Notes for intro.html

1.  
   The Buea ‘Seminar on Social Problems’ covered topics including matrilineal succession, social mobility and the family, migration, demography, settlement and land tenure, statistics, development and women’s roles in voluntary organisations. The material presented at this informal seminar is still quoted (notably Francis Nkwain’s account of anlu [women’s war] in Kom). In addition to Nkwain, the members included Benedicta Ngu, Elias Matthew Nwana, Tambi Eyong Mbuagbaw, Benedict Simo, Gwen Burnley and Patrick Sine. Many of the participants have since risen to prominence.
2.  For example: Geary (ed.)1979, Tardits (ed.) 1981, Chilver (ed.) 1985, Mbunwe-Samba, et al. (eds) 1993.
3.  On support for scholarship on Africa in the 1950s and 1960s see Chilver 1951, 1957 and 1958.
4.  ‘One of the aims of the series of booklets, started in 1965, [was] to make available historical source material not otherwise easily obtainable in West Cameroon’ (E. Ardener, in Ardener, S., 1968). Other titles in the series included Chilver (1966), E. Ardener (1965), and Ardener, S. (1968).
5.  Edwin Ardener’s search for local documents had led in October 1959 to an invitation to collect together the archival material he had come across, often mouldering away in cupboards in various government offices. He had been particularly concerned about a collection which had been bundled up by Professor Onwuka Dike some years earlier for despatch to Nigeria, which still lay among mounds of collapsing files and stray documents, all deteriorating in the dirty, hot and humid loft of the Secretariat in Buea. Eventually, on the foundation of the Federal Republic, and at the far-sighted initiative of the then West Cameroon Government, he was asked to establish a government Archives Office. First temporarily housed in an old German building (and for a time in his absence in its old, rat-ridden kitchens!), the archives were finally moved into a purpose-built office in Buea. For this Ardener selected the site, drew up plans with the Public Works Department, installed fitments, and equipped and trained staff. Special mention must go to the devoted duty of Mr Kima, the first Cameroonian member of staff, who shared the discomforts of the Secretariat loft, and who worked with his later colleagues to save many documents from the predations of insects and of man. The office was officially opened by the then Prime Minister of West Cameroon, the Honourable Muna, in 1969. More recently the fine collection of German books and records was moved to Yaoundé, but the administrative history of western Cameroon is still, at least partially, available to scholars in Buea. Some of the contributors to this volume have made good use of it.
6.  These papers are due to appear as the 1996 issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford.
7.  Readers should note that Pursue to Attain, the document considered by Tardits, was written at the end of the period of amicability between Njoya and the Germans which was marked by gifts of uniforms and other goods.
8.  First by Ankermann in 1910.