Table Of Content“A distinctive feature of Walter Nkwi’s book is in the extensive and sophisticated use of AA AFRICAN MODERNITIES
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photography – digging into parish archives, private photo album, mission records, to retrieve
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and enhance those precious nuggets of historical knowledge. This is an immensely original way isI
of writing history, and it works wonders. Nkwi also uses written documents found in different toC
rA AND MOBILITIES
kinds of archives, including private ones.” icaN
JEAN-PIERRE WARNIER, author of Cameroon Grassfields Civilisation l E M
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hO An Historical Ethnography of Kom,
“Bringing current social science perspectives to his archival and ethnographic research on n
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the community of Kom, Walter Nkwi covers the convergence zones of Cameroon grassfields g
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customary practices, the apparatus of “newness” from schools and cars to text messages, the apR Cameroon, C. 1800-2008
scholarship about and experiences of indigenous “belonging” and diasporic identity, and hN
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much more. His “epiphanies” revealed as conclusions to this tour de force text will become the oI
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reader’s own.” KI
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MILTON KRIEGER, author of Cameroon’s Contemporary Culture and Politics mS
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“The quest to seek an African basis for the continuing relentless progress towards social change aN
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is given new language in this book by Walter Nkwi. It helps fills a gap in our knowledge of D
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how all the pieces of modernity fit together in African society, in the context of Northwest ro M
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Cameroon.” nO
,
STEVE HOWARD, Director, Center for International Studies and African Studies Program, CB
Professor, School of Media Arts and Studies, Ohio University . 1IL
8
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In this book Walter Gam Nkwi documents the complexities and nuances embedded in African -
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modernities and mobilities which have been overlooked in historical discourses in Africa and 0E
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Cameroon. Using an ethnographic historical approach and drawing on the intricacies of what it 8
has meant to be and belong in Kom– an ethnic community in the Northwest Region of Cameroon
– since 1800, he explores the discourses and practices of kfaang as central to any understanding
of mobility and modernity in Kom, Cameroon and Africa at large. The book unveils the emic
understanding of modernity through the history and ethnography of kfaang and its technologies
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and illustrates how these terminologies were conceived and perceived by the Kom people in
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their social and physical mobilities. It documents and analyzes the historical processes involved t
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in bringing about and making kfaang a defining feature of everyday life in Kom and among Kom r
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subjects.
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WALTER GAM NKWI holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. He N
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has published in peer review journals, book chapters and encyclopedias. He is currently the
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Faculty Officer in the Faculty of Engineering and Technology and also Senior Lecturer in the i
Department of History, University of Buea, Cameroon.
Langaa Research & Publishing
Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
North West Region Walter Gam Nkwi
Cameroon
African Modernities and Mobilities:
An Historical Ethnography of Kom,
Cameroon, C. 1800-2008
Walter Gam Nkwi
Langaa Research & Publishing CIG
Mankon, Bamenda
PPublisher:
Langaa RPCIG
Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
North West Region
Cameroon
[email protected]
www.langaa-rpcig.net
Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective
[email protected]
www.africanbookscollective.com
ISBN: 9956-762-72-5
© Walter Gam Nkwi 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any
information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher
DISCLAIMER
All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Jean-Pierre Warnier…………………..………………… v
Preface…………………………………………………………………. ix
Acknowledgement……………………………………………………. xi
1. Introduction: Theory and Progress of KKfaang…………………….. 1
2. Background and Methodology…………………………………….. 25
3. Kom In Global Communication Ecology, c.1800-c.2008b………... 53
4. Roads, Mobility and Kfaang, C.1928-1998…………………………. 81
5. Motor Vehicle (Afue’m A Kfaang)…………………………………. 107
6. Church, Christianity and Kfaang in Kom (Ndo Fiyini Ni Iwo
Fiyini Kfaang)…………………………………………………………. 131
7. School, Schooling and Literacy (ndogwali kfaang) 1928 to
c.1980…………………………………………………………………... 163
8. Letters and Letter Writers (Ghelii-Do Gwa-Ali Kfaang)………….. 189
9. Plantations, Coast (Itiini Kfaang), Bushfallers and Returned
Migrants……………………………………………………………….. 205
10. Ex-Service Men, (Ghiili-I-Wong-I-Kfaang) 1914-1946…………… 225
11. Elite Women (Ghii’ki Kfaang): Women and Newness in Colonial and
Post-Colonial Kom, Cameroon Since c.1930s………………………... 247
12. From Foot Messengers to Text Messengers c.1800-1998: Change and
Continuity of Kfaang Men…………………………………………….. 269
13. Mobility and Encounters With Different Worlds………………... 297
14. Conclusion: Kom Identity as Work In Progress…………………. 331
Bibliography…………………………………………………………... 345
iii
iv
Foreword
Jean-Pierre Warnier
You, the dedicated reader, have you ever thought of Christian churches as
technological tools? I guess not. Yet this is what Walter Nkwi suggests we
should do. He is right. You might object that a church cannot be compared to
a garage, a workshop of a factory. Are you sure? A factory turns out cars, or
washing machines. Won’t you agree that churches turn out Christians? Can’t
you see that they make use of tools of their own and implement given
techniques: baptism, sacraments, doctrine, choirs, celebrations?
What is a technique? It is an efficacious and traditional action on
somebody or something. Churches and Christianity, as techniques, are
traditional in the sense that the devotee has to apprentice him/herself to
something that is transmitted (and altered in the process) and that has its own
efficacy in shaping the believer’s behaviour, bodily conducts, knowledge,
consumption habits, social networks. So, yes, Walter Nkwi is right: Christian
churches are a technology of sorts. Let us say they produce and shape certain
kinds of persons, of subjects, of Kom subjects.
Walter Nkwi extends this approach to consumption goods, beer, bicycles,
cars travelling, mobility, media of communication. Take consumer goods.
Nkwi talks of soap, matches, salt, clothes brought from the coast to Kom by
plantation workers – at least those who survived the ordeal - in the 1920s and
1930s. Most people will say that such goods only concern the ordinary logistics
of daily life, that they do not shape different lifestyles, identities, subjectivities.
Wrong! Says Walter Nkwi. The travelling sophisticate – man or woman - has
gone to the coast and has marvelled at the sea retreating and coming back with
the tide just as s/he has marvelled at everything that can be experienced in an
urban setting. S/he will have been shaped, altered, changed in various ways
that will be embodied in new behaviour and consumption patterns. These in
turn, together with the consumer goods like cars, bicycles, shoes, boots,
bottled beer, pens, paper will be put to the test in Kom and, by and by, give
shape to a different, if contested, “Komness”.
Although Nkwi does not make any reference to the philosopher Michel
Foucault, I would say that his book is quite Foucauldian. Technology,
information media, mobility and social hierarchies encapsulated in the notion
of kfaang are technologies of the subject. They are means that any subject –
man or woman – can appropriate and domesticate or reject and by which s/he
will govern itself, shape its identity, and, at the same time, be subjected to
more external, social, forces. With kfaang, one becomes a different kind of
v
person. Benedicta – a prominent character in Nkwi’s book – is made of a
different stuff than her mother and sisters. She is a different kind of person.
But more than that, through her mobility, through being exposed to different
walks of life, countries, ways of eating, travelling, acquiring knowledge, she
herself has changed. She has become a different kind of person. She does not
govern her own life the way she used to, twenty or thirty years before Walter
Nkwi met her.
Kfaang, says Walter Nkwi, is nothing new. Kfaang did not begin with the
Bamenda-Kom tarred road, nor with the dirt road. Neither did kfaang begin
with the introduction of the coastal consumer goods in the 1920s. Kfaang did
not begin with the import of guns, gunpowder and beads long before the reign
of Fon Yuh.
Walter Nkwi is a historian. He knows that two, three centuries in the past,
Kom people were mobile. They experienced change, they were
communicating and exchanging information and knowledge. They had their
own techniques to do so. Let me add one more example to those given by the
author that will push us even further back into the past, beyond the threshold
of 1800 he takes as a benchmark in his book. Anytime as from 1600, Kom
farmers, like the coastal and Grassfields people, began experiencing with new
cultigens that came from America, especially groundnuts, tobacco, and certain
kinds of beans. Later on, around the middle of the 19th century, they adopted
maize. Around the turn of the 20th century they started cultivating even more
American cultigens: manioc, tomato, potatoes. With each new crop came
assorted bodies of knowledge on their cultivation, the way they could be used,
interspersed or not with other plants, cooked, and smoked in the case of
tobacco. So there was kfaang in the 17th century and even long before. This
implies that, if you want to analyse the way it works, you have to look way
back into the past and get interested in history.
Walter Nkwi’s book is about the history of kfaang. His concern is to
document and analyze this kind of historical process, and what it produces as
regards being a Kom subject. How does it shape Kom subjects and their
identity? His book does not only concern ideas that people have in their mind,
but their practice, what they perform and do in everyday life.
This is why he puts so much emphasis on photography. He makes an
extensive and sophisticated use of them, digging into parish archives, private
photo album, Mission records, to retrieve and enhance those precious nuggets
of historical knowledge. This is an immensely original way of writing history,
and it works wonders. He also uses written documents found in different
kinds of archives, including private ones.
vi
Let me make a plea on his behalf. You, the interested reader, do keep your
family archives preciously, including photographs, personal letters, private
documents, with the utmost care and piety. Why should you keep them? They
are basic ingredients in producing local historiography, something without
which Walter Nkwi could not have written such a convincing book on Kom
identity through kfaang.
Why should you read this book? Not every Kom person - not every
Grassfielder - will read it unfortunately. Some will do. For them, Nkwi’s book
will be a means to know who they are. They will discover the historical
processes that produced their Komness. How can we govern ourselves and
interact constructively with others if we do not know who we are, where we
come from, how we came about to be shaped the way we are, what are the
forces we and our forefathers met on our way and that we conjured, rejected
or domesticated? Not that such an identity is anything smooth and consistent.
It has its internal tensions, discontents and even conflicts. But those are part
and parcel of what made Kom people what they are. Whoever has walked
along the path drawn by Nkwi will be in a much better position to know about
self and others, and about their potential for enlightened action. S/he will be
in a better position to deal with kfaang in the future. It will keep going in ever
and ever new ways. And, in the end, it should be made clear that his book is
not only of concern exclusively to Kom people. Any Grassfielder, any
Cameroonian, any human being interested in our global world would gain
from pondering and meditating upon other people’s lives besides their own.
Emeritus Professor Jean-Pierre Warnier
Ethnologue, Centre d’études africaines, EHESS, Paris, France
Jean-Pierre Warnier has conducted research in political and economic
history in the Cameroon Grassfields since 1971. He has taught anthropology
at the Universities of Ahmadu Bello, Jos, Yaoundé I, and lastly Paris-
Descartes. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed the study of bodily and
material cultures as technologies of kingship and power. His latest publications
include The Pot-King. The Body and Technologies of Power. Leiden, Boston: Brill,
2007; and Cameroon Grassfields Civilization. Bamenda: Langaa, 2012
vii
viii
Preface
Physical mobility of people from place to place as individuals or as groups is
essentially horizontal, potentially limitless, and generally motivated by the
desire and ambition to take advantage of new opportunities for self or group
advancement. Between 1800 when the Kom people are assumed to have
settled in their present site, 1928 when the St. Anthony Primary School was
opened, 1998 when the road linking Kom and Bamenda was tarred and 2008
when Kom experienced the new ICT revolution, the number of people
travelling out of Kom and back steadily increased. They started, first by
trekking ever-longer distances out of Kom or away from home in pursuit of
trade, education and employment opportunities especially but not exclusively
in the plantations on the coast of Southern Cameroons. Ultimately, they would
venture beyond Cameroon to Nigeria and on to Europe. This spatial mobility
was greatly facilitated and accelerated by ‘modern’ transportation and
communication technologies like the roads and vehicles. Such persons were
usually among those whose horizons had been widened by other modern
agencies of change like the schools and churches which are themselves
considered as technologies in this study. In addition, they were the first people
to become familiar with the ‘singing’ and ‘talking boxes’ namely gramophones
and radios, as well as shoes, clothes and new cosmetics and in time would
possess them, thus further distinguishing themselves as people of newness and
the new way. They were also responsible for the introduction of new houses
constructed with zinc and stone. Restless and ambitious, educated through
schools like St. Anthony’s or by their daily encounters with the wider world,
they did not only form new Kom communities when they were away from
home but when they returned home from ‘abroad’ with their outlook changed
they formed new social strata and hierarchies in Kom society that enjoyed
enhanced prestige and social status. Indeed, they became purveyors of
newness and change. This was their reward for having travelled, lived, worked
and achieved away from Kom, thanks to the ‘new thing’ or ‘thing of newness’
or-Kfaang -- as it was called in the Kom language. The stories of Benedicta and
Anyway who are amongst the informants, and countless other Kom people
like them who included men and women, young and old - are at the heart of
this study. It is an illuminating metaphor for this complex, multidimensional
process and experience of social change and newness or kfaang.
This book describes the cumulative impact of generation after generation
on Kom of horizontal and vertical mobility and early twentieth century paths
of communication technologies on Kom people and their society. It raises
ix
