Although this book is that reviewer's nightmare, a Festschrift, its authors and editors have made a serious effort at thematic coherence. As indicated in its title, the book is not only about a specific region of Cameroon but also addresses issues of ‘encounter’ (here stressing European scholars and their African interlocutors), ‘transformation’ (historical changes), and ‘identity’ (a pervasive issue for Anglophone western Cameroon with its shifting links to pre-First World War German Kamerun, interwar British mandate rule, and postcolonial reintegration into the much larger francophone Cameroun). A fourth, unstated, theme – most closely associated with the work of the scholar being celebrated, Shirley Ardener – is gender.
Most of the authors here (like the Ardeners) are anthropologists, but much of the book is historical. Shirley Ardener's own contribution is to edit a hitherto unpublished essay by her late husband, Edwin, on the problems of reconstructing an accurate account of the precolonial past (and its ethnic identities) from the available sources: oral traditions collected through or influenced by colonial intelligence reports, compiled in British efforts to establish Indirect Rule in the area and preserved in the Buea archives that both Ardeners did so much to keep intact. Sally Chilver contributes ‘an epitome of extracts’ from a largely unknown but very rich account by the German officer Hermann Detzner of his experiences tracing the Cameroon–Nigerian border. West Cameroon identity and the resulting proto-nationalist politics of the mandate era are discussed by Verkijika Fanso, the only dedicated historian of this team. However, the most finished piece of historical scholarship comes from an anthropologist, Peter Geschiere, discussing the first German effort to conquer Buea. Although Edwin Ardener himself provided a detailed account of this event, Geschiere's archival researches shed new light upon the ambivalence of metropolitan commitments to the entire project of inland expansion, resulting in an improvised (from redeemed Dahomean slaves) and very incompetent military force and thus a disastrous outcome (defeat and death of the German commander, Freiherr von Gravenreuth). Geschiere's identification of this catastrophe with the general semi-privatized early stage of European rule in Africa is insightful, but he might have linked it more profitably to the north-west Kamerun concession company cited in other chapters here, rather than evoking a fetishized notion of ‘colonial violence’.
The three chapters on women vary greatly. Caroline Ifeka ‘revisits’, in rich ethnographic detail and with much reference to Marxist and other theory, a ritual of sexual display. The effort to integrate the instances of women engaging in such practices with both witchcraft beliefs and engagement in an increasingly commoditized economy is admirable but requires more than the space allotted here to become truly effective. Margaret Niger-Thomas more modestly lays out (with wonderful illustrations) the story of funerary statues uniquely erected to celebrate the lives of women members of a now defunct female status association. Finally, Joyce Endeley and Nalova Lyonga provide an account of their own relationship with Shirley Ardener in forming a partnership between women's studies programs at the universities of Buea and Oxford, which they present as a model for ‘north–south relationships’.
Reflexive anthropology is, at best, a very complex issue and here runs the gamut from autobiographical narrative to collaboration with indigenous scholars to ‘inculturated’ Catholicism. The first option is widespread but particularly applicable to Ute Röschenthaler's account of her efforts to unearth the history and culture of Nsanakang, a once important west Cameroon village now reduced to a backwater. Ludovic Lado, a Catholic priest and anthropologist, explores both sides of a debate about replacing the European (and expensively imported) wheat bread and grape wine of the Eucharist with more local products such as millet porridge and beer. The discussion is interesting but openly (and damagingly) limited by its restriction to ‘elitist’ arguments and concerns about their ‘essentialism’ rather than any ethnography of local religious experience.
Fiona Bowie is represented in two ‘reflexive’ essays. The first, on change in a town that was also the site of a notorious German colonial death, is co-authored with a Cameroonian scholar, Michael Mbapndah Ndobegang, and might be better classified under ‘transformation/history’, although the introduction by Bowie raises interesting questions about various issues of ‘encounter’. Bowie's solo chapter on ‘multi-sited ethnography’ addresses an entirely different set of issues: first, it deals with her own dual role as an ‘outsider’ researcher and an ‘insider’ member of the Focolarini religious movement that has many followers among the people of her field site, Fontem; second, it turns out that Fontem people are now scattered about not only Cameroon but also Europe and North America, so that they have to be seen in the same peripatetic terms as the anthropologist herself.
Bowie's contributions epitomize the strengths and weaknesses of this volume. The questions that they raise and the historico-cultural frame of reference are both interesting and shared with other authors here but very little is resolved on even a tentative basis. Perhaps just posing the questions and undertaking the research is a sufficient tribute to the lasting influence of both Shirley and Edwin Ardener.
