The first quality that captivates the reader of this unusual book on a segmentary society in confrontation with colonial modernity is the particularly meticulous identification of the sources. The book is an updated version of Quinn's doctoral dissertation in history submitted at UCLA in 1970. Its inestimable advantage in being brought out as a book almost forty years later is not only that it inserts and integrates more recent scholarship but that it introduces the author's large archive of interviews, unpublished writings by Beti notables, photos, microfilms of documents and copies of difficult-to-find published articles, all now catalogued, annotated and deposited in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University. Altogether, the Quinn Papers comprise ‘sixteen boxes, three microfilm reels, two envelopes, an expanding folder and four tape recordings. The entire collection is available on seven reels of microfilm’ (p. 9). So the approximately 120 pages of historical distillation and compilation from these and other recently published works reads as a kind of homage to the Beti sources and an invitation to make one's own acquaintance of them.

The importance of the sources is very prominently displayed. Whereas the history is written in classic narrative style – ‘Beti resistance was sharpest in the first decade after the Germans' arrival’ (p. 47) – Quinn's interactions with individual people comprise the dedication, the introduction, the three substantial Appendices and the long list of sources. This is a different and original way of giving pride of place to the human spirit, one which conveys loving appreciation without either privileging a single dominant voice or including an unruly profusion of divergent voices. Having myself met some of the men he cites and photographs (Abbé Theodore Tsala, Père Engelbert Mveng), read in some detail about others (Max Abe Foudda) and appreciated the vastness of their reach, I feel indebted to Quinn for creating the collection of their writings and interviews and to Berghahn for publishing this book as, in a sense, a companion to it. They enable others to listen to the originals, drawing on the author's contextual narrative with minimal shaping by authorial ‘voiceover’. Thus the space between narrative and source can, as Quinn intends, ‘serve others in advancing Cameroonian studies’ (p. 10) by allowing and encouraging other readings.

For his own text, Quinn states explicitly that ‘this study is a product of its times, the late 1960s’ (p. 9). Much is already appreciated by those of us who have used the dissertation as a point of reference in subsequent research. In this book version he does integrate new findings on Southern Cameroon, but he eschews taking issue with them or comparing his own account with the history of other segmentary societies in Africa: Northrup, Isichei and Ekejiuba on the Igbo, MacGaffey on the political ideas of the Kongo, Saul and Royer on military organization in the Sahel. The basic theme is the one he set in the 1960s, namely to simply ‘reconstruct’ (p. 10) the history of political events, ideas and practices in a segmentary, nonliterate society, over a period when colonial military presence, administration, religious hierarchy, education and economic markets reshaped political life. It is both a history of the events the Beti submitted to and a guide to how they thought about them. They took part in all of these shifts, providing leadership in many of them. Hence the prominence of intellectuals in Quinn's framing and his conviction of the continuing importance of their testimonies. But his conclusion about political structure, at least up to 1960, points out the limitations rather than the strengths of vision and practice. ‘Theirs was a static way of looking at the world, possessed of cultural richness, but not political or structural adaptability’ (p. 118), and particularly with respect to the forging of a modern collective identity in political and economic life. This argument is not really provided with a full evidentiary basis and argumentative exploration, and its abruptness is a testimony to Quinn's earlier claim that ‘I do not follow any school of historical or anthropological writing’ (p. 9). One could wonder further: is this limited viability in modern times due to segmentary organization per se, to the Beti version of political leadership, in which being a compound chief was ‘the pinnacle of success’ (p. 118)? Or perhaps to the difficulty for the modern Beti philosophical and ideological leadership of articulating and lending positive value to new forms of discipline, as Mbembe suggests in his still-fascinating book based largely on Cameroon, Afriques indociles?

Quinn's book will not answer these questions for the reader, but it does open access to the life and words of prominent and brilliant Beti men who struggled, in their own day, with their own questions and answers.