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The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields
The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today’s youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book.
Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today’s youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.
Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today’s youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.
385 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2007
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May 19, 2013
Argenti's book should shake to the core any person who has a legacy of slavery in their family history, as I do. Argenti offers a masterful ethnography of people who still, as Mbembe notes in "La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920-1960)" (p. 388), dream of being chained and led to the sea. This hit me still harder because I spent two years among these wonderful, strong, creative people who even now are full of satirical humor and awareness of life's ironies. That they could be so generous with a representative of people that have exploited their young people for centuries is itself beyond comprehension. It also justifies tendencies among some to view me at first as primarily a reservoir of financial capital.
Though the descriptions of masking performances are as yet unmatched, Argenti's theoretical and epistemological approach are deeply problematic. In this context, useful critiques have been written by Scott MacEachern (http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev....) and Filip De Boeck (http://www.academia.edu/3014546/Revie...). In particular, I think important questions can be raised about whether people in the Grassfields are really silent about the histories of slavery and forced labor, and therefore to what extent historical insights must be based on unarticulated collective interactions of "peoples." Perhaps the author put too much faith in ethnographic observation, at the expense of interviews. Broadening these questions would allow not only Argenti's discourse- and image-intensive perspective (involving Mbembe, Roitman, Bakhtin and Foucault) but also James Scotts' and Steven Feierman's work on consciousness and on-stage/off-stage work; Foucault's equivocal micro-politics of self-discipline (governmentality); and Marc Edelman's work on social movements and strategic invocation of "peasants" among others. Ethnographies and interviews could be structured with the idea that both elite and marginalized (like their Western interlocutors) are able to at least partially articulate the structures/processes/representations underlying long generations of exploitation. Thus, research could concentrate not only on cultural sense-making but also on strategic positioning through representation, location and action.
Argenti begins his book with the proposition that, "[d]espite young people's ongoing struggles against marginalization and of resistance to oppression in the Grassfields, not a word was spoken to me about slavery or forced labor during the duration of my stays in the region." (p. 3) He puts this down to the immense traumas faced by the community as the result of these acts, traumas that persist to this day in the autocratic Cameroon state. He makes this clear in detailing an attack in 1996-1997: "The violence of the paramilitary forces was so acute on this occasion that the population of Oku was forced to flee into the surrounding forest, retracing the steps of their ancestors, who had escaped into the mountains to seek refuge from raiding Chamba slave catchers, or later, as members of the floating population, to evade the impositions of oppressive chiefs and colonial labor recruiters ..." (p. 31)
Argenti argues that this climate of trauma-induced silence, combined with fragmentary explicit or "objective" historical records of slavery and forced labor, requires that long experiences with slavery, oppression and rebellion be studied through the "embodied or belated" histories of masking performances. "The ambiguous mythical histories and the agonistic dances of the Grassfields bear witness to the underlying social and political continuities in the relations between youth and elites that belie hegemonic modernist discourses and imaginaries of revolutionary historical transformation and progress (p. 6) ... Although it may be tempting from an empirical point of view to dismiss that which is not made explicit (and thus effectively to erase it from the historical record), we are called upon to recognize that peoples find ways of bearing witness to the silences of their histories -- ways that are found where language and discursive memory break down" (p. 22). The operative word here, I suggest, is "peoples." Peoples encompass, and are encompassed by, cultural structures which perpetuate hierarchies of exploitation, serve as non-discursive outlets for historical/current traumas, and provide some space for ironic resistance. Masking performances therefore offer, according to Argenti, ways to understand the "inescapable features of violent pasts [that] exist in the perpetual present of the struggles and cleavages that they have spawned ... (p. 23)"
Argenti then lays out through graphical accounts and inference a compelling narrative of the continuities between pre-colonial slave raids, colonial forced labor regimes, and post-colonial state/palatine joint exploitation. Palace figures attempt to legitimate their hierarchical control, including past enslavement and human sacrifice, through justificatory myths that are then subject to "revisions, doublings and veiled critiques" (p. 34) by "youth." This idea of "youth" is problematic because it has as much to do with marginalization as with age. "Relative seniority is not calculated simply on the basis of age but by means of a complex, multilayered assessment of an individual's economic power, social connections, kinship and affinal ties, gender, esoteric knowledge, membership in secret societies and military organizations, position in the hierarchy, and so on." (p. 7). "Youth," by virtue of marginalization, have for generations been subject to bachelorhood, penury, placelessness and enslavement. They have also therefore been at the forefront of socio-political and socio-economic transformation, from establishment of new fondoms, to charged interactions with missionaries and colonial figures (the tapenta boys).
Though the descriptions of masking performances are as yet unmatched, Argenti's theoretical and epistemological approach are deeply problematic. In this context, useful critiques have been written by Scott MacEachern (http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev....) and Filip De Boeck (http://www.academia.edu/3014546/Revie...). In particular, I think important questions can be raised about whether people in the Grassfields are really silent about the histories of slavery and forced labor, and therefore to what extent historical insights must be based on unarticulated collective interactions of "peoples." Perhaps the author put too much faith in ethnographic observation, at the expense of interviews. Broadening these questions would allow not only Argenti's discourse- and image-intensive perspective (involving Mbembe, Roitman, Bakhtin and Foucault) but also James Scotts' and Steven Feierman's work on consciousness and on-stage/off-stage work; Foucault's equivocal micro-politics of self-discipline (governmentality); and Marc Edelman's work on social movements and strategic invocation of "peasants" among others. Ethnographies and interviews could be structured with the idea that both elite and marginalized (like their Western interlocutors) are able to at least partially articulate the structures/processes/representations underlying long generations of exploitation. Thus, research could concentrate not only on cultural sense-making but also on strategic positioning through representation, location and action.
Argenti begins his book with the proposition that, "[d]espite young people's ongoing struggles against marginalization and of resistance to oppression in the Grassfields, not a word was spoken to me about slavery or forced labor during the duration of my stays in the region." (p. 3) He puts this down to the immense traumas faced by the community as the result of these acts, traumas that persist to this day in the autocratic Cameroon state. He makes this clear in detailing an attack in 1996-1997: "The violence of the paramilitary forces was so acute on this occasion that the population of Oku was forced to flee into the surrounding forest, retracing the steps of their ancestors, who had escaped into the mountains to seek refuge from raiding Chamba slave catchers, or later, as members of the floating population, to evade the impositions of oppressive chiefs and colonial labor recruiters ..." (p. 31)
Argenti argues that this climate of trauma-induced silence, combined with fragmentary explicit or "objective" historical records of slavery and forced labor, requires that long experiences with slavery, oppression and rebellion be studied through the "embodied or belated" histories of masking performances. "The ambiguous mythical histories and the agonistic dances of the Grassfields bear witness to the underlying social and political continuities in the relations between youth and elites that belie hegemonic modernist discourses and imaginaries of revolutionary historical transformation and progress (p. 6) ... Although it may be tempting from an empirical point of view to dismiss that which is not made explicit (and thus effectively to erase it from the historical record), we are called upon to recognize that peoples find ways of bearing witness to the silences of their histories -- ways that are found where language and discursive memory break down" (p. 22). The operative word here, I suggest, is "peoples." Peoples encompass, and are encompassed by, cultural structures which perpetuate hierarchies of exploitation, serve as non-discursive outlets for historical/current traumas, and provide some space for ironic resistance. Masking performances therefore offer, according to Argenti, ways to understand the "inescapable features of violent pasts [that] exist in the perpetual present of the struggles and cleavages that they have spawned ... (p. 23)"
Argenti then lays out through graphical accounts and inference a compelling narrative of the continuities between pre-colonial slave raids, colonial forced labor regimes, and post-colonial state/palatine joint exploitation. Palace figures attempt to legitimate their hierarchical control, including past enslavement and human sacrifice, through justificatory myths that are then subject to "revisions, doublings and veiled critiques" (p. 34) by "youth." This idea of "youth" is problematic because it has as much to do with marginalization as with age. "Relative seniority is not calculated simply on the basis of age but by means of a complex, multilayered assessment of an individual's economic power, social connections, kinship and affinal ties, gender, esoteric knowledge, membership in secret societies and military organizations, position in the hierarchy, and so on." (p. 7). "Youth," by virtue of marginalization, have for generations been subject to bachelorhood, penury, placelessness and enslavement. They have also therefore been at the forefront of socio-political and socio-economic transformation, from establishment of new fondoms, to charged interactions with missionaries and colonial figures (the tapenta boys).
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