As the title of this volume implies, Cameroon is a meeting ground for a wide diversity of cultures and polities both native to Africa and intrusive from Europe. Its unique history is reflected in the range of ethnic affiliations of the academics - Cameroonists - whose energies have been drawn to it. Foremost amongst these are Cameroonians themselves, so many of whom have demonstrated a deep scholarly interest in their past and in their present societies and cultures (see Fanso, Langhëë and Banadzem below). This has occurred at the local level with individuals (including traditional dignitaries), with teachers and others working in small area-based groups, or with academics or administrators in national and overseas institutions. The co-operation and the generous welcome they have unfailingly shown to Cameroonists from abroad has been remarkable. For Cameroonians too, the chequered history of their country must sometimes seem to drive it close to the danger of falling between a number of international stools. So there is special exhilaration when and wherever Cameroonists get together at workshops and conferences where colleagues from many continents meet up.
Happily, the international network of Cameroonists has grown stronger and stronger in recent years. It goes back a long way. Cameroon studies were fostered to some extent in schools, in teacher-training colleges and at the school of administration at Yaoundé. Many other initiatives were taken in Cameroon, including an informal group of returnees trained abroad who met and gave papers at a small seminar in Buea convened by Edwin Ardener in 1963. 1
A significant step forward in the international field was taken by Claude Tardits who in 1973, with the backing of the CNRS (Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques), organised a large international conference in Paris on the contribution of history and ethnology to the civilisations of Cameroon. This occasion drew in many scholars from Cameroon, and out of this colloquium the Grassfields Working Group (GWG) emerged and has since met on a number of occasions in France, Cameroon, Britain, Holland and the United States.
Meanwhile, in Cameroon, the pioneering work in the Grassfields of the anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry was honoured in the mid-1980s by the formation of the Kaberry Resource Centre (KRC), the research wing of the Association for Creative Teaching, itself founded only shortly before. Cameroonists have also been able to keep in touch through a Newsletter edited in and distributed from the United States by Eugenia Shanklin, which has book reviews and short notices of conferences and other activities. More recently Cameroonian professionals and students working and studying abroad have established an international electronic bulletin-board system to exchange gossip, and report on affairs back home in Cameroon. The ‘Camnetters’ carry on a vigorous debate on an extensive range of social, political and sporting issues, which enables the Cameroonian (and Cameroonist) diaspora to keep abreast of current affairs back home (see Fowler, in prep.)
All of the study groups mentioned above have produced publications. 2 It was no surprise therefore that at a meeting of the GWG in Oxford in November 1991 another publication should be planned. In this case, however, there was to be a special feature: the book was to be dedicated to a key student of Cameroonian culture and history and a founder member of the working group: E.M. Chilver, known to friends and colleagues alike as Sally. It is important to note, however, that this book is not a Festschrift containing a motley of papers with only a tenuous link between them. It is written and edited by Sally’s friends who, while bringing their distinctive expertise to their contributions, precisely share with her an interest in Cameroons studies; it is therefore well focused. Indeed, so many excellent contributions were offered that the editors perforce found themselves editing, not one volume in honour of Sally, but three sets of papers. (See the editors’ Preface below.) Thus this volume has been preceded by the publication of a set of papers in the 1995 issue of the journal Paideuma entitled ‘Perspectives on the State: from Political History to Ethnography in Cameroon. Essays for Sally Chilver’, and will be followed by a special edition of the Journal of the Anthropology Society of Oxford (JASO). These are essential reading; together the three volumes reflect the state of Cameroon studies today.
Why, though, should Sally Chilver have been given this accolade? As she now occupies a niche in Cameroon history a biographical word or two are merited here, although a much fuller account by Mitzi Goheen and Eugenia Shanklin is available and their fascinating biographical essay can be found in the special edition of JASO . The authors have kindly permitted me to draw briefly upon it here to add to my own knowledge, but for more details of Sally’s colourful life the longer text is essential reading. Sally Chilver’s full bibliography (liberally drawn upon by the authors herein) is also found in JASO.
Sally Chilver’s first contact with Cameroon came in the summer of 1958 when she accompanied her friend Phyllis Kaberry on a tour of the Grassfields to work on the divisional records for a case study of the local administration. Sally was well equipped for the task. She belonged to a well travelled and scholarly family, her father, Philip Graves, being a Times correspondent who had lived and worked in Turkey and travelled to other parts of Europe and the Middle East; Sally had a multicultural upbringing. After her mother’s tragic and early death in 1935, the recently graduated Sally Graves set off independently ‘on a tour to the Middle East and Bulgaria, just as people go to Nepal these days’ (Goheen and Shanklin, 1996). Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy gives a flavour of the exciting times and milieu in which Sally then circulated. It gave her the chance to begin her writing career as a freelance ‘stringer’, sending back stories to The Times in London.
Two years before the war she married Richard Chilver and set up home in London only to be conscripted into war-work as a civil servant in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. It was then that she first heard of the French Cameroons, as the war effort required her to encourage the export of West African products. After the war, and a brief spell at The Daily Mail newspaper, she returned to the civil service and eventually became Secretary of the Colonial Social Science Research Council, an advisory body which sponsored overseas research. 3 In this job she came into contact with various social anthropologists, including Phyllis Kaberry who in 1951 was completing the draft of her book Women of the Grassfields (1952). Soon afterwards she met Edwin Ardener, who had just completed a field research trip among the Igbo with the aid of a grant from the Council. Sally was responsible for implementing the policy of establishing research institutes in East and West Africa (The East African Institute for Social Research [EAISR] and The West African Institute for Social and Economic Research [WAISER], now The Nigerian Institute for Social and Economic Research [NISER]). It was WAISER that first took Edwin Ardener to Cameroon, and it was Sally to whom he handed the manuscript of Plantation and Village in Cameroon, in which Richardson, Warmington, Ruel, Morton-Williams and myself had played supporting roles.
Sally Chilver’s interest in social studies and her curiosity about Africa grew to the point that she decided to see it for herself. So in 1958 she accompanied Phyllis Kaberry on a ten-week visit to the Grassfields. It was almost a case of game warden turned poacher! Sally herself has explained that Phyllis Kaberry wished to restudy the political systems of the polities in the western Grassfields which she had first encountered in the 1940s. ‘These systems were now faced with the new pressures of recent political, fiscal and economic reforms, the take-off of smallholder coffee production and the emergence of a nationalist leadership’ (Chilver and Berndt 1992: 34).
Describing herself with typical modesty as ‘an apprentice historian in stout boots’ Chilver returned for further stints with Kaberry in 1960 and 1961 to continue their study of ‘the interplay between German and British administrations, and the political structures they found and tried to manipulate’ (Berndt and Chilver 1992: 35). During this period Chilver and Kaberry engaged the interest of local people in their work, circulating drafts among them for their comments. She recalls:
whatever resthouse or manjong house or whatever we stayed in ... became a port of call for the literati of the area, and conventional fieldwork was amplified by results and hypotheses being constantly discussed with them... (Berndt and Chilver 1992: 35)The circulation list of the first 1966 draft of the volume Traditional Bamenda’(published in 1968) included not only administrative and education department officers, but also two local historical societies. This publication was originally intended as part of a larger project initiated by Claude Tardits for which Edwin Ardener was to supply a text on the western Grassfields and on the forest areas of the then West Cameroon down to the Coast. The project was never completed, but Ardener arranged publication of Traditional Bamenda in a series he issued 4 on his annual visits to the archives office which he had established at Buea. 5 Recently Sally Chilver has returned the favour by preparing for publication a section of text written by Edwin Ardener for the original project, which covers a stretch roughly from Esu across part of the Mamfe Overside.
Sally Chilver and Phyllis Kaberry produced a string of publications both jointly and individually. A biography by Berndt and Chilver of Phyllis Kaberry, and a full list of the latter’s writings, can be found in S. Ardener (1992) which also includes two essays written in Phyllis Kaberry’s honour (one by Sally herself, another by Caroline Ifeka).
By now Chilver had irretrievably crossed the bridge between the civil service and academia; first, from 1958 to 1961, she was Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford before it was merged with Queen Elizabeth House. It was during this time that she lured Edwin Ardener, as a visiting Oppenheimer Scholar, to Oxford. In 1964 she became Principal of Bedford College, London University, but in 1971 she was back in Oxford as Principal of Lady Margaret Hall. On her retirement from the latter she plunged full-time into her work on Cameroon studies. The task seemed urgent; sadly, Phyllis had died of a stroke six years earlier. Sally set about sorting and editing their field notes in order to make them more accessible to others.
When I first knew Sally, Edwin and I, back from the bush, had just set up home in two rooms in the Caledonian Road in London, and we had the cheek to invite her round to sit in our made-in-the-bush deck chairs (I still have the detachable raffia backs) which were our only seating for some time. I am still fortunate in living only a stone’s throw from Sally in Oxford. I run round always to find a ready ear and an encouraging word. She has the latest news from Cameroon, which she garners from her extensive correspondence, and which she tells eagerly as if it were local gossip from just up the road. Someone has got a new job, another has just published a paper, a third has recently got married. Details of a new piece of research have arrived, another gap in the cultural jigsaw is filled. This I learn as Sally looks up from her dining table, long since given over to the spread of manuscripts she is perusing or editing at the request of some Cameroonist, young or old, despatched from some village in Cameroon, or Yaoundé, from across Oxford or perhaps from Holland or the World Bank. Being an historian Sally takes a long view and respects the value of archives. Between these activities she assiduously continues to render the ethnographic notes that she and Phyllis made in the 1940s and 1960s into readable condition for others to use.
The papers below easily demonstrate the continuing relevance of the issues which concerned scholars who worked in the 1950s and 1960s, among them Sally and Phyllis, and also Edwin Ardener and Claude Tardits and others whose initiating roles Sally has acknowledged (1992: 105). Many years ago I noted that I was unhappy at the dismissive approach of some writers (e.g. Onwuka Dike) when referring to the coastal dignitaries who coped with the complex economic and situations of their period (S. Ardener 1968: 21). Whether the political leaders did this well or badly, were knowledgeable or out of their depths in international affairs, they deserved respect for their attempts to negotiate a way through the confusions of their time and situation. They were certainly taken seriously by those with whom they engaged in dialogue. That some may occasionally have been out-manoeuvred is not surprising given the overwhelming forces of change they had to face. How many heads of state do better today? Happily this book carries forward the meticulous unravelling of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political issues undertaken by Phyllis Kaberry, Sally Chilver and many others, including the heirs of those involved in Cameroon.
Those of us who worked in Africa through those early optimistic years, when bright futures for Africa were forecast - and believed in by all of us - were fortunate. Today the whole world seems more complicated. That Cameroon is still at a crossroads today is all too clear. The political experiments, the economic ups and downs, the social revolution as generational and gendered relationships change, and other pressures within and from outside the nation - all these impel Cameroonians to reflect on their cultural and political history.
How did Cameroonians cope in the past? What can be learnt for the future? Human nature does not vary much, if at all, from time to time nor from place to place: conditions do. However, freedom for action is never unrestrained. We all carry our past with us, and peoples and nations do the same. In a multicultural community such as Cameroon, with its international links, the diversity of many cultural and political histories still have to be taken into account. None of us start with a blank sheet on which to write our future.
Furthermore, if Cameroonians can learn from the course of the events in which they and their forebears have been involved, so can others. For the human past belongs to everyone. It is by the telling of other peoples’ tales that we learn about ourselves: what to do and what to avoid. The history of Cameroon therefore belongs to us all. It is an exciting one. It is a story of princes and powers, of wars and peace treaties, of disasters and achievements. Fons and commoners, Queen Mothers, Governors and warriors in and out of uniform, wielding spears or guns, diviners and mission converts, all play their parts in the presentations in this book, each now is accorded the attention merited. We must be grateful to Ian Fowler and David Zeitlyn for undertaking their task, which comprises three publications, and to Sally Chilver for inspiring it.