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Publish or Perish, or How to Write a Social History of the Wàndala (Northern Cameroon)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Hermann Forkl
Hermann Forkl*
Affiliation:
Linden-Museum, Stuttgart
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Extract

It has been in the tradition of this journal to elaborate a methodological apparatus to scrutinize the evidence of older written sources on African history. However, for various reasons, we tend to apply a different standard to recent sources, apparently considering them reliable per se because they developed in the same enlightened context of Western intellectual life as our own. Book reviews, nearly the only refuge for Western self criticism, sometimes cannot achieve it, as I will show.

The source on which I would like to comment is a dissertation completed at Boston University in 1984. It is based on oral traditions and for this reason, strictly speaking, a written source itself, apart from a number of published as well as archival sources, whose way of quotation will be re-examined below at first. The interviews were conducted by the author in 1974/75 (Morrissey 1984:225) with north Cameroonian Wandala and Shuwa Arab informants, some of whom I became acquainted with during my own fieldwork in 1984.1 would argue, though, that the following comments are not solely of interest to scholars specializing in northern Cameroon.

It might seem to some rather heavy-handed to criticize so closely a doctoral dissertation, but American dissertations are freely available to interested parties in both photocopy and microfilm. As a result they are commonly cited in other works in much the same way as more formally published studies. This being the case, it seems reasonable to submit them to the same scrutiny as any other work in the public domain. I should point out that I conducted my own fieldwork in ignorance of Morrissey's work, becoming aware of the latter only after my return from the field in 1984.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 77 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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