Reconsidering Patrimonialization in the Bamun Kingdom: Heritage, Image, and Politics from 1906 to the Present
2016; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00287
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoBehind the photograph depicting the facade of the palace of the kings of Bamun in west Cameroon, reproduced at two-thirds of its real size, the Chicago Field Museum also presents a vitrine dedicated to the Palace Museum.1 The photograph is not a representation of the original structure created by King Njoya (ca. 1860–1933) in the 1920s, or of the later building established at the palace entrance by his heir King Njimoluh (r. 1933–1992), but rather it encapsulates the fourth version produced by a Swiss expert during palace repair works in 1985 (Bosserdet 1985). Another restructuring was carried out in 1996 and the latest, involving the construction of a new museum, is ongoing.2 The Field Museum vitrine is therefore obsolete and has always been incomplete. It does, however, acknowledge the existence of an endogenous patrimonial process, presenting objects presumed representative of it, namely masks, a portrait of King Mbuembue (r. first half of the nineteenth century), objects associated with King Njoya, manuscripts in Bamun script, and products of the encounter with the European world. As artificial as it may seem, this mise en abyme of an “African” museum in a “Western” museum is therefore significant.In the mid-1920s, there already existed a museumlike institution in the royal palace founded by King Njoya following the dismantling of his kingdom by the French colonial administration. Unique in Cameroon and Central Africa, this display, which corresponded more to an exhibition of dynastic legitimacy and of a “royal treasury” than a museum per se, responded primarily to a local political agenda. In fact, the stakes of controlling regalia pitted the palace museum against the collection put together by the King's cousin, Mosé Yeyap (ca. 1875–1941), a Christianized interpreter at the local colonial post. While this context of increasing political tensions was central to the creation of the royal museum, its importance also resided in the crystallization of multiple parallel patrimonialization processes, which characterized the emergence of a “Bamun modernity” between 1895 and 1933, during the long reign of King Njimoluh, and up to the present. These processes derive from the existence of Bamun script and historiography; the large-scale circulation of photographs and printed materials; means of self-representation; the continuous presence from the end of the nineteenth century of external third parties, namely Muslim proselytes, Protestant missionaries, colonial administrators, researchers, and even internal opponents who stimulated creations or reactions; and the personality of protagonists, specifically that of King Njoya. The reciprocal influence of the diverse actors and vectors must be viewed in a synchronic manner in order to bring out the contiguous and often antagonistic patrimonial arenas and, consequently, the modalities of articulating politics and patrimony in the Bamun kingdom.The existence of patrimonial processes seems to be integrated into a social organization founded on the capitalization of borrowings. From the founding of the kingdom, probably in the seventeenth century, a desire for autonomy from his homeland led the first king to use the language and elements of the rituals of conquered peoples. This policy of incorporating captured peoples, rituals, and later artistic techniques continued beyond the arrival of the first Europeans in July 1902. Fundamental in maintaining political prominence in the cultural region called the Grassfields, the politics of incorporation required a balance between processes of innovation and stabilization, both of which fall within the powers of the king, in modified forms, up to the present. As a result, patrimonial processes were closely linked to power wielding at various levels, and the power-patrimony paradigm was continuously reconfigured.Principle of heritage: from ruin to patrimony. The continuity of the power-patrimony paradigm is portrayed in the methods of transmitting and inheriting titles as property. The referent is the method of dynastic transmission, reproduced in lineages and families (Tardits 1980, Wasaki 1992). The new king “ascends to the throne of Nshare Yen,” founder of the dynasty, as the heir of an office that incarnates his forefathers. With each enthronement, the ruler reaches back multiple generations, re-entrenching an ancestral figure in the present. In assuming this statutory and symbolic heritage, the heir also receives objects related to lineage and rank—that is, both the property belonging to the private family sphere and a right to insignia of external representation or public attributes such as the machete, spear, cap, and royal blue and white ntieya fabric. Between these two spheres are found objects specific to enthronement, given by the king to his son in the palace, which include specific durable insignia such as a single brass bell called a süre and, since since the early twentieth century, a long Islamic robe called a gandoura, as well as an organic object, a red turaco feather generally kept in the house of a maternal uncle. Transmission is thus ensured through internal and related measures, besides lineage.The importance attached to maintaining patrilineal transmission underlies the conception of patrimony. As underscored by Germain Loumpet (forthcoming), the terms associated with patrimony are related to the notion of m'fom. Depending on the word stress, this monosyllabic word has the following meanings:A sacred place where the prince (nji) goes in circumstances that threaten the very existence of the lineage, to which access is otherwise forbidden under pain of a curse and death, the cemetery of lineage heads (m'fom) is also a place of conservation par excellence, where objects can be kept in greater safety than anywhere else.4 The major patrimonialization paradigm is therefore a conception based on the dread of discontinuity and of rupture, but also on the demarcation of sacred places. While the existence of ruins evokes a curse (ndon), the Bamun nevertheless respect ruins as a place where something had existed and continues to maintain a presence. From this standpoint, the same ambivalent word designates both the patrimony of a lineage and its possible absence, its material (cemetery) and immaterial (lineage transmission) aspects.It is therefore possible to consider the need for lineages, as with the palace, to continuously maintain and add on a level both symbolic and actual. The value of patrimony stems from the capacity to incorporate additional elements taken or borrowed from others. The distinct notion of collective patrimony must thus be underscored, not because it was absent from the transmission of royal power and its function of invoking dynastic continuity, but because it supposes an external conception imposed on internal and local usages.A translation process: iconography and script. Preceding the arrival of Europeans by several decades, the first major documented transformation of Bamun society is linked to the introduction of Islam. The presence of Hausa traders from the 1860s, followed in approximately 1894 by Fulani cavalry from Banyo during the civil war of Gbetnkom Ndombouo, popularized the dissemination of copies of the Qu'ran and the wearing of long robes. Islam and its material culture appeared then as the vectors of a new political power, and it is probably this point that interested the young King Njoya when he invented the first version of the Bamun script around 1895.In several accounts, Bamun script is a medium of conservation and patrimonialization. Not only did it enable the emergence, between 1906–1910, of an official royal historiography, drafted in later cursive versions of the writing, as well as counternarratives from persons opposed to the king, but its very first ideographic version, lewa, also acted to conserve iconographic signifiers transformed by the revealed religions. The most vivid example is perhaps that of the stylized spider, the meaning of which, imposed by Islam and later by craftsmen, is “work.” The original meaning, however, is “wisdom” or “truth,” in line with the creature's divinatory function. The trapdoor spider is the messenger of the ancestors that also delivers their message by dreams assimilated to spider webs. More generally, a semiological analysis of lewa shows the predominance of square and rectangular signs for designating space and triangular signs for social status. Ontological signs are circular, while radiating signs indicate periodicity and duration. Lastly, the sign of the king, mfon, combines space (a square), with status and position (a diamond terminating in circles) (Fig. 1). This ideographic system therefore recalls the more ancient iconographic one and is found both in the form of the throne (a round chair on a square base) and on the map of the kingdom (Galitzine-Loumpet 2011b). Moreover, the more ancient iconographic system as well as lewa functions, with nuances, at the level of the micro-states throughout the region called the Grassfields.King Njoya and his entourage were certainly not aware of the double patrimonial function with which the lewa signs were a posteriori invested, no more than we can fathom the local evidence of iconographic readings. The means of transition from one system of graphic communication to another, however, highlights the importance attached to the notion of permanence and reincorporation, the functionality of iconographic signs being transferred to the ideograms of a version of writing that was itself evolving. Seven versions were ultimately required, the latest dating to 1910, for the Bamun script to be able to serve a wide variety of purposes, including historiography, etiquette and palace administration, accounting, pharmacopoeia, and various narratives.The arrival of the Germans on July 6, 1902, further transformed the perception of objects by introducing new regimes of value. These involved a distancing, as attested to by various events, photographs, and letters. Several periods can thus be distinguished, which are not exclusively chronological. The first period (ca. 1902–1920), itself divided into many stages, is that of the encounter and gradual matching between various patrimonial processes. It corresponds to the emergence of a market and can hardly be discussed without mentioning the growing influence of the photographic medium. It ended with the reassertion of royal power for a short period corresponding to World War I. The second era (ca. 1924–1940) is that of the emancipation of the category of “Bamun art.” Patrimony became a field of direct confrontation. For King Njoya, it was a period of relinquishment in favor of new actors and patrimonial media. Finally, the last period, which appeared in the mid-1940s and continues until the present under renewed forms, is marked by the patrimonialization of the early actors, principally King Njoya himself. I will come back to these different phases and also underscore the introduction of new vectors of patrimonialization, namely photography and drawings.The photographic medium and the art market: the skull, the throne, and European appreciation. Major political and symbolic events explain the introduction of new patrimonial paradigms between 1906 and 1910. The first patrimonialization process is linked to the restitution of the skull of King Nsangu (r. ca. 1865–1885), King Njoya's father, during the joint German-Bamun expedition against the neighbouring Banso Kingdom in 1906. This episode was crucial for a young, contested king and also corresponds with the beginning of his great historiographical work entitled “Book of Past Things and Wars among the Bamun” (Nda lewa nga pamom pua pit). The return of the skull opened a field of reciprocity and recognition between the Germans and the Bamun within which objects were immediately integrated. This exchange was at first political, as part of the old game of alliances between peers. An example is the effigy statue offered to the German authorities at the death in 1908 of Captain Glauning, a friend of the king who was very closely involved in the acquisition of objects for the Museum of Berlin (Geary 1994:25, 2011:49–55). These exchanges were thereafter rapidly monetarized. King Njoya became the authority over a new value of objects which he could transfer, keep, or try to monetize beyond the normal circles within which objects were disseminated.A posteriori, the most outstanding episode of the ongoing transformations is undoubtedly King Njoya's visit to Buea in 1908. The main intent of this journey was to present the German governor with a promised copy of the Bamun throne. The copy of the throne was not completed on time. It was the throne of his father, King Nsangu, that King Njoya reluctantly removed from the palace premises, then from the fortified town of Fumban, and beyond the Noun border river—a journey that crossed various fundamental concentric thresholds in the conception of the pureness of the kingdom. It was the throne of the king of the Bamun, still recognized by small neighboring kingdoms; but it was already considered as an object, a gift intended for Emperor Wilhem II, when King Njoya posed in front of the throne while wearing a pseudo-German uniform, his transformation a metaphor for that of the object. In Buea, the royal present became a trophy for the Governor, and it took at least two decades for the throne to finally be exhibited as a masterpiece of African art (Galitzine-Loumpet 2008, Oberhofer 2012:36). Initially, the radical metamorphosis was considered a misunderstanding, as King Njoya did not receive the tokens of gratitude he expected, such as European horses, guns, and clothing. One can imagine the effect produced by this separation through the continuous production, to date, of Bamun counternarrations. King Njoya's transformation of disappointment into the mastery of new European techniques (Njoya 1952:135) was matched by popular explanations of a Bamun ruse, maintaining that the “real” throne was in Fumban.The introduction of this distinction in use constituted an important new element which paved the way for the liberalization of the royal rights to materials and motifs through reforms initiated by King Njoya between 1910–1920 in the areas of the rights of ownership and sale. Henceforth, many materials, patterns, and articles of clothing were usable by or accessible to the most affluent, irrespective of their rank. A Bamun art market was being gradually established under the control of the king, but with the support of a new vector, namely photography.The photographic medium. The value of objects was mostly contingent upon the dissemination of German photographs of objects. The photographic plates were developed on the spot and immediately became part of a system of gift-giving and prestige property, raising great interest on the part of the royal family (Geary 1988:37).The objective and future of photographs were therefore various and, at times, oppositional depending on whether they were taken by Europeans or Bamun. The codes of representation and technical know-how were European, however; Christraud Geary mentions the dissemination of ethnographic conventions through a number of colonial-era pictures (1988:34). While close-ups and frontal portraits of individuals dominated the often intimate photographs taken by the Swiss missionary Anna Wuhrmann, who had particularly friendly relations with the king, other authors preferred more open shots comprising architectural objects and elements aimed at documenting the Bamun Kingdom. This external approach for a long time influenced the relationship between the Bamun people and their photographed image. Having quickly realized the symbolic and political importance of photographs, King Njoya, as early as 1912, arranged his own pictures taken with his various wives, the most famous being the head-and-shoulder pictures of himself and Queen Ndayie, both wearing partially European garb and in unusual poses.5 Other photographs of the same series are conserved in King Njimoluh's office in the royal palace. These images are related to a series of portraits of queens largely with bare chests.6 Were these photographs of the same period and personally selected by the king? It is likely. These pictures of the palace highlight the existence of parallel standards and call into question the dominant canons.What should be noted here is the influence of photographs on the development of an art market. This patrimonialization through photographs was somehow doubled ten years later with the arrival of French colonial military, and later civilian authorities, who replaced the defeated Germans and the British in May 1916. In turn, the French discovered “Bamun art” and an export market that was already employing a significant number of people. In 1917, Frederic Gardmer, an army photographer, thus documented the various trades and the “outstanding objects produced by the Bamun people” (Fig. 2).7 In addition to this interest in “Bamun craft,” photography, from 1920, began documenting the growing conflict between King Njoya and the French colonial administration.An intermediate era: World War I. The years 1914–1918, which correspond to the defeat of the Germans, the departure in captivity of the Swiss missionaries, the transit of the British regiments of the Indian Army, and the establishment in May 1916 of the French military administration marked the reassertion of royal power as well as a reconsideration of the political and patrimonial dimension of the Bamun writing.Once again a master of the political game, King Njoya also tried to reaffirm his position symbolically. These short-lived golden years were marked by major projects aimed at portraying royal capability and quality: the invention in 1915 of the syncretic religion Nwet Kwete; the drawing of a map of the kingdom beginning in 1913, followed by one of Fumban; the strengthening of the royal schools for learning Bamun writing through the appointment of literate Bamun Christians; and the beginning, finally, of construction work on the new palace in 1917.The year 1918 marked a first turning point. Under the supervision of the missionary pastor Elie Allégret, Governor Lucien Fourreau imposed religious freedom, further freeing the Christianized elite from royal control, and appointed Mosé Yeyap as a writer and interpreter at the colonial post. Decisive for subsequent events, the context of this appointment can only be understood within a particular episode, namely the discovery of two history notebooks written in Bamun script in the Basel mission, abandoned after the German defeat in 1916. In particular, a later Bamum text disclosed that, “The Sultan was very angry when he learned that Christians were speaking and writing about all that was bad about the country and giving [it] to strangers to enable them to see the basis of the country's secrets” (Njoya and Pepuere 2006). In fact, these two notebooks belonging to Pastor Göhring contained a version of the Bamun history, descriptions of the Nja ceremonial dance, and an account of the late nineteenth century war with Banso. They were not, therefore, a counternarration of the official historiography collected at the palace but, more precisely, the hijacking of the royal prerogative to compose history. This event attests to the progressive detachment from King Njoya and the palace from the processes of patrimonialization.Collections and drawings. The liberalization of the production of objects in the 1910s opened a new production space still under the control of the king. Up to 1920, “Bamun art” concerned objects mostly produced for European museums and foreigners in transit, alongside a considerable production of objects commissioned by the king. Thus, in 1924, King Njoya could still commission a portrait of King Mbuembue. Moreover, owing to its exceptional nature, linked to Bamun historiography and not to a specific ritual, this object highlighted changes that took place right within the palace.An art of reaction: the influence of Mosé Yeyap. The change that took place at the end of the 1920s directly resulted from the degradation of the political situation and portrays its paroxysm. In late 1919, Lieutenant Prestat's poisoning accusation8 led to the deportation of the king's close associates to Campo on the Cameroonian coast. Those deported included Ibrahim Njoya (ca. 1887–1966), an accomplished scribe, sketcher, and sculptor. In 1920, the royal schools were closed, the use of Bamun script banned, and the lost-wax cast characters used for printing in Bamun script destroyed. In 1924, another shady case was used as a pretext to break up the Bamun kingdom. Placed under house arrest in his palace and later at his country estate to the east in Mantum, the king's prerogatives were drastically reduced and his political power shared among several paramount chiefs. The same measures eliminated Nguon tributes and ceremonies and created a handicraft center separate from the palace, located near the colonial post. As can be seen, these measures affected the entirety of royal authority, which did not distinguish art from politics.The influence of Mosé Yeyap in the conflicts that led to the exile and eventual death of King Njoya seems clear. Literate in Bamun, German, and French, he occupied a central position in the colonial administration and was the only one who openly challenged the king. There is, however, the danger of attributing all the transformations that took place during this period just to the confrontation between two personalities and of minimizing the general context which Yeyap, nevertheless, used remarkably well. The people's discontent at a changing Bamun society was certainly exploited, but one of the lasting effects of the informal alliance between the French Protestant mission and the colonial administration was the invention of “Bamun custom,” that is, a filtered and controlled tradition that was a pivotal element of social control on which French peace was based (Galitzine-Loumpet 2011a).It can be suggested, however, that the confrontation between the two men signaled the emergence of a modern concept of patrimony born of the conflicts between legitimacy and ambition, politics and art. In the Bamun context, patrimony derived from a kind of political art of reaction between two individuals and two social representations, each trying to outbid the other. A graph derived from various sources presents the following approximate sequence of events (see Timeline). What the colonial administration saw as the loss of royal prestige and secularization of a sacred art, Bamun considered a political struggle. While the administration was not completely deceived, it was slow in fathoming individual ambitions beyond its own motivations.Representing objects. Postcards published by the Evangelical Mission of Paris and by various photo studios established in Cameroon bore testimony to this symbolic field of battle. The very act of collecting objects from the extended lineages and keeping them in one's home should be understood—as it is to this date in the Bamun kingdom—as an open challenge to royal power. A photograph showing Mosé Yeyap standing in front of various objects and the authority conferred on him by his central position revealed his political influence (Fig. 3). Several pictures represented him standing in front of his collection in a composition using court codes. In the Bamun arena, this visual message is unequivocal, all the more so as the king's cousin did not hide his dynastic ambitions. It was not only the representation of “Bamun tradition” to foreigners, but also a challenge spatially inscribed on a hill facing the palace, at the summit of the handicraft street and below the colonial administration. It was not only the exhibition of rank-related attributes, but also the representation of a new modernity.Yeyap was also an active supplier of objects, either to various missionaries or directly. The archives of the Ethnography Museum of Geneva contain correspondence between its director Eugène Pittard and Yeyap (Morin 2014:6–7), which is all the more important as it also attests to the sale of palace objects during King Njoya's exile and the regency that ensued.In contrast to Yeyap, there were few or no photographs of the king in the late 1920s. King Njoya's political eclipse corresponded to his disappearance from photographs. Although in the early 1920s King Njoya still posed for missionaries in front of his throne, pictures gradually shifted focus to Bamun Christians or handicraft activities, which became increasingly popular. This disappearance was noticeable on postcards, calendars, and exercise books ordered by the Evangelical Mission of Paris and circulated in Fumban. Other personalities emerged, for example Daniel Panjuene (1899–1925), a young convert who died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 and who became the representation of “L'Afrique joyeuse,” or “Happy Africa” (Fig. 4).Thus, the exile of Njoya, his death and burial in Fumban, and the enthronement of his heir were barely documented. My assumption is that this eclipse contributed to the establishment of the “palace museum” and Bamun drawings, as the latter first acted as local photographs.From regalia to museum. Bamun kings inherited, ordered, and displayed objects and regalia, part of which was strictly reserved for royal use and, hence, referred to using a name in a restricted language out of the ordinary. One of the royal functions was to preserve these items for ceremonies, while others were to be kept strictly secret. The statuses and uses of palace objects were, therefore, diverse. At no prior moment, however, did all of them form a “museum” collection from the European perspective. The permanent and public exhibition of royal objects in a place reserved for that purpose was a new and unprecedented act.Yet most studies use the word “museum” as an obvious category (Dell 2013:38, Geary 1983, Nelson 2007:2). This a posteriori interpretation seems problematic, as neither the date of establishment of the “museum” nor the public display of the objects collected by Mosé Yeyap were confirmed before 1929. The notion of collection seems more appropriate. Officially geared towards organizing Bamun handicraft, Yeyap's collection underwent the transformations desired by the French. The creation of the Museum of Bamun Arts and Tradition in 1947 was a new phase in which the palace participated and which I will discuss later.At a still imprecise date, but probably around late 1929, King Njoya created what Gebauer described in 1931 as a “museum” (Gebauer 1971), that is to say a public exhibition area—an equally imprecise point because many objects were forbidden to women and the uninitiated, and even when abandoned the palace remained a sacred place. There is a lingering terminological ambiguity on the issue: Geary uses the words pa nju (“things of the world,” or by extension “things of the palace”) (1983:ix) and some scholars employ nda ngu (“house of the country”) to, at times, refer to the palace museum and in some cases, by extension and erroneously, the palace (nshut). Actually, neither the palace museum nor the palace are nda ngu, which today refers specifically to a secret place where the “bags of the country,” containing the nails and hair of the deceased kings and other enthronement objects, are kept. Likening the museum to nda ngu reveals the absence of an appropriate indigenous term, and it would be interesting to know the moment when the Western word was imposed locally, the change of name serving as an indicator of the transformation of sacred objects into cultural property. Lastly, the name of the museum has itself undergone changes, from the Museum of King Njoya to the Royal Palace Museum and, in the most recent construction project, to the Museum of Bamun Kings.Invention of Bamun drawing. The development of Bamun drawing seemed to counter the increasing invisibility of the king. The timeline for the drawings is still uncertain. However, Ibrahim Njoya, the king's cousin and close aide, made very early drawings around 1915 of royal manuscript decorations and maps of the kingdom and the town. Royal portraits appeared in the late 1920s and seemed from the outset to fall within the political/memorial register. King Njoya occupied a place of honor at the center of the dynastic drawing, standing or sitting in front of the palace entrance, holding a book and surrounded by the main regalia, including the throne, the mujemndu double gong, a cluster of spears, ivory, and royal ntieya fabric. His bust was directly inspired, to the smallest detail, by a photograph taken with his wife in 1912.In the same vein, the representations of the other kings were based on the photographs of King Njoya, as for example in an anthropometric profile produced by Bernhard Anckerman in 1908 (Figs. 5–7). The principle was thereafter abundantly used. Preserved on tracing paper and reproduced in many drawings showing the king alone or with his peers, this practice attested to the incorporation, once again, of one medium in another. It also demonstrated the number and dissemination of pictures and the importance given locally to photographs as elements of power. There were variations in the composition of drawings—care was given to framing devices that served to adapt and strengthen the visual idioms of European sovereignty through positioning and framing.9 Although it is difficult today to give the exact number of drawings in circulation around 1930 and their various uses, it seems certain that Ibrahim Njoya was not the only renowned sketcher.Drawings reportedly featured in the political arena, at least until the death of King Njoya. They were, however, quickly aestheticized, as illustrated by the fate reserved for the map of the k
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