1 Introduction
Colonialism set in motion contact between groups of people, cultural knowledge systems, patterns of sociocultural interaction and languages (among many other things), the outcome of which is visible in current postcolonial contexts. A challenge to researchers of colonialism, especially in Africa, has been the unavailability or scantiness of documents produced during this period. These could provide access to the state of minds of the parties involved, the potential challenges they faced and the contact of starkly different social systems. Some of the documents that can be found in archives around the world are travel diaries, letters, journals, newspapers and telegraphs. Unfortunately, most of these were written by colonizers and therefore predominantly record their perspective (see, for example, Von Hagen 1908; Schuchardt 1979; Gilbert 1985; Weber 2012; Włodarczyk ٢٠١٣). However, a few also depict the perspective of the colonized and/or a clash of both, as in, for instance, the letters of Louisa Mvemve (Burns 2006). For a comprehensive understanding of how foreign and local patterns and structures of knowledges thrived during colonialism, we need access to both perspectives. How they interacted with or challenged each other is central to how they eventually co-existed or became hybridized.
The impact of colonial contact may be gauged from artifacts, written and visual material that was produced at that time. Through written correspondence between the different entities that were involved in colonialism, we get an insight into contemporaneous patterns of decision-making, intergroup communication and especially the contact, conflict and potential coalescence of inherently different and often conflictual knowledge systems as they happened. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the conflict of conceptualizations of the notion of age in letters written by colonial authorities and Indigenous Cameroonians during the colonization of the Southern Cameroons by Britain (1916–1960). Whereas for the British, being old signified senility and a time to retire, for the Indigenous population it was a mark of experience and wisdom, qualifying a person for further administrative authority or power. This
Using letters exchanged between British colonial authorities and Chief Manga Williams of Bimbia, in the British Southern Cameroons, I seek to answer the following questions: What conceptualizations of age were adopted in these colonial letters? How did these differ in letters written by colonial administrators and colonized subjects – in this case Chief Williams? What repertoires of knowledges drove their production, rejection and perhaps co-construction?
The rest of the chapter is organized thus. The next section offers a brief literature review of research on colonial correspondence, followed by an overview of the particular historical context of the British Southern Cameroons, where the correspondences that are analyzed in this chapter were written. Chief Manga Williams’s life and relationship with colonial officers, and the circumstances under which the letters were written, are presented as the major source of data. The section entitled, “Conceptualizations of Age: Conflicts of Knowledge”, is the core of the chapter, and illustrates perspectives on age with examples from letters written by colonial officials and Cameroonians. How these conflicting conceptualizations co-existed after Williams retired is discussed in the section that ensues. The conclusion calls for more historical data-driven investigations into the functioning of colonial encounters as a means of understanding processes of sociocultural and linguistic hybridism, coalescence and co-existence in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
2 Colonial Correspondence: a Brief Review
Clerks of the Colonial Office at that time had to be professional letter-writers therefore they must have had at their disposal a repertoire of more or less routinised forms of written communication. Moreover, these forms of communication must have been related to fairly clear conceptualizations of different discourse patterns.
It is to be expected, therefore, that writers corresponding outside the circle of colonial clerks relied on their own repertoires or employed letter-writing companies for the purpose. In the latter case, while the generic structure of the letter may have remained the same, the content and the conceptualization of issues often differed, reflecting the content dictated by the client. The Chief Manga Williams letters studied in this chapter bear traces of both. Williams himself was educated in English and German and perhaps wrote some of his letters. Some of the petition letters sent by Cameroonians to the colonial office were written by letter-writing agents – this was always indicated at the end of the letter.
In linguistics, not much research has been done on colonial correspondence, especially letters and how they reflect the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. A few studies, however, exist. The edited volumes by Stolz, Vossmann and Dewein (2011) and Engelberg and Stolberg (2012) deal with the impacts of German colonization on African and Oceanic languages and cultures at various levels. Among other things, the volumes explore contact between Indigenous languages and the German language and the place of colonial power structures. The impact of German on a dialect of the Beti language in German Kamerun (now Cameroon) is explored by Nyada (2011); Azamede (2011) demonstrates how Ewe was transformed from being an Indigenous people’s language to a religious lingua franca in German West African territories. The evolution of pidgins and creoles was also influenced, albeit minimally, during the German colonization of Cameroon (Weber 2011, 2012) and Papua New Guinea (Mühlhäusler 2012), in that German words and expressions were introduced into the lexicons of these languages. In most of these studies, the place of religious missionaries is accentuated and portrayed as central to the linguistic changes that took place (Stolberg 2011) and their spread beyond their immediate communities.
On the basis of predictions derived from locating the Samoan people “racially” and culturally, agents articulating themselves in the SZ [Samoanische Zeitung] discuss processes of cultural change and possible measures of preserving a “codified version” (Steinmetz 2004: 268) of fa’a Samoa (Samoan culture) … the cultural alterity of the Samoans is dynamically constructed in order to legitimise the colonial enterprise as a whole.
The unilateral conceptualization or construction of colonized subjects and their cultures along with their knowledges is a common facet of colonial discourses. However, examining correspondence and discourses produced by these subjects themselves is salient to understanding the instantiations of colonial contact and power. This chapter tries to fill this gap. But first, I describe the historical context of the British Southern Cameroons, where the exchanges analyzed here were written.
3 A Brief History of the Southern Cameroons
The colonial history of the territory known today as Cameroon/Cameroun is complex. Between 1887 and 1961, it was colonized by three European countries: Germany (1884–1916), France (1916–1960) and Britain (1916–1961). Shortly after the Berlin Conference of 1884, aimed at regulating European trade in and the colonization of Africa, the Germans signed a treaty with the Duala kings, Bell (Mbeli) and Akwa, on July 12, 1884, establishing the Protectorate, or Schutzgebiet, Kamerun. However, the kings preferred the British and had written a letter to the British consul in Calabar (Nigeria) indicating their “voluntary colonial submission” to Britain for the sake of peace and security (Fonlon 1969; Wolf
When Germany lost the war, its colonial territories were confiscated. Schutzgebiet Kamerun was taken over by France and Great Britain in March 1916, along the colonial boundaries established in 1910. France received more than four-fifths of the territory and Britain the remaining two strips of land neighbouring its colonial territory of Nigeria. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany officially relinquished ownership of its colonial territories as part of the postwar settlement. German Kamerun was mandated to France and Britain by the League of Nations, creating the current anglophone and francophone divide of present-day Cameroon.
In 1946, after the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, the Cameroon territories ceased to be mandated territories and became trusteeship territories, according to Article 77 of the UN Charter. Thus, political development was added to the mandate’s aims, which previously had been predominantly geared to social and economic development. Political development further ensured the territorial integrity of the territories. The French part was governed centrally from Paris (Ndam Njoya 1976: 135) because of its size and population. However, the British part, referred to as the British Southern Cameroons and the British Northern Cameroons, which was made up of “two long, narrow, mountainous strips of land … separated from each other by a gap of some forty to forty-five miles” (UNGA 1956: 116) with a small population, was merged with and administered from Nigeria, which Britain had colonized in 1884. The focus in this chapter is on the Southern Cameroons.
In 1960, French Cameroon obtained its independence from France, becoming La République du Cameroun. The British territories achieved independence in 1961 after a plebiscite that was intended to determine the nature of their post-independence existence. In the plebiscite, the British territories were asked to choose between joining French Cameroun or remaining with Nigeria. The British Northern Cameroons voted to remain with Nigeria and was integrated into that country. The British Southern Cameroons voted to unite with French Cameroun, a return to the German colonial entity, forming the Federal Republic of Cameroon. Today, as Map 10.1 shows, the former British Southern Cameroons constitute two administrative regions of the 10 regions of Cameroon. These are the Northwest and Southwest Regions, generally referred to as the anglophone zone.
Former Southern Cameroons (Anglophone) territory in Cameroon today
SOURCE: ANCHIMBE (2013: XXV). COPYRIGHT: ERIC A. ANCHIMBE
The data used for this chapter was culled from the long letters between Chief Manga Williams of Bimbia, Southern Cameroons, and the British colonial
Chief Johannes Manga Williams (OBE), born in 1876, was the grandson of Chief William (also known as Bile) of Bimbia. In 1858, Alfred Saker and the Baptist Missionary Society bought a piece of land from Manga Williams’s father, which they developed into a missionary settlement, later named Victoria. After the Germans annexed Cameroon in 1884, they negotiated with and acquired the Victoria settlement from the Baptist Missionary Society, and “replaced the Town Council and the Court of Justice with a Native Mixed Court” (Takougang 1994: 13). The members and president of this court were appointed directly by the German district officer (Bezirksamtmann or Stationsleiter), unlike the traditional cultural practice of hereditary chieftaincy and administration. In the post-German era, in 1937, the British district officer of Victoria wrote an intelligence report on the administrative strategies of the Germans. He detailed that “respect for the spiritual power and traditional knowledge of their elders was superseded by a sense of confidence in the younger men of ‘brain’ and ‘push’” (Allen 1937: File 8). As Takougang (1994: 14) confirms, “Manga Williams matched that profile. He was young (thirty-two years old in 1908), entrepreneurial and fluent in both the English and German languages”.
When the British took over the territory after the First World War, they kept Manga Williams in the position of Native Administrator and later appointed him the paramount chief, in part because he was educated (fluent in English and German), wealthy and intelligent. In the words of the Resident Administrator of the Cameroon Province, “there was no other suitable candidate” (Takougang 1994: 16). Both the Germans and the British granted access to power based on youth, vibrancy, education and wealth. The Indigenous perspective, however, additionally prized age and the wealth of experience gathered over time.
Chief Manga Williams therefore held two positions of power. He was the hereditary Chief of Bimbia as well as the Native Authority appointed by the British colonial office. As Native Authority he was, in line with the British colonial policy of indirect rule, the link between the Indigenous population and the British colonial administration.
The discursive construction of age, what it entails and its consequences or benefits differs between letters written by British colonial officials and those written by Cameroonians. These conceptualizations were tied to societal notions of responsibility, relevance and active contribution to society. For the British, age was tied to the number of years one had lived. The higher this number, the lower the cognitive ability of the person. This perhaps explains why, in several of the communications, the British officers felt it necessary to state Manga Williams’s age as a direct or indirect justification of their request that he retired.
In contrast, the Cameroonians did not refer directly to age in their correspondence. In none of the letters was Manga Williams’s age problematized, not even by his opponents, who wrote several petitions requesting his removal as Native Authority or President of the Victoria Federated Council. For this society, age was not automatically a hindrance to a person’s ability to serve their society. Possibly, this is why Manga Williams’s opponents instead stressed his supposed illegitimacy as hereditary ruler and his autocratic governance strategies as reasons for their petitions for his removal.
In the next sections, I use excerpts from the colonial letters on Chief Manga Williams to illustrate the conflict in knowledges about age between colonial and Indigenous actors, and how each group conceived of the relevance of age to society. All italics in the excerpts are mine, used for emphasis.
5.1 The Colonizers’ Conceptualization of Age
Sir, the truth of the matter is jealousy and covetousness. They [his fellow Cameroonians, authors of the petitions] say I have more interest in the Europeans for the native lands and that I am pro-British. This is not to bias your mind against them, but is a fact.
MANGA WILLIAMS 1949
The only excuse the British used to force Manga Williams to leave office, thereby clearing the way for their constitutional reform, was his age. Using age as a reason justified the offer of an honourable retirement with benefits. In examples 1–3 below, direct reference is made to his age and the colonial officials make it clear that Manga Williams is an old man. For instance, in Ex. 1, the Acting Resident writes to The Secretary in Enugu to recommend that Manga Williams’s request for a car allowance be granted. Among the several reasons Williams had advanced in his request was the expansive geographical nature of his administrative region. The Resident highlights Williams’s age, over 70 years, and hence the need “for him to travel in comfort if he is to carry out his duties” (Ex. 1).
Ex. 1. He is an old man (over 70 years of age) and it is essential for him to travel in comfort if he is to carry out his duties, therefore he had no option but to purchase a new car of proved reliance and comfort.
4.09.1947, AG. RESIDENT, CAMEROON PROVINCE TO THE SECRETARY, EASTERN PROVINCE, ENUGU
In 1947, the calls for Williams’s resignation or removal had just started. He still enjoyed the unwavering support of colonial officials, given his ardent loyalty to them. It is therefore understandable that the Acting Resident supported his request for a car allowance. In this letter, however, there is an implication that if Williams had been younger a car allowance would not have been necessary. The colonizers’ construction of age as a deciding factor in decision-making is undeniable.
Two years later, the petitions increased and the calls for constitutional reform that would introduce local governments similar to those in Nigeria signalled a progressivist turn in the colony, which favoured British policies. The District Officer for Victoria (Ex. 2) welcomed these calls but regretted that they
Ex. 2. The real difficulties are going to arise on Chief Manga Williams’ return. The people are now so awakening to ideas of constitutional reform and local government that, however regrettable it may be in the cause of efficiency and gratitude to a trusted public servant, he will never be able to resume his former position. Nor do I think the new situation has been brought about solely by his absence in England; it has only been hastened. It is to be remembered that such changes as have occurred have been brought about in a peaceful and constitutional manner, are fully in accordance with the new principles of local government and, but for the unfortunate consequences to “The Grand Old Man”, might almost justify us in moderate self-congratulation.
26.09.1949, DISTRICT OFFICER, VICTORIA DIVISION TO THE SENIOR RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE, BUEA
In the eyes of the British, constitutional changes “in accordance with the new principles of local government” (Ex. 2) took priority over their support for “a trusted public servant” like Williams. To justify their “moderate self-congratulation” in achieving peaceful constitutional changes, they used Williams’s age as the factor that rolled the dice. The choice of words “The Grand Old Man” signalled the end of an era in which the British relied on the concentration of colonial power and Indigenous hereditary power in one person. The introduction of local governments meant an end to Native Authority administrators who had doubled as chiefs and colonial administrators – one of whom was Williams.
Whereas the end of the era of an absolute single ruler as a link between the colonized people and the colonial administration was usually triggered from bottom to top and peaceful, the British found themselves stuck with Chief Manga Williams, whose loyalty they had enjoyed. How were they to discard him? Would it not be a betrayal of this loyalty to simply tell Williams they did not need him anymore? To avoid a messier break up than it already seemed to be in the exchange of letters over a seven-year period, they decided to invoke age – the natural phenomenon of growing old, getting weaker and less active. The District Officer for Victoria therefore decided to send Williams into honourable retirement not because of the petitions against him but because he was old and “undoubtedly failing somewhat” (Ex. 3).
26.09.1949, DISTRICT OFFICER TO SENIOR RESIDENT
Ex. 3. I have come to the regretful conclusion that Chief Manga Williams who is 75 and undoubtedly failing somewhat, will pretty soon have to proceed into honourable retirement, and the Council must be told of our intention that he should do so. It is we who have sown the seed, and we cannot now preach two sets of precept, nor is the compromise of constitutional monarchy open to him as in the north, because he is not properly speaking “a monarch”. He must receive a substantial pension, a reasonable proportion of which must be paid by the Victoria Native Treasury and the balance by the Government in recognition of his public services and his loyal support of British rule against dissident influences. In view of the dearth of genuine leadership in the Cameroons, I think it is not out of place to suggest some further decoration.
In none of the letters written by the colonial officials who had contact with Williams or in the many petitions written against him by Cameroonians is it mentioned anywhere that Chief Manga Williams was failing because of his age. In Ex. 6, the petitioners, who were his fellow Cameroonians, do not problematize his age nor do they suggest he is weak or ailing and hence unfit to rule.
For the district officer, Williams could not be a constitutional monarch, as in the North, which would have granted him access to power for life. So, to further compensate him for the loss of his power and for his “loyal support of British rule against dissident influences”, Williams was granted “a substantial pension” and “some further decoration” (Ex. 3) as well as possible honorary positions on council boards.
Examples 1–3 show an insistence by the British on age and the supposed corresponding decline in cognitive and physical abilities as a disqualifier for holding colonial power. In Ex. 1, Williams’s request for a car allowance is positively supported by the Acting Resident, among other things, because “He is an old man (over 70 years of age)”. In Ex. 2, Williams, “The Grand Old Man” must lose his previous position of power because a new wave of local government reform leaves him no space. He supposedly belongs to the past because he is old. In Ex. 3, the British claim that at 75 he is failing and must retire honourably. The British conceptualization of age was hypothetically tied to an imagined natural biological curve of life that is expected to fall as one grows older. Did the colonized Southern Cameroonians share this same view of age? The next section offers an answer to this question, with examples from Williams’s letters and the petitions written by his compatriots.
Several studies have highlighted the importance of age-based hierarchy in African societies. In some societies, age difference is a non-negotiable marker of superiority and an indicator of who owes who respect, deference and politeness. Age tends to be linked to society’s baggage of accumulated knowledge and is “tied to lived experience and generationally transmitted access to the society’s history, knowledge and code of conduct” (Anchimbe 2021: 126). Similarly, Macia et al. (2019: 819) explain that, in Senegal, “older adults are without doubt the keepers of traditional values and the guarantors of the perpetuation of community habitus”. Chiangong (2021: 6) describes “the role of the elderly as custodians of their community’s history and culture … as keen observers of the transformation of societal values”. What these three quotes indicate is that, in African societies, the older one gets, the wiser and more knowledgeable one becomes. Age is therefore not linked with the natural decline of cognitive and physical abilities, as in the British conceptualization, but with the acquisition of knowledge that society needs for its success and future. This conceptualization is evident in the arguments in examples 4–6.
The petition letters written by the Southern Cameroonians do not mention age as an impeding influence in the ability to keep power. They shared the same cultural background as Williams and so identified with the same conception of age. Manga Williams, for instance, had gathered a wealth of wisdom and experience during his long life which he believed was relevant for the country. He lamented, “this country is wanting in wisdom and understanding” (Ex. 4), which explains why he was “desirous to exhort and teach” the self-seeking (younger) people of his society the wisdom and knowledge he had assembled as “an old administrator”, with the hope that “in future a few may be found among them to be of some use towards the progress and general welfare of this country” (Ex. 4).
Ex. 4. As an old administrator for so many years and a native I know so many things and have experienced so many things during my time and have been very tolerant especially that I found that this country is wanting in wisdom and understanding and being desirous to exhort and teach them that in future a few may be found among them to be of some use towards the progress and general welfare of this country, for at present nothing but selfseeking is the main object and nothing else.
10.11.1949, MANGA WILLIAMS, PRESIDENT FEDERATED COUNCIL, VICTORIA TO THE SENIOR RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE, BUEA
Williams encapsulated the duty expected of the older and experienced members of society. At 75, he considered himself to be full of wisdom and
In Ex. 5, Williams invokes the cultural value of age as being positive, that is “a man of good age”, to justify his request for a car allowance and other benefits in the event of his retirement. This positive casting of age as good incorporates other values like wisdom, maturity, ripeness and understanding.
Ex. 5. I can gather by this action that the simple reason is that a person serving in the Native Administration is an inferior to those serving under the Government and as such N.A. members are unworthy of provisions which are not only necessary for the performance of my duties but also for my health being as a man of good age and long service which you are not ignorant of.
05.01.1952, MANGA WILLIAMS TO THE RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE
Ex. 6. That times and again, through petitions and interviews, have we been suggesting to the Government the needs for changes and urging it to accede to our demands of reform in our Native Administration Judicial and Executive works but have often met with disappointment. Mr J.M. Williams, O.B.E. whose father as stated above was never a village Head nor a Chief but an ordinary foreign-native who came to sojourn in Bimbia with his son has, since many years past and through support of the Government, been allowed to rule the indigenes autocratically and as it pleases him.
11.08.1949, PETITION BY MUSUKA ET AL. TO THE GOVERNOR, LAGOS
The framing of old age as a wealth of lived experiences embellished with wisdom and understanding (Ex. 4) and as good (Ex. 5) in Indigenous conceptualizations contradicts the British perspective, which considered old age a determinant for retirement from active public service. We see both perspectives at work and in conflict with one another in the correspondence between the colonial and Indigenous actors. This clash epitomizes the differences in social and knowledge systems that came into contact during colonial times. How this conflict was resolved and how the two systems fared thereafter is the focus of the next section.
6 Co-existence of Conceptualizations: Age and Spheres of Power
Colonialism thrived through violent and peaceful clashes, subjugations, takeovers and coalescences of sociocultural, political, educational, religious, linguistic and economic systems. Precolonial systems clashed with colonially introduced ones in various ways and domains. The outcomes generally varied, depending on the societal system or social domain involved. Whereas religion was often authoritatively imposed and consolidated, leaving little space for Indigenous religious practices, other domains gradually fused together or co-existed in delimited and independent domains. Administration was one of them. The colonially introduced, centralized, political national government flourished when nation-states were created at independence. However, these nation-states functioned, sometimes side by side, with ethnic, clan or village kingdoms and chiefdoms. Two succinct examples are the Asante Kingdom in Ghana (Obeng 1986) and the Kingdom of the Baganda in Uganda (Reid 2017). The colonial judicial system co-existed and still co-exists with the customary law systems that are a continuation of precolonial, Indigenous arbitration systems.
The Manga Williams Papers expose a similar clash of political systems and of conceptualizations linked to them, such as political vs hereditary power, age-based claims vs appointment-based claims to power, retirement vs lifetime right to office, among others. For Williams, and by extension Southern Cameroonians, age granted him the wisdom and experience needed to continue in
Ex. 7. We the Victoria Federated Native Authority resolve that in the event of his resignation from the Native Authority for any reason Chief Manga Williams will be paid during his life time a pension of £300 per year from the funds of this Native Authority.
17.01.1952, RESOLUTION OF VICTORIA FEDERATED NATIVE AUTHORITY
Ex. 8. The way now seems to be open for Local Government reform.
18.01.1952, ACTING RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE TO THE COMMISSIONER OF THE CAMEROONS, BUEA
Aware that his opponents had castigated him as an obstacle to local government reforms in their petitions and that the colonial government might have been persuaded by this argument, Williams felt the need to set the record straight. In a letter responding to the petitions and accepting his retirement, he emphatically refuted that he was “an obstacle in the way of progress in the Local Government” (Ex. 9).
05.01.1952, MANGA WILLIAMS TO THE RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE
Ex. 9. My being born here and brought up under a religious Mission training, and by natural inclination had never misled me to act as it were autocratic in any way, but to perform all my duties according to the organizations of the Governments in charge of the country and so I wish the Government had not been entertaining any wrong notion in the belief that the well invented story of my antagonists who cleverly employed the falsehood of my being against the introduction of the Local Government was true. I have never been against any constitution as far as it is hoped to further the progress and welfare of the people. If the Authority introducing the Constitution fails to achieve the right aims and purpose for which the Constitution had been created, it is their business and not for me to oppose. I hope therefore that the retirement had not been considered as treating me as an obstacle in the way of progress in the Local Government, but will serve for its success.
Williams’s letter (Ex. 9) is significant in that it resolved the clash between the colonial and Indigenous systems. By declaring that he was not an obstacle, he opened the way for the new system to establish itself in the political constellation. But the question is, what happened to the hereditary power of chief that he held?
Although the colonizers won by pushing Williams out of the colonial power apparatus, their victory was not significant because it was limited to only that sphere of power – the colonial political power. Williams continued ruling as the Chief of Bimbia endowed with hereditary power, which he valued as “ordained by God” and “cannot be bought with money” (Ex. 10). Thus, the hereditary power of a chief triumphed.
Ex. 10. Whether I be a member of the New Constitution or not I am and will ever remain a Chief whether I hold an office or not, for the actual meaning of a chief by inheritance and right cannot be bought with money and it is a fact that promotion comes from God alone. My appointment was ordained by God and therefore I thank God for not having abused it.
05.01.1952, MANGA WILLIAMS TO THE RESIDENT, CAMEROONS PROVINCE
The two spheres of power therefore co-existed, each occupying its own ambit of influence and applying different norms and conceptualizations of age and power. For the colonizers, age determined how long a person could wield power before qualifying for honourable retirement. For the Bimbian or Cameroonian
These two systems co-exist even today in the two spheres of power and authority: the government with its political and electoral procedures and the Indigenous, tribal and ethnic with its hereditary rights to power. To the latter belong Fons, Chiefs, Lamidos, Quarterheads, etc. While the Indigenous system functions on a hereditary or inheritance axis, the government functions on an electoral and political appointment axis.
7 Conclusion
The chapter set out to describe the conflicting conceptualizations of age of colonial officers and Indigenous subjects, as reflected in letters written during the British colonization of the British Southern Cameroons. Using the Manga Williams Papers, I illustrated that the relationship between age and access to power was construed differently between the two actors. For the British, age determined when an official should retire from service. But for the Cameroonians, age was the golden period of knowledge and wisdom when a person was most resourceful and could help society from a position of power.
During the colonial era, these two perspectives often conflicted, but in Cameroon they now co-exist in delimited spheres of influence. The hybridism, syncretism and co-existence of sociocultural, linguistic, religious and economic systems in contemporary postcolonial contexts may have emerged in ways similar to those described here about age. How this happened can be understood only by studying records produced during this era, exploring how different actors interacted with one another, arrived at the decisions they made and overcame challenges from peers and opponents, and the discursive choices they used to express their positionalities. The data I used here is intended to offer this view. More studies that adopt a similar data-driven approach based on real-life data produced during colonial times will certainly provide additional in-depth understanding of cultural hybridism, social co-existence and multilingual processes triggered by colonialism.
Acknowledgement
My sincere thanks to Glory Essien Otung, the project research assistant, for collecting most of the correspondences on which this research is based.
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