Kfaang and its technologies
Towards a social history of mobility in Kom, Cameroon, 1928-1998
Walter Gam Nkwi Leiden: African Studies Centre, African studies
collection 30, 2011.
Physical mobility of people from place to place as individuals or as groups
is essentially horizontal, potentially limitless, and generally motivated by
the desire and ambition to take advantage of new opportunities for self or
group advancement. This mobility is the basis of Grasslanders’ communities
in Anglophone Cameroon and beyond. In this study of Kom, the second largest
kingdom in the Bamenda Grasslands, life histories and rich archival files
enlighten the history of mobility in relation to the development of
communication technologies. Between 1928, when the St. Anthony’s Primary
School, Njinikom, Kom was opened and 1998, when the road linking Kom and
Bamenda was tarred, the number of people travelling out of Kom and back
steadily increased. This spatial mobility was greatly facilitated and
accelerated by ‘modern’ transportation and communication technologies like
the roads and vehicles. Such persons were usually among those whose horizons
had been widened by other modern agencies of change like the schools and
churches which are themselves considered as technologies in this study.
Kfaang, a notion of newness, has become the core to understand the flexible
identity of Kom people and their appropriation of technologies in their
notions of being Kom and a Kom community that transgress international
borders.
Review by Janneke
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