Comment on Jean-Pierre Warnier's “The Grassfields of Cameroon: Center or Periphery?”

Abstract

Jean-Pierre Warnier’s article makes important points, even as he raises provocative questions for African historiography. The central thrust of the article is an important challenge to the existing historiography of the Cameroon Grassfields: that the complex societies and kingdoms there rose, not in response to the Atlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century, but from more indigenous (at least to Africa) processes, whose core was located in the interior, rather than the coast. He marshals some telling, though inconclusive, evidence to support his hypothesis, primarily to show that archaeological and linguistic evidence combine to suggest that the region probably possessed a dense population in quite remote times, and these people were thus not simply fleeing the slave trade, but responding to local conditions, if not in the highlands themselves, at least to a world system that included the Nile Valley and the Lake Chad Basin. The question of relocating the core regions of the system to which the Grassfields belong is an interesting one, and that there is sufficient evidence to refute, at least, the idea that the slave trade and the Atlantic world were responsible is convincing. Defining the way in which complexity developed is, however, more problematic. Warnier’s work rests on a long-standing question in African historiography: the question of what used to be called state formation and in recent terminology is more often called the origin of complexity. In defining this, Warnier draws on world-systems explanations, which in turn rest on patterns of exchange. World-systems analysis ultimately rests on ideas of dependency and