Indigenous Political Hierarchy and Sustainable Collective Meaning in the Changing Cameroon Grassfields

The legitimacy of Cameroon Grassfields' traditional government rested on mythic power origin, construction and spirituality. Endowed with transcendence that emanated from the primordial past, the sacred assignment of this indigenous political hierarchy exudes through conscious sustainable actions of collective existence, opportunities, benefits and development. But this determining value of societal control, concord, development and shape was soon lost to eccentric polemics. The selections in this volume, all by Grassfielders, present dynamic articulation of the struggle of the hierarchy with the dictates of time; dictates depicted by colonial, post independent and contemporary rudiments. They emphasize the unadulterated sacred purpose, value and role of sustained collectivism and development exposé which the indigenous government made patent before their sudden loss to foreign domination, control and expectations. The shovelling of this negative vibrant process is the contributors' own reassessment of the place of their principal institutions in the fast mutating society, the revitalization of their heritage, the reaffirmation of the meaningful politico-cultural rights, the reversion to, and re-establishment of, a real indigenous hegemony over the nature and influence of the region's collective being and development.