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Acknowledgments

The conception, research, and writing of this book would not have been possible without the support of a wide and varied network of mentors, friends, colleagues, and family.

I am grateful to the teachers who first recognized my interest in African history, developed my research and writing abilities, and advanced my conceptual thinking: while an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga, Larry Ingle and Martin W. Daly; and while a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Florence Bernault, Tom Spear, Michael Schatzberg, and Stanlie James. Florence Bernault is deserving of gratitude not only for relentlessly directing my doctoral studies but also for generously recommending me to her colleagues in France and Cameroon. These included Marc Michel and Odile Chatap-Ekindi, who provided invaluable orientation to the archives in Aix-en-Provence, Yaoundé, and Nkongsamba. I owe a special thanks to fellow students at Wisconsin—Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Dior Konate, Ousman Kobo, Cheryl Sterling, Ryan Ronnenberg, and Penelope Pack—whose friendship made getting through graduate school much shorter and sweeter.

I began this book in upstate New York, at Le Moyne College, and could not have completed it without the support of my colleagues and department there and at subsequent institutions: at Le Moyne, Doug Egerton, Keith Watenpaugh, Pat Keane, Charles Onyango Oduke, Donna Marcano, and especially Linda LeMura, then Dean of the Arts and Sciences, who motivated me to remain committed to my scholarship while in the teaching college environment; while on postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University, Sandra Greene, the late Martin Bernal, Judith Van Allen, Wilson Chacko Jacob, Edward Baptist, and Carina Ray, all of whom offered critical feedback to various portions of this book, and to the Fellows in the Society for the Humanities for stimulating discussions and exchanges; and at the University of Ottawa, my current institutional home, Naomi Davidson, Corinne Gaudin, Jeffrey Keshen, Paul Lovejoy, and Antoni Lewkowicz. Elizabeth Schmidt has graciously served as a critically encouraging reader of this and other work over the years.

Many excellent people outside of academia provided nurturing support throughout years of scholarship, research, travel, and writing. In Madison, Emilie Ngo Nguidjol and Aliko Songolo opened their home and allowed me to share many of life’s sweeter moments with them and their wonderful children, Tosha, Ngijol, and Koko. In Nkongsamba, Jean-Bernard Pogo, a member of the Elite Association of Baham, and his wife, Mercedes Yougaing, accepted me as part of their family. The Pogos and their children, particularly Eric, Elisabeth, and Clemence, patiently assisted me throughout my time in Cameroon. They answered my questions and imbued me with an immeasurable quantity of knowledge of what it meant and means to be Bamileke in the Mungo region, then and now; the research for this book would have been far sparser were it not for the generous foundation they provided.

In Cameroon, on various occasions from 1999 to the present, a number of people routinely ensured that I was well, cared for, and had access to the documents and persons necessary to my research there; they include Maurice Takam, Dieudonné Pouhe Pouhe, Odile Chatap-Ekindi, Marcelline Betene, Monita Baba Djara, Perry Burtch, the late Ignace Djoko Néguin, David Benson, Chantal Ndami, and Brigitte Wami, as well as Joseph Kiegaing, Djoko Domguia, and André Gabiapsi, who assisted me in gathering oral data in Baham, particularly from 2001 to 2003, and Chaïbou and Eitel Mambingo, who helped me gain access to the prefectural archives in Nkongsamba and Dschang. I remain especially grateful for the hospitality and assistance of the late Abbé Jean-Noël Potago of Melong II, at whose presbytery I was a regular visitor. I appreciate my parents, Roy and Zeleny Terretta, for instilling in me a love of learning, reading, and travel from an early age, and for visiting me during periods of field research in Cameroon.

This work could not have come to fruition without the generous financial and institutional support of the Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Le Moyne College Research and Development Program, the University of Ottawa Research Development Program, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

For their role in the various logistics of the book’s publication, I owe an additional thanks to Jean Allman and Allen Isaacman, series editors; Nancy Basmajian, managing editor at Ohio University Press; Jane McWhinney, my editor; Brian Balsley, cartographer; and Beth Pratt, cover designer; as well as to the anonymous readers who provided helpful feedback. Perhaps most memorably, I am grateful to Gillian Berchowitz, who, to accommodate Eli Terretta Gueye’s gestation and arrival into this world, was very flexible with deadlines for final revisions and the like.

I am indebted to Abdoulaye Gueye for lighting a spark in my mind and spirit that ultimately led to the book’s completion.