Mandu Yenu
Because of the diminishing returns of endlessly finessing what I've done before doing more archival work, I'm leaving the chapters on royal visits to Germany to the side for the moment, although there is still work to be done on the Samoa / Tamasese chapter and I'm heading out to the Krupp archive for some information about Chlalongkorn's stay in Essen with them.
This week I've moved on to look at an example of royal reciprocal gift giving and its role in German colonialism. Part of this is examining the not exactly famous but not exactly unknown 'gift' of the Bamum throne of King / Sultan / Emir / Njoya to the Kaiser for his birthday. It means diving into the most recent work (and the old stuff too) on German Cameroon, which is great, as I'm a bit behind on that material. The big works by Stefanie Michels and Christraud Geary are currently on my desk, as are the memoirs of Theodor Seitz. It also means revisiting some material on German anthropology and looking at museology and curatorial studies. It's all heavily contested terrain at the moment.
Behind this chapter lurks the story of the joint German / Bamum military campaign against the Nso and local diplomatic, political and military dynamics. Thrown into this is the complicated relationship between Njoya, the Basel missionaries in the region, German traders and the representatives of the German state. The latter were mostly in the coastal region and relied on the assistance of Njoya to keep the hinterland stable.
I'm trying to foreground Njoya's sense of what was going on and to juxtapose it against German accounts. Happily, Njoya left a memoir, albeit much later. Unhappily it's in French and that will make it difficult for me - slow work! After World War One, he became one of Robert Aldrich's 'banished potentates' and so had some time to write, apparently. Some important bits of his history have been translated by Christraud Geary, but I will have to trawl through the original myself.
One thing I'm also toying with is threading through Esposito's notion of munus - perpetual gift giving. Esposito has a very nifty theory of the gift as a form of political obligation, which the German administration and the Kaiser (albeit due to being poorly advised and not understanding what was at stake) both recognise and get entirely wrong.
I was hoping to keep this book light on theory, but I might be able to have my cake and eat it too by weaving the theory through the footnotes for those who want it, while leaving the narrative unclogged. Not sure yet. Thankfully the historiography is not too voluminous, but the 'decolonising' moment (not that it's necessarily about decolonisation at all) offers scope for some advanced discussion.
This takes me back to my current dilemma - audience. I'd like to try for a scholarly monograph that is accessible to the broader public this time. Don't laugh. The result, I'm afraid will be that it falls between two stools. And I hate glossing over complexity. It'll be a miracle if I can tell a complete and complex story in user-friendly prose. Some things are just hard to talk about and shouldn't be over-simplified.
But this example, Njoya's throne, stands a chance of being intelligible on all the levels at once, I hope. We'll see.
This week I've moved on to look at an example of royal reciprocal gift giving and its role in German colonialism. Part of this is examining the not exactly famous but not exactly unknown 'gift' of the Bamum throne of King / Sultan / Emir / Njoya to the Kaiser for his birthday. It means diving into the most recent work (and the old stuff too) on German Cameroon, which is great, as I'm a bit behind on that material. The big works by Stefanie Michels and Christraud Geary are currently on my desk, as are the memoirs of Theodor Seitz. It also means revisiting some material on German anthropology and looking at museology and curatorial studies. It's all heavily contested terrain at the moment.
Behind this chapter lurks the story of the joint German / Bamum military campaign against the Nso and local diplomatic, political and military dynamics. Thrown into this is the complicated relationship between Njoya, the Basel missionaries in the region, German traders and the representatives of the German state. The latter were mostly in the coastal region and relied on the assistance of Njoya to keep the hinterland stable.
I'm trying to foreground Njoya's sense of what was going on and to juxtapose it against German accounts. Happily, Njoya left a memoir, albeit much later. Unhappily it's in French and that will make it difficult for me - slow work! After World War One, he became one of Robert Aldrich's 'banished potentates' and so had some time to write, apparently. Some important bits of his history have been translated by Christraud Geary, but I will have to trawl through the original myself.
One thing I'm also toying with is threading through Esposito's notion of munus - perpetual gift giving. Esposito has a very nifty theory of the gift as a form of political obligation, which the German administration and the Kaiser (albeit due to being poorly advised and not understanding what was at stake) both recognise and get entirely wrong.
I was hoping to keep this book light on theory, but I might be able to have my cake and eat it too by weaving the theory through the footnotes for those who want it, while leaving the narrative unclogged. Not sure yet. Thankfully the historiography is not too voluminous, but the 'decolonising' moment (not that it's necessarily about decolonisation at all) offers scope for some advanced discussion.
This takes me back to my current dilemma - audience. I'd like to try for a scholarly monograph that is accessible to the broader public this time. Don't laugh. The result, I'm afraid will be that it falls between two stools. And I hate glossing over complexity. It'll be a miracle if I can tell a complete and complex story in user-friendly prose. Some things are just hard to talk about and shouldn't be over-simplified.
But this example, Njoya's throne, stands a chance of being intelligible on all the levels at once, I hope. We'll see.
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