nsanakang: Living in the Borderlands To begin with, encounters between the Europeans and the local population seemed to have been satisfactory for both sides. In 1895, the British-German boundary commission of Arden-Close and von Besser chose Nsakpe village as a good place for a future first station. Nsakpe was situated near the present border and the Cross River rapids. Following a visit from the chiefs of the surrounding villages, ArdenClose (1941: 191) noted: ‘During our stay at Nsakpe, we had the usual talks with chiefs from neighbouring villages about population, trade etc. It was the custom for each chief to bring some dash of sheep, yams, plantain, goat, coconut, a porcupine etc. We returned what we thought was the value of the dash in trade cloth, tobacco leaves or brass rods, and sometimes beads.’

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This peaceful beginning was soon disturbed. The next Europeans, under Queiss, reached Nsakpe from the Rio del Rey in 1898 and established an interim station or factory at Nsakpe,20 at which point the people of Otu refused to clear the roads. When Queiss approached them, the inhabitants became annoyed and, as Ita writes, activated their cult agency Eja to hypnotize the enemy. Queiss, six soldiers, and 120 of his carriers were killed (Ita 1981: 34f.). The trader Conrau21 was sent to rescue Queiss, but as soon as he heard of his death, he returned to Fontem. There he was held captive by the Bangwa, who were agitated because labourers sent to the coastal plantations earlier with Conrau had not returned. He died soon after in circumstances that are described elsewhere (see Chilver 1967). It took a year until the punitive expedition under von Besser reached the area in Spring 1900. He eventually established a military station at Nsakpe (where he placed Hauptmann Guse), cruelly subdued ‘the Keaka and Ekoi’ and ordered various punishments.22 Nsakpe village quickly moved away from the German station to a quieter place in the neighbourhood of Ayaoke (von Ramsay 1901: 235). At that time, the GNK had a concession from the colonial government extending from Bamenda to the Cross River. Only a few months later, in September 1900, the trader and general manager of the GNK, von Ramsay, arrived at Nsakpe with eighty-one armed carriers. He came from Douala via Mundame on the Mungo and the Keaka country (von Ramsay 1901: 235). After a one-day march from Nsakpe, von Ramsay was the first European to reach Nsanakang. He was surprised to find the local population regarding itself as English, and von Ramsay had some trouble convincing the chief ‘Oberhäuptling’ of Nsanakang to give him land for the factory that he wished to open (Mansfeld 1908: 18).23 As had happened all over the country, the Europeans thought that they had bought the land outright and hence enjoyed absolute rights over resources. However, the local population gave them land for usufruct only and interpreted themselves to be in the stronger position as givers of land. Nsanakang was a rich place, and in front of the Ngbe hall von Ramsay saw heaps of commodities imported from the British side: schnapps, rum and Dutch square-shaped gin bottles. Soon after his arrival, von Ramsay noted a British steamship negotiating the rapids. On another day a British gunboat held some shooting practice just behind Nsanakang on the upper (German) side of the rapids. He also met canoes with Calabar traders on the Cross River (von Ramsay 1901: 235). In November 1900, Sir Ralph Moore came up from Calabar with a gunboat to Nsanakang to protest against the German traders’ activities and to reaffirm British interests on the Upper Cross River. The flow of goods down the Cross River was a constant source of worry for the German traders. Eventually, in 1901, the boundary problem was solved in favour of the Germans. After he had opened the first factory at Nsanakang in November 1900, von Ramsay discovered that the Cross River was navigable further upstream towards the Bali road. This encouraged him to open several factories further upriver as well as to maintain a number of steamboats with which he intended to trade rubber, ebony, ivory, and palm oil and kernels for cloth, beads, commodities and rum (von Ramsay 1904: 28; Mansfeld 1908: 18).24 In Autumn 1900, Graf Pückler-Limpurg arrived, and the station at Nsakpe was handed over to Graf Rittberg. In January 1901 Governor von Puttkamer arrived at Nsakpe. Hauptmann Guse received him

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with a welcome parade. Von Ramsay was also present doing geographic surveys (Puttkamer 1901). It is amazing how the small villages managed to supply the German expeditions who demanded food at any time of the year. Puttkamer, for example, arrived from the Rio del Rey25 in January 1901 with a party of nearly 200 persons: it included Oberleutnant der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe Glauning, Police Inspector Biernatzki, Police Officer Brückner, 11 policemen, 144 carriers and 2 mules plus cooks, laundrymen, servants and orderlies. Puttkamer also inspected the GNK’s storehouse at Nsanakang. In February, Hauptmann Glauning replaced Graf Rittberg. In April 1901, after further explorations upriver, Glauning decided to open a toll station at Nsanakang and in July to move the station to Ossidinge further upriver (Moisel 1903: 5; Mansfeld 1908: 18). The Nsanakang toll was, however, situated at a different point on the river from the English toll at Agborkem Waterfall. This further complicated the control of trade (Michels 2004: 177). In August 1902 Oberleutnant Houben began his ill-fated activities as the District Officer of Ossidinge. His cruelties were so disturbing that even the GNK feared for its trade and urgently demanded the military station Ossidinge be transformed into a civil government station. In November 1902 it was handed over to Graf Pückler-Limpurg. The position of the GNK had become problematic, and resistance to its practices increased among the local population. During an expedition to the Overside in January 1904, Graf Pückler-Limpurg went with 35 police soldiers, 19 carriers, and 6 other men to open up the country further north of the Cross River. His visit eventually provoked the Anyang uprising (also called the Mpawmanku war, because the expedition was defeated by the Bachama under Chief Mpawmanku). On 14 January Graf Pückler-Limpurg was killed and five of his European merchants were murdered. The factories at Basho, Badje, Agborkem, Mamfe and the Ossidinge station were burnt, and the Nsanakang toll station was destroyed. Police Officer Wolff and the director of the GNK, Willhöft, eventually fled from Nsanakang to Nigeria after an unsuccessful resistance. Moisel argued that the British should be held responsible for this uprising because they might have stirred up the Ibibio and Aro on the Lower Cross River (1904: 90). Ballhaus maintains that, in the final analysis, it was the pricing policies of the GNK that led to the Anyang uprising in early 1904 (1968: 149–162, 152).26 At Agborkem we heard a most bewildering story concerning the first German traders, which I quote in part below. One old man at Agborkem repeated to us what he had been told by his father.27 In this version of the story, responsibility for the course of events is laid on local people. He recounted: When the Germans came for their market, they didn’t come for a quarrel, they didn’t come for war. But the black man believed: we are different. He is white in colour, we are black. How do we know him? Our elderly Pa said, somebody has come for his market [to trade] with all his goods, cloths, with everything he has. Ata Awo dreamt that people would come from down river; they were as white as an egg. When they came, they wouldn’t go back. They would seize this land. Then our great grandfather, the one who followed Agborfa, shouted at him. He said: you, with this your ekpinon [your witchcraft society], in two days, three days, before it is a month, you will see. He did not know that a white man was coming from below with a ship. The whites started seeing plantain peels. They also saw corn peels. And asked themselves where all these things would

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come from. They concluded that they came from up river. And they had heard that the people upriver had tails. Then they started ascending the river and coming. They wanted to see those people with tails. But first they went back to bring more of their food. They said: I will come again. Me, I am a trader. I will bring you anything you people want. I will bring it. Wine. A different boat contained only wine. Matches, tobacco, and pipes were the things which he dashed the people first before he said he will come back to bring gunpowder, guns, everything, drinks. He said that they should build a shop and keep those things until he was back. He said he would buy both cracked and uncracked kernels. He would buy rubber and build market stores. Eventually the people saw all these things filling up the market. They shouted, just now that this man came from somewhere, he has already done this type of thing? Let’s kill him and seize all these things. We don’t know where he comes from. From then on problems fell on us. That is why we are in slavery up until today. Are you hearing? The German was not a troublesome man. He came only for his market and his trade.’

The old man continued telling of the uprising and the execution by the Germans of the persons responsible for the killing at Agborkem. After the people had rid themselves of the traders they celebrated their victory, which proved short-lived. Six months later several punitive expeditions arrived. First, an advance punitive column under Leutnant Nitschmann came to Nsanakang, followed by Oberst Müller with the main expedition on 5 March. He had with him 10 European officers, 2 medical doctors, 13 non-commissioned officers and 370 African mercenaries for the pacification of the area. Hauptmann Langheld came to his help to secure the Bali road with half a company. Through the major part of 1905 the socalled pacification continued (Moisel 1904: 90). As a punishment each village had to provide 20–30 forced labourers, 20–30 guns, 20–30 goats, and 2 elephant tusks. Some villages, including Ekok, Nsanaragati, Esagem and Nsanakang, readily paid in guns, elephant tusks and cows (Ebai 2001: 52).28 Alfred Mansfeld took over the Ossidinge station under these conditions in August 1904. Following the uprising, the government imposed heavy fines but also decreed German criminal law. Around 1906 six villages moved their sites to Nigeria to avoid this. Among them were Babong, Babi, Mbobui, Mbeban and Ekang. A year later some of them (Babong and Babi) had returned (Jahresbericht 1907–08 National Archives, Yaoundé; Ita 1981: 21), while others (Mbeban, Ekang and Mbobui) remained in Nigeria.29 Mansfeld (1908: 128–29) realized that the trade with Nigeria and knowledge of the growing wealth of the Calabar chiefs had already, in pre-colonial time (between 1875 and 1900), led to the migration of a good number of villages out of German territory in the direction of Calabar. He took note of the porcelain wares and tin trunks the people had collected in their houses, which were all of British make, and observed that the people preferred to buy English cloth, hats or red uniforms. Mansfeld knew that the five toll posts that had been established in the meantime could scarcely contribute anything to the reduction of smuggling. The boundary was much too extensive and the local population knew the paths well.30 One of the first tasks Mansfeld undertook was to order the villages to resettle along the roads. If they did not do so after a certain time, he burnt the houses. To encourage people to resettle and pay their fines, he presented prizes. The first

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prize, paid in trade goods, did not go to Nsanakang but to Ogomoko village. All the villages that had fulfilled their task received a special cap and a German flag (1908: 20). The relocation of the villages on the roads was welcomed by the GNK, which was established in 1899, because it made it easier to assemble the desired number of carriers.31 The missionaries, who arrived shortly afterwards (in 1912), also announced their gratitude and praised Mansfeld for his achievement in bringing the villages to the road, which facilitated their mission work greatly (Stolz 1912: 13). On the other hand, the missionaries complained that Mansfeld was encouraging the expansion of the Ngbe society because he thought it would be helpful in the settlement of debts and could enforce laws on behalf of the colonial government.32 Later, after the war, the missionaries complained further that the English allowed the cult agencies to appear in court to ensure the swearing of oaths. Eventually, the consolidation of small villages into larger settlements produced what are today’s chieftaincy problems in the region. People were not used to living closely together. Each chief wanted his own village, and to move away with his people if he desired to do so. Mansfeld, who described the Kembong-Ossing-Landschaften as the ‘Kornkammer’, or bread-basket, of the Ossidinge-Bezirk, worried about the busy trade to Calabar (Jahresbericht 1904–05, National Archives, Yaoundé). At that time (after the British had managed to break up the last local trading spheres) the Calabar traders were able to buy slaves themselves from the Bamenda Grassfields. Mansfeld thought that the Calabar traders took advantage of the local population. They came upriver with European commodities, stayed for one or two months and returned to the coast with 20 to 25 heavily loaded men (1908: 128).33 Since the border was still unclear, another Anglo-German border commission finally came that same year to demarcate it from Rio del Rey to the Oyi River according to treaty. This enabled easier transport down to the coast as transit costs no longer had to be paid. Nevertheless, because Nsanakang had only one customs officer, the GNK continued to fear that the population would trade its products directly to Calabar (Stolz 1912: 10, 12). The colonial government was not at all concerned that the local population of the Cross River traded in women’s and men’s societies and cult agencies. In 1906, Mansfeld moved the government station from Ossidinge to Mamfe. The station director Buthut stated that the debts from the uprising were more or less settled (only those villages that had moved to Nigeria had not yet paid), and even that relations with the British were excellent, as was clearly attested by the visit of the Deputy High Commissioner Mr Fosbery to Nsanakang in November of the same year. Nevertheless, Buthut did complain that the station workers exploited the local population ruthlessly, and that in turn the latter expected no benefit from government.34

Nsanakang in the Firing Line The era of German colonial government began to come to an end in 1914. In the First World War, African troops fought for the Germans against African troops fighting for the British, possibly even brothers against brothers, given that Ejag-

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ham lay on both sides of the border. In August 1914 British troops entered Nsanakang, and by 24 August 1914 the village found itself under occupation by two companies with two artillery pieces, 220 men in total. However, attempts to take the German positions by storm were unsuccessful. According to Mentzel (1936: 43), the failure of the British Cross River Column at Nsanakang on 6 September was most damaging. It had occupied Nsanakang without specific orders to do so, but was supposed to hold the line because it was already in place. On 6 September a German western detachment of three companies led by Hauptmann Ramstedt made a surprise attack on the column, surrounded it and mauled it badly. The British lost both artillery pieces, five machine guns and more than a hundred men either dead or taken prisoner (Mentzel 1936: 44). The total force of the Schutztruppe in all of Cameroon amounted to about 700 Europeans and 6,100 Africans in March 1915. This was the first of several battles in the area.35 In April 1916 Cameroon was divided between England and France on a provisional basis. The division created by the border and the division of ethnic groups such as the Ejagham was submerged for a good forty years (only to return following the vote of the South West and North West Provinces for Cameroon in 1961; see Brain and Eyongateh 1985: 95). Roads now went directly from Mamfe to Calabar or Enugu. The missionaries and the trading companies gradually returned. In 1920, the African and Eastern Trade Corporation occupied the land of the GNK at Mamfe and Nsanakang, for which they paid an annual rent of only one pound sterling. In 1929, the United Africa Co. leased GNK land at Mamfe, Tali and Nsanakang (5.29 ha). Most of the remaining forest owned by Nsanakang, Nsanaragati and Eyumojock had been turned into a forest reserve.36 In 1925, Nsanakang had a native court that also represented the clans of the Mamfe Overside: Boki, Eba Mbu and Ekokisam (Gregg 1925).37 The cemetery at Nsanakang, nearly swallowed up by the jungle, is a witness to the past (Figs. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5). We would have been unable to locate and see the gravestones without the help of some boys who went with us to have a look at them. The graves were scattered, and while some stones were still upright, most had fallen down on the ground. A few were still in one piece but many were broken. One of the boys had a piece of paper on which was written some details of some of the gravestone inscriptions. It included references to three British graves: Captain C.R.T. Hopkinson East Surrey regiment. W.A.F.F. 6th Sept. 1914 in Nsanakang. 7300 Sergeant J. Dennis, Royal Field Artillery and Nigeria regiment, W.A.F.F. 6th Sept. 1914 in Nsanakang. In memory of Lieutenant A.C.Holme, Gloucester regiment who was killed in action at Nsanakang on the 6th Sept. 1914. (Fig. 6.4)

Two German graves were also listed there: Herbert Kratz, geb. 1.Okt. 1870 in Meseritz Kreis Schivelborn in Pommern, gest. 24.Juli 1902 in Nsanakang. Johann Carl Cecil Holling, geb. 14. March 1870 in Rendsburg, gest. 21. Juli 1902 in Nsanakang. (Fig. 6.5)

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Figure 6.2: British/German Cemetery at Nsanakang (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

The others were so overgrown that they could scarcely be deciphered. Here, English and German gravestones placed by Europeans after the war lay side by side. They had been erected in two sets: an older series supplemented by a more recent series. Each of the stones was individually carved and decorated, some with crosses, others with rectangular or mitre-shaped stones. Most were for fatalities of the First World War; a few others dated from an earlier time.

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Figure 6.3: British/German Cemetery at Nsanakang (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

In his compound, the chief had a stone tablet (Fig. 6.6) on which the following words were inscribed. It refers to another four German soldiers, three of whom had died at Nsanakang for the Kaiser: Es starben für Kaiser und Reich am 6.Sept.1914 bei Nsanakang: HPTM. A.D. F. Rausch, 8.2.1877, Giessen Lt.d.r. P. Glock, 26.8.1881, Züzenhausen GBFB D.r. J. Schrader, 2.4.1885, Berlin Am 9.Febr. bei Ewuri-Kembon: Lt. d.r. H.Schürmann, 18.5.1878, Köln

The graves were not at all cared for. Some time later we heard a story that a Nigerian who had come to Nsanakang to buy land to build his house on had opted to have just that piece of the land on which the graves were sited. People speculated about why this mysterious Nigerian wanted the land with the graves, suspecting that he would make a lot of money from it. They also feared that he could put either them or the German government or whoever under pressure, and that this would cause trouble. Eventually the Nigerian was prevented from buying the property and everything remained as it was. Graves certainly have an air of unquiet, especially if untended. People felt their presence. Other graves in the country had a similar effect, as I will illustrate with another anecdote. In March 1999, the wife of the chief of Mundame on the Mungo

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Figure 6.4: Gravestone of Lieutenant A.C. Holme (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

River was not at all surprised to see my assistant and me approaching her house one day. She exclaimed with joy that she had been waiting for us. She said this because she thought we were sent from the German embassy. The Germans used to visit some graves located near the Mungo River beach regularly, every five years, but now they had not been there for ten years or more. It was high time for

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Figure 6.5: Gravestone of Johann Carl Cecil Holling (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

them to be tended. There were three graves, and she had deciphered one: ‘Hier ruhet Ernst Franck, geb. 29 März 1877 zu Hamburg, gest. 24 November 1906 zu Mundame’. The other two were broken and unreadable. The Germans had also left behind a big steel pot on a cement base. She finally accepted that we were there on another mission (to seek information on huge carved sculptures that Max Esser had collected in an adjacent village; see Chilver and Röschenthaler 2001). She kindly told us what she knew and allowed us to leave only when we had promised to inquire at the German embassy why they had not come there for so long. Later, when I was back in Germany, the chief‘s wife wrote a letter asking what had come of my inquiries and reminding me how important it was that the Ger-

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Figure 6.6: Commemorative Stone Plate in Chief‘s Compound in Nsanakang (Ute Röschenthaler, February 1999)

mans should come there again to visit the graves. ‘It is a pity to remind you instead of you visiting and making libations over their heads at least once in every five years’,38 she insisted. I had indeed made inquiries at the German embassy, but the opinion prevailed that the embassy could not continuously spend money at Mundame as there were only a few graves and not many tourists.39 The chief’s wife felt that libations should be done for one’s own ancestors but not for other people’s, and then only on the ground in which the ancestors rested. The people of Nsanakang, too, envisaged being buried in the earth of Nsanakang. Even if the chief had made libations for the Germans because he was responsible for the souls of dead strangers on his ground, these dead bodies must still have been unsettling.

People and Powers In colonial reports, notions of tribe and clanship play a prominent role. For the Germans it was the tribes that were significant; for the British, it was the clans. The term that the people use to refer to themselves these days, ‘Ejagham’, was not a colonial invention. Mansfeld refers to the Ejagham as the language of the people, but otherwise divided the District (Bezirk) into the seven tribes (Stämme) or districts (Landschaften): Boki, Anyang, Bakoko, Ekwe (Ekoi), Keaka, Obang and Banyang. German colonial officers assumed that a tribe must form a unit of action, feeling and thought – somewhat like a nation. A tribe was supposed to trade and fight together. Mansfeld, who otherwise understood much of the local ethnog-

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raphy, wrote, for example, that ‘the Ekois’ knew how to prevent ‘the Keakas’ from trading directly with ‘Calabar’, and that this trade had brought ‘the Ekois’ a lot of wealth as middlemen (1908: 127). As can be gathered from their reports, the Germans expected each of the ‘tribes’ (Keaka, Ekoi, Anyang) to come together to fight in the Anyang uprising. A tribe had to fight as a unit, and not doing so was read as a sign of a disunity and lack of resistance. Hence ‘tribes’ were punished collectively. Arguments based on ethnic units were also put forward by Roman Catholic missionaries. Hoegn and Vieter (1913) complained that the division of ethnic groups by the colonial border would make missionary work more difficult.40 From what I could gather from my research, a feeling of unity was largely present at the lower level of the village or village groups who considered themselves to have a common ancestor or some other type of blood tie. This united lineages and villages who claimed common descent and performed their warriors’ society together, as was the case with Nsanakang, Nsanaragati and Eyumojock and their Ncebe warriors’ society, in which members of the so-called ‘royal’ lineages participated and which excluded foreigners and former slaves. These smaller units of lineages and villages came nearer to the ‘clans’ that the British colonial officers were so eager to seek out, although it is very likely that no clan heads ever existed in this part of the Cross River area. In addition to its warrior society and associations, each village had its own mystical agencies, which also promoted its political and economic powers. Their owners used their powers to defend their village against enemies or to destroy a neighbour’s farm out of jealousy. These powers were vested in individual lineages and passed down to descendants. Responsible individuals were initiated into the secrets of how to activate the mystical powers. One example of the use of these powers refers to Eyimba, the alleged founder of Abia village. Before Abia went to settle at the other side of the Cross River, they stayed for a certain time in the forest of Nsanakang. Nsanakang people had agreed to this and permitted them to use their land. But when the villagers saw the rich and prospering farms of the Abia people, they became jealous of the latter’s success and sent bush fowls to destroy their farms. As a result they were afflicted by famine, and most of the Abia people left to cross the river and move to Mkpang (between Abonorok and present Abia) (Awu 1995). Another episode refers to Okomba, the founder of Bendeghe Ekiem. He, too, stayed in the neighbourhood of Nsanakang. Before his people crossed the river to the other side, he transformed himself into a huge snake on whose back his people safely crossed, whence derives the clan name Nyoaya, ‘snake of the water’. In another version of the story, Tabo, who also belonged to the Nyoaya clan and went to the other side of the river, had occasion to leave because of a quarrel about the inheritance of their founder. They returned and crossed the river again, and here a slave showed them the way when he transformed himself into a huge snake (Ita 1981: 18). For the Ejagham, mystical agencies played a significant role. These were usually located at a specific site but equally they could be as mobile as the people themselves. Once the people resettled, these mystical agencies followed them to their new place of settlement. Other powers were encountered on the way and domesticated. Wonderful stories of transformations were widely known and ea-

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gerly retold. Such stories concerned persons who transformed into huge snakes, crocodiles, hippopotamuses or mudfish and spent days in a river, or might return a trader’s wares that had been lost in the river. Pools or mountains were created, and rocks were placed in the way of enemies. In his second book, Mansfeld (1908: 221) published a picture of the sacred hippopotamuses of a certain village across the border and east of Ikom. He did not mention the name of this village because he had promised the villagers not to tell anybody of the tame animals in order to save them from being shot (Fig. 6.7). They were the animal family, the efeme powers of the village, and the entire family of hippopotami came at the call of the Figure 6.7: Hippopotamuses with ‘Owners’ at the Cross River (Alfred Mansfeld, 1928)

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village chief. Most villages knew of such powerful animals, which formed their double in the forest realm. These were intrinsically linked to the prosperity of the villagers and were activated for the defence of the village. They were the efeme of the village, a form of witchcraft, oje, referred to as ‘witch’ in Pidgin, but different from other forms such as Ekpinon and Nyongho. Bakut village had its crocodiles in the Munaya, certain families in Inokun had the leopard, others had a certain fish, in certain Obang villages there was Belung nya,41 Obubra knew fairy figures in the river and Babong controlled elephants. Others drew their powers from a mountain or a hill. Esukutan, for example, owned a hill that could be called upon to ‘throw blinking mirrors.’42 To own such powers was essential in order to attract wealth, build up an effective trading sphere, and fend off the attacks of enemies. These powers were also activated in the colonial period but eventually proved unable to match the power of the Europeans. Still, the local powers could be activated or occasionally bought for defence. In the Anyang uprising, or Mpawmanku war, Mamfe men used to transform into bees and sting their enemies (Ebai 2001: 13). Ebai recollected the story that deep pools were made to appear shallow to German soldiers, who entered the water and drowned (2001: 54). Local warriors are said to have dug deep holes on roads, into which they planted sharp sticks and poisoned iron rods (Ebai 2001: 58). Another trick that I was told about in various places was to use mobile scarecrows that seemed like real soldiers to their opponents, who would use their ammunition to fire at the decoys and thereupon were attacked from an unexpected direction (see also Ebai 2001: 58–59).

Arts, Politics and Identity After we had taken down the history in the chief’s yard at Nsanakang, the iyamba used the occasion to give a speech on some major points of his own interest. He greatly emphasized the need to construct a road to Nsanakang. Once a road was constructed, everything would get better, trade would become easier and wealth return to the village. One just had to look at Nsanaragati with its new brick built houses and roofs of corrugated iron. Whether it was a logging company, the Development Society of the South West (SWEDA) or a German development agency that helped them construct it, a road from Eyumojock to Nsanakang would change everything for the better. We had similar experiences in the villages of Upper Ekwe, which were equally underdeveloped and had no road. We had also noticed that the Obang villages that had eventually obtained roads quickly picked up, built new houses and attracted back their youth. Other roads had been planned in the past and never built. The nearby villagers of Mbenyan, for example, claimed to have saved the money for road construction, but no road had yet been built because of mystical powers located on a hill on the way to Ndebaya. In a combined effort, the villages who owned a share in the magic hill had first to meet and bring animals for a sacrifice in order to appease the powers of the hill. If not, any work on the hill would disappear by the next morning, and the construction company would have to start anew. Since it was difficult to bring the different parties together, the road had not yet been built. The road to Nsanakang would not have quite such a difficult start.

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The iyamba did not only aspire to enjoy the honours of his new title as the chief of Nsanakang’s Ngbe society. People often complained that riches alone counted when people aspired to a prestigious title and that Ngbe had degenerated into a mere title society. The iyamba had yet more ambitious aims. When the Ejagham Cultural Centre at Eyumojock was founded two years later, the iyamba volunteered to be its executive director. The centre needed a personality who would energetically promote it, and so it was registered officially under his name. The foundation ceremony included the ritual placement in the ground of a foundation stone that the Rural Council of Eyumojock had set aside for the building. A male goat was decapitated by officials of the Obasinjom cult agency, its blood poured over the stone and the medicine trees planted by its side. For the occasion, a number of officials were invited to give speeches, and ten or more dance groups of repute from various villages came to entertain with their performances.43 A famous singer, Ogambuk from Abia village in the Cross River State of Nigeria, was also invited. As has become usual at such ceremonies, an egusi cake44 was provided, and those who wished to receive a share donated ‘an envelope’ to the secretary. To encourage people to do so, a moderator announced the names of the chiefs, elites, and other well-to-do guests and the sums they had donated. In return, they took the microphone and gave short speeches to commend the event. A cow was slaughtered to feed the invited guests and dance groups. The cow, said to be worth 100,000 CFA,45 was pledged by the iyamba. The iyamba had worked for decades as a customs officer at the border checkpoint of Ekok. He had long been a member of the ruling CPDM political party. And – not completely to our surprise – one or two years later the iyamba won the election for the mayorship of Eyumojock and the presidency of the local CPDM. Now his opponents – a mayor is never without opponents – attacked him precisely with the question of how he could possibly win all these elections. Nsanakang was the iyamba’s second Heimat. People spread the rumour that the iyamba was a Nigerian, and therefore should be neither an iyamba in Nsanakang nor a mayor of Eyumojock subdivision. The iyamba argued that it was his mother’s village, and her family owned the title of iyamba, and therefore it was perfectly reasonable according to traditional law to become an iyamba there. Other people continued to argue that not even his mother was from there. Whatever his lineage ties to Nsanakang might be, the iyamba had grown up in Bendeghe Ekiem. With his initiation ceremony, which had taken place during our stay at Nsanakang, the iyamba had ritually legitimized his status as a Cameroonian and membership in one of the founding families of Nsanakang.46 He had established himself as a native of Nsanakang because only members of a founding family could become an iyamba. This demonstrates the flexible nature of identity. He was very welcome at Nsanakang. The olden times when the salt wells had brought riches were gone. We were shown the revered salt wells, still there behind the village under bamboo trees. For now, they were the abandoned gold mines of Nsanakang, yet we were told that they could be revived any time the villagers wished to do so. Together with the iyamba and his wife, we left Nsanakang by boat to Nsanaragati, from where he invited us to Ekok to see his house. We passed a sand bank of

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the Cross River that here formed the border with Nigeria. We passed Agborkem Waterfall, the former British ‘Bookend’ toll station and Beecroft’s Abocoom. Nearby, we saw a temporary settlement of Afikpo fishermen by the beach with small huts and a tiny market. These were true strangers and very different, and there were a good number of them. Von Ramsay (1901: 235) long ago noted that he saw Wey (Vai), Lagos, Accra or Sierra Leonean traders in all of the villages. Mansfeld (1908) also recorded the stranger population in the area. A century later, in the Ejagham villages, we met mainly Igbo and Bamenda men, but also some workers from Ghana and other West African states. Nsanakang villagers do not recall their history in clear detail. Nsanakang did not even remember where its own Ngbe and Angbu had come from. Many other villages did better. Nsanakang was in a desperate condition. It had never really recovered from the misfortunes of the past. That the Cross River region straddled both Cameroon and Nigeria made it a marginal, borderland region. Furthermore, the experience of colonization was particularly complicated for non-centralized societies because they had never before had the experience of coping with anything like a hierarchical power, as Fisiy and Geschiere (1996) have pointed out. Even the introduction of the Ngbe society had caused suspicion with its attempts to build up a trading network. The Ejagham villages bought Ngbe, but at the same time did everything to adapt Ngbe to their needs and stay independent. Presumably the future of Nsanakang would improve if it had access to a motorable road – which was the iyamba’s main concern in his speech to me and the villagers. The youths on the rocks of Nsanakang were not just singing pop songs into the humid evening air, they were continuing their welcome song for the iyamba, who had clearly arrived only a few minutes before us.

Acknowledgements This chapter evolved from a research project on the dissemination history of associations and cult agencies in the Cross River area of South West Cameroon and South East Nigeria between 1998 and 2001. The project was hosted at the Institut für Historische Ethnologie, University of Frankfurt am Main, and was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council). An earlier project was carried out in the same area in 1987 and 1988 and was supported by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the NaFöG (Nachwuchförderung des Landes Berlin). For their helpful insights and critical comments I am grateful to Sally Chilver, Clement Takang Manyo and Stefanie Michels.

Notes 1. Sharwood-Smith and Cantle (n.d.) still talked about eradicating the slave trade in the 1920s. 2. Eugen Zintgraff met the powerful Efik trader Yellow Duke as far north as Nguti on the road to Bali in 1888 (1895: 114). The Duala trader Ndumbe or Manga Bell (a son of the Duala chief

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

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Bell) came up from Douala to Kumba. They were welcomed by the local chiefs, none of whom wished the Duala or the Efik traders, and most certainly not the Europeans, to go further and endanger their trade (Röschenthaler 1999). The first explorers were able to travel the Mungo upriver, only under the escort of chief Duala’s traders. Each of them had to pay a toll at every trading post. In 1884 Max Buchner reached the Bakundu country in the company of the trader Manga Bell Mukonye (1914: 182), as did Hugo Zöller with Dr Nachtigal in 1885, the same year in which Bernhard Schwarz failed with his expedition. Manga Bell did not wish to be seen with Buchner by the Calabar traders who came up for the trade in palm oil. He also did not wish to have problems with the notorious Chief Makia, whose sphere of influence started there (Buchner 1914: 182). Beecroft is said to have collected the first known skin-covered mask on this journey (Campbell 1981: 18). He baptized the rapids ‘Ethiope’ after the steamship that took him and J.B. King up the river (Beecroft 1844). The rapids are sketched in Schwarz’s map of 1888 as the Ethiope rapids, and the place, no longer known today, is situated some way east on the Cross River, which he called Ekokojuko. The Scottish missionaries reached Okuni only in 1890 (McFarlan 1946: 81f.; Allison 1968). Talbot started his station at Oban in 1907 (Jones 1956: 125). Four were at Nsakpe, one at Nsanakang, eight at Mbenyan, one at Mbakang, one at Nkimichi, one at Ebinsi, one at Ossidinge, two at the former Aiwawa, one at Mamfe. Mansfeld described in detail the production of salt (Mansfeld 1908: 10). Fobia (1985), for example, notes that the Mbo or Bebum people heard from the Banyang village Eyang about the salt wells of Nsanakang and decided to seize them. The Ejagham fought them in several heroic battles that earned the latter the well-known Ejagham adage: ‘Okanam Mbo, Onam Mbo, Onam Eku’ (Don’t buy an Mbo (as a slave), if you buy an Mbo you buy death). The Mbo finally gave up the mission and returned to Eyang. They found themselves confronted at the battle of Mbakang with an unknown weapon – the gun (Fobia 1985: 12). Rutherfoord (n.d.) estimated that these so-called Kebu wars against the Mbo took place around 1885. Rutherfoord, J.W.C. n.d. An Assessment Report on the Keaka Speaking Area in the Mamfe Division of the Cameroons Province (edited by O. Anderson), National Archives, Buea. Those above named villages owning salt wells were locally called abhek. See also Cantle (1926). In the forest of Upper Ekwe we had earlier seen people carrying bundles of 15–25 sticks, each stick being about 3 cm in diameter and 1.5 m in length. One boy said they were sold to Hausa people, who made their cattle fences with them. Another boy at Elisa beach talked of a big secret about the sticks, claiming that they were used as powder for Moon Tiger (a shop-bought green coil burnt to drive away mosquitoes) and contained some medicine against malaria. They may be the young branches or stems of the iroko tree. This is Caroline Ifeka (editor’s note). Swabey, M.H.W. (D.O.). 1937. Intelligence Report on the Kembong Area, Mamfe Division, Cameroons Province. File No 1460/11937, AF 30. Altogether the three villages had a population of 530, according to Cantle (An Assessment Report on the Ekwe District of the Mamfe Division, Cameroons Province. MS.1926). Swabey reported that the Ogo clan consisted of Nsanakang with 57 to 112, Nsanaragati with 59 to 131 and Eyumojock with 20 to 68 adult males per total population. He did not mention Nsan Okem Isughi, perhaps because it had already left for Nigeria by his time. Eyumojock meant the ‘bathing place (eyum) of the elephants (ojok)’ which was Lake Ejagham. Nsanaragati means ‘the fallen Nsan tree (nsan) on which the people walked (aragha eti)’, and where they decided to stay. Eyumojock explained it in a similar way. Haig (Intelligence Report on the Boki of Ikom Div., Ogoja Prov. With special reference to the Abo clan. Minloc 6.1.149, File No. EP 7629A. 6-95, National Archives, Enugu, 1930) mentions a war called Eta Puma war, in which Ogo of Nsanakang lent his ally Etaa Puma two guns to fight his Boki enemies, who knew only spears. The elders explained that the full name of the place was Emat Orue aya, which means ‘if you don’t leave here it is your own problem’, a proverb that refers to the paths (emat) behind the houses that people used when going to the farms or to the stream (aya) to take a bath; such paths are used when one does not wish to be seen.

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14. Sealy-King, L. 1932. Intelligence Report on the Ekoi, Calabar Province. CALPROF 53/1/551, National Archives, Enugu. 15. Three sections of Nsanaragati are related to Egemene, but the fourth, Osaw Egui, derives from a place called Osaw Egui that was situated between Ayaoke and Inokun but no longer exists. Half of Osaw Egui went to join Nsanaragati, and the other half founded Inokun (the Asong family of Inokun). 16. Nsanaragati, too, had Bubumbe and Isughi, among others. When an Ngbe chief is greeting the cult inside or out of the hall, he calls the names of all the above smaller associations before saying ‘Bario’, e.g. ‘Isughi Oghé, Ikobhi Oghé, Moninyo Oghé, gebháb Barió’; then the rest of the members answer: ‘Owá’. Nowadays, however, most members are initiated into Ngbe without even understanding that these smaller associations exist (according to Richard Etchu Ayuk, of Inokun village and working for the Voice of Manyu, Kembong). 17. The Ngbe of Eyumojock and that of Nsanakang differed considerably in the number of grades and branches. From what can be gathered of the histories, both villages had acquired their Ngbe separately. 18. Membership was open to Monaya boat owners with an outboard engine. The weekly turn controller had to pay the sum of 2000 CFA at the start of his turn: 1000 CFA to the union and 1000 CFA to the Nsanakang traditional council. They tried to make all foreign boats terminate at Nsanakang (and not at Nsanaragati) except by negotiation with the weekly turn controller. Boat owners could pass without paying any commission if they carried fewer than 20 jerry cans of petroleum, but for above 20 they paid 1000 CFA. 19. Edwin Ardener’s summary of the reports on the Overside villages, called ‘Oral Traditions and Administrative Identities’ (this volume) was compiled largely from archival materials. Apart from the National Archives of Buea, the National Archives of Enugu, the Archives Nationales at Yaoundé and the files of the Reichskolonialamt at the Bundesarchiv Berlin were useful additional colonial sources. 20. Moisel (1903: 2) maintains that the expedition’s mission was to start recruiting labourers. Stefanie Michels (2004: chap. 4) quotes Puttkamer (1912: 192), who writes that the aim of the von Queiss expedition was to found the Nsakpe station. See also the files ‘Durchführung der CrossSchnellen Expedition unter der Führung von Hauptmann von Besser 1900, Juni-Sept.’ in the National Archives at Yaoundé (FA 5/11) and in the Bundesarchiv Berlin (R 1001/3348). 21. See Ndobegang and Bowie in this volume. 22. In September 1900 von Besser ordered Chief Ogba, from Mbenyan, to organize the collection of the fines. Alfred Mansfeld later worked well with Chief Ogba. Jolanda Ballhaus has studied the correspondence in her dissertation. She took the side of the oppressed local population (1968: 134) and gave a vivid picture of the nature of von Besser’s policy. From Nsakpe he went to the villages to ‘shoot people’. He talked of having got ‘90 heads’. Von Besser even neglected the feeding of his own carriers and soldiers intentionally, and between sixty and seventy carriers died from hunger. Others, when they were exhausted, were just left lying in the bush to die. Subsequently von Besser was arrested and spent half a year in prison. He was suspended from colonial service only to be later recruited into the German army. 23. See Michels (2004: chapter 5.2, p. 190). 24. Ramsay explored the Cross River from Nsakpe to the rapids and on to Nsanakang in a three-day trip at the end of January 1901 (Moisel 1903: 3). 25. From Musongoseli, where the solid ground started, he undertook a nine-day trek via Ekonatu (Ekononaku), Akoto (Akobo on the map) and Ekonda Kondu (Ekundukundu) with a factory of the Deutschwestafrikanische Handelsgesellschaft, where he met Sergeant Budde, who had come from Ndian with ten carriers. The next place was Nguru (Ododop or Korup), then Ekoneman (Ekoneman Ojong Arrey) with a factory of the Ambas Bay Trading Co. directed by the German Eck. Then he reached Mbobui and its factory run by the GNK under Georg Valdau, Inokun, Ayaoke and finally Nsakpe. Puttkamer left Nsanakang with Ramsay on 9 February 1901 (Puttkamer 1901). 26. In the meantime rubber plantations and factories had been opened on the other side of the Cross River. Goods were stolen. Graf von Pückler arrived with thirty soldiers at Bachame, where he met stiff resistance. He went back to Basho, was ambushed, ran out of ammunition, and eventu-

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27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

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ally was shot, as were twenty of his men. Factories were looted and burnt, and most of the German officers and traders killed. For more details on the course of the uprising see Ebai (2001: 46) and Michels (2004: chap. 7.1). See also Ballhaus (1968: 99–180). Stefanie Michels recorded a similar story at Nsanakang (2004: 208–9). Schlosser (1904: 735) noted that the chiefs of Kajifu and Ewisi had started to provide penal labourers and showed up in person at the station. He took this as a good sign. Between 23 August and 9 September, fifty penal labourers were collected. For more details see Michels (2004: 311). Sealy-King (1932) maintains that Babong had returned ten years later, whereas Mbobui (related to Babong) went further south to the Efik country (where it remains). According to Michels (2004: 181) these toll stations were at Okuri, Ekang, Nsakpe, Nsanaragati, Badje and Bodam, each staffed with an African clerk. Sharwood-Smith and Cantle, n.d. An Assessment Report on the Anyang and Manta Tribes of the Mamfe Division, Cameroons Province. File no. 512, AF 4, National Archives, Buea; Ballhaus (1968: 169–70). Many people, among them the head of my host family at Kembong, remembered that the Germans had burnt whole villages for that reason. At the end of 1905, the following factories were in the Ossidinge Bezirk: the Gesellschaft Nord-West Kamerun (GNK) in Nsanakang with branches in Mbabong (Babong), Baddje (Badje), Abonando, Mamfe, Nkare (Nkawkaw), Bascho (Basho), Abbat (Abat) and Bakumba (now extinct). The Deutschwestafrikanische Handelsgesellschaft had branches in Mbabong (Babong), Mbela (Bera) and Okuri; and John Holt & Co was located in Bakut. Baertschi (1926 Jahresbericht Besongabang (3 May 1927), E-5-2, 2.) notes that a German trader had opened a factory on the hill in Babong where later a school was built. At the same time, the missionaries criticized Mansfeld for trusting his assistants too much. When he left for holidays in Germany, Schipper, who replaced him, discovered that much was not as it should be, and that his translator was not reliable at all (Stolz 1912). Missionaries arrived relatively late in the area. In 1912 the Catholic Pallotine missionaries came to Ossing with two Fathers, two Brothers and eight indigenous teachers (by 1913 they were twenty), who staffed one station school and seven village schools. They taught only boys (Berger 1978: 154, 182f.). Shortly thereafter, the Basel missionaries arrived in the same village. Because of high competition in recruiting souls, they moved their station to the neighbouring Besongabang that same year. Until June 1913 the government-favoured Ossing station remained under the Pallotines, who were then replaced by the Herz-Jesu-Priests, who started in Cameroon in 1912. Due to the war they worked for only two years in Ossing (Berger 1978: 194, note 4). In the contract of 1878, which the British consul had managed to sign with the Calabar chiefs and the Scottish missionaries had advanced through difficult negotiations, one paragraph stated that from then on trade should be open to all, including the Europeans. The Ngbe society was supposed to publish and sanction the laws (Nair 1972: 179; Latham 1973: 82). For a different opinion on the Calabar traders see Michels (2004: 225). Jahresbericht 1905–1906, Ossidinge 1 April 1906 (file no. FA 1/66, pp. 163–79), National Archives, Yaoundé. See Sommerfeld (1914 Gefechtsbericht (5 and 6 September 1914). FA 5/24. National Archives, Yaoundé); for details see also Michels (2004: 362). Apart from Nsanakang, Ossing, where the Roman Catholic Missionaries had a station, was also among the first places to be heavily attacked. The Apostolic prefect Lennartz (1916 rapport addressé au gouverneur général de la Nigérie, 12.1.1916. Ossing: No. 142 Vol. 580, Pp. 104–120, 124–125. Archivo storico, Propaganda Fide, Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei populi.) recorded in 1916 that the Catholic missionaries were regarded as spies. After the war, Shanahan (1919 Report on a journey by Shanahan from Onitsha to Douala via Ossing, 2 March 1919, prefecture apostolique de Adamaoua. No.143 (1919) Vol. 636, Pp. 136–43. Archivo storico, Propaganda Fide, Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei populi.) undertook a journey from Onitsha to Adamawa via Ossing, he found the site of the former German mission, built only two years before the war, lying in ruins. The Basel missionaries reported chaotic conditions and terrible battles between German and British soldiers in the Banyang and Ejagham territory (Stationschronik Besongabang, 31 December 1914, 1915. E-6-1.4: 64–8. Basel Mission Archives).

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36. In 1935 Nsanaragati complained to the forestry officer D. Rosevear (1935. Kembong Native Administration Forest Reserve, Mamfe Division. Letter of 23.3.1935 to K.R. MacDonald, Senior conservator of forests: Southern Provinces, Enugu. File no. 2866, Vol. ii, Qh/d,1940, 2115, National Archives, Buea.) that because of the forest reserve, they lacked enough fertile land for farming. He wrote that the people in this area earned most of their cash by selling their yams in Calabar. A forestry officer, together with the District Officer, inspected all the land in question with a view to alter the reserves’ boundaries. Finally more land was granted to them. 37. Gregg, C.J.A. 1925. An Assessment Report on the Boki, Eba Mbu and Ekokisam Clans of the Mamfe Division, Cameroons Province File no. 1068, 1592/26 Af 24. 38. Letter of 31 March 1999. 39. There has been an attempt to organize tours to these sites combined with a boat trip on the Cross River and trips to some other historical sites. MATOP (Manyu Tourism Project) has been created as a registered NGO in the South West Province with the encouragement of Stefanie Michels. 40. Hoegn und Vieter. Correspondence of 1913. Ossing. No. 141 (1916) Vol. 579, Pp. 500–506, 513. Archivo storico, Propaganda Fide (Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei populi). 41. A kind of fish described as resembling a snake or eel, about a metre long and ‘3 fingers’ thick. It is widely eaten. 42. Reflective mica is found on hillsides in this area. 43. Those invited included the Njom Ekpa association from Ajayukndip, Ngbe from Eyang and Onaku, Nkoroya from Nsanaragati and Egbobha from Inokun. 44. Made from the seeds of an inedible melon. 45. About £100 sterling. 46. This may be a coincidence. According to Mansfeld (1908: 264–66), the chief ’s name at Nsanakang was Ndep in 1908.

CHAPTER 7

The Latent Struggle for Identity and Autonomy in the Southern Cameroons, 1916–1946 Verkijika G. Fanso

Studies of nationalism in the Southern Cameroons generally begin during the course of the Second World War with the formation of nationalist pressure groups. Hardly any study tries to link the protests, demonstrations, petitions and other manifestations that followed the Anglo-French partition and the absorption of British Cameroon into Nigeria. These continued throughout the entire interwar period and gave rise to the nationalist developments in the 1940s and 1950s (Chiabi 1997; Ngoh 2001; Chem-Langhëë 2004). One exception is Edwin Ardener, who published a series of articles that traced the development of the ‘Kamerun Idea’ in the Southern Cameroons to the interwar years (E. Ardener 1958). This chapter tries to show that Southern Cameroons nationalism during and after the Second World War was a continuation of the latent or proto-nationalism that originated shortly after the Anglo-French invasion of Kamerun in 1914–1916. The story of the struggle for identity and autonomy, or the right to self-determination, in the Southern Cameroons began almost immediately after the Anglo-French invasion and partition of the German protectorate of Kamerun in the course of the First World War. While the invasion was still in progress, efforts by the two Allied Powers to reach an agreement putting the territory as a whole or parts jointly captured under condominium failed because of the high-handedness of both powers. The idea of a condominium had come up because it was felt that a joint administration would assure the unity of Kamerun, give it a common sense of direction, and avoid partition, which might become permanent and lead to outright annexation of parts of the protectorate (Fanso 1989: 53–59). Failure to agree on the terms of a condominium in 1916 led straightaway to the de jure partition of Kamerun disproportionately between Britain and France on a one-to-four basis in favour of the latter. The British had conceived three possible scenarios for the partition:

Notes for this chapter begin on page 150.

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that the whole of Kamerun, except for parts of the emirates of Yola and Bornu and the Cameroon Mountain region, should go to France in exchange for all of Togo and Dahomey; that they should give up their share of Kamerun, except for the pieces including Victoria, Buea and the Cameroon Mountain and parts of the emirates of Yola and Bornu, in exchange for the French half of the condominium in the New Hebrides; …that Kamerun be partitioned equally from the sea up along the Sanaga River so that they obtain the western and the French the eastern half.

In the end, the British accepted a tiny disjointed territory ‘mainly as an exercise of infilling’ along Nigeria’s eastern border (E. Ardener 1962b: 343). This insignificant British share, intended for outright incorporation into Nigeria, began to be administered as an integral part of that country. But the provisions of the peace treaty of 1919 at Versailles made former German colonies mandated territories of the League of Nations and placed their peoples under mandatory powers on behalf of the League. The British sphere became the British Mandated Territory of Cameroon, referred to simply as British Cameroon. The British immediately divided British Cameroon into the geographically discontinuous Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons. The Southern Cameroons was made up of the southern part of the southern section (including what are the South West Province and North West Province of contemporary Cameroon), while the Northern Cameroons was made up of the entire northern section and the northern part of the southern section. ‘This procedure was taken so far that the north-south subdivision, which was of long standing in Nigeria, was extended to the new territory. This resulted in the emergence within the British sphere of a “Northern” and “Southern” Cameroons’ (E. Ardener 1996: 277–78). During the interwar period, the Southern Cameroons was known as the Cameroons Province and was one of the provinces of Southern Nigeria, later of Eastern Nigeria. Northern Cameroons formed part of three different provinces of Northern Nigeria.

The Beginning of the Struggle During the period of transition from war to peace and throughout the mandate period, which officially began in 1922, Britain administered Cameroon as an integral, faceless appendage of Nigeria. The struggle to maintain or establish a distinct Southern Cameroons identity in Nigeria began as a protest against the AngloFrench partition and the merger of Cameroon into Nigeria. It originated from the fact that a people who already possessed a colonial identity were torn away from their country and incorporated into another as an insignificant lot. Cameroonians reasoned that by partitioning their country, which had gained international recognition since the time of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, Britain and France were punishing the inhabitants, not the Germans they were fighting against. Kamerun was not Germany; Kamerunians were not Germans; they had even, in many places, welcomed the Allied Forces in the course of the war. It was for this reason, in fact, that what would have become an inglorious past in the history of a people under

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the Germans became instead a mark of national awareness and a fight to maintain identity. The Southern Cameroonians were aided in this exercise by the principle of the ‘right to self-determination’ propounded by world leaders during the war and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (Fanso 1983: 426–28). But was German colonization the sole basis for the sense of a distinct identity that became evident in the Southern Cameroons after the partition of 1916 and the subsequent incorporation of the British territory into Nigeria? It is surely convincing to argue that although the Germans did bequeath to the country and its inhabitants a lasting name and an overall experience, their administration was too short, especially in the vast interior, to have left a sense of a distinct Kamerun identity. There were certainly other bonds that united Southern Cameroonians with the other peoples of what Awasom (2003) calls the ‘south-western quadrant of Cameroon’, i.e. present day South West, Littoral, North West and West Provinces. According to Edwin Ardener: ‘It formed a common area of modernization from 1827, at first linked with the official, subsequent mercantile, settlement at Fernando Po. It then became subject to the Baptist Mission influence … from 1841 to 1887, and finally formed the main administrative and commercial core of the German Protectorate. The old Cameroons was linked largely by water-transport, and some interchange of population through education and administration was maintained until, and even after, the mandate settlement of 1922’ (1967: 197). These were the people who spearheaded the anti-partition demonstrations and petitions to the League of Nations. As the foremost challengers of the partition, they cooperated with each other to obliterate the obnoxious colonial divide through realizing the dream of reunification. The wider region was the stronghold of the UPC party and movement, whose platform was immediate independence and reunification of the British and French Cameroon (Joseph 1977; Gaillard 1992: 97–109; Amaazee 1994: 199–234). It is important to point out that during the inhabitants’ early protests against the partition, the concept of country or nation was of the whole Kamerun. When the partition was not annulled (and hence Kamerun not reunited), the concept gradually came to apply to British Cameroon generally and to the Southern Cameroons in particular. It should also be recognized that the idea of identity for Southern Cameroonians was not simply the recognition and retention of the name Cameroon in the Nigerian context, which had already been done by the status given by the League of Nations. Nigeria, without the phrase ‘and the Cameroons’, referred to Nigeria proper, without the mandated territory of British Cameroon. However, the recognition of a Cameroon territory and a Cameroonian people in Nigeria was only in name, without any real administrative counterpart in the territory. Southern Cameroonians, therefore, wanted the local and international recognition of British Cameroon in Nigeria to be matched with an effective distinct administrative set-up in the territory, as was the case for Northern and Southern Nigeria, later the Northern, Eastern and Western Regions of Nigeria. So, during the mandate period when Southern Cameroonians spoke of ‘my country’ they generally meant British Cameroon; usually the Southern Cameroons. They definitely did not include Nigeria proper – Cameroonians were not Nigerians; they thought very vaguely of the former German protectorate of Kamerun. In later years when the

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idea of recreating Kamerun appeared illusory, a substantial wish in the territory began to emerge, in the words of Shirley Ardener, ‘for a separate independent political future which would not unite the Southern Cameroons to either neighbour’ (S. Ardener 1996: xii–xiii). Throughout the mandate period migrant labour flowed into the coastal plantations from the grasslands region of the territory and from French Cameroon. From this migration of labour, according to Edwin Ardener, ‘derived the spread of pidgin English into all parts of the province; a basis of unity greater than the tribe resulting from a common working history … the assimilation of migrants from the French mandate to the provincial career pattern’ (E. Ardener 1996: 282). Out of this developed a distinctive Southern Cameroonian way of life. It was this that distinguished Cameroonians from Nigerians.

Early Manifestations of the Struggle The very first people in the Southern Cameroons to express an opinion about the status of the territory after the partition were traditional rulers. The few who were approached and whose statements were recorded were of the opinion that the status or identity of the territory should be maintained as the Germans had it, not as the British wanted it. Pressed by the British in 1918 to sign in favour of their sphere of Kamerun, the Fon of Bafut refused, arguing that the Germans might return to rule the country as it was before they left.1 The Fon of Babungo expressed a similar opinion, saying he could not help the British to divide the country because the Germans were very likely to come back. In Dschang, the chiefs of the district, who were initially placed in British Cameroon before their area was handed to the French, were very sceptical in spite of the definite assurance given by the British ‘that it was now impossible for the Germans to return’.2 These traditional rulers were not against British rule; they were against their territory losing the identity it already possessed. They were, in fact, urging the British, as King Njoya of Bamum made known to King George V of England in a letter in 1916, to take over the whole of the former German protectorate under British rule.3 The Bamum district was also initially under British administration before it was handed over to the French. Following immediately in the footsteps of traditional rulers were the literate Cameroonians who were already aware of the international politics concerning former German territories. These literati led the way in individual effort to convince the elite of the society, other traditional rulers and their subjects across the Anglo-French boundary to team up against the partition. Foremost in this group was Prince Alexander Ndoumbe Duala Manga Bell, who was in Europe during the Paris Peace Conference and participated in the Pan-African Congress jointly called by the black American W.E.B. DuBois and the Senegalese Blaise Diagne and meeting at the same time in Paris. Diagne was already a distinguished personality in French politics whom France had appointed as their African delegate to the peace conference. He had played a vital role in the recruitment of 680,000 black African soldiers and 238,000 labourers for France by 1918. DuBois had wanted

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the victorious Allies to reward the Africans for their support during the war by establishing a charter of human rights for Africa (Murphy 1972: 385). As many as fifty-seven delegates from various African colonies, including Prince Manga Bell of Kamerun, attended the Congress, which ‘attracted at least some of the desired attention from the powers around the Versailles peace table’ (Murphy 1972: 386). The influence of the Paris Pan-African Congress on the rise of early nationalism in black Africa after the First World War cannot be underestimated. In the first place, it was the first such congress to be attended by Africans. The 1900 London Congress was attended mainly by Blacks from the West Indies, North America and Britain. Secondly, the Paris Congress successfully sent an appeal to the Peace Conference to give the black man of Africa ‘a chance to develop unhindered by other races’ (Murphy 1972). Shortly after the congress, in 1920, the earliest African nationalist political organization of the colonial era arose in the Gold Coast under Joseph Casely-Hayford. This political organization not only endorsed the Pan-African Congress programme but also pledged full support for it. A similar development, though slightly different, took place in the partitioned Kamerun under Prince Manga Bell. Shortly after the Paris Conference endorsed the partition, this heir to the throne of the Bell clan of the Dualas returned to French Cameroon and began the campaign against what was for him an international conspiracy against Kamerun. He began shuttling back and forth between French and British Cameroon, appealing to kings, chiefs and traditional authorities on both sides to support even the idea of an uprising against the perpetrators of the act, and also preaching the doctrine of self-determination of smaller nations.4 Prince Bell’s shuttle diplomacy did not please the British authorities in the Southern Cameroons who commented negatively about his ideas of selfdetermination and independence.5 Prince Bell’s campaign apparently encouraged the writing of petitions to the peace conference pleading that Kamerun be treated as a neutral country and not be partitioned. ‘Should this request run counter to the Allies’ intention,’ a group of nineteen Duala petitioners urged, ‘we would be prepared to submit to a contrary decision of the conference whereby we would be entrusted to the protection of one of the Allied Powers, but we beg that the right of choosing such a power may be conceded to us’.6 Other petitions called attention to the difficulties placed in the way of relations among the people divided between the British and the French (Fanso 1983: 434). After all, British Prime Minister Lloyd George had declared in a speech in January 1918 that the captured colonies ‘are held at the disposal of a conference whose decisions must have primary regard to the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants of such colonies … The growing consideration, therefore, in all these cases must be that the inhabitants should be placed under the control of an administration acceptable to themselves’ (Miller 1928: 115; Fanso 1983). We must not underestimate the ability at this time of Africans generally, and in particular Kamerunians, to keep abreast of international politics. Other petitions to the conference had demanded the suppression of both the Anglo-French boundary and the mandate status and denounced the cupidity of the colonial powers who would not tolerate the idea of national autonomy among the people entrusted to their care.7

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Although these petitions were general and not specifically about British Cameroon, British authorities did not take kindly to them and tried to render them ineffective. The British and Dominion governments, as mandatory powers, were agreed, for example, that petitions to the League by private individuals or public bodies in the A and B mandates ‘should either be returned to the petitioners with the request that they should submit them through the local government, or retained by the Secretariat of the League of Nations and a copy forwarded as soon as possible to His Majesty’s Government. Of these two courses we are inclined to think that the former is better’.8 The French, for their part, denied the inhabitants of the mandated territories the right to petition the League, regarding any attempts to do so as ‘subversive’ acts (Joseph 1977: 32). Accordingly the peoples of the mandated territories did not find it easy to channel their grievances to the League of Nations, and hence the limited number of petitions. Given the attitude of the British and Dominion governments, it is possible that many petitions against the partition of Kamerun and the fusion of the Southern Cameroons with Nigeria were suppressed and/or destroyed. But people continued to write as individuals or groups up to the end of the Second World War. Towards the end of the War, a soldier, B. Njume, writing from the war front with the Allied troops in Southeast Asia, called on the British authorities to reunite Cameroon. ‘Every fighting man and civilian of this country’, he wrote, ‘lay hopes for a better united Cameroon’ after the war (Ngoh 1990: 26–27). At the end of the war, according to Victor Julius Ngoh, some ‘ex-servicemen criticized the partition of former German Cameroon and the level of development in Southern Cameroons’ (Ngoh 1990: 26). It is worth mentioning here that the feeling expressed by the Southern Cameroons chiefs that the Germans were likely to come back to rule Cameroon was also strongly contemplated by the Allied Powers in the 1920s and 1930s. It is known that although London, Paris and Brussels avoided any specific territorial promises to Germany in the mid 1920s, ‘they let it be known that they would be prepared to discuss the transfer of mandates as soon as Germany had loosened her relations with the Soviet Union, signed the treaties with the Western Powers and subsequently become a member of the League of Nations’ (Rüger 1986: 316). Germany became a member of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission in 1927, thereby acquiring an ‘implied equal legal status with the other commission members and a voice in negotiations on the mandates’ (Rüger 1986: 318). Even as late as 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, the foreign policy committee of the British cabinet in London was still considering the possibility of ceding Cameroon and other territories in West Africa to Germany (Ballhaus 1986: 367). Yet the British authorities in Cameroon were adamant that it was impossible for such a thing to happen. The struggle for identity in the Southern Cameroons during the interwar period was also marked by continual attachment to things of the German past and resistance to some values of the new power. In spite of the Germans’ physical absence from the territory from 1916 to 1925, the German colonial currency, the Mark, continued to be valued by the people more than the British colonial sterling circulating in Nigeria and Cameroon. Indeed, many Southern Cameroonians resisted

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the British currency for more than ten years, in spite of the fact that the mark had been declared an illegal currency and was not accepted by the British administration in payment of taxes, fines and other official dues.9 A second reminder of the German past in the Southern Cameroons was the German language. Many people who had attended German schools not only retained the knowledge but also discovered that their education was still useful when the Germans returned to their plantations and businesses in the Southern Cameroons. The planters and businessmen who returned after 1925 continued to employ Cameroonians in the clerical services of their businesses, giving preference to those who could write, read and speak German. In consequence of this, quite a number of French Cameroonians who had acquired German education crossed over into the Southern Cameroons to seek employment with the Germans (Fanso 1983: 441–42). Many were employed as cooks, clerks or labourers. In the 1930s, interest in the German past amongst some of the educated elite led to the formation of pro-German organizations in the territory. There was, for example, the German-speaking club Bund der Freunde, whose members met occasionally to drink, sing and socialize (Joseph 1977: 47). In due course, those who were members of pro-German and German-speaking clubs became suspect as secret agents who were reporting to Germany about the British and French administrations in Kamerun. Their secret society was said to be based in the Southern Cameroons, with branches in French Cameroon and Togo. It was believed to be full of agents working for the return of the Germans to their former protectorates. In 1940, the secret organization was uncovered and both Southern Cameroonians and French Cameroonians connected with it were arrested and despatched to Douala, where they were detained by the French authorities.10 Cameroonians demonstrated their attachment to the Germans most glaringly when the British were recruiting in the territory for the war against the Germanled Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis of the Second World War. Cameroonians ‘were more interested in working in the plantations, owned and managed by the Germans, than in enlisting as soldiers’ to fight against the Germans (Ngoh 1990: 26). In the recruitment exercise, only 3,500 Southern Cameroonians enlisted, compared with the more than 25,000 able-bodied men employed by the Germans in their plantations in the Southern Cameroons. In any event, the popularity of the German past in the Southern Cameroons was most likely a reaction against the partition of 1916, a ‘thank you’ for the job opportunities in the German plantations and other businesses and a warning to the British for failing to set up a distinct administration in the territory. How could the German past be forgotten, when virtually all the administrative and economic structures in the British Southern Cameroons were relics of the German period?11 By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, the struggle for identity and autonomy in Southern Cameroons was being taken over by political pressure groups tailored after similar movements in Nigeria. By then, concerned Southern Cameroonians had come to realize that relying solely on the League of Nations for a solution to their problem was a fruitless exercise. They had also realized that organized movements were likely to be more effective than individual initiatives. It was also towards the end of the 1930s that Southern Cameroonians who

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had been forced to abandon their German education and begin all over again in English were coming of age, graduating from Nigerian colleges, and standing up to the challenge of the fusing of their territory into Nigeria. Young Cameroonians working or studying in Nigeria proper, not in the Southern Cameroons, formed the earliest Southern Cameroonian pressure groups.

Latent Nationalism: A Mature Phase The entire period of the Second World War and a little beyond served as a preparatory stage for the leap into real nationalism in the Southern Cameroons. It was during this period that young Cameroonians studying or working in Nigeria began to learn from early Nigerian nationalists how to organize their struggle for identity and autonomy and how to formulate their political grievances and aspirations. The earliest Nigerian movement, which influenced the youths of Southern Cameroons most, was the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), which was formed in 1937.12 The principal objectives of the NYM were the development of a united nation out of the conglomeration of the peoples inhabiting Nigeria and instilling in them understanding and a sense of common nationality (Kale 1967: 23). The leaders of the NYM soon influenced some Southern Cameroonians, among them P.E.N. Malafa and P.M. Kale, who enlisted as members of the movement, possibly in order to learn from within. Impressed and inspired by the example of the Nigerians, the young Cameroonians quickly organized their own movement, the Cameroons Welfare Union (CWU), in 1939, under the leadership of a veteran school-master, G.J. Mbene (Kale 1967: 21, 24; Chem-Langhëë 1976: 33–36). The main purpose of the CWU was the quest for an identity for the Southern Cameroons and the recognition of its leaders by the British authorities and the Nigerian government. It advocated the direct representation of the Southern Cameroons in the Nigerian Central Legislative Council in Lagos. It would appear that when the system of representation in the Nigerian Legislative Council in Lagos was introduced in 1922 without providing any representation for the Southern Cameroons, Cameroonians were probably unaware of it or were too preoccupied with the problems of the partition and fusion of their territory with Nigeria to be concerned with Nigerian constitutional matters. The question of representation was not yet an issue even among Nigerians. However, whether or not Southern Cameroonians were aware, Southern Cameroons as a mandated territory should have been accorded either an elective or nominated representation in the Legislative Council. In 1940, the movement was renamed the Cameroons Youth League (CYL) and led by Paul M. Kale as president, Emmanuel M.L. Endeley as secretary and John N. Foncha. The principal objective of the CYL was ‘promoting, improving upon and protecting a distinctive Cameroonian identity in the Nigerian Federation’. With branches established in the Nigerian towns and colleges where there were more than two Cameroonians and all over the Southern Cameroons, the CYL was determined to ‘sound a country-wide clarion call for a united national crusade for [the liberation of the Southern Cameroons] in the post-war years’ (Kale 1967: 24,

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50). The CYL would act as a medium through which the opinions of Cameroonians on matters directly affecting the destiny of Cameroon would be presented to the Nigerian government and to the local authorities in the Southern Cameroons. The League was able to publish and distribute a monthly bulletin entitled The Cameroons Youth League Newsletter, which served as a means of disseminating information and news to its members and branches. CYL branches sprouted up in the towns and districts of the Southern Cameroons, as students studying in Nigeria returned home on holidays or at the end of their courses and founded local branches. It was in this way that John N. Foncha formed the Bamenda Improvement Union in 1943 and P.M. Kale and others the Bakweri Union as subsidiaries of the CYL. Besides fighting for the development of their particular regions in the Southern Cameroons, these local associations were also promoting the principle for which the CYL was formed – namely, articulating the political demands and ensuring the political distinctiveness and autonomy of the Southern Cameroons. During the period when the CYL was the sole pressure group and mouthpiece of the Southern Cameroons, it continued to press for increased representation for the territory in the Nigerian legislature, where Chief Manga Williams had sat as an appointed representative since 1942 (Chiabi 1997: 43). It also presented a challenging memorandum on education in the territory to the Elliot Commission in 1944; played a very important part in the campaign against the Richards Constitution of 1946, which had completely annulled the territory’s representation in the Nigerian Legislative Council; and continued to urge home rule for the territory. Its president, P.M. Kale, besides attending meetings and representing the CYL wherever necessary, continued to put across the Southern Cameroons point of view to the British Nigerian government and the entire public using the Nigerian press and pamphlets. In 1943, for example, Kale prepared and distributed a pamphlet entitled ‘Post-War Reconstruction – A Clause for the Cameroons’, in which he argued that at the end of the War the term ‘mandated territory’ should cease to be applied to Cameroon and the territory should be taken over fully as a British protectorate with the same rights and privileges as other British protectorates; roads should be built to facilitate trade and enterprise, and educational facilities should be improved upon along the same lines as in other British protectorates. In September 1946, P.M. Kale published an article in West African Pilot titled ‘The Future of the British Cameroons and the United Nations Organisation’. In it, he pointed out that although the British were popular in the Southern Cameroons, the territory had not fared well at all politically, economically and socially during the twenty-five years in which it had been administered as an integral part of Nigeria. He called on Britain to treat Cameroon in the same way that it treated Tanganyika, a class B mandated territory like Cameroon. He urged very strongly that a spokesman for the Southern Cameroons be allowed to take part in the drawing up of the trusteeship agreement. ‘We do not desire any longer’, he resolutely added, ‘to be bartered about like chattels and decisions taken about our future without giving us a chance to participate in the negotiations’. Well-schooled and experienced nationalists took up protests against the Richards Constitution in the Southern Cameroons and Nigeria, which quickly led to its revision. But it was

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the early starters – the latent nationalists – who had laid the foundations for their protests, successes and failures.

Conclusion The rise of national awareness and struggle for autonomy in the Southern Cameroons began as soon as the partition of Kamerun and the usurpation of the British territory as an integral part of Nigeria took place. The endeavour was maintained during the interwar period and manifested through verbal and written protestations against both the partition and the fusion into Nigeria, as well as through continual attachment to German values and efforts to form pro-German clubs. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, the latent nationalists had started forming pressure groups and canvassing for the autonomy of the Southern Cameroons either as a region within the Nigerian context or as a country in its own right. It was then that the issue of the representation of the territory in the Nigerian Central Legislative Council was raised and successfully pursued. But in 1946, the Richards Constitution divided Nigeria into three regions, each with a Regional Executive Council and a House of Assembly, leaving the Southern Cameroons in the air. This major constitutional reform not only ‘failed to address the problem of the growing political awareness of Southern Cameroonians as indexed by their [many] requests for a separate Region’ (Ngoh 1990: 64–65) or country, but also deprived the territory of the single seat it had acquired in the Legislative Council in 1942. It was at this stage that the struggle for identity and autonomy in the Southern Cameroons passed from the hands of individuals and groups of amateur nationalists into the hands of real nationalists.

Notes 1. Buea Archives, Aa/1918/24, DO Bamenda to resident Buea, 10 June 1918. 2. Public Records Office (British Archives), C.O. 649, governor-general to secretary of state for colonies, 34 August 1916, report by H.R.H. Crawford. 3. Buea Archives, Aa/1918/38, Njoya King of Bamum to the Great King of the English, 1916. 4. Buea Archives, Ba/120/5, report on the Cameroons Province, February 1920. 5. Ibid. 6. PRO, F.O. 371/3775, File 166, Petition from Douala, 18 August 1919. 7. Yaoundé National Archives, APA, 10890, Commissaire Marchand to minister of colonies, 24 May 30. 8. PRO, F.O. 371/7051, File 1149, 1921, secretary of state for colonies to Dominion premiers, 14 July 21. 9. Buea Archives, Ab 22, assessment report on the Bandop Area, 1 May 25. Also, PRO, C.O.C.P. 879/118, File 1049, report on Osidinge, 21 June 1916; report on Bamenda Division, 21 November 1916. 10. Buea Archives, Aa/1940/1, intelligence report, 19 March 1941. Also, PRO, F.O. 371/26681, secret report, 30 June 1938. 11. For some examples see E. Ardener (1965). 12. In fact this emerged from the Lagos Youth Movement, which had been formed in 1933.

CHAPTER 8

Titi Ikoli Revisited Fetishism, Gender and Power in Transitional Forest Economies of the Upper Cross River Borderlands, 1920s–1990s Caroline Ifeka

Introduction Nineteenth-century Western classical social theory addressed the relationship between religion and society in terms of its mediation by experience, as in Durkheim’s la conscience sociale or Weber’s Protestant individual’s calling to ‘work by faith’ (Weber 2001; Durkheim 2002). Post–Second World War anthropology developed analyses of the role of religious beliefs and practices in the maintenance and transformation of human social and psychical structures (Levi-Strauss 1967; Turner 1995). In this view the social is disconnected from ‘nature’, which in Christian thought is willed by God to be man’s servant (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). Secular pre- and post-modern theorists share with market economists the Cartesian premise – ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ rather than ‘I recognise Thou in all phenomena’ – and so the external world of ‘nature’ is excluded from a mainstream (neo-Durkheimian) conception of religion as an identity that makes meaningful social and power relations (Lienhardt 2002; Kapferer 2003). Yet Ancient Egyptians recognized the human mind’s capacity to conceptualize man’s identification with the natural world as ‘Thou’ (Frankfort et al. 1949). So, too, do forest peoples of the Cameroon-Nigeria border. Whereas scientists and God’s scribes formulate elaborate divisions between humankind, nonhuman species and the divine, customary thought recognizes but transcends duality through discourses and practices of spirit possession and shape-changing transformations (Jackson and Karp 1990; Deren 1984). In this essay I return to the ‘problem’ of female sexuality, gender and power addressed by Shirley Ardener (1975) in her classic essay on titi ikoli among the Bakweri. In this customary practice Bakweri women, adorned in green creepers Notes for this chapter begin on page 166.

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signifying the wild, expose their sexual parts while chanting songs embarrassing to men. Ardener explored titi ikoli as a traditional form of resistance by women to men’s complaints in contexts of strain between the genders, as in the challenge posed to male authority by young women’s departure for sexual work in colonial and postcolonial townships. Reviewing my archival and field data (1999–2002) on fertility rituals among the Anyang in the Takamanda Forest Reserve (Cameroon) and the Cross River National Park (Nigeria), and bearing in mind the anthropological literature on women’s role in articulating culture clash (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), I believe Ardener’s analysis still points a way forward. In this paper I develop a conceptual framework for analysing Anyang women’s changing cultures of fertility and resistance in the context of customary and Western cultures of procreation and profit in which, over time, new systems of production and prayer begin to challenge old cosmologies of biological reproduction and metaphysical renewal in which female fertility is key.1 I propose that points of intersection between a once-hegemonic non-capitalist economy of reproduction for familial/clan ‘wealth’, and an emerging capitalist economy of production for individual profit, condense around Anyang rituals of fertility. These rituals mobilize fetish objects animated by spirit beings that are, I argue, mediums of articulation between ‘old’ and ‘new’ economies. Old – but changing – religious beliefs express women’s (and men’s) perceptions of female bodies and their fetishized2 sexual power, in ongoing mystical interaction with the gods, as a mystical process that integrates the human community and its forested environment with life-giving cosmic forces. The latter’s immanent presence is evidenced in the birth of many children as well as in the harvesting of abundant crops and successful hunting of large forest animals. However, new beliefs of worshippers in recently established small Pentecostal churches represent human bodies as bundles of material flesh, sinful harbingers of Satanic desires, in conflict with an individual’s ‘unique’ spirit made ‘strong’ by fervent (loud) prayer to Jesus and the Father, who respond by empowering supplicants to conquer Devilish devices. I argue that women’s fertility practices in transitional forest economies develop through a ‘double’ articulation between customary ‘parent’ cultures (which produce use values to a diminishing but still significant extent) and modern capitalist exchange for profit systems pervaded by evangelical Christianity and Westernizing education (Ifeka 2005, 2006). Anyang ‘parent’ cultures construe social relations between groups struggling to establish rights over biological resources (e.g. the vulva/womb) in terms of spirit beings, protectors and destroyers of fertility. These powers articulate gender relations in terms of procreator/procreatrix identities sanctioned by the gods of (male) secret societies that in the non-capitalist village economy regulate the accumulation and distribution among male elders and notables of reproductive wealth in the form of children and fecund wives. (Note, though, that family elders could achieve nothing of physical and spiritual reproductive import without complementary sanctioning by women’s secret societies and fertility rituals.) ‘Parent’ cultures and household economies of subsistence production for biological and metaphysical renewal that coexist with, and through, women’s and men’s unpaid

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labour, help reproduce capitalist relations of production for economic gain established in forest villages through cocoa farming and migrant labour to southern Cameroonian plantations as well as to Nigerian cities. For example, Anyang women harvest and process non-timber forest products (e.g. bush mango, Irvingia gabonensis) for sale to Ibo and Bamileke traders – but at prices that barely reflect women’s labour time. Likewise, Anyang men spend days in the forest hunting increasingly threatened animals, which they sell to traffickers in the (illegal) international bush meat trade. Contemporary Anyang borderland economies are increasingly penetrated by impersonal market forces that are beginning to dissolve the social into relationships between things (commodities), which are the products of labour exchanged in the marketplace for cash. Now Pentecostal pastors take cash donations from the faithful, who believe that this money ‘purchases’ rewards given by God to the deserving in the form of jobs, cash windfalls, and pregnancies; pastors and petitioners unite in expressing their relationship with God in terms of things, commodities. Then, in a seeming volte-face, after much prayer and fasting pastors and devotees reinterpret these commodified blessings in terms of the special spiritual relationship that they claim exists between themselves, ‘true’ believers, and the Father. My analysis is undertaken primarily in respect of the Western Anyang peoples currently of the Takamanda Forest Reserve (South West Cameroon), and the Cross River National Park (Nigeria), with limited comparison to contiguous Boki villages situated west of the Park. I carried out field work at intervals from 1999 to 2002 in three Anyang villages: Ubeh, Awancho and Njashu located in Takamanda on the Cameroon side of the border with Nigeria. From the mid 1990s I also worked in the Anyang villages of Okwa 1 and 2, enclaved inside the Cross River National Park, as well as in several Eastern Boki villages in Cross River State (Nigeria). The Anyang are hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators whose Takamanda domain in the long rainy season is two days’ hard trek from Mamfe (South West Cameroon) through thick forest and across deep, fast-flowing rivers. Even so, some young men and women move from Mamfe to Douala, and across the border to Ikom (Nigeria), to engage in casual wage labour and sell fake medicines, sexual services, small articles and divination. In Anyang ontology, consciousness of human identity with an externally existent phenomenal other is apprised magically. Representations and ritual processes address procreative power that participants experience as transferring a fetishized other’s vitalizing energies into vital organs that fetish priests periodically ‘make strong’ through sacrifice, secret words to gods and medicated substances rubbed on areas of the body where these organs are located. Anyang told me that each individual has several spiritual aspects or ‘souls’ – e.g. bush or animal (ufume), shadow (mendoh) and ancestral souls – that exist simultaneously inside and outside the body. Like the body’s vital organs, an individual’s souls are thought to need periodic replenishment. Animated by prayer, sacrifice to spirit beings and medication, these souls’ potency is released and transforms flesh into ‘skin’, a metaphysical envelope of spiritual identities that simultaneously contains and animates matter (Okwa 1997, 2002).3

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Ancestral self and collective paternal identities, for example, are embodied in graves or watery sites harbouring progenitors’ sacred essences. Phallic power is fetishized in adolescent youths’ rites of passage, which involve seclusion in the god’s bush shrine, circumcision by priests of the men’s secret society (Lakumbo) and return in possession of secret knowledge of the phallus. Another potent identity that explains success in farming, hunting and petty trading respectively, is the human self ’s bush soul. Identities, however, are not only multiple but permeable: an individual’s bush soul may merge in some contexts with his/her belly soul (negbu) – of variably malevolent and benevolent potency – and in other contexts with his/her shadow soul. That is, each evinces aspects that can fuse (temporarily) with capacities popularly associated with other souls. For example, the bush soul moves out at night and assumes its ‘real’ animal form as an elephant or buffalo for the purpose of damaging the farms of others. Thus, the man or woman who is seen to have more wealth than his/her neighbours can be spotted at night transforming into a cane rat, buffalo or elephant that protects the transformer’s crops or wild bush mango stands, but destroys those of other people. When a person’s bush soul is thought to be busy night after night performing in this way, it merges in popular imagination with ambiguous powers attributed to the belly soul and blurs into the shadow soul’s capacity for political control over others. Men with a strong shadow soul (leaders) have that control over others because they possess the (magical) capacity to live a ‘double’ life, shifting from the (day) world of appearances to the (night) world of bush and belly soul activity. An individual’s destructive nocturnal activities may mean that the community condenses their multiple identities into one, that of a ‘witch’ (gefume). Anyang women, as well as men and children of perceived uncertain disposition, are thought to transform into witches, malevolent quasi-human beings whose emanations merge at times with those of mystically powerful elephant bush souls, hippopotamus ancestral essences in slow-flowing deep rivers, and certain forest snakes. Whatever the witch’s shape, wherever it is operating and whoever the victim, the witch is invariably a bisexual fetish medium of articulation between the procreativity of human and nonhuman (animal, plant) worlds, a penetrator of wombs and foetus destroyer (Ifeka 1999: 87ff; cf. Leonard 1906; Talbot 1923, 1927).

Fetishism and Economics: Articulation of Non-capitalist and Capitalist Systems In regard to penetration by market forces of non-capitalist economies, I shall explore meaning embodied in ways that can be substantiated, reified and transcended by what Alter (2006: 769) calls an unsignified experience of other-in-self that people interpret through the medium of the fetish. As Alter says: ‘the fetish … [is] … a thing which brings magic to life and makes life magical; a concept that gives form to illusion and makes form illusory’ (2006: 769). Fetishism denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power and dominance to otherwise inanimate objects (Taussig 2002: 479), whether they be manufactured products, things fabricated in

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the mystical mode or natural objects such as rocks animated through applications of ‘medicine’ (Mansfeld 1909; Talbot 1923; Ifeka 2005). Taussig’s Marxian exegesis (1980, 2002) grounds fetishism in particular modes of production and reproduction that I believe are applicable generally to Cameroon-Nigerian transborder contexts, and more particularly to Anyang women’s fertility practices. On the one hand, in sites of capitalist production (plantations, cities) we have the fetishization of relations between people in terms of relations between commodities, whose production by human labour for the employer’s profit is concealed in the difference between the commodity’s selling price and the exchange value of the wage paid to the labourer. On the other hand, in city and bush alike, there is what Taussig (2002: 479) calls ‘folk mysticism’. By this he means reasoning derived from a concept of the universe as an interrelated organism. Individuals interpret ‘Thou’ and ‘I’ as one through the self-conscious application of animistic analogies with which they express their experience of transformations in the self’s identities from predominantly human to animal and mystical forms. As these mystically empowered individuals move from human to animal shape and back again, sometimes by day and often by night under cover of darkness, they are ‘doubling’, yet through apparently sharing in the same mystical potency the shape-changer experiences his human and animal selves as one. Such magically real activities prove that some human beings do indeed acquire another (double) identity that they share with certain animals (typically cunning smaller mammals and strong larger ones), whose ‘natural’ physical force shape-changers draw on in order to increase their control over others’ actions (Okwa 1997; cf. Lindskog 1954; Ruel 1969; Devisch 2003).4 Anyang insistence on a greater reality – the essential identity of the human and phenomenal – that overrides appearances of disjunction presents anthropology with a challenging conundrum. Contrary to Anyang ‘parent’ cultural values, anthropology is informed by the notion that humankind is superior to and quintessentially different from ‘natural’ phenomena and processes. Indeed, an unthinking dualism shaped anthropological analysis in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s. For example, it was taken as a ‘fact of nature’ (Gramsci 1971: 12) that Western culture was politically and economically superior to and separate from the exotic African/Asian other, object of Western imperial gaze. Edwin Ardener, with his characteristic sense of irony (2007), challenged dualism with a self-consciously binary model! He proposed a schema that operates on two levels: the paradigmatic compared to the syntagmatic; the pattern (template) compared to circumstantial elements (realien). Edwin Ardener (1996: 256)5 uses the idea of ‘template’ to express the persistence of certain themes in belief, encoded in practice, from which ‘replication’ occurs only when other elements in social and physical environment combine to permit this. Realien provide circumstantial details of content through which replicated elements are expressed; they may be different on every occasion, but as Levi-Strauss (1967) argued, the bricoleur assembles them according to principles as the resolution of opposites. The latter are integral to Ardener’s conception of how, over time, Bakweri society resorts to a few relatively unchanging strategies in resolving conflicts between economy, belief and society.

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In his classic essay ‘Witchcraft, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief’ (1970) Ardener deploys the concept of template and realien to highlight the permeable nature of Bakweri ideas of body and spirit boundaries. The one flows into the other – for example, envy in the form of the imaginary witch carries away victims who perform zombie labour for another’s otherwise inexplicable fortunes – and together they constitute the engine of a potent Bakweri template or model of one’s economic misfortune to the benefit of another’s fortune. Such beliefs demonstrate a relational gestalt that informs folk mysticism. Ardener might have gone further to develop his analysis of an important medium that triggers interaction across metaphysical/physical boundaries. Though glimpsed in Bakweri reification over time of inona (envy), and in perceived witch attacks, Ardener glosses over and mutes the fetish as medium of articulation. Shirley Ardener (1975) may be closer to identifying the fetish as medium in her influential article on female militancy and titi ikoli. The Bakweri women in her study drew on a cultural repertoire of ritualized actions in ways that activated images of the vulva as fetish – magically potent pathway to the womb, the source of children, wealth for men in the form of future labour and daughters ‘going out’ in marriage (Chilver 1990b; Ifeka 1992: 151).6 Among Anyang the vulva is represented as detached, in the form of tortoise shells placed on small mounds propitiated and animated with small offerings of food (e.g. plantains, or an egg cracked open over a fine tortoise shell), night dancing, and prayers (Ifeka 1999; Chilver 1999). In such contexts female fertility is of great concern to women, as well as to some older men seeking to uphold their control of junior men, daughters and wives, whose procreative labours are maximized through metaphysical inputs (Meillassoux 1981). In titi ikoli, Bakweri women’s rituals of resistance fetishized the vulva, rendering it as a potent point of articulation not only between the genders and their procreator/procreatrix identities, but between the culturally dominant economy of use values and the-then minority commodity economy of exchange values. In general, outside the plantation economy, commodity production was linked to the subsistence economy indirectly through exchange (C-M-C) rather than directly through production by wage labour alienated from the means of production and creating surplus value, profit, for the capitalist employer (M-Mi) (Marx 1973).7 Even in the 1990s, men’s control of women’s bodies, sexuality, and procreative power was still key to the political economy of reproduction, albeit on the wane. Consequently, in these forest borderland contexts the fetishized vulva is a potent medium of articulation, not only between the genders in power plays but also between the then culturally hegemonic economy of reproduction and an emerging capitalistic economy of production for profit. At times, this fetish medium is signified and experienced as integral to the female body and women’s cherished procreative self-identity (e.g. titi ikoli); at times, it is detached and disembodied in the form of oval-shaped earthen mounds, tortoise shells and round stones, whereupon it becomes the object of female propitiation, medication and worship. The fetish object thus resembles a contemporary cyborg in that it comprises metaphysical and physical attachments or inputs that enhance its biological capabilities and, by analogy, those of its fabricators and users (Haraway 1991).

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Among Anyang, I suggest, the fetishized vulva is an instance of the persistence of certain themes in religious belief that engender reproductive identities: it is part of an enduring template. Its circumstantial elements (realien), however, change in content and in relation to production as between a forest political economy of reproduction and a globalizing commodity economy of production for profit and pecuniary gain. Whatever the context, people experience a continual process of shifting between visible and invisible worlds denotative also of material and spiritual contexts, of commodity and subsistence production relations. Duality, or doubling through shape changing, though increasingly contested as devilish by post-1970s small church congregations (largely female), persists and informs women’s fertility rituals – as I shall show in what follows.

Trade and the Diffusion of Rituals On the cusp of the twentieth century, the Germans established import-export companies including the Gesellschaft Nordwest Kamerun in the Upper Cross River district of Ossidinge (Röschenthaler 2006). From 1899 to 1910 the company sought to monopolize trade along the Cross River and in thickly forested Anyang country (letter from E.M. Chilver, 6 November 1999). At this time the Banyang were probably most dominant as traders, linking markets in the Grassfields with Calabar and Douala (Ruel 1969: 11–12). However, my field enquiries suggest the Eastern Boki were, and remain, important traders in the middle and upper reaches of the Cross River. Commodity exchange was facilitated by barter or direct exchange as well as by brass rods introduced originally by the Portuguese (Sharwood-Smith 1924; Jones 1963: 94–95).8 Anyang and Banyang traders attended four large markets in the Upper Cross River area: Widekum, Eka, Esaw and Nkon. Traders exchanged salt from the forests of Keaka (Eastern Ejagham) for livestock from Dschang. Livestock was also exchanged for palm kernels and oil from Anyang, Boki and Banyang forests, which harboured then-abundant supplies of wild rubber (Funtumia elastica) and camwood (Pterocarpus osun). Traders exchanged these products for slaves, cloth and dyes imported from Calabar, Tivland and Igbo groups to the west. Banyang sold forest products to expatriate and local buyers from Ikom, the Western Ejagham (Ekoi) port on the Cross River (Nigeria), as well as to buyers from Mamfe (Cameroon), and to Boki and Bumaji villages in the south in the central Cross River (cf. Röschenthaler 2006).9 In the 1920s economic depression reduced trade and constrained the growth of production for sale, while sustaining smallholder petty commodity production within relations of kinship and affinity. Senior males’ political and mystical powers depended significantly on their ability to give out daughters and sisters in marriage to men bound through customary ties of reciprocity and gift exchange in order to assist in-laws (Sharwood-Smith 1924; Swabey 1937; Chilver 1990b; Ifeka 1992, 1999). These were largely non-capitalist economies producing use values for human benefit. Notionally, men’s secret societies controlled the means of reproduction – land, secrets of mask fabrication and rituals of cosmic renewal – but in reality they relied on women’s secret societies for the successful per-

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formance of fertility rituals for abundant procreation by forest animals, economic trees, wives and daughters. Local markets – and the widespread exchange by barter, and increasingly for cash, of rituals, secret societies and anti-witchcraft jujus – boomed until the early 1930s, when decline in overseas demand for palm kernels reduced the importexport trade.10 But, as I show below, fertility rituals continued to spread in the Upper Cross River region. Among those that Anyang women told me were introduced from Eastern Ejagham, and also diffused among neighbouring Boki peoples, are the following: monenkim, celebrating a firstborn daughter’s first childbirth, seclusion and circumcision11 (cf. Röschenthaler 1998); ngbogha-ndem, a long, drawn-out ritual of alternating periods of seclusion and ‘coming out’ for firstborn daughters, who subsequently joined the secret society of the same name with its own secret language; magbu or ‘baby mother’, a smaller monenkim for junior daughters, which means ‘red’ or ‘camwood’ in Denyang on account of heavy applications of red camwood dye on the initiate’s body; and twin cults called ufah in Denyang (Ifeka 1999: 28–29; cf. Röschenthaler 1998: 41–42). A major reason for diffusion was women’s growing freedom, thanks to the Pax Brittanica, to trek long distances to markets. Women were becoming less markedly a ‘muted’ group (E. Ardener 2007). Elderly ladies told me how in the early 1950s, for example, they had ‘gone out’ in groups to trade at markets across the border in Nigeria, at what is now Sankwala in northeast Cross River State. In the course of selling palm oil as well as seasonal forest products such as bush mango and ‘salad’ (Gnetum africanum) in exchange for cash or goods (e.g. salt, cloth, sugar, matches, candles), some adventurous ladies begged or bought induction into the ‘secrets’ of fertility dances originating in Eastern Ejagham (Cameroon) and Western Ejagham (Nigeria). Western Anyang women brought back to their villages new body painting designs and contemporary variants of older dance movements engaging buttocks and pudenda, as well as songs, new and old, praising sexual prowess for procreation. Perhaps they were making an implicit statement to men that they now had more control over their sexuality? Was this increased freedom of movement not encouraging perceptions of gender to shift a little in women’s favour? Informants said that their dance rituals (e.g. monenkim) flourished from the 1920s to the 1970s (Ifeka 1999). Women told me quietly, with more than a tinge of sadness, how thereafter these became less popular because they were associated increasingly with an embarrassing ‘bushiness’ – that is, a lack of ‘civilization’, education and progress. In 1999–2001 I observed these rituals becoming linked to an emerging underclass of female-headed and other households living in impoverished conditions due to lack of remittances from migrant kin, the absence of physically powerful husbands, sons and brothers to clear forest to make large farms, and the lack of adequate cash earnings from bush mango and salad harvesting. These women said they were prevented by these factors from participating with more comfortable village households in the developing exchange value economy of commodity production for external staple and forest products markets. For example, one young Anyang woman of a poor family gave birth to her first child in 2001, in Awancho village. Her husband had not yet completed traditional

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dowry and bride service to his in-laws – whereupon his wife could live with him – so she gave birth in her parents’ house. On her behalf the mother performed a once more common ritual (magbu, ‘baby mother’) in celebration of a first birth. The mother’s mother, female relatives and other members of the Gekwe women’s secret society periodically painted her face, body and legs in colourful designs and rubbed her trunk and thighs with rich red camwood dye. The mother ceased all outside labour for up to a year after her child was born, and her own mother assumed a double workload, caring for her own farm as well as her daughter’s so the extended family could continue to eat. It may be that these underclass families are more attached to performing customary rites of passage on account of the status achieved by the young mother and her natal family as she ‘rests’ and – like an elite city lady – grows plump in the seclusion of the family house. Magbu’s performance may also indicate the respect that village women still give to reciprocity through customary forms of labour exchange, without which most would find it impossible to produce sufficient food to feed their large families, and which compels their collective participation in Gekwe-supported rituals propitiating local gods of fertility. Completion of the ritual may also reflect these poor women’s importance in the women’s secret society. This still-potent institution has its own sacred grove close to the village. However, it lacks a shrine with fetish objects because its Gekwe cloth, medicated with mystically dangerous menstrual and other vaginal fluids, is itself a fetish through whose medium women protect their fertility from witches. The men, too, are active in their own secret society (Lakumbo), whose shrine is hidden inside the forest well away from women’s view. Members patrol paths at each end of the village in their customary role of village ‘policemen’ defending the community against human and spiritual enemies (Ifeka 1999: 89ff.; Ruel 1969: 199ff.). Here, too, Lakumbo members placed medicines on a species of witch plant (Achomanis deforms) believed to prevent malign spirit entities and witches from bringing epidemic diseases, accidental deaths and sickness into the community. Between the 1920s and 1960s people accused of being witches in Anyang villages were hanged on witch or devil trees, possibly menoh genoh (Ocubuaka devilii).12

Women’s Fertility Rituals: The Vulva as Fetish Medium Gekwe members are (and were) organized in mystically powerful counterpoint to the village men’s Lakumbo, which alone offers blood sacrifices for harmony between ancestors, gods and humankind.13 Anyang women cannot participate in judicial sanctions by swearing on a leafy branch (evumbo andeh; Costus afer) owned by the men’s secret society. Rather, women swear exclusively on Gekwe. This secret female fetish is a sizeable piece of loin cloth (or beaten plantain leaf, sometimes bark) said to be tied inside a tiny palm nut kernel (Ifeka 1999: 42, 67). It has been ‘passed through their private parts’ and contains ‘menses blood (which) has power’. As an informant explained to me, men do not bleed from their genitals, and so a man cannot ‘be powerful from his private parts’ (Ifeka 1999: 67). After they dance throughout the night, naked or semi naked, with green creepers

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(Mamordica charantha) around their necks, non-menstruating Gekwe members proceed to their sacred grove in on the edge of the village. There, so as to draw down their god’s cosmic power, the elders ‘show out their private parts’ as they ‘pray with their nakedness so that their private parts may fight against witchcraft’; displaying their genitals (fetishizing potency), they also swear on their (bloody, vaginal fluids–impregnated) Gekwe (Ifeka 1999: 1). Thus, like the bodies of heavily cicatrized ngbogha-ndem initiates, their infected wounds weeping blood, Gekwe dancers make visible their ‘double’ identity as they assume another, mystically charged ‘skin’ or soul (persona) infused with procreative cosmic power.14 An important, though now waning, women’s fertility ritual pertains to twin births and the ritual measures taken to reduce mystical dangers to the twins and their families from excessive cosmic danger associated with twinship. Fathers of twins are involved in the ritual, but the primary responsibility is women’s, especially senior Gekwe members and their acolytes.

Women’s Fertility Rituals: The Snake as Fetish Medium Each twin has a green snake kept in cool water inside his or her twin pot (Ifeka 1999: 22). Where possible the snakes are taken from watery hollows carpeted by moss in the trunks of big trees. Twins may not eat snakes; indeed, if anyone kills small green snakes, the twins will die or become critically ill (Okoh 2000; cf. Willis 1974: 59–65). Anyang informants insisted to me that the snakes are the twins, the twins are the snakes, and both are celestial powers emanating from cooling and heating energies identified with the moon and the sun respectively. Twins are potentially dangerous to those living in close proximity. The twin’s shadow souls must also be protected from a dangerous surfeit of mystical power by medicinally treated green leaves and an elaborate array of medicinal concoctions stored in special calabashes or in specially made pots with green creepers (Marmordica charantha) tied around the neck. The twins’ pots (mesa ufah), made by women, are rubbed with red camwood dye that is not only analogous to, but also purportedly confers, wealth in fertility. Twins’ spiritual and physical health depends on the well-being of their shadow souls, which are believed to animate and to be embodied in two green (sometimes black) snakes. Indeed, twins are said to display extraordinary gifts as they move between worlds, ‘doubling’ or shape-changing from human to snake form and vice-versa, and exercising foresight. The snakes represent relations between gendered parents, children and community in terms of relations between spirit entities of the forest. In Anyang thought, the snake is a fetish medium of articulation between cosmic forces and humankind in general, and twins and their parents in particular. Like all mystically powerful fetish beings, the snakes (twins) must be propitiated and kept ‘cool’, calm, in non-malevolent mode. Anyang cosmology insists that an individual’s self-identity is healthy and strong when its multiple selves or souls are active. This scenario of multiplicityin-unity is, I suggest, a key motif whose complexity and potential for spiritual

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danger through personal and social disorder is regulated by twin rituals that underscore how transcending, if not transgressing, dualism informs all processes of life. These rituals evince a continuing uniformity across the Upper Cross River region and beyond. Anyang ‘standardization’ of ritual practices, I argue, owes much to a patterning through fetish mediums (e.g. small green snakes, twin pots) of relations between elements or realien (e.g. creepers, body painting designs) associated with principles of ‘doubling’. Breaking through constraints, unleashed, these signifiers represent social relations between the twinned double made human flesh in terms of relations between spirit beings. The snake thus fetishizes social relations in tangible forms. Consider the following elements of our template. First, the category of twins (ufah) includes a single child considered to be a ‘twin’ (gefa) because it is marked as mystically special by being born ‘foot first’, with front teeth, a caul, and so forth (Ifeka 1999; cf. Diduk 2001: 29). The ‘second twin’ is said to be ‘hidden’ by the mother, but escapes in the form of its ‘double’, a small green snake called okwonkwo mmeo that is seen slithering quickly from place to place in the family compound and must not be killed (Ifeka 1999: 19–23). Second, Anyang say that each of a pair of twins ‘has four eyes’, as does a single twin, who is more spiritually powerful in some respects and can see things that others cannot on account of its ‘second’ sibling remaining ‘hidden’ in the mother’s womb (Ifeka 1999: 20). These special powers of ‘seeing’ simultaneously the mystical and its embodiment in material form are uniquely dangerous, because they are possessed by such small human beings (cf. Brain 1969: 215). Third, Anyang parents of twins said that the mother and her infant(s) must be secluded for fourteen days (Ifeka 1999), preferably to reside in a house fenced off from others and medicated to secure the family’s mystical protection from excess spiritual danger (cf. Jeffreys 1949: 189–90). Also, parents, baby nurses and twins must not look upwards at the sky, where celestial forces dwell. During this fourteenday seclusion, perhaps signalling a perceived need to protect the community as a whole from surplus fertility of humans and earth, no woman may farm or harvest any crop as ‘this could cause the crops there’ to rot (Okwa 2002: 6; Talbot 1927). Fourth, on the fifteenth day the parents and two baby nurses (of the same sex as each twin) leave the house holding the twins, and all those assembled for the twins’ ‘coming out’ dance (uga) can now see the babies (Ifeka 1999). Anyang female attendants paint the mother’s body with flowers, plantains, domestic fowl and lizards – symbols of female cultivation and domesticated fecundity. The father is rubbed with camwood and decorated with white lines (mbo mu). The twin’s mother is dotted with small white chalk circles on the less auspicious left (female) side of the head; the father is dotted on the more auspicious right (male) side of his head, so dots protect the spiritually vulnerable area between the nose and the ear.15 Anyang women skilled in the art of dotting told me these marks secured leopardlike power and protection against dangerous spirit beings (Ifeka 1999: 21).16 Painted by senior members of Gekwe, dots and other kinds of body painting highlight role and gender differences between senior women and men. The particular animals and plants depicted, the colour of the plant dyes used, the lines

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connecting them with widely recognized patterns transmitted from mother to daughter, constitute ritually potent and mandatory elements (realien) of a template of ‘doubling’. Drawn from the men’s ‘wild’ world of forest animals powered by embodied spirit entities, and from the women’s world represented in these (but not all) contexts as domesticated, informants seem to be saying that this intermingling of metaphysical and physical elements through ‘doubling’ enhances individual and community procreative capacity. Thus, these body paintings may signify the body’s encompassment in an enabling carapace of ‘cosmic-power’: spiritual energy envelops the material body in another ‘skin’, so in that moment of fusion, shimmering power is the female womb united with the potent phallus: two fetishized organs become as One. Sixth, the ‘coming out’ dance commences. Their bodies beautifully painted, the twins’ parents move into the dance circle outside the family house and within the protective fence. Each parent ‘doubles’ up on the other because each one holds the same special staff made of a spiritually ‘strong’ wood also used by the men’s secret society. The wood (mato ufah; Palisota hirsuta) is decorated with white chalk and red camwood; the twins’ pots are likewise painted; the parents’ equivalence is emphasized as they each wear one fathom of cloth that is unrolled between the house threshold and the dance circle (Okwa 1997: 8–9). After everyone has danced seven times in a circle, and sung seven songs for a single twin and fourteen songs for two twins, the parents place three dots on all their faces: each has a single white dot on the forehead and one on each temple close to the ear to ‘prevent the babies from clashing with spirits, i.e. witches’. The dots stop the parents from hearing ‘spiritually harmful things’ (Ifeka 1999: 21; Okwa 2002: 10). Seventh, a special calabash17 is selected and hung from the house rafters and filled with a potent concoction, termed gechuare, which includes small fish (tilapia), maggots, red deer meat and tortoise flesh.18 When parents and twins eat the medicine, it neutralizes excess spiritual danger associated with the babies’ foresight, and prevents them using their mystical powers to cause illness or death. The medicine is intended to ‘settle’ twins’ cosmic power so they may enjoy strong health and not disturb their parents’ and wider family members’ well-being. As a precaution against sickness caused by mystical attack, the concoction may also be rubbed on every joint of the twins’ and their parents’ bodies. The gechuare is supervised by a local diviner (mu megia), who must also be a ‘twin’ and thus possess foresight so that, in true fetish medium fashion, he can mediate between the living and spirits. Finally, the twins’ father consults the medicine man who prepares the pot for each twin. These pots contain very special spring water, and the leaves and bark of a tree found only deep inside the high forest, which make the water wonderfully cool so the twins’ shadow souls never die (Ifeka 1999: 74). As already indicated, these appear in the form of two black or green snakes that live inside the twin pots; each snake embodies a twin’s shadow soul, the source of a twin’s mystical power and strength. The shadow soul of a twin in the pot, the snake, is hidden from evil persons or forces; cooling grasses are placed on top of the pot to cover it well (Okwa 1997: 5; Ifeka 1999: 19–20).

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Dualism and Self-Identity In this fertility ritual twins’ shadow souls (mendoh) are represented in the form of little snakes sliding out of their pots and gliding across the family compound towards the forest from which they came. The ritual highlights the mendoh aspect of the self that in this context seems to englobe, without suppressing, the (twin) individual’s other identities. I turn to a detailed portrait of the multiply structured self by a Boki philosopher (Oshita 1993: 235–39). Oshita made a study of his people, who live in large villages contiguous with western Ayang communities straddling the NigeriaCameroon border; Western Anyang and Eastern Boki speak mutually intelligible dialects. Boki ‘customary’ cosmologies of the self, understood from a masculine perspective, are still potent, despite massive conversion to Christianity since the 1930s. Perhaps owing to underdevelopment and the strategic importance of petty commodity, kin-based relations of production and reproduction in everyday survival (Ifeka 2004), Boki (and Anyang) ‘parent cultures’ continue to celebrate multiple identities and practices of ‘doubling’ in a limited range of contexts. On closer examination we find, as among the Anyang, that the self’s several identities or souls appear in a limited range of combinations: these recurring elements constitute a cultural template. According to Oshita (1993: 235–39), customary and contemporary Boki ontology tends to interpret mind (d’tiem, heart) and body (bikoh) as interacting through feelings that people identify with the heart as well as with a physical substance in the head, the brain (bubom); this organ generates thoughts (okabe), which also flow into feelings.19 Thus, heart and mind are conceived dualistically, but less in the Western, Cartesian sense of body/mind split, and more in terms of emotional and mental processes, whose movements simultaneously reify and resist the heart/ body split.20 For instance, an individual’s heart or mind (d’tiem) is thought to survive physical death owing to his soul or spirit (busun), which goes on being active. The body’s physical demise means that the busun merges with cosmic life-giving energy – perhaps the final dissolution of the two – into one fading breath. Oshita (1993: 238) finds an underlying oneness: ‘The busun is not just an example of a split personality. It is the essence of the person.’ Thus, in accord with other WestCentral African peoples, and highlighting the cosmic unity that transcends apparent duality and encapsulates all matter, Boki and Anyang regard certain beliefs as real states of being that exist simultaneously in at least two forms (Ifeka 1999: 23). Mystical powers of transforming from human into animal shape, techniques of ‘doubling’, also denote a capacity to ‘see’, to have direct interaction with the gods, ancestors and other mystical beings as witches (Diduk 2001: 32). An Anyang man with the power of shape-shifting recreates one social persona as two (e.g. the human releases his ‘bush soul’ that is also a wild animal, cf. Talbot 1923: 67). My analysis differs from Oshita’s interpretation in suggesting that Anyang theories of the self accord the shadow soul a pre-eminent position as self-identity transmuting into fetish medium (snake) in certain contexts (e.g. twin rituals), whereas in others (envy) the bush and/or belly soul may prevail. However, some elements

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in our template of ‘doubling’ mediated by certain fetish mediums occur among both ethnicities. For instance, like the Boki busun, the Anyang shadow soul or mendoh cannot be seen normally, but soothsayers can see and feel someone’s ‘shadow’ arriving in a place before the person does in the flesh, as it were. Mendoh and other spiritual powers like ufume, a person’s ‘animal soul’ or transform, located in the belly and ‘livers’, are believed to survive the male/female body’s physical death.21

Women’s Fertility Practices and Petty Commodity Production As noted above, some underclass families still perform these rituals in the customary mode so as to protect twins’ shadows. In seeking an explanation for the growing association of traditional women’s fertility practices and poor families, the following trends may be pertinent. Western Anyang villages in the forested borderlands are impelled by market demand, and their own needs for cash, to supply wage labour to harvest and carry forest products to road collection points. An emerging underclass comprises women who live with a series of male consorts, others who reside independently in their own female-headed households, and men whose sick wives are unable to farm. Another, growing element is men who are strangers: landless, or fleeing the law, or hawking fake drugs, they trek into the forested borderlands where they seek to settle and obtain hunting and bush clearing rights. Households in these categories rely heavily on non-timber forest product extraction for cash income and day-today economic survival. Young women also travel to other forest villages and towns for sex work, a trend that may account in part for the reported high incidence of HIV infection in Upper Cross River borderland settlements. Economically vulnerable women, reliant on their own labour, with children by different men, draw on traditional women’s fertility rituals that celebrate the female body as a means of production and procreation. Therefore, perhaps, traditional fertility rituals ‘make sense’ economically, even though the twin’s mother’s mother takes on a double workload for up to a year while her daughter grows plump in the seclusion of the parental home. Certainly the growing identification of women’s fertility rituals with an emerging underclass signals the emergence of petty commodity production on the back of women’s (and impoverished men’s) self-employed, largely unpaid labour. In this mode of production, transitional between non-capitalist subsistence and capitalist profit-led economies, many family households work land they have cleared on the village forested commons, and employ their own labour to produce staple farm and forest products for subsistence and, to a variable extent, for sale. The latter furnish the financial means to pay school fees, buy clothes and food items, and travel to markets, hospitals and cities to visit village migrant workers. However, some households now generate sufficient cash from selling forest products and cash crops (cocoa, palm oil) that they can afford to employ casual wage labour. If these borderland villages were closer to towns, where there are banks offering soft loans, they would become capitalist farmers, producing only cash crops (cocoa, palm oil, bananas) for sale

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on land they have appropriated from the commons and over which they claim exclusive ownership. Women’s fertility practices, ennobling an emerging economy of petty commodity production both for subsistence and for sale, reflect on and articulate tensions between a non-capitalist past and a fully capital-intensive future, when women and men may have no other option than to sell their labour in exchange for a wage. And yet, as Edwin Ardener (1970) argued with regard to Bakweri ontology, elements in an Anyang cultural template of ‘doubling’ recur in time and space. On the one hand, women’s customary fetish medium, the vulva, mobilized by Gekwe members, articulates a coming together of the different genders for procreation, and re-presents social relations in terms of relations between spirit beings. On the other hand, the fetish medium as commodity increasingly reifies relations among human beings as relations between things, bought and sold on the market for a thing, money.

Conclusion Revisiting Shirley Ardener’s essay on a Bakweri women’s ritual of resistance, titi ikoli, I have argued that the fetishized vulva is an instance of the persistence of certain themes in religious belief that engender reproductive identities: it is part of a template always in existence, covertly or overtly, throughout this period. Key elements in twin rituals recur. For instance, perhaps referring to the maggots that constitute part of the gechuare and protect twins against cosmic dangers, some ‘educated’ and possibly relatively better off parents now carry out a modified version of parts of the customary ritual. An example, often quoted by informants, is that parents take the twin(s) to a bush toilet and hold them upside down so their faces touch the maggots in the shit, whereupon ‘they become spiritually blind’ and will grow up like other children. Circumstantial elements (realien), however, change in content and in relation to production, as between a formerly hegemonic forest political economy of reproduction and a globalizing commodity economy of production for profit. As yet, people still experience daily events in terms of a continual process of shifting between visible and invisible worlds, that is, between material and spiritual powers identified with commodity and subsistence production relations. They still interpret unwanted events (e.g. premature death, measles epidemics) through malevolent spirit beings that the women’s Gekwe society resists in titi ikoli mode through their unique fetish medium, the vulva. Such fertility rituals as magbu (baby mother) and mesa ufa (twins) are still performed by some households, principally those of the underclass but also at times by chiefs and their womenfolk keen to accumulate status by engaging, rather self-consciously, in ‘traditional’ rituals. Gekwe members fight off witches by performing naked in the night, exposing their genitalia. Yet witchcraft accusations and confession rituals suggest that these displays of communal commitment to a shared procreative identity are at times less in response to an agreed collective commitment by women to renewing their

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fertility and that of the land, and more in response to a marked growth in individual women’s perceived nocturnal antisocial activities. Today, women are perceived as devouring one another’s procreative power, i.e. their customary wealth – symptomatic, perhaps, of increasing penetration of non-capitalist kin-based social relations by commodity production for profit. Yet the vulva as fetish medium in western Anyang ‘parent’ culture also continues to represent relations between the genders in terms of the naked female genitalia’s mystical power to resist demonic forces. Men who disobey Gekwe’s rules may be punished by death through incurable sickness that annihilates their multiple selves and their shadow souls; in the absence of mystical attack the shadow soul would survive the demise of other selves housed inside and outside the body and assume the form of ancestral hippopotami, alligators or huge fish. Similarly, in the women’s fertility ritual for twins a key theme seems to be that duality is reduced to unity, difference to sameness. Informants emphasized repeatedly that the shadow soul of a twin is the snake: the ‘twin is a snake’. Thus, the two fuse into one fetishized entity, one medium of articulation between human and nonhuman kind. Here, then, is an Anyang template of elements and realien that in one configuration or another recognizes the phenomenal in the social, the ‘Thou’ in the ‘I’: the cosmic One.

Notes 1. I wish to express my profound appreciation of the friendship and intellectual achievements of Shirley Ardener and E.M. (Sally) Chilver, as well as the late Edwin Ardener. Discussion and debate over so many years have deeply shaped my lifelong commitment to anthropology and field research, and in one way and another have contributed much to the ideas and data presented in this chapter. I have also to acknowledge the invaluable assistance in the field of Jackson Okwa, Magnus Okoh and Sylvanus Abua, key members at the time of our NGO’s field research team. I thank the British Academy for a grant in support of field research, and am grateful for the kind assistance of the Leverhulme Trust (UK), which awarded me a research fellowship that gave time to write an earlier version of this essay, though the Trust is in no way responsible for the ideas expressed. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful advice, and to Ian Fowler for his encouragement, ethnographic inputs, and considerate editing. 2. As recorded by Mary Kingsley, among other nineteenth-century travellers in West-Central Africa, fetish means ‘juju’, which is Pidgin English for the French word ‘joujou’ (doll or small toy figure). ‘Fetico’ is derived from the Portuguese for fetish, meaning objects, trees, fish, idols, etc. said to be imbued with spiritual power when appropriately ‘medicated’. A fundamental belief about fetish is that the connection of a certain spirit with a mass of matter, a material object, is not permanent. Therefore, as in West African and Haitian ‘juju’ and ‘voudou’, there is a continuing need for powerful ‘medicine’ to draw down the divinity to inhabit, animate and empower the object in question (see Deren 1983; Rosenthal 1998; Devisch 2003). 3. Leonard (1906: 333) writes of human spirits that ‘in losing their dualism (they) had lost their humanity’, which could not return to their human form. Anyang believe each individual has several spiritual aspects or ‘souls’: one returns to the ancestors; another (the ‘shadow’, mendoh) returns to its celestial ‘home’ and in certain contexts merges with the individual’s bush soul (ufume) and so assumes animal forms. Gefume metshu refers to the process whereby a human soul changes,

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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for instance, into an elephant soul; the two are spiritually the same person – two-in-one – but he/she has changed their ‘skin’ or ‘soul’. In Denyang an individual’s mendoh also means ‘skin’, body shape and soul (Ifeka 1999: 10, 13, 27). Another term in Denyang for transforming into an animal is ufume menya (Sharwood-Smith 1924; Ifeka 1999: 34). An additional aspect or ‘soul’ called negbu located in the belly is associated with witchcraft, and though potentially benevolent it can also be malevolent. This ‘soul’ should die when its ‘owner’ passes on, but it may continue to disturb the living, in which case the body is disinterred and broken into several pieces to ensure the soul is properly dead. Negbu is also associated at times with mendoh. Anyang extend negbu to encompass other potentially malevolent aspects of shape-changing as humans (women, men, children) who transform at night into witches (Ifeka 1999: 33). Ibibio, Ibo and Nigerian Ejagham believed in the early twentieth century that some humans can assume the shape and identities of certain plants and trees (Leonard 1906: 298ff; Talbot 1923:67–70). Among the Western Anyang a possible example of such a tree might be ‘devil stick’ (Distemonanthus benthiamianus, in Denyang genoh alloh) whose bark is also used for very powerful medications to ward off destructive cosmic powers (see note16 below). However, citing Mary Kingsley, Partridge (1905: 125–6) asserts that middle Cross River cosmologies posit that every man has four souls, of which ‘the bush soul is always in the form of an animal in the forest – never of a plant’. See Edwin Ardener’s essay on Bakweri fertility rituals – liengu (1975a) and the elephant dance (1959) – in which participants search for ‘wild’ potency as they don creepers (liengu) and elaborate elephant masks and raffia clothing. In some Anyang fertility rituals (e.g. monenkim and magbu) women wear cowries – a ‘traditional’ form of money – around their necks. The ‘double’ flange may denote the female genitalia (Ian Fowler, pers. comm. 14 March 2007) that in Bakweri and Anyang thought open the way for the male organ to inseminate the vagina. Cf. Report on the Bangwa Area, 1942. Big jujus, like the Cross River Ekpe society’s ukwindi, come out covered with the same species of creeper (Mamordica charantha) as used in twin rituals, indicating that this creeper possesses ‘wild’ forest potency (Ifeka 1999: 31). Note that like other ethnic groups in the Upper Cross River region, Western Anyang bury senior Ekpe society men in house graves with forest leaves scattered on top (Ifeka 1999; cf. Ruel 1969). See also Michael Herzfeld’s Foreword to Ardener 2007 and chapter 5 in the same volume. Elder males, with some assistance from older women, sent out girls in marriage, and so created affinal (political) relations of exchange between clans or patrilines in a non-capitalist kin-based economy of reproduction (cf. Rey 1975). C-M-C = commodity-money-commodity exchange; M-Mi = Money-Money with profit added from production by wage labour alienated from the means of production and creating surplus value, profit, for the capitalist employer (Marx 1973). Sharwood-Smith, B.E. (A.D.O.) 1924. An Assessment Report on the Menka District of the Mamfe Division in the Cameroons Province. File no. 4111/21. AF 37, National Archives, Buea. Mansfeld (1913–14); Ossidinge Division Annual Report (1916) File No 43/17, Ce (1916) 2, National Archives, Buea; Ossidinge Division Annual Report (1918) Ce (1918) 1, National Archives, Buea. Mamfe Division Annual Report (1931). Monenkim rituals were carried out under the authority of the men’s secret society, the leopard society (Egbe). This was also the practice in Bakweri, where earlier ‘[e]very village had a witch hanging tree’ (Ardener 1956: 105). Today in Anyang and neighbouring Boki villages (metaphysical) witches are said to hang from trees, which is why they are felled (Ifeka and Flower 1997). Western Anyang associate several species of plants and trees with witchcraft, as indicated in the Denyang name. For example, one ‘witch plant’ is Achomanis deforms, a plant of the cocoyam family with broad leaves; menoh genoh, a witchcraft or devil tree upon which witches were hanged is classified tentatively as Ocubuaka devilii; Distemonanthus benthiamianus is ‘devil stick’, genoh alloh. Compare with a typical Anyang sacrifice. The chief priest of the village’s fetish oshu ukieh sprinkles the blood of utshu – i.e. a red deer (signifying the forest/wild) and a cock (signifying the village/domestication) on the effigy’s ‘body’ (Okwa 2002).

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14. Until some thirty years ago, Eastern Ejagham firstborn daughter initiates (ngbogha) were immured in the family house for varying periods under the supervision of the women’s ndem society to be ‘fattened’, circumcised and informed by a senior woman about women’s love and fertility magic. Crucially, on ‘coming out’, initiates had to subject their bodies to so much tattooing – ‘cutting and cutting’ the flesh – that the bleeding wounds became infected and many girls died (Ifeka 1999: 28). In this unfortunate excess of ritual enthusiasm women’s leaders engaged in self-inflicted bleeding of the female body, whereas monthly bleeding is not self-inflicted. 15. Partridge (1905: 17) observed this popular and frequently repeated motif in body painting among the Ejagham and some other Upper Cross River peoples. Twins in Denyang are called bea ufah for two twins and mege ufah for one twin (Ifeka 1999: 18); the parents of twins are termed mainyi (‘mother of god’) and tainyi (‘father of god’). Cf. Jeffreys 1949: 192–93. Note that the Yoruba call the father of twins Taiyi. 16. A British colonial officer reported how initiates’ faces were painted with the ritually prescribed number of white chalk circles or dots on the forehead and between the ears and nose; their heads were adorned with fine (white, red) bird feathers (Intelligence Report on the Kembong 1942). Anyang, Ejagham and other women of Mamfe Division practised similar painting a century ago (Röschenthaler 1998: 40). 17. Jeffreys (1949: 190) observed that in Eghap a double-bellied water pot was made for twins, one placed on top of the other to ‘act as one water-pot’. 18. Though the increasing dearth of certain plants and animals, due to deforestation, makes it more difficult now to complete gechuare according to ‘custom’, informants more or less agreed that the following are spiritually necessary ingredients. These are mixed with palm oil, red cocoyam (Xanthasoma sagittifolium), antelope, small fish (tilapia), ‘sleeping’ deer (in Denyang, mewumenyia; cervus spp.), and maggots from a latrine. Re the ‘sleeping’ deer: ‘A wild animal which does not move away when approached by a human being is widely considered to be a human in transform and should not be killed’ (Pers. comm. Ian Fowler 14 March 07). Bush pig meat, elephant and water beef (a small mammal living alongside streams) are desirable additions. Some elderly female herbalists told me that a plant mixture (gecheigeme) can be used instead of the gechuare mixture (Ifeka 1999: 22). As many items as possible should be mixed together, with the palm oil, and put inside a single gechuare calabash for the twins (and their parents) to eat from in order to avoid ill health. (Here the unity of parents and twins may be signalled by their eating the same mixture from the one calabash.) On other occasions twins may each have their own gechuare calabash; just as they have their own twin pots with special plant mixture placed inside, in the cool water where the shadow soul snake resides (Ifeka 1999: 23). This mixture may include chewed red deer meat, kola nuts and alligator pepper mixed with the bark of an especially potent tree bark (devil stick) that fights hostile forces but reputedly can kill defaulters; the mixture is tossed into the twin pot (Ifeka 1999: 42). 19. This possibility is enacted in Upper Cross River masquerades or ‘plays’ that honour ancestral or natural spirit beings. Anyang and other peoples of the region speak of a shape-changer assuming another ‘skin’ that is symbolized by a mask (ancestral or animal face) and masquerade dress (body-hugging suit and raffia skirt); it may also be symbolized by the human soul embedding in an animal/tree/snake/rock ‘double’ (Ifeka 1999: 11–13). 20. In the mid to late 1990s we carried out household surveys in Eastern Boki villages on income and survival strategies. We found that one-fifth of households held landless labourers working for local cocoa farmers who owned land and could afford to pay workers a daily wage. At this stage in the growth of privatized land ownership, most families exercised entitlements to private property in land and to the village commons, allocated annually in shares to applicants on the basis of need (cf. Ifeka and Flower 1997; Ifeka 1996). 21. Anyang informants told me that the heart (one physical entity with double clavicles) and lungs (two entities) are linked by a ‘rat structure’ (nemphoe) that confirms witchery (Ifeka 1999: 27; cf. Bohannon 1957). These organs are known to elders, priests and seers, who conduct post-mortem surgeries at night on certain dead bodies, including those of suspected witches, in order to see whether the deceased’s liver and/or heart have tell-tale ‘black blood clots’, symptomatic of malign intentions against innocent others.

CHAPTER 9

Commemorating Women in a Patrilineal Society Margaret Niger-Thomas

This chapter describes the ndem association among the Banyang and Ejagham tribes of Manyu Division in the South West Province of Cameroon, the role it plays in status acquisition among women and its sudden decline over the years. The main aim is to highlight the importance of memorial statues meant to honour women. Ngboko-ndem are colourfully erected life-size clay statues on graves of women who were highly honoured in the society in their lifetime. These statues were made solely to commemorate women: according to Mansfeld’s UrwaldDokumente (1908), chiefs and other respected elders were not honoured by statues over their graves. The second aim is to honour Shirley Ardener, a distinguished personality and a great contributor to knowledge as a Cameroonist and as an anthropologist.1 The concept of association is not new in Africa or in Cameroon. Several types of present-day women’s associations have been described by a number of authors (March and Taqqu 1986; Moore 1988; Röschenthaler 1988; Wipper 1995; NigerThomas 1995). Among these are common initiative groups; rural co-operatives and self-help groups; economic interest groups and urban business enterprises; occupational and sociocultural associations; and church groups. Despite the informal nature of most of these associations, they have contributed enormously in increasing women’s visibility. The study of women cross-culturally has shown that women’s associations with one another are important for women, just as same-sex associations are for men, and that both types of association typically animate the life of a community (March and Taqqu 1986). Women have developed a shared identity and even wider options through their associations with one another. Among the Banyang and Ejagham tribes of Manyu Division, the ndem association stands out as unique, meant to honour firstborn daughters especially during marriage and at death. While other forms of associations in these societies

Notes for this chapter begin on page 183.

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have gained recognition over the years, what remains of the ndem association are memorial statues of women who were commemorated at death in the period from the 1930s through 1985. For over seventeen years Shirley Ardener’s work as an anthropologist, her love for the field and especially her commitment as a Cameroonian specialist contributed greatly to shaping my views and approach to anthropology. The history of this brief contribution to this book dates as far back as 1988, when we met for the first time at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Our conversation began informally in a pizza restaurant where we sat down for dinner. Shirley and Edwin’s trips through Mamfe, a town that developed in colonial times near the southern borders of Nigeria, were reviewed. The concepts of Mamfe Go-Up and Mamfe Come-Down were discussed.2 Of special interest to Shirley were the picturesque ngboko-ndem statues seen along the road as one travelled from Mamfe to Ekok, the last town on the Cameroon side bordering Nigeria. Four years later, through Shirley’s ingenuity, I had a research fellowship in 1992 for six months at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women in Oxford. This led to closer contact with her, a review of past events in Cameroon and networking with women cross-culturally, all of which enkindled my desire for further studies. Thus the genesis of my doctorate studies later in Leiden could be traced from the events that unfolded after my first contact with Shirley. After many years (over two decades), Shirley revisited Cameroon. She braved the very rough roads from the coastal town of Limbe at the foot of the Cameroon Mountain to visit the field in Mamfe where I was carrying out fieldwork for my doctoral thesis. On Sunday, 31 March 1996, Shirley, my driver and I set out for Mamfe. After about thirty minutes our vehicle broke down, and Shirley and I sat on the veranda of a small bar while the driver went out in search of a mechanic.3 It is from our discussions there that I not only derived the title of my book Buying Futures (November 2000), but also came up with a detailed study on Women’s Initiatives in Agriculture and Trade (Niger-Thomas 2000: 51–85). Her commentaries in the field – always reminding me of in-depth studies, participant observation as she herself observed every action very keenly, field notes, diary and other anthropological methodologies – provided many insights into my work. This chapter could not have been possible without Shirley drawing my attention to the memorial statues of women one passes on the Mamfe-Ekok road through the Banyang and Ejagham country.

The Banyang and Ejagham of Manyu Division The Banyang and Ejagham ethnic groups of Manyu Division have a patrilineal organization.4 They live in clan settlements in a large, sparsely populated area of the Manyu River (formerly the Cross River) in the tropical rainforests of South West Cameroon and South East Nigeria. Within the Banyang country, a broad distinction is made between ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Banyang, taking its orientation from the flow of the rivers.5 It is the Lower Banyang community that shares a boundary with the Ejagham who are closer to the Nigerian border.

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Traditionally both the Banyang and Ejagham are cultivators engaging in fulltime agriculture. Women concentrate on subsistence farming and grow the main crops and vegetables. The men grow cash crops, mainly cocoa and coffee. Women derive usufruct rights to farmland from their husbands and family, as marriage is strictly virilocal. Men own most of the fruit-bearing trees and a few domestic animals; they also fish and sometimes hunt. Women fish in smaller rivers as well, as making use of a number of forest products. The Banyang area comprises eleven villages, while the Ejagham account for approximately 150 villages. Each village is governed by a council of elders represented by a ‘chief’, nfor among the Banyang and ntuifam among the Ejagham, who holds a ritual office at the apex of a hierarchical structure. Social activities take place in men’s and women’s associations, which are both prevalent in these areas.

The ndem Association The ndem association is believed to have originated in the Ejagham area and spread to Banyang lands. This view is justified by field reports collected by Malcolm Ruel (1969), Ute Röschenthaler (1988) and present data collected in 1996. According to one myth (Ruel 1969), the first ngboko-ndem fell from the sky into a large boma tree.6 She wore strange dancing attire and spoke to the awed spectators in a queer language. Later on, she married and taught some of the women her secrets. Parents started to initiate their firstborn daughters, and ngboko-ndem developed into an association. It quickly became famous and spread to other parts of Ejagham country and to neighbouring ethnic groups. Röschenthaler, in her paper ‘Honouring Ejagham Women’, noted that long before colonial times the Eastern Ejagham modified the seclusion of firstborn daughters by developing an association called ngboko-ndem. In Nchang village the following associations were reported to have existed in the past: ekpa, nkim, ana, ndem, nenwa.7 Of these the most important and most widespread noted by Ruel (1969) was probably ndem, which was most elaborate and highly organized among Lower Banyang (and Eastern Ejagham) but which extended also, somewhat fragmentarily, into Upper Banyang villages. In the course of pursuing field research in the Mamfe area some twenty-seven years after Ruel, we met a number of his informants, including Pa Philip Enow Eta, now in his early eighties. He lived some 10 km from Mamfe in Eyanchang village, which is the next village after Nchang on the road to the Eastern Ejagham country and the Nigerian border. Though a male, Pa Philip had been initiated into the ndem association by his mother, and like other informants he confirmed earlier stories of the origin of the association. His grandmother, Ma Ewube Besong Aya, married at Nkpot village, is reported to have been one of the early founders of the ndem association.8 One day as she sat with friends, there arrived some visitors who claimed to have been sent with a gift and a message to the land. She did not know where they came from but received the visitors and, together with her friends, was initiated into the ndem association. In appreciation, chickens and goats were given to the visitors. Ma Ewube Aya remained the leader and initiated her first daughter, Ma Ebangha Taku, who got married at Eyanchang village and gave birth to Pa

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Philip Enow Eta. Eyanchang is reported to have been the birthplace of the ndem association in the Banyang country. Pa Philip and his mother went from village to village to introduce the association into which firstborn daughters were initiated. In very exceptional cases, firstborn sons (as in the case of Pa Philip) were initiated and took the title of obale, but they did not go through the same initiation rite (especially not the confinement) that the ngboko-ndem (females) did. The obales were mainly involved in obtaining the attire and equipment that were used during initiation. They helped prepare the costumes and played the drums during initiation and other celebrations, especially those for deaths. As earlier mentioned, this association is dying out and only a few elderly members are still alive.

Initiation A young girl is initiated into the ndem association at puberty or before marriage. The fees are paid by the father, and membership gives her higher status in society. She is always considered a leader among women and has recognition among the council of elders in the village. Men listen to her voice. As Röschenthaler noted: ‘As an ngboko-ndem, she enjoyed high status and reverence throughout her life. When attending communal meetings, she carried her stool, and was allowed to sit, like chiefs and elders, whereas all others had to stand. She was also among the first to be served refreshment’. During initiation she is kept in confinement for fourteen days, during which many sacred things are revealed to her. She is introduced to the spirit world and made to stand on the leaves of a species of plantain called manon-ekwa while a series of small cicatrizations are made down her arms and across her chest and back. The blood is collected in the plantain leaves and used for other supernatural purposes. She is well fed during the period of confinement and does not take any formal bath; rather, her skin is rubbed with coconut milk and white clay. She is taught the ndem laws and all the rules applying to members of the associations and regulating their relations with non-members. She also takes one of a series of special names (Bessem, Eneke, Ebangha or Eyere) reserved for members of the associations. At the end of the period of confinement the girl is dressed in a special outfit to wear in public during a formal ceremony. A short waist cloth covering made out of the beaten bark of a tree called ebhok is worn in the form of a skirt, called ebhok-ndem. Her body is rubbed with sepu (camwood) and on her legs nja (rattles) are tied. Her headgear is made up of black-coloured cloth with feathers of the ngwene (peacock), eghan (guinea fowl) and a tail feather of a cock, standing erect. She wears a cord work necklace coloured with sepu and formed into three rows of cowries, which are also found on her headgear. Her face is decorated with a chalky material called sekok. Even though obales do not go through confinement during ceremonies, they are dressed in fibre skirts and also wear nja (local rattles) made from the shells of a hard nut like that of the shea tree. The association has its own dance, held during initiations and on the occasion of a member’s death. When appearing at association dances the ngboko-ndem always wears distinctive feathers, especially those of the peacock, in the back of her hair as a mark of status.

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The ceremonial appearance in public of the ngboko-ndem or bagbokorem (plural) marked the full initiation. It was during this period that suitors came to take their brides home. The bridewealth for an ngboko-ndem was higher than that paid for other women. It was not an easy task for a bridegroom to take his bride from her family: usually a struggle was involved because the parents counted her as too precious and priceless to part with. Sometimes the bridegroom was made to pay the bridewealth afresh, though not in a situation where the young man and his family had helped to foot the bill of her confinement. The primary purpose of the ngboko-ndem association was to give status to women. The association indirectly reflected the system of status achievement and competition among the men of the community. Community leaders bought status for their daughters (and thus, indirectly, for themselves) through the association, while in turn those men seeking community status sought also to marry those ‘leaders among women’ (Ruel 1969: 204). As Ruel further noted, ‘It was not a matter of chance that in both Tali and Besongabang when I inquired about ndem, I was sent to the senior wife of the village leader’. To this day, living members of this association still command respect in the society. It was common during field research for a man to have heard such statements as ‘you are married to an ngbokondem’ if his wife was beautiful and a lot of money had been spent to get her. In other words, a man can boast of his wife being an ngboko-ndem, which means that she is special, costly and expensive to marry and maintain. It was due to this acquired status in society that a member was commemorated at death by the building of an effigy to her name. Unlike the women, men who perform in the association remain only honorary members and do not receive a statue after death.

Memorial Statues As one drives into the Lower Banyang land from Besongabang village through the Eastern Ejagham communities, it is common to find old anthropomorphic mud or cement statues that were erected many years ago in honour of deceased members of the ngboko-ndem association. Even though a few of such effigies will be found in Upper Banyang villages, they are rarer there than in Lower Banyang. Regarding the statues visited, informants could remember the year or period when the ngboko-ndem died but not exactly when the statues were built. However, all our informants reported that statues were constructed before the big funeral celebration, which usually took place several months or even years after the corpse was buried. The earliest bagbokorem recorded during field research were found at Egbekaw-Ossing village in Eastern Ejagham. Figure 9.1 portrays two sun-dried mud statues erected in honour of two women of the family who were members of the association. Only the name of one of them (on the right) could be recalled: Ma’ Sem Ayuk Enow, who died in the late 1930s. Such a statue could be placed on the grave of the deceased or, more commonly, in front of the family house. Among the Lower Banyang and Ejagham, when an nbgoko-ndem dies her corpse must be carried from her husband’s to her parental house. The patrilineage is responsible for a member’s funeral celebration. Mem-

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Figure 9.1: Ma' Sem Ayuk Enow (right) died in the late 1930s. EgbekawOssing (Margaret Niger-Thomas, 1996/1998)

bers of the association are called on by the patrilineage to dress the deceased in her dancing costume, including the staff and a drill or ape’s thigh bone, before she is laid in state in a sitting position. Very early in the morning the corpse is buried by the men while the guests leave and await the funeral celebration. About a week or two before the date is announced, the patrilineage of the deceased once more invites members of the ngboko-ndem association. While the

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family summons and pays the artist and his assistants, members of the association instruct and oversee the construction process of the statue. Throughout the period of fabrication they are provided with large quantities of food and drinks. A small shelter is first built, and then the statue is erected. Members of the association paint the statue and decorate it with the deceased’s dancing attire. The process is kept secret from public view by building a fence that is removed only on the day of the big funeral celebration, when everybody can see the statue and comment on its beauty as they had done during the period of the deceased’s initiation. Members of the association dance around the statue and sing praises in her honour. The statue depicts a woman sitting like a chief, a symbol of honour and status in society. Her body is brightly coloured in white or yellow with red and blue stripes (see Fig. 9.2). These same colours are used in decorating the ngboko-ndem’s body during ceremonial dances as a sign of beauty. The eyebrows or nose are marked with black lines while small beauty marks are painted on the cheeks. She wears headgear crowned by a multitude of blue, black and white feathers. A big shawl is tied round her neck, covering her breast, and her arms and armlet are adorned with rattles and other forms of decoration made out of fibres from the barks of trees or modelled in clay. In her right hand she holds a staff, symbolizing status; in the left she holds the thighbone of an ape. Statues were made by different artists using mud, clay, stones and, in recent years, cement. Until about the 1960s most statues were transient structures of sun-dried clay. For those statues modelled with mud and clay it is quite common to find that legs, arms and heads have decayed over the years and fallen off (see Figs. 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6 and 9.7). Figure 9.2: Ma' Agnes Eyere, ca. 1910–1980. Besongabang (Margaret NigerThomas, 1996/1998)

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Figure 9.3: Ma' Bessem Ebai-Enow, died 1975. Besongabang (Margaret NigerThomas, 1996/1998)

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Figure 9.4: Ma' Bessem Ako, died 1962. Ntenako (Margaret Niger-Thomas, 1996/1998)

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Figure 9.5: Ma' Bessem Enow, died late 1960s. Takpa-Ossing (Margaret NigerThomas, 1996/1998)

The Cross River track served not only as a means of commerce between Nigeria and Cameroon but also as a transfer of culture between neighbouring villages. As reported by our informants, some of the artists came from Nigeria, especially to those Ejagham villages quite close to the Nigerian border, while others were from Cameroon. The styles do not differ much from one village to the other. What was common among them was the sitting position of all the statues identified in the field and their decorative nature, though some decorations were more sophisticated than others. This depended on the wealth of the patrilineage. Regardless of the person’s age, the statue represents ‘beauty’, which a woman manifests most clearly at the end of her initiation. Body and facial differences may be indicated, but generally the statues do not show any individuality. They are idealized figures. An exceptional case was found at Ndekwai village, where the style reflected a modern tombstone or monument rather than the traditional form of statues found throughout the Banyang and Ejagham country (Fig. 9.8). Our informants reported that the style was brought from Nigeria by a Nigerian artist who wanted to construct something different from what had been the practice. This particular monument was more costly to fabricate and took a longer period to complete. Like the statue adjacent to it, cement rather than clay was used. In all the villages visited, we noticed that these statues no longer have the significance they had before. They are left to decay – especially those made out of clay. Effigies made out of cement may last for several years; some, like those in Fig. 9.8, have survived for as many

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Figure 9.6: Ma' Ebkoh Bessem, died early 1970s. Egbekaw-Ossing (Margaret Niger-Thomas, 1996/1998)

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Figure 9.7: Ma' Ebangba Obon, died 1985. Egbekaw-Ossing (Margaret NigerThomas, 1996/1998)

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Figure 9.8: Ma' Eyereta seated. Tombstone of Ma' Eneke Agbondip (died late 1960s). Ndekwai (Margaret Niger-Thomas 1996/1998)

as thirty-five years (1961–1996). Quite often the head or arms are broken off and the foundation is exposed and threatened due to erosion; what remains often serves to dry laundry or as a resting place for animals.

Conclusion My concern in this chapter has been to review the ndem association in the Banyang and Ejagham communities in Manyu Division and the importance of memorial statues in commemorating deceased members. In most traditional African societies, women are still marginalized and do not enjoy the same status as their male counterparts. Ndem was one of those rare associations for women in the area that created an impact and was recognized in society. It gave women (or at least firstborn daughters) a higher status. They were treated with reverence by their patrilineage from the age of puberty, and even their husbands and affinal family honoured them in their lifetime and at death. At death, the patrilineage organized the commemorative funeral ceremony, which involved the erection of a statue. This was not done for firstborn males, even those who were members of the association. Ngboko-ndem possessed a voice in a male-dominated society; she was listened to in public or in her family and contributed to decision-making. As described in this essay, very little is left of this association, and very little evolution took place in terms of activities, style of effigies, etc. Almost all the members are dead, and what remains visible are old, decaying statues of deceased members dat-

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ing from the late 1930s to 1985, when the last ngboko-ndem in Egbekaw-Ossing village was commemorated (Fig. 9.7). As reported by one of the living ngboko-ndem in Besongabang village, there had been plans to involve the few members still alive in the arts festival in Yaoundé (capital of Cameroon) as a demonstration of African culture, but this plan failed. The question that remains is this: why has the ndem association fallen into total decline when the cultural importance of associations in Cameroon has been recognized by the government and encouraged through formal decrees signed by the head of state since 1992? Several factors account for this decline, including education, religion, economic empowerment, and changes in values. Young girls no longer want to go into seclusion and be fattened; they prefer to go to school. This can be confirmed by the rate of literacy in the area in recent years; sometimes there are more girls than boys in the local primary schools (Niger-Thomas 2000). The need to prioritize family needs and manage limited financial resources no longer permits parents to spend large sums on initiation rites and elaborate commemorative ceremonies. Values have changed, and women themselves put more emphasis on socioeconomic activities than those that are purely cultural. Ignorance about how to explore such cultural practices for the well-being of the womenfolk and the family could also account for the static and diminishing nature of ndem and other forms of associations in the area.

Glossary ndem ngboko-ndem bagbokorem obale ebhok ndem-ebhok sepu mbt sekok ngwene eghan nja nkwap manon-ekwa nso-any

The name of the association. A female member of the ndem association. Plural form of ngboko-ndem. Male member of the ndem association. The tree bark used for dress-making. The fibre dress made from tree bark, worn for initiation rites and other ceremonies. A red substance (camwood) used by female members to beautify themselves. A red-coloured fluid used for decoration. A yellow substance used for decoration. Peacock. Guinea fowl. Rattles made of hard nutshells and hung on the fibre skirt. The seat on which the ngboko-ndem sits during her initiation. It is constructed to contain her initiation outfits. A type of plant with red leaf veins, used for initiation rites. Drill.

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Notes 1. I met Shirley Ardener for the first time in 1988 at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Oxford University’s International Development Centre, Queen Elizabeth House. She carried out anthropological fieldwork for many years in Nigeria and Cameroon. She has published on these countries and has also edited and contributed in various aspects to a number of books on women in the Centre’s series. She is still a member of the CCCRW, now called International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford. 2. ‘Mamfe Go-Up and Mamfe Come-Down’ referred to the flow of all traffic, including commercial vehicles commonly called ‘lorries or mammy wagons’, during the colonial period. Road building was very slow because of the difficult terrain in the surrounding areas. These public vehicles traveled out of Mamfe only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, known as ‘He-Days’ and came into Mamfe on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, known as ‘She-Days’. (The going up of vehicles was given a masculine connotation referring to the low intensity of social activity as compared to the feminine connotation of ‘She-Days’, when social activities were heightened as families received friends and relatives, and bars and restaurants were fully engaged.) Sundays were free for noncommercial vehicles, which were very few at the time and could move in and out only with a special permit given by the District Officer. 3. The outcome of this incident has been described in an unpublished paper by Shirley and me presented in Leiden (December 2000) and Oxford (July 2005) entitled: ‘A Serendipitous Encounter in Cameroon: Turning the Negative into Positive’. 4. This essay is based on field research carried out in 1996 and 1998 in the Mamfe area. I am particular indebted to Pa Philip Enow Eta of Eyanchang village and the Banyang and Ejagham men and women along the Mamfe-Ekok road who patiently responded to my questions and recounted the ngboko-ndem history. Pa Ashu Abunaw (commonly called Teacher Kenyang) acted as a resource person, spelling and translating the Kenyang words. I am very grateful to my research assistant, Ojong Ben Victor, who spent long hours collecting data in different villages. 5. This geographical distinction is relative, and the dialectical and cultural differences that are associated with it are gradual (Ruel 1969: 2). 6. Ngboko-ndem: the name given to a female member of the ndem association. A boma tree is a tropical silk cotton tree. 7. Nchang village is one of the eleven villages that constitute Lower Banyang, or what is commonly called Mamfe Central Area. It is quite close to the eastern Ejagham lands. 8. Nkpot is the first Eastern Ejagham village after Eyanchang in the Banyang land.

CHAPTER 10

The Challenge of Multi-sited Ethnography Fiona Bowie

In an interview conducted in Cambridge in 1982,1 Audrey Richards contrasted her own training and fieldwork experience, which involved studying a whole tribe or society, with the more modest ambitions of contemporary ethnographers, who generally take a single theme or a subgroup as their focus. For the first half of the twentieth century, the concern of anthropologists was to fill in the blanks on the map. At the London School of Economics, Audrey Richards was a student of Malinowski, who was actively promoting his new brand of anthropology based on prolonged residence and participant observation. She recounts how, when leaving to undertake fieldwork among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia in 1930, Malinowski ran along the platform of Victoria Station, ‘to my great regret carrying about fourteen coloured pencils’ that he thrust into her hand, saying, ‘Now remember, brown for economics, red for politics, blue for ritual!’ When I was preparing for my own fieldwork in Cameroon in 1980 the situation was not so very different.2 I knew that I wanted to do ‘mud-hut’ anthropology based on extended participant observation in a single location, preferably as rural as possible. I chose Fontem (Lebang),3 in what was then Mamfe Division of Anglophone South West Cameroon, for logistical reasons. I had a long-term interest in Fontem and the chance of supplementing my limited research grant with some paid work at the mission or Mariapolis run by a Christian group known as the Work of Mary or the Focolare Movement.4

Locating the Field I had known of Fontem through regular updates on the progress of the mission ‘town’ or Mariapolis from the early 1970s as a member of the young people’s section of the Focolare Movement. As a member of the Gen Movement (the second or new generation of the Work of Mary), I had been involved in raising money Notes for this chapter begin on page 197.

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to build the hospital, school and workshops run by members of the Focolare. Although I loved the slide shows and accounts of the Bangwa that I heard at Focolare meetings in Rome, I simply did not believe that the relationships described were quite as perfect as portrayed, and guessed that the story was much more complicated and interesting than the official version of events. I did not attempt to repeat the ethnographic work of Robert Brain on Bangwa kinship and marriage, wood carving and masquerades, although I certainly observed, asked questions, and sought to understand as much as I could about Bangwa society and culture.5 Robert Brain had arrived in Fontem shortly before the arrival of the first members of the Focolare in the mid 1960s, and therefore documented the society before and during this period of initial contact, providing an excellent basis from which to judge changes and continuities instigated by the presence of the Focolare. He had lived near the mission site as a guest of a Chief Fobellah Nkeng, who also became a great friend of the Focolare and one of my own informants. Many of the people Robert Brain had talked to were, not surprisingly, those I also found to be good interlocutors. They tended to have a reasonable knowledge of English or Pidgin English, had often lived outside Lebialem (the name of the Division that encompasses the Bangwa and Mundani) and were likely to have been educated to at least primary school level. In other words, they had enough distance from their own society and sufficient contact with Western forms of thought and education to understand and respond to the kinds of abstract models and obtuse questions that anthropologists insist on asking. I suspect that I spent more time with women than Brain had done, but as Edwin Ardener observed, women tend not to meet the prerequisites of the ethnographer’s ideal informant. They have less time to spend talking to anthropologists, less access to education, and more likelihood of being monolingual. Above all, women are less likely than men to model their knowledge of society in abstract ways (E. Ardener 2007). It was crucial to the success of my own research among the Bangwa that Brain had been well liked and respected. He was regarded as hard-working and was appreciated for having learnt the language, and for his attempts to raise the profile of the Bangwa and record their culture through his publications. The Bangwa had a much better grasp of my role than the Focolarini, who regarded me as a potentially awkward and unpredictable member of their community rather than as a professional anthropologist. I don’t think that members of the Focolare in Fontem ever fully grasped that I was also studying them, and they found my interest in disputes and the more sensitive elements of their relationship with the Bangwa out of place, unsettling and at odds with the spirit of unity that serves as the foundation of relationships within the Mariapolis. My ethnographic project was therefore based on a three-way relationship (between the Bangwa, the Focolare and the ethnographer) rather than a two-way one (between ethnographer and hosts). The fact that the Focolare is an international movement, and that their work in Fontem is just one of many such projects, gave the fieldwork a transnational dimension from its inception (Gallagher 1997). It was simultaneously ethnography in a distant, exotic location and fieldwork ‘at home’, in the sense that in studying the Focolare I was operating as both an insider

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and an outsider, which brings its own set of methodological complications and ethical dilemmas (Bowie 2003).6 Most Bangwa who remain in their villages are farmers living in scattered compounds cut into the sides of the hills and mountains, isolated from one another by streams and rivers that can become impassable in the rainy season. The women grow subsistence crops such as cocoyam, beans and cassava. All compounds keep chickens and sometimes pigmy goats, and have a plantation close to the compound with crops such as bananas, plantains, cocoyams and pineapples. Fruiting trees such as avocado or guava are usually claimed by a particular individual or compound. Surpluses are sold by women in the local markets, and it is with money from their farms that women try to pay for medicines and school fees, clothes and other domestic goods. While some husbands and fathers provide adequately for their wives and children, many cannot afford to do so – or choose not to, particularly in large polygynous families. The atsendia, or maternal unit of mother, children and close maternal relatives, remains the closest equivalent to the Western notion of ‘family’. Women also help the men with plantations of coffee and cocoa, and in lower regions oil palm grows well and can provide a good income. Unfortunately the economy of Cameroon, a country rich in natural resources, suffered a series of collapses in the 1980s and 1990s, and salaried workers cannot be sure of receiving their pay. Corruption is endemic, and with the removal of the ‘ransom’ that the government used to demand from any citizen wishing to leave the country and the introduction of the visa lottery system in the United States, there has been a steady exodus of its best-educated citizens. While this phenomenon is by no means unique to the Bangwa, they are an entrepreneurial people (closely related to the Bamileke7 of the West Province) and have been quick to take advantage of the opportunities offered by migration to the US, and to a lesser extent to Europe.

The Field Expands In a conversation in 2005 with Mr Philip Tazi, an educationalist, journalist and prominent member of the Bangwa community in the United States, it became clear that the Bangwa exodus is becoming progressively larger and more organized.8 He estimated that in the last four years the Bangwa community in the Washington, D.C./Maryland area has grown from around 300 to nearer 600 individuals, most coming from Lebang (Fontem), using existing familial and social networks. Those already in the US are sufficiently well organized to help people in the visa lottery system through their now extensive networks in North America and Cameroon. The Bangwa community in the US includes lawyers and government employees who regularly post advice on the Internet on matters such as immigration and visa controls, as well as serving their compatriots as individual clients. The economic and political situation in Cameroon is regarded with such pessimism that if a potential emigrant’s name is drawn they will leave at once, whatever their circumstances. Mr Tazi cited the case of one person who left for the US just before taking his university final exams, while another completed one year at uni-

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versity in Cameroon but left everything to go to the US when her name came up. People are willing to take much lowlier jobs than their qualifications would warrant and are prepared to work hard to further their education and move up in the world. Mr Tazi mentioned that he had recently been having some work done on his house, and from the electric to plumbing and building used only Bangwa workers. The expatriate Bangwa in the US are concentrated in specific geographical locations (particularly the Washington, D.C./Maryland Beltway and Cleveland, Ohio). Wider family and community networks are maintained through extensive travel and use of the telephone and Internet. Annual conventions organized by LECA-USA (the Lebialem Cultural Association) are attended by a majority of the Bangwa living in the US, with visitors from Cameroon and Europe. While the first Bangwa to leave Cameroon for the US or Europe tended to have at least a first degree, or came to study, this is less true of more recent arrivals. Women who might have left school at twelve or fourteen, married and worked as farmers in Lebang, are realizing that they can live well in the US and earn enough to support their children through college by working as a care assistant or in some other semiskilled position. While the majority of Bangwa marry from within the Nweh community, often someone from the same or a neighbouring ‘village’ or chiefdom, they do not necessarily arrive in the US or Europe with their spouses. The fact that many of the marriages are polygynous also complicates arrangements. A man might try to settle wives in different countries, with children and other relatives moving between homes. One way of keeping an entitlement to farm land and maintain contact with a natal village is to leave one or more wives and some children at home while establishing another wife, often better educated and probably professionally employed, in the US or Europe. Cameroonian law allows a man to choose when he first marries whether he intends to be polygynous or monogamous, but women who are legally recognized or customary spouses in Cameroon are not necessarily granted legal status abroad. In countries that do not recognise polygynous marriages as legal, only one wife will be given the status of ‘legal wife’ and be entitled to obtain a passport or visa on that basis, a situation that encourages some Bangwa women, who can afford it and have the necessary contacts, to have their children in the US so as to give the children the advantage of US citizenship, even if resident in Cameroon. The first signs of this later Bangwa expansion were visible back in 1980, but I did not pay the phenomenon much attention, in part because of my romantic attachment to the ideal of single-sited, in-depth fieldwork. I had travelled a long way to find my remote anthropological subjects, and I didn’t want to discover that they were transitory, mobile, global residents like myself. During my initial fieldwork I trekked to Mbetta, two days’ walk to the south of Fontem in Mbo territory. Mbetta was the site of the old Mill Hill Catholic mission station that served the Bangwa area from 1936 until the early 1960s.9 It was on a particularly steep, narrow path that I encountered a man who asked politely, in Pidgin English, who I was and where I was going. He then informed me that he was tired, as he had just returned from visiting his son in Washington, D.C. The incongruity of the situation in a place so far from roads, towns, jet aeroplanes and external communications was more than I was ready to assimilate, and I merely filed the comment away in my

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memory, reminding myself that Bangwa men had often been long-distance traders and therefore were used to travelling. It was not until 2001 that the transformations taking place among the Bangwa really came home to me. It is no coincidence that it was the through the Focolare Movement, with its international links and the globalizing technology of the Internet, that I began to appreciate the nuances of Bangwa transnationalism. Due to spend some time on sabbatical in the US, I looked at the Focolare Movement’s US website with a view to making contact. The North American website was advertising the annual Luminosa Prize awarded by the Focolare Movement, which was to be presented to the Fon of Fontem, Lukas Njifua, with the ceremony taking place at the Mariapolis Centre in upstate New York. It was clear that they expected other Bangwa to be present at the ceremony, most of whom were currently resident in the US. If I wanted to follow the story of the Bangwa, I saw that I would have to shift my focus from Cameroon to new locations, including New York, Washington, Ohio, London and Rome. It was also evident that wherever the Bangwa go, some of them at least maintain contact with local members of the Focolare Movement, which has a presence in over eighty nations and on every continent. Key people within the Bangwa community facilitate these relations, and there is a surprising consistency in the way in which the story of the Bangwa/Focolare relationship is presented. The Focolare emphasis may differ from that of the Bangwa, but the evolving narrative is shared. The script goes something like this: the Bangwa (like the Jews) are a chosen people, and Fontem is the lamp set on the hilltop that will shine for the rest of Africa. The Focolarini (consecrated members of the Focolare Movement) saved the Bangwa from extinction and gave them hope and the gift of unity. In an article in the African edition of the Focolare magazine New City, for instance, a young Bangwa woman, Marilen Nkafu, living in the Mariapolis Centre in Kenya wrote: I come from Fontem in Cameroon, from a tribe called the Bangwa, which was particularly touched by the love of God. In fact in the 60s the rate of infant mortality had reached above 80% due especially to sleeping sickness and my people were going towards extinction. They started praying very hard, asking God to save our tribe. Nothing was happening, so they started asking themselves: ‘Are we so sinful that God cannot listen to our prayers?’ Now what can we do? The people collected money to send a delegation to the Bishop, and he asked the Focolare Movement to help … what touched my people was the mutual love they could see among that group. This is why in a short time people felt attracted to live like them. This was the beginning of the Focolare Movement in Africa. (2000: 22–23)

The first small group of doctors and nurses arrived in Fontem on 6 February 1966 (having spent some months in Shisong in the Bamenda Grassfields while the move to Fontem was negotiated). Although the Focolarini and the Bangwa have faced difficulties and misunderstandings in their relationship with one another, it is this shared narrative of near destruction followed by the seemingly miraculous arrival of the Focolarini, like an answer to prayer, leading to a reversal of Bangwa fortunes and the development of Fontem’s vocation as a beacon of spiritual and

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social development, that is repeated time and again by both the Bangwa and members of the Focolare Movement.10

The Challenges of Multi-Sited Research George Marcus, in a seminal article ‘Ethnography in/of the World System’ published in 1995, argued that multi-sited fieldwork encourages anthropologists to go beyond a simple opposition of global and local, to produce an ethnography in and of the world system. The global becomes, in Marcus’ words, ‘an emergent dimension of arguing about the connection among sites in a multi-sited ethnography’ (1995: 99). There is a degree of anxiety expressed in the anthropological literature as to whether multi-sited ethnography can produce the kind of data on which anthropologists traditionally depend. There is a difference between living in a place, knowing individuals well and sharing in their lives, and the much briefer and more ephemeral engagements that characterize some multi-sited research. In her excellent monograph tracing the development of Oyotunji African Village in South Carolina, Kamari Maxine Clarke (2004) follows the networks of those seeking a pure form of African religious and social experience in various parts of the US. She also accompanies a group from Oyotunji on a pilgrimage to the Ogone region of Nigeria, which they see as their ancestral and spiritual homeland, to seek religious initiation. On learning that in the African heartland many people have abandoned their traditions for modern conveniences and Christianity, and finding that they are not regarded by the locals as fellow Nigerians, the Oyotunji villagers (like the Amish and Mennonites before them) decide that they, rather than modern Africans, are the true heirs and repository of African spirituality and tradition. In the pioneering Inuit in Cyberspace, Neil Blair Christensen (2003) relies solely on the Internet for his data gathering. The author has some knowledge of the languages and cultures studied, being part Greenlandic himself, but also finds the need to justify what is indeed a new form of ethnography, tracing a novel medium of cultural expression – community web pages. Marcus (1995: 106) suggests several strategies for multi-sited research. Most are not new and characterize works such as Malinowski’s study of the kula cycle of exchange between the Trobriands and neighbouring islands of the Western Pacific. The first technique he outlines is to follow the people. This is certainly something that is relevant to my research on and with the Bangwa. The advantage of starting with single-sited long-term participant observation is that this creates a basis of local knowledge and local relationships that can be reactivated after many years. A second means of constructing the multi-sited space of research is to follow the thing, a methodology outlined by Arjun Appadurai in his introduction to The Social Life of Things (1986). Although I have not tried this explicitly with the Bangwa, I do pay attention to the exchange of material objects and wealth, with high-value goods such as SUVs and computers moving to Cameroon and items of cultural value, such as costumes and ritual paraphernalia, moving to Europe and America.11 Marcus includes under ‘things’ a sensitivity to cultural style, and

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here one could look fruitfully in the Bangwa context to the Bangwa singer known as Asamor, who draws on the Nweh language and local knowledge, West African musical tastes, Western music and technology, appealing to Bangwa audiences in Cameroon and in the diaspora. Asamor, aka Chrys Morfaw, is a student at Bonn University in Germany. He has an active website12 with critical as well as enthusiastic, involved fans who help market his two albums and promote his gigs in Germany, London, the US and Cameroon. As Ida Morfaw’s contribution to Asamor’s guest book indicates, one can also use Marcus’s third category or suggestion – to follow the metaphor. It is not just the person or musical style that one can examine, but discourses and modes of thought. Web pages lend themselves to this type of analysis. We can see clearly the role of kinship, of religion and of the Nweh language and Bangwa culture in the guest book offerings, as well as in many other forms of web and Internet exchanges. Marcus’s fourth technique for multi-sited research is to follow the plot, story or allegory, as Vieda Skultans (1998) has done successfully by looking at wartime memories of Latvians. Of course the study of myth and collective narratives, processes of remembering and forgetting, and the exploration of alternative realities are not new to anthropological theory. Part of my work is to trace the stories, often in film, on the Internet or in other media, that the Bangwa and Focolare are telling about themselves and about their relationship with each other. These developing narratives are rehearsed online, at formal and informal meetings and in print. To follow the life or biography is another method with a pedigree in anthropology that is particularly well-suited to multi-sited research in a transnational context. By following both individuals and families and tracing their networks, the workings of the world system become subject to ethnographic scrutiny without at the same time destroying the individual agency of the subjects. One of my current projects is to compile the life stories of the Khumbahs, a good example of a transnational family, and to examine Bangwa and Focolare interactions by profiling particular individuals who have come from or have spent time in Fontem. The study of conflicts has long been a staple of anthropological research methodology, for conflicts reveal boundaries and therefore the rules by which people live, and what counts as transgression of those rules. As Mary Douglas pointed out (1966), there can be no contravention of a system without a system of rules to contravene. Examining the boundaries of a system reveals its contours. Although as a research methodology this can be interpreted (and has been by some members of the Focolare Movement) as simply looking for trouble or failing to focus on the positive, i.e. what unites rather than divides people, it is in fact a key means by which to understand what constitutes Focolare and Bangwa culture – and to reveal the areas of misunderstanding and tensions that arise when two (or more) systems of classification collide. It is not just Bangwa-Focolare relations that are sometimes at odds with one another. By following Bangwa Internet exchanges, the curious ethnographer of cyberspace discerns many lines of dispute that might otherwise be kept within the family or community, opening up new avenues of investigation and helping to follow relationships between families and across continents.

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Finally, Marcus does not dismiss the strategically situated single-site ethnography. Roger Just (2000) demonstrated that only by staying in his Greek village could he understand the comings and goings of villagers who spent periods of their life in the merchant navy or overseas. The village remained the point of reference through which and in which the global connections were anchored, and from which they radiated. Single-sited ethnography can be seen as a particular form and moment within a multi-sited project. Marcus, among others, makes the point that ‘in contemporary multi-sited research projects moving between public and private spheres of activity, from official to subaltern contexts, the ethnographer is bound to encounter discourses that overlap with his or her own’, and that ‘in any contemporary field of work, there are always others within who know (or want to know) what the ethnographer knows, albeit from a different subject position, or who want to know what the ethnographer wants to know’ (1995: 112). Marcus concludes that ‘[s]uch ambivalent identifications, or perceived identifications, immediately locate the ethnographer within the terrain being mapped and reconfigure any kind of methodological discussion that presumes a perspective from above or “nowhere”. One can no longer assume the authority of describing “one’s people” to an academic audience who are not in a position to challenge one’s data’. Fieldwork relationships are often transformed by relative ease of contact in multiple contexts. The use of the Internet and entry of one’s subjects into the professional, Western spheres, once the preserve of the anthropologist – even into the realms of academia – help dissolve ‘traditional’ hierarchies. It is no longer a case of going to find the Bangwa in the forests of Cameroon. I can and do encounter them in London, in Oxford, in Washington, in Rome, as well as in Fontem, and I continue to engage with the Focolare, and to take a particular interest in their relationship with the Bangwa, in all these locations. Being reflexive, that is to say, acknowledging one’s position in terms of class, gender and ethnicity, and detailing one’s relationships with fieldwork subjects, is important but not sufficient. Nor is it enough to reflect on the ways in which personal biases and the dialogic nature of data gathering might impact on one’s results. Where, as with the Bangwa, one has an educated and interested group of interlocutors, the imperative for collaboration and co-authorship, for finding projects and perspectives that can encompass the interests of both or all parties is hard to deny.13 I cannot see a way back to the type of authorial authority and freedom that characterized ethnographic or anthropological writing in the past, nor would I wish to return, even if it were theoretically possible to do so. The anthropologist’s informant has also, in many cases, become a colleague, critic, reader, collaborator and often a friend, greatly enriching the anthropological endeavour in the process. Having illustrated some of the ways in which the world has indeed shrunk in terms of my own fieldwork, and looked at the methodological implications of multi-sited research, I will focus on one particular family to further illustrate the dynamics of transnationalism. The story of the Khumbahs, as with many of the Bangwa, is interwoven with that of the wider family of the Focolare Movement. Among both the Khumbahs and the Focolare we discover the story of some remarkable independent women who have broken with cultural expectations and

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stereotypes, and who see and understand the urgent need for a dialogue between cultures and generations.

The Khumbahs David and Mary Khumbah were one of the first Christian couples in Fontem. David resisted pressure from his family to take additional wives, making them one of the few monogamous pairs in the area. David Amingwa Khumbah came from the ‘village’ of Bellah Ngeh, not far from the site of the mission that grew up in the Mveh quarter of Lebang, the area that is known generically within the Focolare Movement as Fontem. He trained as a teacher, a profession he followed all his working life. In early 1953 David married Mary Atabong Nkwetaleke, who was some twenty years his junior, a pattern not uncommon among the Bangwa, where girls used to be betrothed as children, sometimes at birth, and usually married in the teens. Men might have to wait until their thirties to find a wife, as widespread polygyny has the effect of distorting the ratio of marriageable women to eligible men.14 The Khumbahs had a church wedding at the Catholic mission in Mbetta the following year. This is also the normal pattern among baptized Bangwa, who invariably perform the traditional Nweh rites of marriage, the exchange of bridewealth in the form of goods and labour, and its obligations and celebrations before a church wedding takes place (or, more often, fails to take place). Even when a couple are both Christians and intend to ‘marry for church’, the church wedding is often postponed until after the birth of one or more children. Mary Khumbah had attended primary school and says that she would like to have continued her education, which would have meant living in the regional centre of Mamfe or elsewhere in Cameroon, as there were no secondary schools within Lebang, but never managed to do so as her father would not allow this. Although all her daughters are highly educated, Mary Khumbah continued to regret the chances denied to her. In the 1980s when I first lived in Fontem, David was retired (and had time for visiting anthropologists), while Mary was working in the recently opened post office in Menji, the area around the parish church that has become the centre of administration for the subdivision of Fontem, and then division of Lebialem. In addition to salaried work, the Khumbahs, like all local families, also had farms to grow their own food, as well as a large compound strategically placed above the Begeh River, beside the road that links the Focolare Mariapolis to the Mveh quarter and Menji parish church. David and Mary had eight children, six girls and two boys, who by 2005 had produced twenty-five grandchildren. Only Mary Khumbah, one daughter and four of the grandchildren are now resident in Cameroon, the remainder being based in the United States. The relationship between the US and Cameroon is complex and fluid. The youngest daughter, Edith, for instance, who lives in Cameroon, ensured that her eldest two children were born in the US and have US citizenship. Edith was refused entry to the US when due to deliver her third child, and after being sent instead to Paris gave birth, and French citizenship, to her youngest child. The

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second daughter, Josephine, lives in the US with her children, but her husband, from whom she is separated, lives in Buea in Cameroon. Mary Khumbah has spent long periods in the US, staying with various children, and all the US contingent return to Cameroon with varying degrees of frequency. Some of the grandchildren have lived in both Cameroon and the US and move between relatives on both continents. Several members of the family have lived for longer or shorter periods in countries other than the US or Cameroon, South Africa being another popular destination.15 There is a strong preference among the Bangwa families to marry fellow Bangwa, preferably people from Lebang or from the same village, who are known to the family. Although none of David and Mary’s children has opted for polygynous marriages, relationships among even baptized Bangwa are no more stable than among Christians or people in secular monogamous marriages elsewhere in the world. Paulina Khumbah, the eldest of David and Mary’s children, was one of the first Bangwa girls to respond positively to the spiritual message of the Focolare Movement when they arrived in Fontem. She became a member of the Gen, the young people’s branch of the Focolare, in 1966 at the age of thirteen, and when she was sixteen was invited to attend a Gen congress in Rome – the first African ever to do so. Chiara Lubich gave Paulina the name Amata, ‘loved by God’, a name by which she is still known by many within the Focolare.16 Paulina returned to Cameroon but in her twenties, having become a single mother, made the momentous decision to move to the US to study, becoming one of the first of many Bangwa to make this journey and leaving her daughter Relindis in the care of her parents. Paulina had a brief marriage to a Cameroonian man who came to join her in the US, but he failed to settle there and returned to Cameroon. Having obtained a degree and then a doctorate in sociology, Paulina set up her own home-care business and sociological consultancy. She puts much of her time, energy and financial resources into supporting her siblings, for whom, as the eldest child, she feels a particular responsibility. The rest of the family have also combined degree-level education with a professional career and strong element of business acumen. The second daughter, Josephine, has a science degree and is self-employed in the health-care industry, as well as engaging in business. Josephine married a Bangwa man from Lebang, George Atem, a lecturer in history at the University of Buea. They had six children, one of whom died. Paulina helped her sister move to the US with her children (but without her husband’s knowledge or permission). The third daughter, Margaret, has a master’s degree in special education. She married a Bangwa man from Bellah Ngeh, Timothy Mbeseha. Although they both moved to the US with their five children, Timothy’s work for the UN in Rwanda and Ivory Coast means that he is often far from home. Because many of the new Bangwa elite are highly educated and mobile, these sorts of commuter marriages, spanning countries and continents, are increasingly a feature of many Bangwa relationships, not just within the Khumbah family. The fourth daughter, Pamela, has an MA in agricultural economics. She lives in Maryland and works for the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Pamela is the only one of David and Mary’s eight children who has neither married nor had children (although like her siblings, she often has younger relatives living in her house). Pamela also keeps in contact

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with the Focolare Movement and is involved in some of their initiatives aimed at bringing together people of different races and cultures in the Washington, D.C. area. Daughter number five, Vivien, is a medical doctor and runs her own clinic in Buea, Cameroon. Vivien has never married but has two children, one currently living in the US and one in Cameroon. As with all Bangwa, her compound in Buea is seldom empty as relatives and visitors from Lebang, young and old, stay there for various periods of time. The eldest son, Emmanuel, who like his sister Pamela lives in Maryland, works in the US public sector and runs his own business. He married an African-American woman, with whom he had twins, and also fathered three children with Cameroonian women, the first of whom was born in Cameroon, before he came to the US. Martin, the younger of the two boys, has a PhD in mathematics. He was chosen as his father’s successor and took the title Nkem Amin when he succeeded his father.17 Although his Cameroonian (Banyang) wife and three sons are all in the US, Martin too has had a peripatetic career. His work as an academic, first as a doctoral and then as a postdoctoral researcher and teacher at various universities in the US, has taken him to many different parts of that country. The youngest daughter, Edith, is married with three sons (all born overseas). Like the Khumbah siblings, Edith is very well educated, with a degree in law and her own business in Buea. The Khumbahs are both typical and atypical. The independence and achievements of the family, particularly the women, are remarkable and probably have a lot to do with the type of family upbringing they had. As Christians they were already different from most of their relatives and neighbours. David Khumbah was a gentle man and excellent educator who allowed his daughters to fulfil their potential beyond traditional female roles. As with the majority of Bangwa who have moved to the US, they are part of an educational elite for whom life in rural Cameroon holds little attraction. Although some Bangwa have built rather grand houses in Lebialem, and there is considerable movement back and forward within families, none of the émigrés have yet returned to live permanently in Lebialem, although it is not impossible that some of the first generation of emigrants will do so, even if their children choose to stay in Europe or the US.18 This penchant for starting and running small business ventures, often based on one person’s skills and resources, is not unusual. Bangwa women have always been involved in marketing their own produce and are keen entrepreneurs, often buying a sewing machine and setting up a dress-making business, or transporting – often by headload – and selling beer and bottled soda pop in the remotest Bangwa mountain villages. Men were once engaged in the slave trade, but with the demise of slavery they have turned their flair for business, a talent shared by other Bamileke peoples, to new ventures. If one can generalize about a people’s characteristics, the Bangwa could be described as intelligent, determined, hard-working, self-assured and focused on bettering themselves and their kin. In moving around the globe they are not abandoning their past or disavowing their culture and sense of belonging to a particular place. They are simply enacting core aspects of their culture in an enlarged setting, grasping new opportunities and conducting their familiar and familial relationships over greater distances. While many regret the ‘loss of cul-

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ture’ and the impact this will have on the identity of the next generation of Bangwa born overseas, they are, at the same time, being entirely consistent with traditional historical and social values in the way that they have entered the transnational, global economic arena. One of the most remarkable aspects of my discovery – and then rediscovery after nearly twenty years – of the Bangwa, was my friendship with Paulina Khumbah’s daughter Nkafu Amingwa. When I used to visit David and Mary Khumbah’s compound in 1980–1981, I would see a small girl known as Relindis, who had been born with mobility problems that made walking difficult. I remember thinking how different our lives were and would be in the future. I would return to the UK with my data, write a thesis, marry my fiancé, become an academic and have a family. Relindis would, I assumed, spend the rest of her life in Fontem, helping with farm and kitchen work and looking after other people’s children. Life, however, had other plans for both of us. When we met again some twenty years later Relindis, using her Bangwa name, Nkafu Amingwa, was living in the Maryland/ Washington, D.C. area. She had travelled widely and was at that time living in her own apartment and working in the local Roman Catholic diocesan office. She was also much more mobile, thanks to several operations carried out in the US over a period of years. Her experiences with the Focolare seemed remarkably similar to my own. Nkafu attended Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College, the secondary school run by the Focolare in Fontem where I had worked as a teacher. We had both lived for a while in the Gen house in Fontem, and found that we share a critical but engaged approach to the Focolare. By moving between her grandparents in Fontem and her mother in the US, Nkafu became remarkably bicultural and well as bilingual, and when she mentioned that she was obliged to return to Cameroon for her grandfather’s cry-die or death celebration in December 2003, I asked if I might accompany her. Marcus suggests following people and things as well as following metaphors, narratives and conflicts. In returning to Cameroon for the cry-die as a guest of the Khumbah family I was able to follow most of these threads simultaneously. David Khumbah had died in 1997 and was buried in the Focolare cemetery in Fontem (Fig. 10.1), a very new practice for the Bangwa. It had taken from 1997 to 2003 for the family to save up and prepare for the cry-die, and it was apparent that there were differences of opinion as to whether a grand occasion was really called for, what the budget should be, who would pay for what and who would or would not be present. I had the impression that the cry-die was largely about giving comfort and support to, and adding to the social prestige of, his widow Mary, and that the children, in-laws and other relatives had differing degrees of interest and investment in their social status within Lebang. A substantial budget was set but far exceeded. Large amounts of goods as well as money were transferred from the US to Cameroon, including a Toyota 4-wheel-drive vehicle, a symbolic rather than a practical item given that the Fontem roads make maintaining vehicles difficult and spare parts are hard to obtain. Many of the gifts, both practical and luxury items, came from the US, a fact that confers high status on these goods. In Cameroon more goods were purchased, a banner hung across the road, chairs and a speaker system hired, pigs and goats

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Figure 10.1: Nekamin David Khumbah 1911–1991 (Fiona Bowie, December 2003)

bought locally and from further afield, and quantities of bottled beer and mimbo (palm wine) provided for guests. The display of wealth and generosity, the cultural dances and the feasting together are essential elements of such celebrations. As people’s disposable incomes rise, so does the lavishness of these events, and one hears muttered complaints of ‘inflation’ in people’s aspirations and of excessive expenditure at some death celebrations, which can leave families and individuals burdened by debt. The Khumbahs are well connected to some of the most important families in Lebang and have wide networks of kin, most of whom were present at the cry-die, many travelling considerable distances within Cameroon, as well as from overseas. One of the remarkable features of Fontem is the way in which an accommodation has been reached between traditionalists (the majority) and Christians, or rather the way in which Christianity is both central and decentred in the message and practice of many Bangwa and of the Focolare Movement. David Khumbah’s crydie included traditional ceremonies for the dead at his birthplace at Belleh Ngeh and a Catholic mass celebrated by a Bangwa priest. The cultural dances followed a thanksgiving mass at the parish church in Menji. There appeared to be no conflict over the blend of Catholic and traditional rites. However, there was considerable tension over what was spent, by whom, and for what purpose.

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Conclusion When one’s remote field location and its inhabitants refuse to remain part of a bounded fieldwork site (even if the boundaries were only ever conceptual) and can interrupt the flow of my thought as I sit at my computer by issuing an invitation to engage in an online conversation, I realize how far we have come from Audrey Richards’ study of the Bemba in the 1930s. It is one thing to recreate the field imaginatively in the act of writing, and quite another to interact with it in a variety of ways (through email groups and video messaging, emails and face to face contacts) on an almost daily basis. When the people about whom one writes are separated by space, experience and language, making ethically informed judgments about what one can or should say is not the same as it is when they share an intellectual and social space with the ethnographer. For one thing, they can tell you quickly enough if you ‘get it wrong’ or they don’t like they way in which they have been depicted. The blurring of the lines between field and home, informant and friend, can make claims to observational impartiality impossible. The intersubjective nature of fieldwork has to be admitted as an inescapable truth to be negotiated, rather than an embarrassment to be denied or an obstacle to be overcome.

Websites http://alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/richardstx.htm (visited 11 May 2005) http://www.asamor.com (visited 17 May 2005) http://www.focolare.org (visited 16 May 2005) http://www.lebialem.info (visited 16 May 2005) http://www.leca-usa.com (visited 17 May 2005) http://rc.net/focolare/luminosa.htm (visited 3 October 2001)

Notes 1. Audrey Richards on fieldwork, 3 May 1982 by Martin Glenke. http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ DO/filmshow/richards.htm. 2. This chapter is based on the text of the Audrey Richards Lecture, hosted by the International Gender Studies Centre, at the University of Oxford, on 18th May 2005. 3. For a discussion of the use of the term ‘Fontem’ for Lebang see Ndobegang and Bowie in this volume. 4. The Focolare Movement was founded during the Second World War in Trent, Northern Italy, by Chiara Lubich, who felt called to live a Christian spirituality based on unity and love of neighbour. There are now members of the Focolare from most Christian denominations as well as people belonging to other faiths. When the Focolarini went to Fontem they were less interested in the number of baptisms – not something that means a great deal where most Christians are polygynous and excommunicate, and where many of those ineligible for baptism are enthusiastic members of the Church. The evangelistic activities of the Focolare Movement centre on the message of a gospel of mutual love that embraces Christian and traditionalist alike.

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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See Brain and Pollock (1971) and Brain (1972). See also Dilley’s discussion of context in anthropology (1999). See also Dongmo (1981) and Warnier (1993, 1995). Conversation 12 February 2005, Rome, at the Social One meeting of international social sciences organized by the Focolare Movement. I would like to thank Professor Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia for inviting me to participate in this meeting. See Bowie (1993) for a description of this period and some of the policies and personalities involved in the Mill Hill mission (the Society of St Joseph formerly based at Mill Hill in North London is now relocated to Maidenhead, Berkshire). Some of the history of the Focolarini’s arrival in Fontem, as well as the sort of misunderstandings that could and did occur, are detailed in Bowie 1985, and were recorded by Martin Nkafu in a taped interview with Lucio dal Soglio, one of the first Focolare doctors to arrive in Fontem. Appadurai argues that ‘[f]ocusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly’ (1986: 3). This focus on the objects themselves as they circulate around the world allows one to conceive of the exchanges as part of complex networks of relations linking individuals and families, communities and continents at multiple levels, acquiring different values at different times and places, and for different people. http://www.asamor.com Some very good ethnographic and historical work by local scholars cannot reach a wider market without the support and interest of Western or Western-educated academics. Euro-American ethnographies can act as a catalyst for indigenous work, helping to initiate a dialogue between local scholars and a wider academic audience. If a few men have several wives, without the additional supply of women acquired through conquest and slavery, others must either wait many years for a bride or go without. I am grateful to Paulina Khumbah for supplying much of the information on her family. The practice of asking Chiara for a new name is common within the Focolare Movement. The name is held to symbolize the recipient’s personal ‘design of God’, and is regarded as deeply meaningful. There is no primogeniture among the Bangwa, and there can be considerable rivalry, often accompanied by accusations of witchcraft, among patrikin who are competitors for their father’s titles and the powers, women and other benefits that go to his chosen successor. The daughters of chiefs also inherit titles from their fathers. Martin Nkafu Nkemnkia, a Bangwa Focolarino based in Rome, believes that even if their children born overseas are unlikely to join them, some of these expatriate Bangwa will indeed return home, as they can never really feel fully part of their adopted countries (pers. comm., February 2007).

CHAPTER 11

The Politics of Religious Essentialism The Eucharistic Meal and Identity Discourses in Postcolonial African Catholicism Ludovic Lado

Introduction This chapter1 attempts an anthropological analysis of the postcolonial discourse of inculturation with a particular reference to the Eucharistic meal in the context of African Catholicism. ‘Inculturation’ is a theological neologism that refers to the localization of the Catholic faith in a particular social and cultural context. Obviously, African Catholic theology has its own internal diversity, but the discourse I have chosen to discuss here has become dominant among theologians interested in African Catholicism in the last thirty years. Inculturation is an elitist discourse and, for this reason, this essay does not include voices from below. I am still planning further research on grassroots perceptions of the Eucharistic meal. It is worth mentioning at the outset that, as I am a Catholic priest, the celebration of the Eucharist is one of my main duties and part of my daily life. So I am quite aware of the fact that the process of conceiving and producing this essay has involved much of what is known today in anthropology as reflexivity. The challenge, of course, with this kind of endeavour, is to find a healthy balance between the scholarly voice and the insider’s voice. It is certainly true, as Hufford has put it, that ‘[w]hen a scholar presents findings that are congenial to her or his own personal views, there is the possibility that those views have unduly influenced the inquiry. However, to assume that rational conclusions can only be reached by those who do not find them congenial would be ludicrous’ (Hufford 1999: 301). The Eucharistic meal is at the centre of Catholic ritual life organized around seven sacraments: ‘Baptism, Confirmation (or Chrismation), the Eucharist, Penance, the Anointing of the Sick, Holy Orders and Matrimony. The seven sacraments touch all the stages and all the important moments of Christian life: they Notes for this chapter begin on page 211.

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give birth and increase, healing and mission to the Christian’s life of faith. There is thus a certain resemblance between the stages of natural life and the stages of the spiritual life’ (Vatican 1999 [1994]: § 1210). The Eucharist is described by the official catechism of the Catholic Church as ‘[s]acrament of sacraments’ (1999 [1994]: § 1211) to underline its unique place among the whole body of sacraments. The Roman rite of the Eucharist was introduced in sub-Saharan Africa by Western missionaries in the nineteenth century. It was reformed after the second Vatican Council, which took place from 1962 to 1965. Although the Catholic liturgy of the Eucharist has undergone many reforms in the course of history, a key practice that has remained unchanged, and that is still required of Catholics everywhere in the world, is the use of only grape wine and wheat bread for consecration (1999 [1994]: § 1412). Some theologians are now questioning this practice, arguing that the imposition of grape wine and wheat bread on non-Western peoples results in religious alienation and, in some cases, economic dependency. On this, for example, an African Catholic theologian writes: ‘Christianity rests on an original symbolism in two parts – immersion in the waters of baptism and the breaking of bread. The way we translate these two actions into African symbolism is the most obvious test of the catholicity, or lack thereof, of the church. Admitting that the field of millet or sorghum is growing to the glory of God, when will these humble fruits of the African soil become part of the Eucharist? A translation of the faith is not enough; the church must transmit the same faith through different signs’ (Ela 1988: 50). In other words, whereas official Catholic doctrine holds that the validity of a Catholic mass is conditioned by the use of grape wine and wheat bread, some theologians of inculturation in tropical Africa think that, for the Eucharist to be meaningful to African people, these ‘foreign’ food items should be replaced by ‘African’ items. I argue here that this debate involves two clashing essentializing strategies, the first on the ‘essence’ of the Eucharist and the second on the ‘essence’ of African cultures and religions. The first section of this chapter looks at the Jewish background of the Eucharistic meal. The second section considers the Eucharist in the framework of the anthropology of food. The final section dwells on the politics of cultural translation inherent to this elitist discourse of inculturation, with particular reference to some ethnographic material from the context of African Catholicism.

The Jewish Background of the Eucharist Meal In this section, I argue that the institution of the Eucharist is a ritual innovation that makes possible the demarcation of early Christianity from Judaism. On the basis of New Testament evidence, the Catholic Church teaches that the Eucharist was instituted by Jesus during his last meal with his disciples on the night before his death. In the New Testament there are four versions of the institution narrative (Luke 22:19–20; 1 Cor. 11:23–25; Mark 14:22–24; Matthew 26:26–28). This chapter is not the place to consider the exegetical aspects of these texts. Suffice it to remark that in spite of notable differences among biblical scholars on how to interpret them, there seems to be a general consensus on the idea that these texts

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tell us more about what the first Christian communities believed happened at the Last Supper than about what actually happened in terms of historical precision. The four versions of the institution of the Eucharist are indeed different interpretations of the same event according to the needs of four different communities. This fact partly accounts for their differences and similarities. Moloney (1995: 19) comments: ‘When we meet the early Christian liturgy in these texts, it is already being experienced in the different communities as a relatively fixed formula, constantly repeated from occasion to occasion. The variations between each version can be understood as being part of the distinctive traditions of the various communities, but the evidence is that within each community the celebrant followed a set pattern of actions, and, at least in this crucial section of the service, a set form of words.’ The four accounts all mention that this foundational event took place during a meal. Concerning the pattern of actions attributed to Jesus, these texts have in common the following features: Jesus takes bread, gives thanks to God, breaks it and distributes it to his disciples; then he takes the cup of wine, gives thanks, and gives it to his disciples. The strong similarities between these ritual actions and those usually performed before and after a meal in a practising Jewish family strongly suggest that ‘[t]he Eucharist had its original setting in a Jewish meal, and in spite of all changes, has never lost its meal character’ (Macquarrie 1997: 114; see also Moloney 1995; Feeley-Harnik 1991). But whether the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples was a Passover meal, as suggested by the accounts of Matthew and Mark, or an ordinary meal is still debated among scholars. On this I follow Nichols’s (1991) suggestion that it was a Passover meal because it coheres with the subsequent dominant Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist in sacrificial terms. Indeed the Jewish Passover involved the sacrifice of lambs to commemorate the Exodus event as the manifestation of God’s saving power. Nichols (1991: 20) gives the following reasons for seeing the Last Supper as a Passover meal: The holding of this meal at night; the disciples’ reclining at table, not usual among Palestinian Jews but a ritual duty at Passover as a symbol of freedom; the drinking of wine, used in everyday life at this period for medicinal purposes only; the beginning to eat before the breaking of bread, something which only happened at Passover; the assumption on Judas’ departure for a commission to do something for the poor, a pious commonplace of the Passover feast; and last but not least, the fact that Jesus, in ritually interpreting the significance of the bread and wine, gave his own personal version of the Passover haggadah.

This reinterpretation of the Passover by Jesus is an instance of ritual innovation: By omitting the sacrificial lamb, and identifying himself with the blessed bread and wine which were its accompaniments, Jesus presents himself as the new Passover victim to be fed on at the Supper. It coheres with this interpretation to see the breaking of the bread as representing, in this case, the violence of the death of Jesus, and the pouring of wine as standing, similarly, for the shedding of his blood. The consumption of the elements would be, then, a common sharing in the sacrificial death of the Redeemer. (1991: 21)

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Whereas the Jewish Passover was celebrated in memory of the central event of Exodus by which God set Israel free from slavery, the Christian Passover will be celebrated in memory of the central event in Christian history, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by which God sets humanity free from sin. Indeed, two of the four versions of the institution narrative have the command to repeat the words and gestures of the Last Supper in remembrance of Jesus. Connerton has helpfully underlined the central importance of commemorative rituals in sustaining and conveying communal memories: ‘commemorative ceremonies are distinguishable from all other rituals by the fact that they explicitly refer to prototypical persons and events, whether they are understood to have a historical or a mythological existence … We may describe this feature as that of ritual re-enactment, and it is a quality of cardinal importance in the shaping of communal memory’ (Connerton 1989: 61; see also Sutton 2001). The Eucharist, as the ‘ritual re-enactment’ of the death and resurrection of Jesus, is a memorial meal. Indeed, the Catholic Church teaches that ‘[i]n the Eucharist, Christ’s death is not just remembered as something past but is present again in the experience of believers as a foretaste of the kingdom which Christ inaugurated’ (Macquarrie 1997: 139). This belief is expressed in the Catholic doctrine of the transubstantiation, which entails the real presence of Christ in the consecrated substances of bread and wine.

The Eucharistic Meal and the Anthropology of Food On the interconnections between food and religion, and taking the Eucharist as an example, Mintz (1996: 8) remarks: ‘No other fundamental aspect of our behaviour as a species except sexuality is so encumbered by ideas as eating; the entanglements of food with religion, with both belief and sociality, are particularly striking … The Last Supper, the Eucharist, the Passover feast, suggest that intricate mixing of food with belief. Here, crudely simplified, are kinds of associations early anthropologists recognized and studied.’ Only recently has food become an anthropological topic in its own right. In most early anthropological writings ‘[f]ood was an instrument for the study of other things’, especially religious ceremonies such as feasts and sacrifices (1996: 3). Not much has been written about the anthropology of the Eucharistic bread and wine. As far as I know, Feeley-Harnik’s book, The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity, seems to be the only major work that dwells extensively on the anthropology of the Eucharist in early Christianity. The scarcity of literature on this subject is partly due to the fact that the anthropological study of biblical materials, especially New Testament material, is a relatively recent development within the discipline (Feeley-Harnik 1994: 2–5). Equally recent is the interest of anthropologists in ‘world religions’ in general and in Catholicism in particular. Feeley-Harnik’s aforementioned study is of special interest as it argues that ‘[t]he eating behaviour described by early Christians symbolists –the feeding miracles, the fasting, the dietary indiscretions, and especially the last supper – was intended to contrast their more universalistic politico-religious beliefs, attributed to Jesus Christ, with the more nationalistic conceptions of other Jewish sects, symbolized

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above all by the Passover meal’ (1994: 2). In other words, the early Christians used the language of food to demarcate Christianity from Judaism, to highlight Christian identity at the time when ‘Christianity was just one among many sects of Judaism’ (1994: 18). They achieved this demarcation by redefining the Passover meal in the event of the Last Supper: ‘The meal is a redefinition of sacrifice. Of all sacrificial meals, it most closely resembles the Passover, but every critical element in the Passover is reversed: the time, the place, the community, the sacrifice, and ultimately the significance of the meal. The Passover is a feast that celebrates kinship and nationhood. Jesus’ sacrifice symbolizes the death of family and polity. His new covenant includes all humanity’ (1994: 19). The present analysis is precisely about the challenged ‘universality’ of some elements of the Eucharist as it is celebrated today in the Roman Catholic Church. But before dwelling on this question, it is worth considering the meaning of commensality celebrated in a Eucharist. In the light of Dietler’s (2001: 67) definition of feast as ‘a form of public ritual activity centred around the communal consumption of food and drink’, a Eucharistic celebration can be described as a feast, for it is a ‘public ritual activity’ that involves the ‘communal consumption’ of the body and blood of Christ in the forms of bread and wine. Dietler rightly underlines the polysemy of religious feasts: ‘Feasts are polysemous, in terms of audience, motivation, and forms of empowerment’ (2001: 78). This is also true of the Eucharistic feast. I limit myself here to the commensal dimension of the Eucharist because it is directly related to what is eaten and drunk during the celebration. There is no doubt that the Eucharist is at the centre of Roman Catholic worship and that there is a specifically Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist that differentiates the Roman Catholic Church from other Christian denominations. The official Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church remarks: ‘The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church’s life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body which is the Church’ (Vatican 1999 [1994]: § 1470). Eucharistic commensality is mediated by the communal consumption of the body and blood of Christ. This consumption is usually called communion: communion with God through the ritual sacrifice (death and resurrection) of Christ on the altar by himself; communion of the participants with one another as they partake in the same ritual meal that empowers them for spiritual growth and Christian witness. About the elements of bread and wine and the transformations they undergo during the celebration, the official Catechism of the Catholic Church (1999 [1994]: §§ 1412–13) normatively states: The essential signs of the Eucharistic sacrament are wheat bread and grape wine, on which the blessing of the Holy Spirit is invoked and the priest pronounces the words of consecration spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper: ‘This is my body which will be given up for you … This is the cup of my blood.’ … By the consecration the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is brought about. Under the consecrated species of bread and wine Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner: his Body and his Blood, with his soul and his divinity.

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But in the last three decades, as already alluded to, a number of African Catholic theologians have questioned the symbolic value of wheat bread and grape wine in relation to the celebration of the Eucharist in the African context. Before looking at the terms of their argument, it is worth considering the ideological framework within which it is formulated. This framework is the postcolonial discourse of inculturation that has emerged within Catholicism in the last four decades.

Mission, Symbolic Violence and the Inculturation Discourse In this section,2 I argue that inculturation is a postcolonial discourse of resistance. Early Christian missionary activity in Africa was on the whole ethnocentric and iconoclastic in its attitudes towards African cultures and religions: [N]either in the nineteenth nor in the early twentieth centuries did missionaries give much thought in advance to what they would find in Africa. What struck them, undoubtedly, was the darkness of the continent; its lack of religion and sound morals, its ignorance, its general pitiful condition made worse by the barbarity of the slave trade. Evangelization was seen as liberation from a state of absolute awfulness, and the picture of unredeemed Africa was often painted in colours as gruesome as possible, the better to encourage missionary zeal at home. (Hastings 1967: 60)

Such attitudes are understandable in historical context. Firstly, missionaries were children of an age in which early travellers’ accounts and early evolutionist anthropology ‘based on inaccurate information and cultural prejudice … made African religions appear to be a morass of bizarre beliefs and practices’ (Ray 1976: 3). Secondly, Western Christianity itself was being challenged in the nineteenth century by the disruptive waves of rationalism and secularism. It was therefore rather on the defensive, and reluctant to accommodate religious ‘otherness’. Thirdly, the evangelization of sub-Saharan Africa took place within the context of colonization, which was essentially a violent enterprise. Indeed, missionaries tended to operate in areas where their home governments were established and often behaved as cultural agents of their own nations (Hebga 1979: 110–11). In the nineteenth century, Christianity reached black Africa as part of the Western campaign of ‘civilization’ supposedly meant to ‘redeem’ the ‘dark continent’ from the claws of ignorance and devilish superstitions (Bediako 1992: 225). Hastings (1989) roughly distinguishes five major periods in the history of relationships between Western Christianity and African cultures. The first period, quite brief, sees ‘the meeting of African culture and Christian gospel in a genuinely pre-colonial situation’ (1989: 21). During the second period African cultures, although still predominant, are ‘now being vociferously challenged by a gospel coming culturally from without’ and backed by powerful colonial institutions. The third period, which covers roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, corresponds to the heyday of colonial domination and to the flowering of Christian institutions in Africa: ‘The missionary appeared to himself and to the observer to be sitting self-confidently enough, authoritatively, almost astride the broken if still pulsating wreckage of tradition’ (1989: 23).

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Then follows the fourth period, the turbulent years of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, marked among other things by calls for African cultural renaissance. Religion becomes also ‘a prime area for the implementation of a program of cultural authenticity’ (1989: 23). About postcolonial Zimbabwe, for example, Randolph writes that ‘[s]ince the [Independence] war there is a great trend towards traditional religion and away from Christianity as a “foreign” or even ”colonialist” religion’ (1985: 121; see also Lan 1985). This period of resistance is characterized by a fierce critique of missionary Christianity resulting in calls for the advent of an ‘authentic African Christianity’. It is in this context that the discourse of inculturation emerged. The following statement from an African theologian better depicts its spirit of resistance: ‘Let us only observe that in their sensitivity to the social and cultural “conditions of production” of any theological discourse, African theologians lament the cultural imperialism of certain of their Western colleagues who, without batting an eye, and even explicitly defending their view, assign an unmerited priority to European culture as the locus of human universality’ (Mushete 1994: 19). These observations capture the state of mind of many African theologians who have written on inculturation. From the preceding considerations it appears that the discourse of inculturation originated among theologians grappling with the challenges of cultural pluralism for Catholicism in the modern world. Most theologians hold today that the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Masson, at the time a professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, was the first to use the term ‘inculturer’ in a theological sense (Masson 1962; Shorter 1988: 10; Boka 2000). This was in a 1962 article that argued for the need to promote a ‘Catholicisme inculturée’, especially in non-Western countries. Before him others had used such terms as ‘indigenization’, ‘adaptation’, ‘contextualization’, etc. to describe similar processes. During the second Vatican Council, which took place from 1962 to 1965, the terminology of inculturation did not find its way into the official documents, which instead used the word ‘adaptation’, a term subsequently criticized by theologians as ethnocentric. It was in the late 1970s that the word ‘inculturation’ began to appear in the official documents of the Catholic Church (Shorter 1988: 10), and this marked its endorsement by the Catholic hierarchy. The fifth period, the present one, is described by Hastings as dominated by pessimism, stagnation and a loss of confidence in cultural solutions. But, taking a less pessimistic view, I think that this fifth period has seen, at least in the Catholic Church, the refinement of the discourse of inculturation as well as its endorsement by Rome as a priority in the evangelization of Africa (John Paul II 1995). It has also seen the development of Black theology in South Africa as part of the struggle against apartheid. In contrast with cultural theology, of which inculturation is the main component, Black theology is ‘more concerned with present politics than past culture’ (Hastings 1989: 32). The same could be said of the theology of liberation, borrowed from South American theologians, which seeks to address present social, political and economic injustices in Africa (Ela 1988). Following the 1994 African synod in Rome, Pope John Paul II (1995) described inculturation as ‘[a]n urgent priority in the life of the particular Churches, for a firm rooting of the Gospel in Africa’ and as ‘[o]ne of the greatest challenges for the Church

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on the Continent on the eve of the Third Millennium’. For the last three decades inculturation has been the dominant theological discourse in African Catholicism (Neckebrouck 1994: 87).

Inculturation and the Eucharistic Meal This section considers a particular ethnographic case of the attempt to inculturate the Eucharistic meal. As mentioned earlier, a number of African theologians have called for the Africanization of the celebration of the Eucharist. As a result of this, a number of experiments have been made here and there, especially in the areas of colour symbolism, music and the order of the mass. The most outstanding outcome so far remains the approval in the 1980s by Rome of a Congolese ritual of the mass that includes, among other things, the invocation of ancestors alongside Catholic saints. But the Vatican and some theologians are still divided over the issue of whether wheat bread and grape wine should be replaced with local foodstuffs. So far, the Vatican is opposed to this idea, arguing that by choosing to incarnate himself in these substances Jesus was making them normative for his disciples. But the advocates of the inculturation of the Eucharistic meal question the existential meaning of the symbolism of wheat bread and grape wine for those African Christians who grow neither grapes nor wheat. They claim that what is at stake here is not only symbolic alienation but also economic dependency, for most African Catholic communities have to import these products for the liturgical use. One of the African theologians writes: In black Africa, we ask God for food in the Lord’s Prayer – the fruit of our land and of our culture; but at the Lord’s Table, we use a food that is the fruit of another land and another culture. Our difficulty in translating the names of imported Eucharistic elements into our local languages is a measure of the foreignness of the Eucharistic liturgy in our African communities … Instead of reproducing a style of celebration marked by a foreign culture, our Christian communities should strive to create, in the Spirit, our own way of manifesting the One who has the power to free us through the gift of his Body. (Ela 1988: 49)

For the purpose of illustration, I now consider a case study put forward by René Jaouen (1995), a French Catholic priest who was a missionary for more than three decades among the Giziga people of Northern Cameroon. He is one of the major proponents of the inculturation of the Eucharistic meal, and my attempt to summarize here his dense argument comes with a risk of oversimplifying it. The traditional religion of the Giziga revolves around millet, which is their main existential symbol. For them, millet is not only food that nurtures life, but it is life itself. It is something ‘sacred’. Jaouen looks first at the place of millet in the traditional religion of the Giziga. For him, the millet is the most central ‘sacrament’ of their religion (1995: 6), their primordial means of communion with the sacred. Jaouen also looks at the myths and the annual rituals of the Giziga in relation to their daily life. In one of the myths, millet is portrayed by the Giziga as the only source of life for

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human beings struggling to survive after the supreme divinities have retreated into the skies. Jaouen interprets this myth as accounting for the passage from nature to culture through transgression, the state of culture being that in which the Giziga have to rely on the culture of millet for their survival. Here millet, the staple of the Giziga, is seen as the symbol of life, as life itself. In the land of the Giziga, ‘Le mil est donc le moyen et le symbole de la vie’ (1995: 43). Jaouen further remarks that every stage of the process of growing millet, from sowing to harvesting, is marked by a ritual. During these rituals, the millet is personified: it is spoken to, listened to, consoled, encouraged, reassured, honoured and beseeched (1995: 84). Considering this central place and role of millet in the symbolic universe of the Giziga, the question raised by Jaouen is whether the celebration of the Eucharist can touch the hearts of the Giziga without drawing on this symbol. Why impose on them foreign religious symbols such as wheat bread and grape wine when their traditional religion provides equally meaningful alternatives? For Jaouen, the use of wheat bread and grape wine within a culture based on millet is ‘l’indice d’une aliénation culturelle et religieuse’ (1995: 7). Jaouen himself remarks that because there are no Giziga words corresponding to the English words ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ he had to make some choices in favour of symbolic translation. This resulted in translating ‘bread’ as af (the Giziga word for their millet staple) and ‘wine’ as mbazla (Giziga word for the locally brewed millet beer) (1995: 146). As one can see, such a translation is determined by Jaouen’s own theological orientation. Writing on similar translations among the Uduk of Sudan, James has rightly remarked: ‘The translations produced by the missionaries reflect their doctrinal position as much as they reflect what might have been embedded in the moral theology of biblical times or those cultural sources from which the texts of the Bible itself were originally drawn’ (James 1999 [1988]: 223). The ambiguity of Jaouen’s translation of bread and wine in the Giziga language pertains to the fact that it invites the Giziga to attribute to foreign wine the name of their local beer and to foreign bread the name of their millet. It suits Jaouen’s doctrinal orientation, but does it really meet the religious aspirations of the Giziga? This question brings us to the issue of the politics of cultural translation, which I now want to consider in relation to the discourse of inculturation.

The Essentialist Temptation The major problem I have with Jaouen’s approach is that it tends to undermine the ability of African Catholics to domesticate foreign symbols. Although I sympathize with his concern about cultural alienation, his overall argument tends to suggest that people can find meaning only in symbols born out of their own cultures. This is what I call the essentialist temptation (see Lado 2006b). After all, the circulation of symbols across cultures is a fact of human history, and African history is no exception. Most of the main crops treated as indigenous today in Africa were introduced to the continent through the transatlantic slave trade between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, during the colonial period,

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European traders and colonizers also introduced foreign crops, some of which the locals were forced to grow, and foreign dishes and processed foods, some of which became associated with elite status. Wheat bread, for instance, became a popular if not universally affordable food in cities throughout much of tropical Africa, where agroclimatic conditions for growing wheat are hardly ideal. Postcolonial food aid programs only deepened Africa’s ‘Wheat trap’ – that is, the dilemma faced by African governments whose politically influential urban populations had become hooked on imported foodstuffs. Corporate marketing of processed commodities (tomato paste, condensed milk, margarine) further encouraged rural as well as urban household to abandon locally produced alternatives. (Freidberg 2005: 23)

African people’s ‘diet and foodways have, indeed, been influenced by the ”westernizing” forces of the market place, missionary education, and both colonial and postcolonial agricultural development strategies’ (2005: 22). This process of change does not appear to be reversible. Clearly there are crucial structural issues of justice and food security associated with these colonial and postcolonial processes (Ela 1988: 87–101), but this is not the place to consider them. It is a fact that wheat bread and grape wine are now available in most African cities, and the consumption of wine has become associated with elite status and prestige. For example, writing about drinking patterns in Cameroon today, Igor de Garine remarks that ‘[i]n terms of modern progressive scale of values, prestige increases from the consumption of local beer to local alcohol, to manufactured beer, to imported wine and spirit – the more expensive, the stronger, and the more foreign the better. Cameroon ranks high for champagne consumption’ (de Garine 2001: 15). That being said, anthropologists have also shown that the adoption of foreign food by a particular society does not necessarily result in the homogenization of related symbolic values. There is still room for distinction between ‘foreign’ food and ‘local’ food. In present-day Cameroon, for example, it is not rare to hear people distinguish between ‘white man’ food and ‘real’ food (meaning local dishes). In this sense, the cultural value of wheat bread and grape wine in sub-Saharan Africa is surely different from what it is in a Mediterranean context. Carole Counihan remarks, for example, that bread is the most important food in the Sardinian diet; she even describes it as a ‘total social fact’ in the sense that among Sardinians, ‘bread is a nexus of economic, political, aesthetic, social, symbolic, and health concerns’ (1999: 29). Another example comes from Sutton, who underlines the centrality of bread in the Greek diet: ‘Bread is the basic staple in the Greek diet, and no meal would be complete without bread to accompany it. As ”rice” means ”food” in East Asian cultures … so bread for Greeks … Bread, of course, has deep religious significance for Christian populations. On every day level, bread is constantly moving back and forth between home and church’ (2001: 33). This cannot be said of present-day sub-Saharan Africa, in spite of the wide consumption of bread on this continent. In this sense, the question raised by the advocates of inculturation concerning the religious value of wheat bread and grape wine in an African context is worth asking. But by making a direct connection between foreign food and cultural (and religious) alienation, some of the theologians of inculturation undermine, in my view, the historicity of African societies. Eating and drinking, as many anthropologists have pointed out, is also a generational issue.

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Many young Africans today do enjoy eating bread and drinking wine. Besides, wheat flour is widely used in African households today for a variety of purposes, including the making and selling of doughnuts as a source of income for many women. There is no reason, therefore, to think that African Catholics will not progressively domesticate wheat bread and grape wine in the ritual context, and thus transform the foreign into the familiar. After all, this has happened elsewhere. For example, Ellen Messer (2004: 185) shows how, as a result of the colonial encounter, the people of Oaxaca (Mexico) introduced Hispanic food items into their religious rituals. Of course, it is not my intention to exonerate missionary Christianity and colonization from its ethnocentric policies in Africa. I am just pointing out, as other anthropologists have done before me, that when writing about African Christianity, it is partial to ‘take the accomplished domination of the colonized as a point of departure, and to focus merely on the suppression and alienation brought about by Western influences in general and Christianity in particular … African Christianity is not merely an extension of the missionary impact, but a continuously developing product which is shaped by a great number of experiences’ (Meyer 1999: xix), including the creative agency of African Christians. On the other hand, the Vatican’s position, according to which wheat bread and grape wine cannot be changed because they were supposedly chosen by Jesus himself, is equally based on an essentialist understanding of Christianity. It also undermines the historicity of the Eucharist, especially the way in which its celebration has changed in the course of history. As I mentioned earlier, early celebrations of the Eucharist were actually part of a real meal. But ‘for a long time the symbolism of a true meal has been abandoned for communion with bread alone’ (Ela 1988: 49), and also notable is the change from the use of real bread to that of small round white hosts. In fact, the question of inculturation of the Eucharistic meal is not only about whether some features of this meal can be changed, but also about who is allowed to change what.

Knowledge and Power: The Politics of Cultural Essentialism Writing about the Catholic Church in Africa, Pope John Paul II (1995: 78) remarked that ‘the challenge of Inculturation in Africa consists in ensuring that the followers of Christ will ever more fully assimilate the Gospel message, while remaining faithful to all authentic African values’ (my emphasis). I have already underlined in the preceding sections the essentialist thrust of concepts such as ‘Gospel message’ and ‘authentic African values’. What the Pope means here by ‘authentic African values’ is not clear, especially in a postcolonial situation. Moreover, ‘who determines the “true values” … of these cultures, and by what criteria can such a determination be made?’(Collet 1994: 29). This question refers to social processes of decision-making governing this cultural experiment. In other words, who controls the process of inculturation, and for whom? The Catholic hierarchy, in charge of ‘authorizing processes’, requires that inculturation be done without ‘compromising’ doctrinal orthodoxy. It is obvious that ‘orthodoxy’ is also

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inherently a political concept, for it encapsulates power relationships, including the relationship between knowledge and power. First of all, it would be a mistake to assume that the theologian of inculturation is the spokesperson of the laity. Not only are their interests different, but the reality is that there are asymmetrical power relationships between them. On this, Hufford remarks: ‘In the study of spiritual beliefs, the political interests of the scholarly community and those of believers are substantially different, and in some respect antagonistic … The cultural authority of scholars, the complex language used in scholarly discourse, and the esoteric nature of academic channels of communication render academic interpretations of the beliefs of ordinary people generally inaccessible to those being studied’ (1999: 298). In Africa, lay Catholics hardly study theology because until very recently it was taught only in seminaries to candidates for the priesthood. This implies that the clergy ends up monopolizing the theological knowledge that is important for doctrinal debates. Consequently, the large majority of African Catholics cannot actively take part in the debates concerning their religious practice. Besides, because priesthood remains everywhere an option only for male Catholics, women in Africa are almost completely excluded from the production of theological knowledge. Because of this, inculturation in Africa is predominantly a male discourse. Here, one monopoly breeds many others: priestly monopoly of ‘religious intellectualism’ (Weber 1963: 118) leads to the priestly monopoly of doctrinal interpretation, which goes hand in hand with the priestly monopoly of religious power. In other words, there is a strong link between theological knowledge and power in African Catholicism. This power is directly related to ‘the authorizing process by which “religion” is created’ (Asad 1993: 37), and to the issue of ‘how (religious) power creates (religious) truth’ (1993: 33). In the Catholic Church in general, there is a strong connection between its understanding of ‘truth’ and its hierarchical structure, as one’s ability to produce doctrinal ‘truth’ depends also on one’s position in the hierarchy.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have attempted to show how the Eucharistic meal has recently become the object of identity discourses in the ritual context of African Catholicism. From the preceding analysis, inculturation appears as a strategic attempt by both theologians and the Vatican to control the process of religious change generated by the Christian encounter in non-Western societies. This encounter has indeed led to many forms of religious bricolage both within and outside mission Churches. The question is: how far can these processes be controlled from above? How subversive of ‘authorizing discourses’ can the religious agency of the masses be? About the complexity of any process of acculturation, Shorter (1988: 7) helpfully remarks: Culture itself comes into existence through collective processes, and the encounter between cultures is likewise a collective process largely beyond the scope of individual

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human choice. It is, of course, an encounter between two different sets of symbols and conceptions, two different interpretations of experience, two different social identities. Unreflective and unprogrammed though it may be, the encounter is fraught with complexity. Its consequences can be discerned post factum at the conscious level, but many of the conflicts it engenders are worked out at the subconscious level.

The advocates of what Mbembe (1988: 57) has called ‘théologies de l’identité et de la différence’ will need to heed the fact that ‘[c]ulture is not an add-on extra’ to social activities and historical upheavals but ‘is built into these activities and into our capacity for sociality – that is, of relating in mutually intelligible ways to others, including our “nastier” warlike capacity for making enemies’ (James 2003: 5). By treating cultures as if they were museum artefacts, some discourses of inculturation abstract them from the historical and social matrix that makes them dynamic. An essentialist concept, inculturation, as the one I have discussed here in relation to the Eucharistic meal, fails to take seriously the historicity of African societies (Mbembe 1988).

Notes 1. This chapter is based on the text of a paper titled ‘The Essentialist Temptation: Eucharistic Meal and Identity in Postcolonial African Catholicism’ given in the Food, Ethnicity and Identity Seminar Series held at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University, in Michaelmas Term 2006. 2. This subsection draws on Lado 2006a.

CHAPTER 12

Making a Difference in North-South Relationships Public and Private Spheres and the Role of the Human Seed in Networking for Local Development Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga

I was like the chicken coming out of the egg and I met Africa – the first thing in my adult life. – Shirley Ardener1 Campaigns [webs of relationships and networks] will develop only when a person or group of people takes the initiative to translate individual frustration into collective action. – United States Agency for International Development2

Introduction The debate on North-South relations remains controversial, polarized and pregnant with mistrust and allegations of injustice. The South holds the North responsible for many of the predicaments it suffers today. On the other hand, the North attributes the South’s predicaments (underdevelopment, poverty, crisis-ridden economies and political context) to mismanagement of its economies and resources and misplaced development priorities, hence pointing a finger at national governments and policies. The debates and discourses on these counter-accusations are found in the works of Brown and Tiffen (1992), Bernstein (2000) and Sen (1999). Nevertheless, it is clear to both parties that neither can live without the other in a world that is fast becoming a global village. Thus, from the macro- to micro-levels, there are ongoing joint activities and actions by institutions and persons in the Notes for this chapter begin on page 230.

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South and North that address each other’s concerns and problems. Relationships of partnership and collaboration, whether formal or non formal, characterize the terrain, except that the latter is often given less credence. These relationships have yielded links and networks that have helped to interconnect people and institutions across villages, communities, countries and continents. This chapter attempts to document a particular set of emerging relationships, linkages and networks that have proved fruitful in building effective partnerships and collaborations between persons and institutions of the North and the South, and led to worthy social development ventures and outcomes. We focus on alliances at grassroots levels and of an individual nature, which enables us draw ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lessons of linkages and networking for development. The discussion is not about individuals and/or processes that have won the Nobel Prize and gained world recognition in the limelight of the media. The chapter focuses on a specific endeavour rooted within a human seed that later became intertwined with other actors, processes and institutions to foster development in communities in Cameroon, England and elsewhere for others who might later access the outcomes of the networking. The authors of this essay consider that the case study presented here has yielded formidable gains for the communities concerned, and thus there are lessons for those pursuing fruitful alliances between persons, civil societies and agencies/ institutions in the North and South in an effort to find global solutions to local problems of development. The study does not deal with the complex discourses and politics of North-South dialogue; it is, however, analytical of practices and actions by individuals, groups and institutions mentioned in the methodology below that have development undertones. Our goal is to bring to centre stage the role of the human face in mainstream local development – a vital ingredient that continues to elude international as well as national development work by agencies, organizations and groups. This case study foregrounds individual interventions and efforts that have remained small – indeed, relatively invisible – and that we describe as beautiful and effective in fostering local development with a human face. A difficult but specific interest of the chapter is to identify and describe the individual attributes that might explain the modest but significant outcomes of what is termed a successful relationship, which could serve as a model in bridging the gap between North and South, through partnerships.

Theoretical Underpinnings It is important first of all to put Shirley Ardener’s engagement with Africa in perspective, beginning with her motivations. The aims of her outward journey to Africa and the significance of her case shall then be discussed in light of existing literature. As signalled in the epigraph, Shirley Ardener’s story is located in the encounter between Africa and the West, specifically during colonization, identified as one of the macro-narratives that have bequeathed the polarizations in North-South relations already referred to in the introduction. Newly married in her twenties, she accompanied her husband on his trip out to Africa with no plan of her own:

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I had no plans really. I think I probably imagined that I would be a social worker in England, somewhere. My parents had no knowledge of Africa but, then, I met Edwin … By then he had planned to come [to Africa]. I just thought I was so lucky to have the opportunity to come with him. His anthropology professor had toured around Africa and had a plan to document the known knowledge of all the peoples of Africa for the International African Institute. That was one of the plans and at that time there were very few people trained because of the war. My husband was one of the first available people and so they came to him … and right from his first degree. So we did not stay even to do doctorates. We came out quite young and, you know, it is like they say, chickens that comes out of an egg, the first thing they see – whether this is a duck or not – they will follow. I think I was like the chicken coming out of the egg and I met Africa – the first thing in my adult life.

Whereas cases of white women in colonial times who offered to help, modernize or ‘enlighten’ Africans with negative effect abound in the literature, accounts of university-educated women are fewer than those of housewives engaged in domestic-related education. Callaway (1987), however, portrayed European women in colonial-era Nigeria who were able to break out of the typical Victorian feminine dependency and take up responsibilities in the public sphere. Like such women, Shirley (who came to Cameroon in 1953 with a BSc. in Sociology and Economics from London University) was atypical. Given the acrimonious discourse surrounding the encounter between Africa and the West and Shirley’s personal goal to ‘make some difference’ (Interview), what difference would she make? It is naive to think that all North-South relationships, links and networks would produce positive results and be beneficial to all; this is far from being the case. Both positive and negative outcomes are products of North-South relationships. Therefore, some theoretical questions must be posed. The pertinent question is, how do we make sense of relationships between South-North entities so that we get the best out of the situation? What are the indicators or pointers that can help us forge a good relationship? When is a relationship exploitative, unjust and taking advantage of the vulnerable? When is it infringing on the rights of others and creating dependency rather than empowering the powerless? These are important questions to better understand, particularly, non formal relationships, the subject of this paper. Whereas formal relationships are structured in terms of expected inputs, processes and outcomes (both positive and negative consequences), this is not the case for non formal relationships. Yet this form of relationship is dominant – rampant, even – and characterizes development successes in our communities, whether in the South or North. Formal and informal relationships should not be seen as entities apart, however: one gives rise to the other, and they are often interwoven for best results. As noted by Professor Bauman in his presentation at the XI World Congress on Rural Sociology (Trondheim, Norway, 25–30 July 2004), the world can no longer opt to prescribe global solutions to local problems (such as stagnant and regressive economies, growth and development). Both the North and South, he said, now operate in a global village, and their affairs have become global. Fur-

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thermore, no country alone can solve all the problems that result worldwide from modernization – the redundancy of labour due to technological advancement, the unviable outcomes of economic progress, the criminality that emerges from social problems brought about by colonialism and imperialism. Countries, irrespective of their locations, must establish interdependency to solve their problems. Despite the lesson from Bauman’s presentation – that global solutions are needed for globally produced problems, rather than for locally produced problems – differences exist between and within countries as to how actors internalize their roles and how they should participate in, and contribute to, the formation of neighbourly alliances that are beneficial to everyone. Even though Bauman’s idea is not entirely new, it is definitely a reawakening call for continents to move away from a strategy of pointing fingers of accusation and avoiding others’ problems and towards one of sharing the processes that lead to solutions to problems that are often and wrongly labelled local but are of global creation, therefore affecting all countries. In essence, the question for decades now has been, how can we form alliances in a world where actions, both within and without nations, are characterized by inequities and inequalities of race, class and gender? To borrow from bell hook’s ideology of differences in the construction of gender and feminisms, in almost all development efforts, particularly at the macro-level, the ‘human face’ continues to remain at the margin, crowded out by questions of economic and political profitability that occupy the centre stage of development. As argued, macro policies and programmes do not fall from the sky. They are the outcomes of ideologies and actions of individuals and institutions at meso- and micro-levels. As noted by Fonchingong and Fonjong (2002), diminished state intervention in development ventures following structural adjustment in Cameroon has rejuvenated the spirit of reliance on personal initiative, self-help, mutual help and use of local capabilities. Facilitated by the legal framework 99/014, which liberalized the creation of civil associations, since the 1990s development initiatives through group actions have proliferated to dot the entire landscape of Cameroon. Peoples, groups, institutions and communities are establishing links, partnerships, collaborations, alliances and networks for capacity-building and, in turn, achieve self-reliance, empowerment and use of local resources to solve problems (local and global). But what do we know, particularly, of individuals who have been active at grassroots levels, channelling the course of development? Do their efforts contribute to the project of finding global solutions to global problems? What processes and strategies are employed? What are the failures and successes? Many biographies and anthologies today are devoted to the lives of eminent persons, yet the story of development misses out, primarily because very little is available in the literature, in a collated manner, on how individuals in the South and North network and link – persons and processes – to the larger picture of global development wherein we might find the response on how to formulate local solutions to problems of a global nature. There are many genuine relationships between persons and institutions of North and South that have a human face but remain undocumented. How can we improve our understanding of these and shape relationships between the two for the better?

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Methodology This study dwells first on human agencies in two locations and academic institutions, namely, the Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) at the University of Buea (representing the South) and the Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women (CCCRW), now the International Gender Studies Centre (IGS) at the University of Oxford (representing the North). These agencies work in building partnerships and networking with others. Of particular interest is how institutions have networked to revitalize the cultural, gendered and historical identities of the Bakweri and have helped to build capacity for institutions in the private and public spheres, in Fako specifically and in Cameroon as a whole. Other partnership institutions discussed below include the British Council, the Bokwaongo community and the Archives in Buea, as well as UNESCO/UNITWIN at the UNESCO headquarters in France. The research statement and questions are analysed with the benefit of the experiences of the authors, who are agents and have been instrumental in establishing the main partnership under study. Other data have been gathered through focus group discussions and interviews with key informants (leaders and beneficiaries) within and without the partnership institutions; the respondents outside of the partnership are linked in one way or another, or have benefited from emerging networks resulting from the partnership. In addition to interviews, secondary data are a valuable source of information, with particular regard to those persons who could not be reached at the time of writing this chapter. Participant observation was useful in determining the present status of events in the field.

Interacting with a Community This section establishes the point of intervention on behalf of the people by describing the social and economic condition of the people and the location. The Bakweri are a coastal people in the South West Province of the Republic of Cameroon. They inhabit the slopes of Mount Cameroon as far as the coast. Mount Cameroon, which peaks at 4095 m, is the highest point in West Africa. Among the principal towns of the district are Bimbia, Victoria and Buea, where the colonial powers concentrated their religious, economic and administrative activities. Of the three areas, Buea has left the fiercest legacy in terms of the Bakweri military resistance to German occupation in 1891 and 1893. These two conflicts – the Battle of Buea and the military expedition of 1893 – had great impact in several respects, including the settlement pattern, the economic structure and the psychological disposition of the indigenes, who had to relocate their settlement as a result of the two battles. All of Upper Buea was dispossessed after the second attack in order to make way for the German station. The legendary leader Kuv’a Likenye fled on advice and requested his people to do likewise: ‘Acting on this advice, whether for lack of ammunition, or for fear of Bakweriland being annihilated, brave Kuv’a called his people together, and with the words of a leader bade them to leave

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Buea for a while, until the Lord called them back again. This land, he told them, had been their ancestors’ for generations, and it would be theirs forever, and so no fear should be entertained as to their coming back to it again. Thus came another movement of the Buea people into different homes and villages’ (Kale 1939, quoted in E. Ardener 1996: 113). Shirley Ardener underscores the trauma associated with these wars when she points out that ‘from some thousand people – after the war with the Germans – they had been cut down to a few hundreds and the rest were scattered. It was psychologically damaging. One of the biggest villages was deeply affected; the impact was considerable’. Moreover, almost a century later, the downward trend in demographics prevails, aggravated by immigrations of Cameroonian and Nigerian tribes into the plantation area for labour, trade and/or administration. It is no surprise that she observes, ‘There were only 20,000 Bakweri according to the census when we first came [1950s] and you see there were 27,000 young men working here on the plantations, plus their families and all the support people that came in to serve them’ (Interview). Clearly, the subjection of the Bakweri of Buea and their relocation facilitated the implementation of drastic German economic drives, as stated in the German official report: ‘As a result of the complete subjection of Buea, and the impression which the punishment of this feared tribe will make in a wide area, security on the Cameroon Mountain will be all that is desired. The plan of the Basel Mission to erect a health station in Buea will now be able to be executed without danger. Also one of the principal obstacles to the extension of plantations in the Victoria hinterland is removed, and it is to be hoped that the military operation will bear rich fruits also for the economic revenue of the protectorate’ (E. Ardener 1996: 111). The establishment of plantations on usurped indigenous lands meant that the indigenes were moved out of the refuge of the mountain, where they had primarily been hunters, and forced to become plantation labourers. This is not to say that they did not operate individual farms, but when all was said and done, plantation agriculture became the main source of cash income apart from a few clerical jobs. In any case, for a robust enterprise such as plantation agriculture, built on extensive labour inputs, the labour force of the indigenes was definitely inadequate. This gave need and room for the influx of immigrants from other tribes. It is noteworthy that no literature on the Bakweri depicts them as hostile to other indigenes besides the colonizer, which might explain why they seemed to welcome the flood of newcomers even when some of the African foreigners settled inside the perimeter of the Bakweri fence, kot’a mbowa, rather than on plantation camps. Even the camps harboured mixed tribal groups, which the plantation workers preferred to living in segregated groups. In a study by Edwin Ardener (with S. Ardener and Warmington, 1960: 101–2), out of 1,711 sampled labourers, 82.5 per cent preferred to live in multi-tribal camps because the mixture could gain them more experience as well as reduce jealousy and witchcraft. What is evident even today is that the immigrants are well established, able to accumulate and own wealth, which includes vast lands, without menace. What are the implications of the historical legacy for Bakweri culture and identity? Edwin Ardener’s summary is perhaps edifying:

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For the general student of African history the climax of the story is a remarkable one. Its outline has been generally known, but it has lacked detail. The Cameroon Mountain was for a decade effectively denied to a modern European power by a people with a population of no more than 1,500. This resistance was both political and military, and the documents make it clear that it was led by a Cameroonian of remarkable acumen: Kuv’a Likenye. He was remembered by his own people, but after the collapse of the mountain population under the impact of the plantation economy, his historical contribution came to appear retrogressive and barbaric. Unlike some other Cameroon kings, Kuva received a totally hostile press from the German officials. Missionaries hated him. Thus he alienated Christian Cameroonians. (E. Ardener 1996: 42)

To this picture of a people robbed of its history, we must add the anthropologist’s assignment, formal and non formal. Such an assignment is seen in the following case: CDC and the D.O.s in Cameroon had requested someone to come here to look at the impact of the plantation system on the country and at that time we were asked to solve the problem of why the Bakweri were apathetic to development theory, their inaction. When we came the study was divided into three parts. One was working on the camps; there were also some economists working with us; secondly to find out about the impact of the large labour force in the area on the Bakweri, and finally to go to the area from which the labour came; we went right to Isu,3 right in the northwest part of the Grassfields. When we were working with the Bakweri, we found really that it was a myth that the Bakweri were apathetic. They did not provide labourers for community development to dig ditches and put in culverts as people in the Grassfields did. But the land is very hard to dig; it’s a mountainous land. Most of the active young men were working (like F. Gobina’s father) as technicians, or as checkers and white collar workers. They were not labourers so much, so when the District Officers looked for labour, they couldn’t find Bakweri; in the villages you found the elderly people and young children and women. Many of the men and women were also living on the plantations, so you could not expect them to be involved actively in digging ditches and putting culverts. (S. Ardener, Interview)

The above quotation rejects the official line, which failed to take into account the imposition of a new way of life on the host tribe. This bias is extended today in the immigrants’ stereotypes and as a result the indigenes themselves suffer a debilitating persecution complex, including the fear of extinction. The Ardeners also discovered from the Bakweri that they considered themselves to be dying out; to deprivation the Bakweri say, ‘God has given us gifts but because of our foolishness it’s the foreigners who are benefiting much more from this land of ours than you and I.’ These were the feelings expressed in the interviews and focus group discussions we conducted. The foregoing contextualization of socioeconomic, cultural and psychological factors defines the moment of intervention. The background is equally indispensable in the determination and appreciation of the approach that is described in the next section. If anthropologist Shirley describes her justification, or perhaps her philosophy, as being ‘to make some difference’, the question is whether this could be an ethic embedded in the discipline. How does the human seed ‘make some difference’ in the above context?

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The Human Seed: Social Capital In this brief discussion of social capital4 we are indebted to Barr and Toye (2000). Central to the concept of networking are social relationships, a form of capital needed and used to foster development universally – in social, economic, political and cultural domains. Social capital remains a veritable resource for the poor and for local development; its centrality for grassroots development in African countries like Cameroon cannot be disputed. To better understand the concept we must understand what social capital is, how it is constituted, who the agencies are, how it is observed, what are the benefits and who benefits – and how it impacts on development. What do we understand as social capital? Barr and Toye note that ‘social capital is created when people associate together for a range of different purposes’. Thus do webs of relationships, networks and coalitions get created and become resources at the disposal of groups, organizations or associations that can be used to achieve set objectives, goals and missions. The previous statement is based on the assumption that people in associations and groups are able to recognize these strategies and therefore see them as social capital that can be exploited for the benefit of the people and their environment. More often than not this is the case for formalized social capital; but such awareness is less likely to inform the many informal relationships that are intangible and remain invisible. Yet these non formal relationships, networks and linkages are invaluable, for they constitute the bases for widespread grassroots human and institutional capacity development. They remain unrecognized, underutilized strategies in national development plans, often replaced and subjected to meaningless destruction at the least opportunity, only to be replaced with newly created structured forms of social capital (i.e. formal relationships, networks and coalitions) that may not be as effective as the former. The best policy is to intertwine the two to create a partnership of capital importance. Some world organizations, such as the World Bank and the UN, have been quick to point out the value of NGOs, for example. Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called it ‘a phenomenon, the new global peoplepower that has happened to the UN and that, partnership with the Civil Society, [NGOs] is not only an option but a necessity … The duty of NGOs is to mobilize, particularly when the government and the market prove inadequate to deal with problems of society’ (EDEN 2004: 3). Their mission as development agencies is not disputable. According to the World Bank (Stiglitz 1999), NGOs are ‘private organizations that pursue activities to relieve suffering, promote the interests of the poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services, or undertake community development’. In like manner, other networks, linkages and community groups promote self-reliance in order to reduce development gaps, especially where government has failed. In the field, typical social capital efforts are seen in the areas of health, unemployment, education, rural development, construction of roads, the promotion of gender and women’s issues, and the provision of loans and scholarships. How do we determine what is effective social capital? According to Barr and Toye, only when a strategy (involving formal or informal relationships, networks

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and coalitions) is innovative, reflective of local realities and geared to engage the poor can we expect to observe the positive outcomes of social capital, in which case it is of interest to determine who has the responsibility for building and fostering social capital. Further, what is the role of exogenous and endogenous agencies in the creation of social capital that would be beneficial to the local realities of the people? Which of the two types of agencies should play the lead role in sustainable development? In like manner, it is of interest to analyse the role of individual and collective actions in the process of creating, accessing and controlling social capital. What is the role of each agency/actor? In what context can social capital flourish? The illustrations that follow will answer these questions.

The Practice and Impact of Social Capital Like most traditional communities, the Bakweri, through use of social capital – that is, relationship networks, coalitions, etc. – were able to organize their livelihood and ensure their welfare by exploiting their environment. Farming provided the households with food, hunting with meat, health was based on traditional herbs and native doctors, utilities such as water and fuel came from the forests and mountain springs. Fortuitously, the mountainous Buea area was free of malaria; this was a blessing, but one that unfortunately attracted the colonizers. In addition, the climate was favourable for cattle-rearing while the volcanic soil supported diverse and rich agricultural activities, including the cultivation of European vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, cabbages, lettuce, green beans, etc. Together these features created a safe haven for Europeans. If the Bakweri environment created a safe haven for foreigners, what were the implications for institutional development? Until Reunification in Cameroon, Buea was the capital of Southern Cameroons and later of West Cameroon, and has since remained a provincial capital. It is seen as a citadel of political administration and boasts some of the country’s oldest secondary educational institutions (Sasse College, Bishop Rogans College). It has all the basic utilities and amenities of a modern town. Despite the concentration of all these, the surrounding areas of the Bakweri communities (e.g. Likombe, Gwassa, Mapanja, etc.) remain undeveloped. These areas lack adequate pipe-borne water, viable health clinics, good roads, electricity and wage employment. The mountainous and rocky terrain poses an obstacle, not just to farmers in terms of getting their crops to the markets, but also to the mobility of the inhabitants and visitors. Due to the rugged tracks, the Land Rover is the typical means of accessing many of these areas – or else people resort to trekking. Given this context, the role of the human seed is evident. The human seed here represents people of good will who can make a difference and are willing to help the less privileged. An effective human seed would be someone who perceives, and is perceived as, social capital, for s/he is a catalyst who does not work alone; someone who is innovative, relates to the local realities and engages the poor in the development of the community at large. The involvement of a cross-section of the entire community enhances sustainable change. In this process the person

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associates and/or networks with other local persons to define both the problem and its solution. S/he does not prescribe but uses the participatory approach to undo myth. For example, it is generally alleged that the Bakweri are lazy and do not like to labour. Using an anthropological approach, a human seed would immerse him/herself in the culture to unravel the stereotypes, rather than simply accepting the premises and setting out to change the people. Such a path is illustrated by the case of Edwin Ardener, the anthropologist who came to Cameroon to solve the problem of ‘Bakweri apathy to development’. The human seed moves around like a landmine detector to identify problems and opportunities. Having noted that the Buea community had been robbed of its history by distortions in the hostile German media and a corresponding lack of indigenous perspective on its history, Shirley and Edwin set out to produce, publish and market, in consultation with local partners, books on the Bakweri kingdom. As will soon become evident, publication is an integral type of return to social capital deriving direct and indirect benefits at individual and group level, and thus to the ethnic group as a whole. In this connection we emphasize the informal relationship with the community that defines the self-affirmed task of publication, seen, for example, in the fact that ‘the Bakweri were asking us to come back to find out if they were dying out. So, we [the Ardeners] did not choose the Bakweri, it was chosen for us and the Bakweri encouraged us. We came back and interviewed all the women in five villages and Edwin produced a book called Divorce and Fertility: An African Study’ (S. Ardener, Interview). To assert that the Bakweri ‘[were] chosen for us’ is to affirm the intertwining of both formal and non formal links to attain set objectives. To undo myth as stated earlier would require the anthropologist to be able to go beneath the symptoms to the processes at play. In other words, the approach here is to deconstruct and reconstruct by bonding and bridging social capital. The anthropologist uses the pillars of collective experience to rebuild identity instead of passively recording the ruins. Hence, ‘at the archives office,’ says Shirley, ‘we … began to bring the historical record back to Cameroon’, thereby giving the returns to social capital by way of the publications they realized: ‘I published from the archives what we called Eye-witnesses to the Annexation of Cameroon in order to bring to light the original, the contemporary documents of the time so people could see how history is made. What materials do we use to try and put in the words of the people who were present … ? We published that and some other booklets from the archives office and after my husband died I collected his papers together, including a long study which had not then been published, on the mountain and the founding of Buea and that became Kingdom on Mount Cameroon.’ Similarly, as a result of the same commitment, Swedish Ventures, 1883–1923, based on a memoir written by a Swede that was in the possession of Chief Liwonjo of Mapanja village, was (after several futile efforts by others) finally published in the same Berghahn Books series as Kingdom. Says Shirley, ‘It is not just about the Swedes; it is about the people they met: the people of the mountain, the people in Kumba and up the Creeks at Lobe and Mbonge, and the conversations they had.’ By linking up the exogenous agency with other endogenous agencies (people and institutions), the Buea Archives, a jewel of knowledge on the brink of dis-

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integration, was rejuvenated. Today, the archives serve the public, international research scholars and Cameroonian university students. Also, the University of Buea and Friends of the Archives, with the help of the German government in a formal ceremony, pledged to sustain the archives, realizing with other users that ‘you can have millions but you cannot have the documentation that was recorded there, and it takes very little to preserve them but it is difficult to get them when they are destroyed’.5 The Buea Archives are an example of a formal institution that then created a network of informal relationships. Another example is the early establishment of the Triangle Club. The latter comprised wives of British officials resident in Buea and some Cameroonians. Ann Cross, wife of the attorney-general, and some other members of the Triangle Club networked with the local population in Buea and around Bokwaongo to address health issues at the community level, especially child mortality. The end product was the building of a health clinic in Bokwaongo – a move up from their intermittent mobile clinic, done at first on foot and later on by Land Rover – so that primary health care was at last provided for the whole community. In addition, and for the very first time in Bokwaongo and its environs, special attention was drawn to the health of babies through the organization of a ‘Baby Show’ on 13 April 1953, which was then recorded in the Buea Archives.6 In carrying out these activities – the construction of the clinic and the organization of a baby show – the Triangle Club worked with both men and women of the local community. The women’s enthusiasm was overwhelming because they felt their practical and strategic gender needs were being met, so they did not hesitate when the woman chief, king’a walana,7 gave the call for communal labour on the clinic project. Strict adherence to their agreed code of practice was such that women reorganized their work and other roles to make time for clinic work: The king of the women at that time rallied the women. She called the women to come out in their numbers; Frida Endeley was then king of the women. When the women heard her call, all of them came out to the big compound. As she is calling out to the women, Ann Cross is with her, following her closely behind … When she says [we will meet at] 4 P.M., in fact, by 2 P.M. that church will already be full of women and their babies, children. Even when she would finish at 8 P.M., not a single woman will leave the church. If you went to the farm, you would make haste to return in time for the meeting … When we saw that the church had become too small for the population, men and women sat in a meeting and agreed that we would build a clinic.

With respect to the type of work done on the clinic project, one of the women reminisced with a deep sense of nostalgia for the good old days: ‘Men cut down grass, the women, too, cut grass and hoed out stones to the tune of songs and shouts – ah, very interesting!’ Like the women, the men felt attached to the project because it resulted in improved welfare generally. For instance, there was no longer any need to carry pregnant women on the verge of delivery over a long distance to the hospital at the Station. In addition, the men did the hard construction work. One wonders whether these activities could have been achieved without a well-structured female leadership and network, since at all times it was the woman chief who gave the rallying call and not the chief of the village, a male. She and her

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assistants liaised with Ann Cross and her team. She was respected and heeded by all, including the male chief when it concerned woman palaver. Nowadays, what matters is whether women still wield this power – a matter we shall revisit in this chapter.

The University of Buea–University of Oxford Link What is the connection between social capital and the creation of the UNESCO/ UNITWIN Chair on Gender, Culture and Human Development Network, a network with webs of bilateral linkages between universities in Africa and the CCCRW at the University of Oxford? Almost twenty years after she and her husband left Cameroon, Shirley Ardener revisited the country in 1995 for a conference held in Yaoundé. Predictably, Shirley would fulfil her passion by using this opportunity to visit Buea and the archives of which her late husband Edwin was a founding member. As one who had lived in Cameroon, an author and a researcher on the concerns and problems of women in Cameroon, England and elsewhere, and the founding director of the CCCRW, she enthused over the existence of the Department of Women’s Studies (now the Women and Gender Studies Department) in the University of Buea under the chair of Joyce Endeley. For the sake of a discipline she very much cherishes, Shirley created space in her crammed agenda to visit and give words of encouragement to staff and students of the department. A book donation of the entire CCCRW book series (then about twenty books) was made to the WGS. Ardener’s meetings with Endeley sparked a very strong desire to make certain that the women’s studies programme did well. This informal courtesy call gave birth to multiple effects with far-reaching impact on the department, the University of Buea and the larger community of Buea. From this maiden visit emerged an informal relationship that has strengthened and blossomed into intertwined informal and formal links and networks over the years. It should be observed that these formal and non formal relationships and networks have turned into social capital, which network members and non-members alike have exploited to foster personal, institutional and community development in Buea and Cameroon at large. A description of the evolution and transformation of relationships and how the processes have impacted on partners and affected communities follows. Women’s studies, as a relatively new academic discipline in Cameroon (found only at the University of Buea) and in Africa in general, remains a daunting challenge, but this did not perturb the inspired and determined human seeds within and without Cameroon in the persons of Shirley Ardener, the late Helen Callaway of the CCCRW and Joyce Endeley of the University of Buea, who took upon themselves the challenge to see the department grow. Through varied communication channels – phone, fax, post and later on electronic facilities, as well as face-to-face contacts (informal meetings) – they discussed possibilities for establishing formal linkages and networks for the benefit of the WGS and its immediate community, Buea. The individuals sacrificed time and funds; for example, meetings were held in homes of partners who often would provide meals and sometimes accommoda-

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tion for Joyce Endeley from Cameroon. Aware of the lack of funds, the trio never missed the opportunity to meet in Oxford when Joyce was on private visits to England in 1995 and 1996. These meetings would bear fruit a few months later when the UNESCO/UNITWIN network was created in 1996. To further develop and consolidate the network, other individuals from different institutions were invited to join the venture. People and institutions were chosen to join the trio based on their interest in the discipline (WGS), including the research component, their resourcefulness and their manifest spirit of voluntarism. It was clear that no honorarium should be anticipated, since no basis existed for it. Under such circumstances, informal relationships and connections proved effective in identifying viable members to come into the network; members came from the African Studies Centre in Leiden (Deborah Bryceson), UNESCO-Paris (Marie Louise Kerney) and departments or programmes in Women’s/Gender Studies at the Universities of Lusaka, Zambia and Tanzania. The network served as social capital, providing members with access to both human and financial resources that in turn were used to finalize, formalize and later on implement the UNESCO/ UNITWIN Chair on Gender, Culture and Human Development project. The first money was a grant, donated by UNESCO Paris, that was used by CCCRW to organize the first formal planning meeting, which brought members of the network together in 1997. A follow-up meeting was made possible thanks to a conference organized by CCCRW in 1999 with funds from the European Union; members from African countries were able to participate in this conference through the British Council UNESCO/UNITWIN arm of the projects in member countries. The UNESCO/UNITWIN network did not last thereafter. Nonetheless, it should not be considered a failure because it gave birth to several bilateral formal links between higher educational institutions in African universities and CCCRW, which were funded by the British Council in Cameroon and Tanzania. It should be evident that the network formation was atypical: it started as a tiny seed, from the ‘grassroots’, with a vision that assured ownership to different members and used exchange visits and informal and interpersonal skills to build on webs of relationships. These attributes stand as the strength of the network and explain why we are of the opinion that it helped to foster equity in the relationships between North-South institutions, sharing of resources, experiences and respect for various cultures of the networks/linkages. This is often missing in North-South cooperation. With respect to the University of Buea (UB) as witnessed and documented by Endeley and Ardener (2004), the UNESCO/UNITWIN programme mission has been largely achieved; the network has linked UB, particularly the Department of WGS, with other universities in Europe, stimulated training and action-oriented research to empower women to play a more active role in social development and ensured the mainstreaming of gender in both the curricula of some departments other than WGS and the attitudes and work of many individual teachers, and reinforced policy issues of the university. It should not be thought that the project and its process were flawless. For example, important components of the network in the signed memorandum, particularly as concerns cross-cultural research, publication and strengthening of South-South cooperation, were never addressed. Without the expected help from

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UNESCO, it was extremely difficult to get donor funds to host meetings in an African country; nor was this possible with the British Council Higher Education Link programme. It had to be a project between an institution in England and one in a partner African country and not between South-South institutions, even if the British Council was present in both countries. This was quite frustrating for those of us from Africa. Going by the tenets of this practice, what should have been a multilateral cooperation to reinforce North-South and South-South interrelationships became strictly bilateral. Likewise, the European Union funds were exclusively for its members, not for non-members. We (the partners of the South) thus missed the opportunity to integrate our efforts to put an African face on curriculum development insofar as this new discipline is concerned in our various universities. The most important factor in the demise of the UNESCO/UNITWIN network and the diminishment of members’ interest was the failure to provide the 3-year support (seed money) promised to the project; instead, just a one-off support was given in the first year (1997). There were also feelings of an imperialist undertone, particularly in circumstances where the under-resourced institutions desired to set their own agenda. Unlike their European partners, they were subjected to tough scrutiny to get their programme approved. Often there was reservation about activities that did not involve British partners or were not executed in British institutions. Admittedly, it is understood that ‘he who pays the piper, calls the tune’: this is an area that needs to be handled with care; otherwise a good project risks failure. These issues surfaced from time to time but were addressed and never allowed to perturb the forward-looking vision of the team members. Ill-feelings and effects were quelled by the experience and maturity of members and open communication that existed among partner institutions.

The Realm of the Formal Below are detailed descriptions and illustrations of the impact that the UNESCO/ UNTWIN network had on member institutions in Cameroon. As mentioned previously, the British Council Higher Education Link (HEL) between the University of Buea and the University of Oxford was the outstanding benefit of the network for UB, particularly for the Department of WGS. The principal partners were the Department of WGS and the CCCRW. The British Council in Cameroon funded this academic exchange project from 1998 to 2000 to the tune of £28,000. The link project resulted in gains enjoyed by others in the larger community outside Buea and beyond, as well as for those in the formal link partnership (WGS, UB and CCCRW). The accrued social benefits for partners included: the enhancement of staff development and teaching through several academic exchange visits of staff; purchase of equipment (computers and accessories) and WGS textbooks, which are extremely difficult to find in bookshops in Cameroon; capacity building through a spate of training/conference/workshop sessions for field practitioners, NGOs and UB staff; production of didactic materials and improvement of curricula; the first publication, in 2004, of the departmental book series entitled

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New Gender Studies from Cameroon and the Caribbean, edited by J. Endeley, S. Ardener, R. Goodridge and N. Lyonga and printed and distributed by the African Books Collective, Oxford; documentation on the Bakweri culture through the publication of Kingdom on Mount Cameroon and Swedish Ventures; and awards of financial assistance and educational support for girls in the Mutengene Handicap Centre in Fako Division, Cameroon, to mention just a few. Below is a description of how the web has evolved over the years.

The Web of Informal Relationships The HEL project rubbed off on the wider community outside the formally designated link. In the three years in which Shirley Ardener came on academic exchange visits to Cameroon, specifically to UB, she performed activities outside the scheduled link activities, and she was also able to make contacts in England that yielded benefits to local institutions in Cameroon. For example, she secured over 300 books from International Book Aid in April for a children’s reading centre in Great Soppo, Buea, and donations in cash and in kind (such as sixteen beds, cot sheets and matching curtains from Ann Cross, one of the founders of the clinic, who is now living in England) to renovate and equip the community health clinic at Bokwaongo. Her other extramural activities included meeting with members of the local clinic and assisting with the plans on rejuvenating the provincial archives office in Buea. She took part in other related meetings with AFAAC (Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon) in support of archive work; convened a meeting of the Bakweri language committee (BLACOM) with the intent of contacting the German embassy for funds to purchase fifty copies of the Bakweri dictionary compiled by Edwin Ardener; continued ongoing research, which included visiting chiefs and promoting the Berghahn Books Cameroon Studies Series;8 and connected with old friends at the Catholic and Protestant missions.

Positive Factors Contributing to the Success of Networks In the context of Cameroon, the relationships between the CCCRW in the University of Oxford, the Department of Women and Gender Studies in the University of Buea and the British Council in Cameroon illustrate the type of relationship that has been long desired between North-South cooperation agencies. The huge benefits that accrued can be attributed to several factors worth emulating by others, especially the effective leaderships on both sides of the world – that is, leaders who are people- and development-centred, ready to make sacrifices, particularly of their time, who share their human resources for others’ benefit and who stir development with, and not for, the people or community, thereby making use of available local resources and institutions. Furthermore, experiences in other countries (USAID 1999) reveal that having a shared concern, which acts as a springboard for members to be able to join forces

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for change, creates a critical mass essential for social transformation. Such a commitment to work together for change can do the trick, as in our case, where these attributes outweighed the ills that often characterize North-South relationships, links and networks or cooperation. Overt traces of ills such as ethnocentrism, racism, class discrimination and imperialism and their effects, for instance inequality, inequity, voicelessness and lack of ownership of the emergent social capital, were not evident. This could also explain the sustainability and robustness of the web of relationships and links five years (2000) after the end of the lifespan of the trio project. If anything, the relationships created have continued to grow and foster different sorts of development for the University of Buea, Buea and the Bakweri community; other Cameroonians and citizens will continue to benefit from the priceless gift of the archives and important institutions like the university and the clinics. On a personal level, posterity will feel the impact of acquired knowledge and skills of those who have been affected by the web of relationships, directly and otherwise. Some of them are currently studying for their doctorate programmes in England (for example, Charles Fonchingong and Christy Abonge). A number of disabled pupils at the Mutengene Handicap Centre in Cameroon have become awardees of the American Girls Scholarship Programme (AGSP) funded by the United States government. Surrounding Bakweri communities (Likombe, Gwasa, Mapanja, etc.) are enjoying the benefits of an upgraded health facility at the Bokwango Integrated Health Clinic. The Bakweri can boast of their history, not just oral but documented, with immense possibilities for posterity through generations to come. Shirley, as a foreign partner, and her counterparts in Buea made enormous sacrifices to achieve the above outcomes, particularly for those outside of the link. Typically, she would extend her stay at her own expense to cover extra weeks doing what she termed ‘time well spent and fruitful’ (S. Ardener, Interview 2000). Of note is the distinctiveness of the agencies (partners) more than the design of the project to achieve these outcomes. Without the formal link, several relationships and networks would not have been born. Should experts not devote more attention to the character of agents of development? The lesson of this chapter is that to effectively move from ‘from the seed to full flower’ (USAID 1999), it makes a difference who is in the field.

Conclusion It is crucial to recognize the importance of both the formal and non formal social capital and therefore strive to interweave the two. The formal link provides greater means, as well as facilities that are often not within the scope of non formal networks. By interweaving the two, one broadens the impact of social capital on development. A good illustration is the HEL programme between the University of Buea and Oxford University sponsored by the British Council office in Cameroon under their higher education programme, because it made possible not only work on the university project, but also collaboration at the clinic, in the archives, on

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the publications, etc. To be able to make these interconnections, the formal and informal sectors must be valued equally, even if funding for the latter, as is often the case, is indirectly through the former. The individual must be willing to sacrifice, especially given that recognition and benefits do not come readily from the informal activity, for one invests more and gets mostly personal satisfaction. To endure this ethic, one must have love for the people and share in their sufferings and joys: ‘If you don’t love the people, you will not bother about their situation’ (Mbwaye). Many lessons are bequeathed here. An important one is that social capital within a given community must be recognized and built on for social returns and sustainability, if it is to grow, even in the absence of the initiator, the human seed. From this essay, it is evident that this is the case; nonetheless, for further illustration, let us revisit the clinic project. After living in a locality and bonding with the people, it is not easy to sever relationships; memories linger and therefore at the least opportunity efforts are made to reconnect. In the case of the clinic, forty years after Ann Cross had left Cameroon, there was a triangular connection from Ann Cross to Shirley to Mbwaye, who hails from Bokwaongo and was a participant in the formation of both the Friends of the Archives and the Bokwaongo clinic. If we may quote Mr. Mbwaye’s exhilarating rendering of the reconnection: Mrs Ardener was part of this team then. It was because of this contact [UNESCO UNI/ TWIN project] with the Oxford University that brought her back. She told me she had seen Mrs Cross. Through her, after forty years of silence, it is through Mrs Ardener that we wrote a letter to Mrs Cross. Then she started helping the health centre through her. Each time that she [Ardener] was coming, she [Cross] gave something for something to be done and we did it. If it was a few things we bought we wrote ‘Ann Cross’, took photographs of them and made a video of women receiving them. The portrait of the young Mrs Cross is in the health centre and, after forty years, she sent us a portrait of herself as she is now.

Here Mbwaye shows his consciousness of Shirley’s ties with the University of Buea as having a specifically formal dimension, insofar as they are based on formal agreements and institutional ties with the CCCRW. Not only was the network rekindled, but also interest in the development of the clinic grew progressively. Hence, with passing years it has developed respectively from a makeshift, church-based health service group to a community health centre run by the Buea Rural Council, then to a health unit run by the government, upgraded to Bokwaongo Health Centre and currently the Bokwaongo Health Area, benefiting the communities of Likoko Membea, Nanga, Wolikao, Bwassa and Likombe, including the government and secondary schools in the area. The exogenous push from both Cross and Ardener gave a boost to indigenous health activities. As a general lesson, it gives credence to the tenet that the success of networking lies more in the quality and capacity of persons in the network/link, rather than the number. This chapter reveals that the local women of Bokwaongo played an invaluable role in the entire network, thanks to their traditional structure. Unfortunately, this structure is weak and endangered in contemporary times, with consequences for

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community development and self-reliance. Whereas the woman chief could mobilize people, especially the women, to undertake development activities for the good of the people (e.g. building the clinic), today she is unable to mobilize this same group of women to undertake the day-to-day management of the clinic. Her status has been usurped by the overall male chief, who has now taken advantage of modern, formal power structures’ current disregard for the dual-sex system. ‘Chief said he did not make us kings, so we are not kings,’ avowed the present woman chief and her deputy. The dual-sex system is an issue that the women felt very strongly about as seen in their bitter and sarcastic remarks: ‘He has made himself into a woman. If someone abuses me [reference to Titi Ikoli, abuse of a woman’s sexual parts], I am expected to go to him, isn’t it? Never! Women are women; men are men!’ The lesson is that we should learn to reconstitute traditional structures that have proven to be effective in development through the use of indigenous resources. There is no gainsaying this recommendation of the focus group, as it could have a wider application in that ‘Changing does not [always] build’: it is necessary to restore the dignity of women administratively so that they will work with men as partners. Another consequence has been cleavage in intergenerational relationships and a resulting loss of history. Young people do not care to remember the story behind the clinic: ‘Those in the 20–35 year range do not come out if the woman chief calls out. They just look at her shouting and ignore her; they walk past her in their trousers.’ The older women’s desperation and disdain remain too striking to omit: ‘We have done something good for them. They give birth here, do we give birth again? Is it not for them that we worked? They refuse to work; you see them in trousers strolling on the streets.’ The ideal, as economists know only too well, is that capital generates capital. Therefore, this multiplier effect in the social domain, as has been demonstrated in this essay, is gained when one builds on the pillars of strength of the community, not its ruins, in order to generate social capital and social returns; the ruins, meanwhile, serve as bridges to further transformations. It is hoped that this study will spur other researchers to document the efforts of the human seed in development. In conclusion, in a context of limited resources, it is helpful to harness and stretch the resources of both formal and informal links to create a web of rippling benefits.

Acknowledgements We wish sincerely to thank the women of Bokwaongo, particularly those who participated in the focus group discussion. We also thank individuals such as Mrs Lydia Litumbe, the first nurse who worked with Ann Cross at the clinic and who retired only a couple of years ago; Mrs Gwen Burnley; and the late Chief Liwonjo of Mapanja (who died shortly after our interview with him). We owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Mbwaye of Bokwaongo, member of the Health Area Committee, who has kept the flames alive since the conception of the clinic. He leaves no stone unturned to create a snowball effect that will foster the clinic and, above all, the development of his people. This is a veritable agent of development unrecognized.

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Notes 1. Shirley Ardener, interviewed by the authors in 2004. All references are to this interview unless otherwise stated. 2. USAID 1999. 3. Esu. 4. See Baron, Field and Schuller (2000) for a general overview of the concept of social capital. 5. Mbwaye interview. 6. Groundsheet No. 521, Negatives 50188-50210. 7. The head of the women is referred to either as Mopho mo walana (head woman) or Mon’ogel’a walana (she who looks after the womenfolk), but throughout our discussion the term used was an appropriation of the English ‘king’ for male as for female leadership. In the present essay ‘woman chief ’ is synonymous with ‘woman king’. 8. The general editors of the Cameroon Studies Series are Shirley Ardener, E.M. Chilver and Ian Fowler. The volumes are: 1: Kingdom on Mount Cameroon: Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast, 1500–1970, by Edwin Ardener, edited and with an introduction by Shirley Ardener, 1996. 2: African Crossroads: Intersections between History and Anthropology in Cameroon, edited by Ian Fowler and David Zeitlyn, 1996. 3: Cameroon’s Tycoon: Max Esser’s Expedition and its Consequences, edited by E.M. Chilver and Ute Röschenthaler, 2001. 4: Swedish Ventures in Cameroon 1883–1923: Trade and Travel, People and Politics. The Memoirs of Knut Knutson, with supporting materials, edited and with commentaries by Shirley Ardener, 2002. 5: Memoirs of a Mbororo. The Life of Ndudi Umaru: Fulani Nomad of Cameroon, by Henri Bocquené, transl. Philip Burnham and Gordeen Gorder, 2002. 6: In Search of Salt: Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880–1960, by Frederick Quinn, 2006. 7: Lela in Bali: History through Ceremony in Cameroon, by Richard Fardon, 2006.

Appendix

As Edwin Ardener makes a number of references in his chapter to the researches of Chilver and Kaberry on the peoples of the adjacent Bamenda Grassfields, some extracts from the results of their work are included here. These comprise passages on groups claiming a Tadkon origin, some material on the so-called Tikar1 and introductory material on the conditions in which this identity knowledge was mediated and produced. These extracts are taken from Notes on the Precolonial History and Ethnography of the Bamenda Grassfields, composed and privately circulated by Sally Chilver and Phyllis Kaberry in 1966.2

The Peopling of the Bamenda Grassfields by its Present Inhabitants: The Nature of the Evidence In the absence of archaeological studies3 the main sources for reconstructing the earlier history of the present peoples of the Bamenda Grassfields must be their oral tradition, objects and sites associated with them, and the languages now spoken. We are not among those who regard the collection of oral traditions as a waste of time, provided that they are subjected to the same kind of critical analysis as other texts and are preceded by a working knowledge of the culture that produced them. We are well aware that our working knowledge is very patchy; much of it has had to be obtained through interpreters, and in brief visits. On the other hand, we had the collaboration of local savants – elderly chiefs, title-holders and religious officers – and the support of educated men who were turning, with a new pride, to the examination of their own society. The latter were ready to act as interpreters. The limitations of our study – little more than a survey, except in Nso’, Bali-Nyonga and Kom – must be stressed. It is a preliminary sketch. Although there are some references to the Bamenda Grassfields and its border areas in the accounts of early visitors to the coast, the Benue Valley, and Adamawa, and fleeting references to the state of affairs in the Grassfields between ca. 1825 and 1850 by recaptives or slaves questioned by Clarke, Baikie, Hutchinson and Koelle, there is only one reference relating to the route followed by one of the peoples now settled in the Grassfields. This is a reference by Heinrich Barth to the southward route followed by the Chamba and the displacement of the Wute: the information was collected in Yola in 1851. Notes for this section begin on page 236.

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The German literature concerned with the Grassfields in its historical and ethnographical aspects consists, during the period of German colonial rule, of the accounts of official explorers, especially Zintgraff (1895) and Hutter (1905), an important article by the cartographer Moisel (1908), a brief ethnographical sketch by Ankermann (1910), and some mention in German museum journals. We should add also material contained in the journals of the Basel Mission, which, though not historical in intent, add to our information. Useful descriptive information, collected in 1913–1915, is also contained in Emonts (1927). The linguistic researches of Tessman (1932), assisted by Ankermann and German administrative officers, were not summarized until after the Great War, and it was only in 1960 that Ankermann’s fieldnotes, all that apparently remains of his extensive researches in 1907–1908, were given to the scientific world. It is evident that much German material has been lost. The German administrative record for the area only partially survives and, like the bulk of other German material about the area, deals mainly with the south-western area, in particular the state of Bali-Nyonga. While the delineation of German administrative divisions was based primarily on considerations of administrative convenience and economic interconnections, though former areas of political influence were respected, those of the British period were influenced by the conception of the ‘natural political unit’ based on common origin and common custom. The establishment by the British of these internal administrative divisions, the Native Authorities, consequently gave rise to official reports, principally the so-called Assessment and Intelligence Reports, which pay particular attention to traditions of origin and to the description of those areas of custom of importance to a colonial administration committed to the setting up of customary courts with a fairly wide area of competence. By and large the Assessment and Intelligence exercises have had some influence on the later conceptions of the local intelligentsia of their own history. References to them are to be found in the administering authority’s reports to the League of Nations, which until recent times constituted almost the sole source of printed information available to them. Consequently any attempt at this stage to discuss the history and culture of the area must involve a critique and reassessment of this material and a loosening or reformulation of the categories established by British administrative practice. Many of these reports we refer to contain historical information of value, especially on the economy of the area, and they record traditions or origin collected from an older generation. Nevertheless, the open administrative intentions of these inquiries inevitably led to the stressing by informants of those aspects of their history that might serve a local purpose or local alignments, and the suppression of others. The general picture to be derived from British administrative reports, and reproduced in the 1953 census categories, was of a broad division of the area into Chamba, Tikar, Tiv and Widekum groups with small refugee enclaves of different origin on the northern marches. In reconstructing the proto-history of the area it was assumed that waves of ‘Widekum’ migrants entered the plateau area from the direction of the forested Mamfe Division and met and mingled with groups of ‘Tikar’ invaders arriving from the eastern savannah. The first reconstructions allowed for different ‘waves’ to which different time-depths were applied largely on

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the basis of dynastic depth and oral tradition. The presence of German material on the Bali-Chamba settlements enabled a generally adequate picture of their historical origins to be arrived at. The ‘Tiv’ category, occasionally applied to the Aghem proper, rested on local dynastic claims to ‘Munshi’ origin. It was in the nature of things that historical reconstructions attempted by administrative officers could not have the support of sophisticated linguistic analysis. Another source of confusion was the use, by informants, of old European political nomenclature, such as ‘Munshi’ and ‘Chang’, in explanations given to administrators. Perhaps in the interests of simplicity of presentation to a remote headquarters and in seeming forgetfulness of earlier and more detailed reports, the category of ‘Widekum’ was created to describe the people inhabiting the Native Authority Areas of Widekum-Menka in the Mamfe Division, Mogamo, Menemo or Meta, Ngwo or Ngunu, Ngemba, Beba-Bafang and, with some queries, Esimbi. The earliest reports on the divisional border areas show that the movement of peoples was traditionally from the edge of the escarpment into oil palm zones of the nearer forests, rather than vice versa. The administrative categorization can easily be accounted for by the fact that most of these so-called Widekum peoples did differ from their so-called Tikar neighbours in political and territorial structure; the differences were most marked for Ngie and Esimbi and least for the so-called Ngemba group. But the so-called Tikar peoples do not speak Tikar languages, and the languages they speak are not radically different from those spoken by the socalled Widekum peoples. There are lexical and broad structural resemblances to be found between languages spoken by the Nso’ and Meta, the former a composite conquest state with a dynasty claiming Tikar origin, and the latter a congeries of small village chiefdoms traditionally originating a few miles to the south of its present habitat. Hence, the major problem of historical reconstruction in this area is the incompatibility of language distribution with alleged ethnic origin and institutions. The last is sometimes the result of a traceable and conscious selection from other communities or of innovation by gifted rulers. The present politico-social units of the Bamenda Grassfields are for the most part composite units, sometimes grouped round intrusive dynasties or built by conquest, or by the slow adhesion of migrating groups in favoured areas, or, more recently, by the temporary agglomeration of smaller groups seeking protection from attack. The history of the Bamenda Grassfields, therefore, must do without simple schematic maps showing broad directions of migration, though some of the effects of invasions in the early nineteenth century or the expansion of particular states can be demonstrated.

Oral Traditions of Migration, Settlement and State-formation The oral traditions we collected or checked do not help us, except in the case of relatively recent movements and invasions, to account for the present distribution of languages and dialects. These traditions are not usually concerned with the origins of peoples but with dynasties, chiefdoms, offices and institutions. They do, it is true, supply supporting evidence for the mixed composition of the politico-

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social units in being when the Germans began to administer the area in 1902. They may take us back, when king-lists are supported by the concrete evidence of royal burials, to the seventeenth century or even earlier. But if they can give us some relative time-depths for the establishment of chiefly lines in particular places, they do not usually tell us about the length of settlement of the peoples composing the chiefdoms.

The Tadkon Peoples The Tadkon peoples in the western area of the Bamenda Division occupied by the Mogamo4 and Menemo (Meta5) local government units composed of fifty villages and hamlets had a total population at the 1953 census of approximately 39,500. This area was the imagined scene of the hypothetical northward invasion of ‘Widekum’ peoples from the foot of the escarpment to the uplands. The mythical site of origin for many of the south-western Bamenda village dynasties is Tadkon, some two and a half miles south of the present palace of the chief of Aghwi or Batibo. At this abandoned site in secondary forest there are places associated with the emergence from the earth of the primal ancestor Mbeka and his transformation into a river guardian-spirit, and an old market site containing the stone backrests of clan heads said to have dispersed from Tadkon south to Widekum, north to Mankon and northwest to the Meta villages by a variety of different routes. The relations between the clans claiming Tadkon origin are expressed in genealogical terms both at Aghwi and in the villages said to be founded by Mbeka’s descendants. If we move from the centre to the periphery, the genealogical links claimed shift, and room is made for the attachment of other clans by the interpolation of collateral or affinal relationships. The legend of the peopling of the area by the progeny of Mbeka – by the patriarchs Tewidekum, Teghanitsha, Tembong Njo and so on – is translatable into a conventionalized schema of settlement by small clans referring back to a series of ancestral shrines and sacrificial sites: of these, Tadkon was perhaps the most influential by virtue of its importance as a border market (as its name implies) serving the interests of a quite densely settled hinterland. Genealogies of chiefly lines in Meta are short (the longest collected had nine names including that of the patriarch; the shortest, four, including the patriarch). This reflects their nature: they consist in general of the name of the patriarch used to invoke collaboration between villages, and the ascendants of the reigning chief up to the one who first settled the area, often from a few miles away, whose name is used to invoke more local collaboration. Until the Meta village chiefdoms were ‘frozen’ by European administrations seeking taxable units or units for court purposes, their expansion was inhibited by the splitting off of peripheral colonies that became small chiefdoms in their turn. Many genealogies are therefore genuinely brief. If we turn now to the traditions of the speakers of the Mogamo dialect we can perhaps reach some tentative conclusions about Tadkon. At Aghwi, where Mbeka’s shrine is maintained, the present chief is the eleventh of his line, descended from Njei Tifu, the ‘grandson’ of Mbeka. The name Batibo is a Bali one, and was

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given by them to Aghwi because the ruling chief of Aghwi when they settled at their present site (ca. 1865) was Tebo. Before Tebo’s reign Tadkon was already a market, to which the Ngemba villages sent cowpeas in exchange for Widekum oil: by Fonggang’s reign it had become a leading slave market in direct touch with Banyang dealers, serving a hinterland as far as Mankon and disseminating brass rod currency, dane guns, beads, cloth, Mamfe salt and English lustre and Toby jugs over a wide area. Just below Tadkon was the crossing-point for penal slaves, beyond which no ransom was possible; perhaps this was established long before the provision of slave-labour for palm oil and kernel collection and processing began to engage the remoter hinterland of the Cross River. It is perhaps significant that Mankon, for whom no satisfactory genealogical link with Mbeka can be supplied, other than the sonship of the eponymous Ndö, had its own stone backrest at the Tadkon marketplace, as did Zang-Tabi, through whose hands the penal slaves or slave-substitutes from the Meta villages passed. And Zang-Tabi offers no ancestral sacrifices at its own patriarch’s site, but only at Tadkon, because its founder is also regarded as a ‘grandson’ of Mbeka. We may perhaps now hazard the suggestion that Tadkon is less a point of origin than a symbol of intervillage cooperation expressed in the kind of idiom we have already described.

The Tikar The ‘Tikar’ ethnonym was popularized by the British administration and applied to those populations of the eastern and central Bamenda Grassfields whose dynasties claimed an origin from the region of the Upper Mbam River and its tributaries. Some of these described their place of origin as ‘Tikari’, some as ‘Ndobo’ and some as ‘Kimi’ or ‘Rifum’ – Kimi being the modern Tikar chiefdom of Bankim or Kimi, and Rifum its lakeside coronation site. The term Ndobo, at least at the early part of the century, referred to the area lying north of Bamum and south of Banyo. The Ndop administrative area in the Bamenda Grassfields acquired its name after the first British assessment in 1925 because of some dynastic claims to Ndobo origin. Among the latter should also be included the Bafut, Kom and Bambili dynasties. It may be significant that the dynasties that specifically claim Ndobo origin and do not mention Kimi or Rifum are in central and southern Bamenda; the Papiakum dynasty (and those of some Bamileke chiefdoms such as Bagam and Bangangte) claims Rifum origins, as do those of Nso’, Ntem and the Tikar hamlets on the Banyo border. In the northwest of the area vaguer claims to Tikar origin are made by some chiefdoms, and here sites in the north-central highlands, Ndeate or Ndewum, are postulated as a secondary centre of dispersal. There are some puzzling things about these claims. In the first place, Tikar languages are only spoken in the border area of the Nkambe Division (at Ngu and Shi near Ntem). Ntem itself is the only Kimi-derived dynasty in Bamenda to have retained a tradition that it adopted the language of the people among whom it settled – the Oga. The border area containing Tikar speakers was much disturbed by raids from Banyo from the mid nineteenth century onwards, and their present locations are relatively new. Among the claimants to Kimi origin in the Bamenda

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Grassfields, only Ntem, Ngu and Shi still maintain ritual connections with the Kimi king; those of Nso’ have lapsed within living memory, though special condolence gifts are still exchanged at a king’s death. Some of these dynastic links, severed by a frontier in the past, have now been revived. These apparent contradictions begin to dissolve if we look across to the traditions of origin of Bamum. Here we have a story of a small princely emigrant group bringing with it ‘the things of Rifum’; it settled among chiefdoms that were going concerns and from which it adopted many institutions as well as their language. The Nso’ tradition of origin is virtually identical with the Bamum story recorded by Sultan Njoya. The Nso’ version is that a prince of Rifum, with a small band of followers, divided from his brothers, the founders of Bamum and ‘Mbam’ (Ditam) at a river crossing. The Nso’ went west through the Mbo Plain (upper Mairin Valley) and eventually made their capital at Kovifëm on the plateau in the Mbam area in the northeast of the present kingdom. The most widely held tradition claims that the country was unoccupied save by visiting hunters, presumably from the Nkambe plateau to the north. The dynasty brought with it ‘the things of Rifum’ – the regulatory society (ngwerong), the princes’ society (nggiri) and the model of seven royal councillors and seven palace stewards. The links with Tikari and Kimi were strengthened by the accession to Nso’ of other groups from the Mbo Plain who claimed an origin from Kimi for their dynasties.

Notes 1. For a full account of the views of Chilver and Kaberry on the Tikar question see Chilver and Kaberry (1971). For material on the Tikar ‘proper’ see Price (1979, 1985, 1987). 2. Subsequently published in 1968 in a slightly modified form by the then West Cameroon Ministry of Primary Education and Social Welfare and the Antiquities Commission as Traditional Bamenda: The Pre-colonial History and Ethnography of the Bamenda Grassfields. 3. See Warnier and Assombang (1982). 4. See O’Neil (1987). 5. See Dillon (1973, 1976, 1977, 1979, and 1990).

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Index

Abo 75–6 Abushiri expedition 72 Adamawa 72, 139, 231 Afo-a-kom xix, xxi African and Eastern Trade Corporation 126 Agara 5, 52, 54–60, 67 Agborkem 112–3, 117, 123–4, 136 Ahidjo, A. 72, 139, 231 Akiga 25–6, 45–6 Aligeti 54, 64–6 Ama 19–20, 22–3, 29, 31, 34, 42 Ambele 31, 33–5, 39, 48 Amingwa, Nkafu 192, 195 Ankermann, Bernhard 232 Annan, Kofi 219 Antisklaverei-Lotterie 73 Anyang 9, 18–22, 27–35, 39, 42, 44, 46–8, 66, 111, 123, 131–2, 139, 152–61, 163–8 Anyang uprising 123, 132, 134 Archives, Basel Mission 88, 91, 139 Archives, British P.R.O. 150 Archives, Buea xi–xiii, xix–xxi, xxiv– xxxv, 40–7, 49, 70, 91, 120, 137–40, 150, 167, 216, 221–2, 226, 228 Archives, Enugu 137–8 Archives, Reichskolonialamt 77, 86 Archives, Yaoundé 124–5, 138–9, 150 Arden-Close 112, 121 Ardener, Edwin W. xi, xiv–xxi, 1–3, 7–9, 12, 14, 40–1, 66, 69–71, 76, 78, 81, 84, 86, 89–91, 120, 138, 141, 143–5, 155, 165–7, 170, 185, 214, 217, 221, 223, 226, 230–1 Ardener, Shirley G. xi–xxiv, 1, 7, 9–11, 14, 41, 70, 86, 119, 144, 151, 156,

165–6, 169–70, 183, 212–4, 217–8, 221, 223, 226–8, 230 Arnett, E. 36, 49 Asamor 120, 197–8 Asonganyi (Asunganyi ) 95–105 Association of Friends of Archives and Antiquities-Cameroon (AFAAC) xii–xiii, xx–xxi, xxiii, xv, 120, 226 Assumbo 14, 18–28, 30–2, 41–4, 46–9, 54, 59–60, 62, 64 Atolo 18, 21, 31, 42, 48 Audu 5, 57–8, 60 Auswärtiges Amt 70, 73–4, 82, 88–9 Babungo 9, 49, 144 Badje 123, 139 Badschama 22, 29, 42 Bafawchu 36, 39 Bafum (-Katse) 24, 43–5, 51–3, 67 Bafut 9, 23, 37–9, 43–4, 49, 72–3, 87, 144, 235 Bagongo 18, 21–2, 25–6 Baikie 28, 231 Baje 31–3, 47–8 Bakassi Peninsula 13–14 Bakweri xiv–v, xvii–xxi, 7, 9, 11, 40, 69–70, 78, 81, 85–6, 89, 92, 120, 151, 155–6, 165, 167, 216–8, 220–1, 226–7 Bakweri Language Committee (BLACOM) xxiii, 226 Bakweri Union 149 Bali-Nyonga 45–6, 231–2 Bamenda xv, xvii, 14–15, 34–5, 42–3, 45, 49–52, 67–8, 116, 122, 150, 234–5 Bamenda Grassfields viii, xxiv, 1, 3, 5, 41, 46, 109, 125, 188, 231, 233–6

– 248 –

INDEX

Bamenda Improvement Union 149 Bamileke 10, 39, 49, 106, 153, 194, 235 Bamum xix, 1, 9, 12, 49, 112, 144, 150, 235–6 Bangwa 7–8, 10, 93–6, 100, 102–3, 106–9, 112, 122, 167, 185–98 Banyang 10, 29–30, 32–3, 39, 41, 47, 96, 100, 106–7, 120, 129, 137, 139, 157, 169–73, 178, 181, 183, 194, 235 Baptists 80–1, 90 Barth, Heinrich 231 Basel Mission 74, 81, 89, 139, 217, 232 Basho (Bascho) 20–1, 31–2, 42, 47–8, 54, 60–2, 65–6, 123, 138–9 Bashu Nebu 31–2, 34 Batibo 36, 235 Beba-Bafang 23–5, 37–9, 43–4, 49, 233 Beecroft, Captain 112, 136–7 Behanzin, King 73 Bell, Alfred 82–3, Bell, Manga (Ndumbe) 136 Bell, Mukonye Manga 137 Bell, Prince Duala Manga 144–5 Bendeghe 119–20, 132, 135 Besongabang 139, 173, 175–6, 182 Besser, von 110, 111–112, 121–2, 138 Betime (Beteme) 31–2, 113 Biddulph, G. 34–5, 37, 49 Biteku 29, 33, 39 Biya, Paul 13, 15 Boki xxvi, 18–19, 21, 27–9, 31–2, 48, 66, 111, 113, 120, 126, 131, 137, 140, 153, 157–8, 163–4, 167–8 Bokwaongo 216, 222, 226, 228–9 Boundary Commissions: 1895, 121; 1912–13, 1, 4, 6, 50, 67 Brain, Robert 10, 94–5, 97–100, 102, 108–9 British Council xx, 216, 224–7 British Council Higher Education Link 225 Buea University xii, xx–xxi, xxiii, xxv– xxvii, 7, 9, 69, 193, 216, 222–8 Buea University Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) xxv–xxvi, 9, 216, 223, 226 Bund der Freunde 147

249

Burnley, Gwen xviii, 229 Callaway, Helen 214, 223 Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) xvi, xviii, 218 Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) 103, 135 Cameroon People’s National Congress (CPNC) xvii Cameroon Studies Series xviii, 15, 226, 230 Cameroons Welfare Union (CWU) 148 Cameroons Youth League (CYL) 148–9 Cantle, L.L. 23, 43–5, 47–8 Casely-Hayford, Joseph 145 Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women (CCCRW) 170, 183, 216, 223–6, 228 Chamba 3, 24–5, 28, 35, 44–5, 58, 67, 231–3 Chapman, Malcolm xvi–iii, 14 Chilver, Sally xi–xii, xv, xx–xxi, 1, 3, 6–7, 12, 14, 37, 40–1, 43–4, 46, 49, 92, 96, 107–8, 122, 130, 136, 156–7, 168, 230–1, 236 Clarke, John 3, 231 Conrau, Gustav 7–8, 93–7, 99–102, 105–8, 112, 122 Cowan, G. 19–23, 31, 34, 41–3, 49 Croasdale 36 Cross, Ann 222–3, 226, 228–9 Dahomeans 74–5, 78, 81–5, 88, 90, 92 Denyang 158, 167–8 Detzner, Hermann 3–6, 8, 14, 50–67 Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) 73 Deutsches Kolonialblatt 69, 89 Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft 71 Dii 51–3, 58, 67 Duala 72, 82, 112, 136–7, 145 DuBois, W.E.B. 142 Durkheim, E. 149 Ebam, Ntuifam John 114 Efange, Chief Peter M. xvii Efuctlefac Fontem 93–4 Egbekaw-Ossing 173–4, 179–80, 182

250

INDEX

Egboghonne 115, 117–8 Egemene 115–6, 118, 138 Ejagham 8, 10, 29–30, 47–8, 110, 113, 115–7, 119–20, 131–2, 135–7, 139, 157–8, 167–71, 173, 178, 181, 183 Ekoi 2, 27–8, 46, 112, 122, 131–2, 138 Ekoi war 117 Ekok 111–12, 116, 119–20, 124, 135, 170, 183 Ekokisam 32, 48, 126, 140 Ekor 19–22, 27, 42 Ekot Ngba 19–20, 42 Ekuri, Chief 111, 117 Elisa Falls 113 Elliot Commission 149 Elumbe 31, 47 Emat (Lake Ejagham) 113, 115, 117–8, 137 Emonts, Johannes 232 Endeley, Dr Emmanuel M.L. xvii, 148 Endeley, Frida 222–4, 226 Endeley, Joyce 2, 11 Epale, S.J. xviii–xix Esagem 113, 117, 124 Esimbi 23–5, 27, 29, 37, 43, 45–6, 49, 233 Esser, Max 6–7, 130, 230 Esu (Isu) xv, 3, 23–6, 41, 43–6, 50–1, 53, 67, 218, 230 Etat 36, 39 European Union 224–5 Ewisi 31, 33, 42, 47–8, 139 Eyumojock 115–19, 126, 132, 134–5, 137–8

Fulani 15, 25, 27, 44–6, 54, 58 Fungom 23, 43–4

Fako Division 11, 216, 226 Firman 72, 87 First World War 3, 6, 8, 13, 108, 113, 117, 120, 125, 127 Fitsə 24–5, 44, 46 Fobellah Nkeng, Chief 185 Focolare Movement 10, 104–7, 109, 184, 188–194, 196–8 Fon Galega 5 Foncha, Dr John N xvii, 148–9 Fonlon, Bernard Nsokika xiv Fontem Defang 93, 104–9 Fontem Njifua 102, 105 Forju, Martin 103 Förstl, Sergeant 53, 57, 61–3, 65

Jantzen & Thormählen 70 Jibu (see also Jukun) 25, 44–5 Johnston, Consul 29, 39 Jua, A.N. xvii Jukun 24–5, 28, 44–6, 67

Gainyi 24–5, 44–5 Gayama (Gajama) 5, 24–5, 44, 51–4, 58, 67 George V 144 Gesellschaft Nordwest Kamerun (GNK) 112, 122–3, 125–6, 138–9, 157 Giziga 206–7 Glauning, Hans 24, 43, 62, 123 Gravenreuth, Freiherr von 7–8, 69–92 Gregg, C.J.A. 30, 32, 48, 126, 140 Guse, Hauptmann 122 Habicht 76 Hammarskjold, Dag xvii, Hausa 24, 43, 45, 54, 57–8, 67, 87, 113, 137 Hawkesworth, G. 23, 37, 43–4, 49 Hives, Resident 52, 58, 60–1, 64–6 Houben. Oberleutnant 123 Hutchinson Consul 39, 231 Hutter, Franz 232 Hyäne 76 Igbo xvi, 136, 157 Ikom 34, 111–12, 133, 137, 153, 157 Ikurav 18, 26, 41, 46 International African Institute xviii, 214 International Gender Studies Centre (IGS) 183, 197, 216 Ituava 5, 55–6, 58–61, 67 Ityuav 18, 22, 26, 41, 46

Kaberry, Phyllis xi, xv, xxiv, 1, 3, 12, 25, 37, 40–1, 43, 46, 49, 231, 236 Kaberry Resource Centre (Bamenda) xv Kajifu 31–2, 48, 139 Kale, P.M. 86, 89–90, 148–9, 217 Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) xvii, 103 Keaka 112, 122, 131–2, 137 Kelua 31, 34, 47

INDEX

Kembong 29, 107, 113, 125, 137–40 Kemcha, Peter Mboya 103 Kentu 42, 45, 62 Kenyang 30, 48, 183 Kerney, Marie Louise 224 Khumbahs 106, 190–6, 198 Koelle, S.W. 3, 44, 67, 231 Kolonial-Abteilung 71–3, 76, 81, 83, 87–8, 90 Kumba 30, 106, 112, 137, 221 Kuv’a Likenye 14, 69, 76, 80–1, 89, 216, 218 Langheld, Hauptmann 124 League of Nations 15, 45, 103, 142–3, 146–7 LECA-USA 187 Leist, Kanzler 82–4, 90, 92 Litumbe, Lydia 229 Liwonjo, Chief xvii, 221, 229 Lloyd George 145 Lubich, Chiara 104, 109, 193, 197 Luminosa Award 105, 188 Madagalli 5, 58 Mafi river 31, 33–5, 42, 48 Mainyu 31, 48 Malafa, P.E.N. 148 Malinowski, B. 184, 189 Mamfe Division (see also Manyu Division) 34–5, 37–8, 40–1, 44, 46–9, 137, 139–40, 167–8, 184, 232–3 Mamfe Overside 1–3, 41, 110–11, 121, 126, 138 Manga Williams, Chief 149 Manta 31, 33–5, 38, 42, 47–8, 139 Manyu Division xxvi, 10, 67, 138, 140, 169–70, 181 Mapanja xvii, 78–9, 220–1, 227, 229 Marcus, G. 10, 189–91, 195 Marx, K. 155–6, 167 Mbayongo (see also Bagongo) 26–7 Mbeka 234 Mbembe, A. 43, 84–5, 92 Mbene, G.J. 148 Mbenyan 112, 117, 119, 134, 137–8 Mbetta 187, 192 Mbeyi 18–22, 31–4, 47–8

251

Mbile, P. xvii Mbo 16, 97, 102, 104, 106, 113, 137, 187 Mbulu 31, 33–4, 48 Meek, K. 16, 43–5 Menji 105, 107, 192, 196 Menka 24, 34, 47, 49, 167, 233 Messaga 22–3, 26, 29, 34, 42–3, 46 Mesu-Ake 31–2, 42, 47–9 Meta’ 36–8, 49 Mfontem, Chief 113 Mill Hill Catholic Mission 187, 198 Mmuock 104, 107 Modelle (Ide) 25, 49 Moghamo 35–40 Moisel, Max 41–2, 44, 46–8, 112, 117, 123–4, 138, 232 Moore, Sir Ralph 122 Morgen, Premierleutnant Kurt 72–3, 76, 81–2, 86–8, 91 Motinda, Chief 69 Motombi-Woleta, P. xvii Müller, Oberst 124 Muna, S.T. xvii Mundame 112, 122, 128, 130–1 Mungo River 72, 112, 122, 128–9, 137 Munschi (Munshi, see also Para) 18, 22, 24–5, 32, 43, 45–6, 48, 54–61, 63, 67–8, 233 Nchwo 31–3 Ndebaya 116–7, 119, 134 Ndiwom (Ndeate, Ndewum) 23–5, 28, 43, 235 Ndobegang, Michael Mbapndah 1, 7–8, 95, 97, 106–9 Ndobo 23, 235 New City 188 Nga 34, 47 Ngemba 36–9 Ngie 34, 36–9, 43, 233 Ngol Kedju 22–3, 26 Ngwo (Ngono) 22, 34–5, 37–9, 49 Niger Delta 13 Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER) xvi Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) 148 Nitschmann, Leutnant 124 Njawbaw 22, 46 Njifua, Lukas 107, 188

252

INDEX

Njoya, Sultan 144, 150, 236 Nkafu, Amingwa 195 Nkafu, Marilen 188 Nkemnkia, Martin Nkafu 198 Nord-Expedition 72 Nsakpe 112, 121–2, 137–9 Nsan Okem Isughi 115–7, 137 Nsanaragati 47, 113, 115–21, 124, 126, 132, 134–5, 137–40 Nso’ 12, 15, 231, 233, 235–6 Nugent, Captain 50, 58–9, 61, 65–7 Obang 131, 134 Obanliku 18, 26–7 Obhon 118 Obonyi (Obonye) 30, 32, 47 Obudu 18, 20–1, 26, 46, 51, 54, 61 Ochebe 19–22, 26, 46 Okus 19–22, 26–7, 31–2, 41–2, 44–6 Okwa 31, 66, 153, 155, 161–2, 166–7 Olitti 58, 61–4 Olulu 22, 29, 31–2, 42, 47 Oman 19–21, 42 Ossidinge 41, 54, 61–2, 66, 68 Otang 19–21, 26, 42 Ote 31, 47–8 Otutu 34–5, 49 Ovando 19–22, 26, 32, 41–2, 48 Oxford University xi–xii, xiv, xvii xix, xx, 2, 10, 170, 183, 197, 211, 216, 221–4, 227–8 Para 58, 60, 67 Peeters, Jules 104 Plebiscite 13, 15 Polizeisoldaten 75, 88 Polizeitruppe 71, 74, 82–3, 88, 92 Pope John Paul II 205, 209 Preuss, Dr 89–90 Pückler-Limpurg, Graf 122–3 Puttkamer, Jesko von 117, 122–3, 139 Queiss, von 112, 122, 138 Ramsay, Hans von 79, 81–2, 84, 87, 91–2, 112, 122–3, 136, 138 Ramstedt, Hauptmann 126 Ranke, Leopold von xiv Richards Constitution 149–50

Richards, Audrey 184, 197 Richter, Dr 78–81, 89 Riebow, Assessor 83 Rittberg, Graf 122–3 Rogozinsky, Stefan von 111 Ruel, Malcom 30, 41, 47, 107, 155, 157, 159, 167, 171, 173, 183 Rutherfoord, J.W.C. 16, 42, 113, 137 Saker, Alfred 81 Sasse College 220 Schuckmann, Rolf von 71, 73–81, 86, 88–9, 91 Schutzgebiet 78, 81–3, 91 Schutztruppe 51, 62, 70–1, 83, 87–90, 92, 123, 126 Schwarz, Bernhard 89–90, 111–12, 137 Sealy-King, L. 42, 117, 138–9 Second World War xviii, 117, 141, 146–8, 150 Sharwood-Smith, B.E. 32–8, 40, 43, 47–9, 136, 139, 157, 167 Sonkwala Hills 18, 21, 23, 27, 59–61, 64 Soppo 78, 86; Great Soppo 226; Small Soppo xvii Stetten, Premierleutnant von 77–80, 82, 89–90 Süd-Expedition 70–3, 76, 79, 81–2, 86–8, 91 Swabey, M.H.W. 114, 137, 157 Swem 26, 28, 46 Tadkon 231, 234–5 Takamanda 9, 30, 42, 47–8 Takpe 31, 47–8 Talbot, P.A 16, 29, 31–2, 137, 154–5, 161, 163, 167 Tali 100, 107, 126, 173 Tambrunkem 115–6, 118 Tazi, Philip 108–9, 186–7 Tessman, Guenter 43, 46, 232 The Lagos Weekly Record 74 Tikar 3, 12, 23–5, 28, 30, 36–7, 39–40, 43, 232–3, 235–6 Tinta 19, 27, 31, 41–2, 44–5 Tiv 1, 3, 18, 20–8, 41–2, 44–6, 48, 67, 232–3 Triangle Club 222, 228 Tweed 36

INDEX

Uge 26–7, 29, 46 UNESCO xix, 40, 216, 224–5 UNESCO/UNITWIN 216, 223–5, 228 United Africa Co. 126 United Nations xvii, 149 Utange 21, 26–7, 46 Vakpe 22, 42 Valdau, G. 111, 114, 138 Victoria (Limbe) 76–8, 80–1, 87, 89–90, 142, 216–7 Vieter, Mgr 69, 132, 140 Volckamer, Premierleutnant von 78–9, 81, 89–90 Wachong, Chief 37, 45 Weber, Max 151

253

West African Institute for Social and Economic Research (WAISER) xvi West African Pilot 149 Wetchu 34–5, 38, 44, 49 Widekum 3, 17, 23, 30, 35–40, 49, 157, 232–5 Wissmann, von 71–2 Woermann 70 Woleta, Esasso 69 World Bank 193, 219 Wum (Aghem) 23–5, 42–6, 49, 233 Yive 5, 14, 20–2, 27, 31–2, 42, 48 Zang-Tabi 235 Zintgraff, Eugen 5, 72–3, 87, 136, 232