Lynn Schler offers a historical biography of New Bell, a dynamic, multi-ethnic Douala neighborhood characterized by high numbers of ‘stranger populations’ – immigrants from Cameroon and other parts of Africa. The work spans the time of the quarter's creation in 1914 to Cameroon's independence in 1960. New Bell remained off the colonial map throughout the German, Mandate, and Trusteeship periods (indeed, no colonial map was drawn of New Bell until 1950), and, until this monograph, it had been mostly overlooked in the historical literature.
By historicizing the influence of Douala's construction on the very identity of its inhabitants, Schler reveals the everyday, practical effects of European urban planning on the lives of African residents (Chapter 2). The Germans originally planned New Bell to be an African neighborhood, separated from the administrative buildings, shops, and hospitals of the European quarter located in Douala's coastal region. But after the defeat of the Germans during the First World War, a French administration, chronically short of funds, failed to acknowledge New Bell's existence in any official way. During the interwar period, the neighborhood hosted increasing numbers of immigrants who settled the land that they called ‘the bush’ and a New Bell identity emerged, one that rested upon the notion of being a ‘stranger’ to the area but that Schler claims otherwise transcended ethnic identity.
In Chapter 3, Schler recounts how, during the interwar period, New Bell inhabitants acquired clothing, shoes, firearms, and durable houses as the expression of an urban identity that set them apart from ‘villagers’ and led to increased social differentiation. In the following chapter, she describes inhabitants' unawareness of, or willful resistance to, colonial laws that served to limit and control the circulation of goods and people, making New Bell appear as a ‘problem neighborhood’ in French reports. Schler presents New Bell's thriving underground economy ‘as an exercise of autonomy accompanied by a nonchalant attitude’ (p. 89). She concludes the chapter with one of the most important points in the work: the ‘rejection of colonial boundaries defining legal and illegal ventures became the foundation of community in New Bell, and the key to its viability’ (p. 95).
By focusing her study on New Bell, Schler uses the neighborhood to ‘decenter the nation-state in the historical narrative of Cameroon’ (p. 7). The existing historical literature largely excludes New Bell, save to present it as a prime site for organized anti-colonial political activity. But Schler demonstrates that New Bell existed as the vibrant, undisciplined, under-developed neighborhood that it still is long before Cameroon's nationalist era. The author shows us a New Bell that mostly evolved beyond the state's reach, and insists that therein developed not a national identity, or a unified political resistance, but a diverse ensemble of marginalized populations, whose espousal or rejection of collective identities – whether political, ethnic, or social – was temporary, situational, and ‘deeply local’ (p. 8).
Yet one wonders how ‘deeply local’ the strangers of New Bell truly were throughout the period of Schler's study, given the trans-regional connections embodied in the neighborhood's population. Other scholars have demonstrated that migrant populations in urban areas of Cameroon maintained ties to their places of origin. And if New Bell did not exist in isolation from the rest of Cameroon, the characteristics of the quarter that Schler historicizes so well, while not the stuff of nation-building deliberately undertaken by elite politicians who traded on their proximity to French administrators, might be precisely the phenomena that best reflect the formation of Cameroon's problematic national identity.
Chapter 6 explores the interaction between political parties formed after the Second World War and ethnic associations that had cropped up in New Bell. Schler argues that ethnic associations ‘ultimately served as a check on the radicalisation of the quarter's residents through association with the UPC (the radically anti-colonial, leftist nationalist party)’ (p. 128). But her assertion seems to paint all New Bell ethnic associations with the same brush and as a result overemphasizes their ‘common goal of combating the pan-ethnic UPC’ (p. 125). Certainly, not all ethnic associations operated in the same way when it came to their engagement with political activity.
Schler's study is an important addition to the history of Cameroon and contributes to a larger body of work on African cities. Her work is all the more valuable for her use of previously un-mined source material (many of the archives that she consulted for this work are stacked in unsorted piles on the floor in the storeroom of the National Archives in Yaoundé) and for the oral interviews on which she relied – and she had no choice. For, if we accept her premise that New Bell came into being largely off the colonial map, we also accept that its history is preserved not in administrative archives but in the memories of old-timers who lived in New Bell from 1914 to 1960.
