A Bibliography of Cameroon


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Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon


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Cameroon is a country endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals, substantial forests, and a dynamic population. It 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. Although Cameroon has made economic progress since independence, it has not been able to change the dependent nature of its economy. The economic situation combined with the dismal record of its political history, indicate that prospects for political stability, justice, and prosperity are dimmer than they have been for most of the country's independent existence. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon has been updated to reflect advances in the study of Cameroon's history as well as to provide coverage of the years since the last edition. It relates the turbulent history of Cameroon through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Cameroon history from the earliest times to the present.




Doing Business in Cameroon


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A vivid ethnographic study of cattle traders, truckers, public contractors and NGO actors' everyday encounters with state bureaucracies in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon.




Socrates in Cameroon


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Bernard Nsokika Fonlon, 1924-1986, rose from humble origins to become one of Cameroon s most famous sons. He was a scholar, a poet, a politician, a philosopher, a man of action and a man of courage. He was never too busy to see someone who was troubled, never too tired to take up the case of the oppressed or the downtrodden. He was a man who could communicate, with style, In half a dozen world languages but who could also use Pidgin English if it meant putting his listeners at ease. He was a man who moved in opulent circles but who collected for himself not money but the hearts of those who got to know him. it is easy to use superlatives of someone like Bernard Fonlon, easy to make him sound like a sage or a sa∫ it is less easy to describe the humour And The courtesy And The gentleness that irradiated all that he said and did. This book describes briefly the life and times of a man whose story incorporates the history of a young nation and whose autobiography, The Pathfinder, has all the excitement of an adventure novel. We could use a lot of words and still not get To The heart of the matter because ordinary words are for ordinary men and Bernard Fonlon was unique. To those who knew him, no introduction is necessary; to those who did not know him, no short introduction is enough. Bernard Fonlon did not leave a worldly legacy to his family and friends and country. He left much more. He left ideas that can never be buried and ideals that will challenge new generations.




Lela in Bali


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"Lela in Bali tells the story of an annual festival of eighteenth-century kingdoms in Northern Cameroon that was swept up in the migrations of marauding slave-raiders during the nineteenth century and carried south towards the coast. Lela was transformed first into a mounted durbar, like those of the Muslim states, before evolving in tandem with the German colonial project into a festival of arms. Reinterpreted by missionaries and post-colonial Cameroonians, Lela has become one of the most important of Cameroonian festivals and a crucial marker of identity within the state, Richard Fardon's reconstruction of two hundred years of history is an essential contribution not only to Cameroonian studies but also to the broader understanding of the evolution of African cultures."--BOOK JACKET.




African Crossroads


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Cameroon is characterized by an extraordinary geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This collection of essays by eminent historians and anthropologists summarizes three generations of research in Cameroon that began with the collaboration of Phyllis Kaberry and E. M. Chilver soon after the Second World War and continues to this day. The idea for this book arose from a concern to recognize the continuing influence of E. M. Chilver on a wide variety of social, historical, political and economic studies. The result is a volume with a broad historical scope yet one that also focuses on major contemporary theoretical issues such as the meaning and construction of ethnic identities and the anthropological study of historical processes. For more information on this title and related publications, go to http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Chilver/index.html




Journalism and Mass Communication in Africa


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Journalism and Mass Communication in Africa provides the first in-depth analysis of the evolution of mass communication and the impact of new media technologies in Cameroon. Written and edited by African scholars, this volume maps out the changing media ecology of Cameroon and provides practical survey methods for communication research. The work details the impact mass public communication has had on the empowerment of Cameroon's 15 million people and the development of grassroots participatory democracy.




Nation Without Narration


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"This book traces the roots of the current turmoil and sheds light on overlooked factors impacting nation building in post-colonial Cameroon. It demonstrates the urgency of cross-disciplinary work on African societies and the continued relevance of postcolonial criticism as a theoretical framework. It extends the postcolonial critique inaugurated by Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration into twenty-first-century sub-Saharan Africa. It also reframes the question of modernity and development in this context, suggesting an approach with bearing on people's lived experience. This study draws from a diversity of fields-political science, literature, history, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies-to demonstrate the limitations of a philosophy of nation building that turned into state consolidation. It is a timely study on Cameroon's currently volatile situation that is applicable to other postcolonial contexts, in Africa and elsewhere"--




Youth and Nation-Building in Cameroon. A Study of National Youth Day Messages and Leadership Discourse (1949-2009)


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This meticulous and comprehensive documentation of Cameroonian Youth Day Messages and leadership discourse on youth from 1949 - 2009 is a gold mine for researchers, historians and anyone interested in studying youth, politics and society in Africa. The book presents and explores themes and content of Youth Day Messages: how these messages tied in with, or veered away from, key events and issues of the time; how they served as a platform for West Cameroon governments, and the Ahidjo and Biya regimes to articulate their political vision, justify their policies, sell their respective ideologies to the youth; and what lessons could be drawn from them on competing, conflicting and complementary perspectives on youth agency in Cameroon and Africa. Churchill links the Youth Day to ongoing discussions in Africa about the role and place of youths as agents of development in Africa. Most significantly, he finally puts Cameroon's controversial Youth Day in its appropriate historical context - not as a political device created by the Francophone politicians to distort Cameroonian history and erase 'plebiscite day' from the collective memory as Anglophone nationalists claim, but as a British Cameroons colonial legacy, successfully sold to the Ahidjo regime as a day to be commemorated throughout the federation, by leaders of the federated state of West Cameroon. Churchill Ewumbue-Monono, a senior career diplomat, is Minister Counsellor in the Cameroon Embassy in Moscow. A graduate of the International Higher School of Journalism, and the International Relations Institute of Cameroon in the University of Yaounde, he was a 1991-92 Fellow in Public Diplomacy in Boston University, USA. He has served in Cameroon in various professional capacities. Ewumbue-Monono has written extensively on Cameroon's political history, and his books include Men of Courage, published in 2005.




Cameroon's Tycoon


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Max Esser was an adventurous young merchant banker, a Rhinelander, who became the first managing director of the largest German plantation company in Cameroon. This volume gives a vivid account of the antecedents and early stages as experienced and described by Esser. In 1896 he ventured, with the explorer Zintgraff, into the hinterland to seek the agreement of Zintgraff's old ally, the ruler of Bali, for the provision of laborers for his projected enterprise. The consequences, many optimistically unforeseen, are illustrated with the help of contemporary materials. Esser's account is preceded by a look at his and his family's connections, added to by an account of newspaper campaigns against him, and completed by an examination of his Cameroon collection, which he gave to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.




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