In the 1880s two Swedes were living on the upper slopes of the Cameroon Mountain. One of them, Knutson, wrote a long memoir of his time in Cameroon (1883-1895). It gives fascinating insights into everyday life in pre-colonial Cameroon.

The 1880s were a critical time in Cameroon. A German warship arrived in the Douala estuary and proclaimed Cameroon a protectorate. At that time, two Swedes, Knutson and Waldau, were living on the upper slopes of the Cameroon Mountain. Very little is known about their activities. One, Knutson, wrote a long memoir of his time in Cameroon (1883-1895) which is published here for the first time. It gives fascinating insights into everyday life in Cameroon and into the multifaceted relationships among the various Europeans, and between them and the Africans, at the end of the 19th century; we learn about the Swedes' quarrels first with the Germans and later with the British, over land purchases, thus revealing the origins of long on-going disputes over Bakweri lands. We are given vivid descriptions of Bakweri notables and their, and the Europeans', cultural practices, a rare eye-witness account of the sasswood witchcraft ordeal, and learn about Knutson's friendships with slaves. Together with appended contemporary correspondence, legal opinions, and early (translated) texts, this memoir must be considered as a unique and invaluable primary source for the pre-colonial history of Cameroon.

The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and administrators from Portugal, Holland, England, Jamaica, Sweden, Germany and more recently France.

Contrary to the negative assessments of the social order that have become prevalent in the media since 9/11, this collection of essays focuses on the enormous social creativity being invested as collective identities are reconfigured. It emphasizes on the reformulation of ethnic and gender relationships and identities in public life.

The last 6 years have witnessed a period of considerable unrest in Cameroun. In 2016, protests within the minority Anglophone regions, against the obligatory use of French in court rooms and schools, were violently suppressed. This, combined with decades of marginalisation by successive Francophone governments, led to calls for secession – the creation of an independent nation of Ambazonia.This book offers a theological reflection on this escalating crisis, examining whether nationalism might be considered a tool of liberation in this particular African context.

The Mbos are a large ethnic group in present day Cameroon and were an important and powerful group until the Anglo-French partition. Following the defeat of the colonial power, Germany, in the First World War, the League of Nations in a March 1916 Mandate, partitioned the territory into two unequal halves among the victorious imperial powers of England and France, to be governed in trust as from 1922. As a result of the partition, the Mbos, who happened to find themselves right along the lines of division, were thrust under French and English administrations. Roughly two thirds of the Mbos found themselves in what had then become French (East) Cameroon, while the remaining one third was placed under British (West) Cameroon rule. Today the Mbos, as a whole, occupy parts of the Littoral and Western (Francophone) and Southwest (Anglophone) regions of Cameroon. While the Francophone Mbos have, over the decades, benefited from all aspects of economic, social, political, and agricultural development, the Anglophone Mbos have been isolated and deprived of all the outward and physical - tangible - aspects of socio-economic and political progress. The persistence of such colonial divisions makes for inequality among the Mbos, despite their common ancestry, ethnicity and cultural heritage. This book seeks to update diverse aspects of the study conducted on the British Mbos by J.W.C. Rutherford and others as a first step toward a comprehensive publication on the Anglophone Mbos.

Cameroon is a land of much promise, but a land of unfulfilled promises. It has the potential to be an economically developed and democratic society but the struggle to live up to its potential has not gone well. Since independence there have been only two presidents of Cameroon; the current one has been in office since 1982. Endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals and substantial forests, and a dynamic population, this is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. To all of this is recently added a serious terrorism problem, Boko Haram, in the north, a separatist movement in the Anglophone west, refugee influxes in the north and east, and bandits from the Central African Republic attacking eastern villages. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Republic of Cameroon.

In 2005, a United Nations study reported that half of the worlds languages (estimated at 6,000) would disappear by the end of this century. A third of these endangered languages are in Africa where, according to the same study, nearly 250 languages have disappeared in the last century. Language is the heart, identity, storage system for the collective and unique memory and experience of every culture, people, including their natural habitat. Loss of language means loss of the ability to retain and pass on not just a belief system but also invaluable knowledge to future generations. This English-Lekongho/Lekongho-English Dictionary is a modest first attempt to minimize the envisaged sad phenomenon of language loss. Nkongho-Mbo people speak Lekongho, one of the five variants of the Mbo language of the Mbo ethnic group of Cameroon, with their ancestral home in the Kupe Muanenguba Administrative Area of the South-west Region. With this book, the authors fervent hope is that there will no longer surface any justification to continue to refrain from speaking Lekongho on a daily basis. This effort will help to regionalize, nationalize and internationalize the Lekongho language since Nkongho people are spread all over the country, Africa and the world.

Bringing together key historical and innovative ethnographic materials on the peoples of the South-West Province of Cameroon and the Nigerian borderlands, this volume presents critical and analytical approaches to the production of ethnic, political, religious, and gendered identities in the region. The contributors examine a range of issues relating to identity, including first encounters and conflict as well as global networking, trans-national families, enculturation, gender, resistance, and death. In addition to a number of very striking illustrations of ethnographic and material culture, this volume contains key maps from early German sources and other original cartographical materials.

This is a comprehensive text on the function of thought in the history and political sociology of Cameroon. The book brings out how the hidden hand of history fashions a political thought which, in turn, creates its own history. Instead of Cameroonians making history, history makes Cameroonians. The book shows how political ideas are fashioned in a post-colonial context in which Europeans impose a superordinate arrangement on a people together with its philosophers. Thinking the nation in Cameroon on behalf of Europeans, especially after the leaders of the national liberation struggle were all eliminated, European philosophers put in place a repressive machine under which Cameroonians were subjected between 1958 and 1990. Repression gave way to a refined form of enslavement a modernised version of slavery. Cameroonians joined the bandwagon and have been producing and reproducing Western industrial economies while day-dreaming of what they will never become. The whole idea of nation-building in post-colonial Africa is put in question. This book offers students of political studies, sociology, anthropology and history compelling evidence to grapple with questions as to whether Cameroon is a state or a nation and questions of sovereignty and citizenship.