Nkemvou, Nelo, and Tabula

Anticolonial Resistance to “Labor Recruitment” in the Early Twentieth-Century Cameroon Grassfields

Bibliographic Data

ID13112198
AuthorsRicardo Márquez García (0000-0002-2621-7545, University of Bonn, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume9
Issue1-2
Pages43-73
Publication date2024-04-29
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Global Slavery (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2405-8351 • E-ISSN: 2405-836X
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/2405836x-00901008
OpenAlexW4396560652
LanguageEN
References cited21

The Cameroon Grassfields faced extreme violence during German colonization in the early twentieth century. The German colonial army used various strategies, such as armed attacks, executions, looting, hostage-taking, and other repressive measures. After military subjugation by the German colonial army, however, the use of various forms of violence continued. Germans made use of multiple strategies in this mountain region to procure laborers for the colonial apparatus on the coast. At the same time, they claimed to be fighting “slave trade” and “slavery.” However, the coercive measures and violence used for this purpose were and are often characterized by those affected and their descendants as forms of “slave trade” and “slavery.” This article adopts an actor-centered approach that combines written sources with corresponding oral accounts and sheds light on local narratives about “labor recruitment.” This will reveal how and why colonized actors conceptualized the systems of coercion they resisted against differently from the German colonizers. The article argues that taking the perspective of colonized actors into account calls into question the distinction between “slave trading” and “labor recruitment.”

Archaeology · Art · Coercion (linguistics · Colonialism · Economics · Economy · German · Literature · Looting · Narrative · Perspective (graphical · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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