Boundaries and History in Africa: Issues in Conventional Boundaries and Ideological Frontiers

Chapter 15 Testing Hypotheses Developed in Cross-Disciplinary Studies: How Genetic Research helped illuminate Nso’ History

333 Chapter 15 Testing Hypotheses Developed in Cross-Disciplinary Studies: How Genetic Research helped illuminate Nso’ History By David Zeitlyn, Neil Bradman and Krishna Verramah Abstract We discuss how genetic evidence can be used to evaluate rival versions of the early history of the kingdom of Nso in the North West Region of Cameroon. Sex specific genetic data are shown to favour one specific variant of the oral history of the Nso in which the royal family traces its descent from a founding ancestress who married into an autochthonous hunter gathering group. The distribution of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Nso in general, and the ruling dynasty in particular, is consistent with their particular marriage practices, suggesting strict conservation of the royal social class along agnatic lines. This study demonstrates how genetics can usefully augment other sources of information (e.g., oral histories, archaeology and linguistics) when studying the history of African peoples. Keywords: Cameroon Grassfields, Nso, Tikar, Genetic History We are honoured to be given this opportunity to make our contribution to the festschrift marking the retirement of our friend and colleague, Professor Verkijika Fanso. During the years of our various collaborations, we have been struck by his devotion to teaching, from which his many students in the history department of the University of Yaounde I have greatly benefited, as well as his continuing interest in new research possibilities. This generous, open-handed approach has 334 led him to welcome many different visitors to Cameroon, and, reciprocally, created opportunities to undertake research abroad, most recently as a research fellow at the African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge, UK. ‘We are sure that other contributions to this Festschrift will trace his intellectual biography so we will not attempt to cover the cattle ground. Rather, we want to emphasize the important role his own history has played in a multi-disciplinary research project we undertook in collaboration with him. This project, made possible by Professor Fanso’s detailed knowledge of Nso’ lore and practice, has demonstrated how a) genetic research can sometimes help historians elucidate events that occurred prior to the local use of written records and b) the contribution the humanities can make to the formulation of alternative hypotheses that are amenable to genetic analysis. By careful analysis of frequencies of different characterizations of the nonrecombining portion of the paternally inherited Y chromosome, it concluded that genetic data were more consistent with an oral historical account of a female migrant from the Tikar marrying a local Visale than with an alternative account in which she was accompanied in the migration by the male founder of the dynasty (Veeramah et al. 2008). Building on and expanding the research undertaken in the Nso’ study we have, over the past decade, been working with Professor Fanso and one of his students to collect genetic data from a large number of different Cameroonian groups to study both the distribution of genetic variation amongst them and the interplay between social factors (for example language, location, religion, political structure, marriage customs and inheritance practices) and the extent and distribution of genetic variation. The humanities and genetic analysis can each present hypotheses to the other and, where expectations are formulated that would have distinct outcomes in data available to the other discipline, assess whether the probability that one or more of a range of possible outcomes are more or less likely than others. The adopted approach is to complement analysis of exclusively genetic data with results from conventional historical research, so we 335 can see how the different approaches mutually inform one another. The work we did in Kumbo illustrates the potential of the approach. That we were successful in that study is in large measure due to Professor Fanso’s extensive knowledge. It was of critical importance that when he was helping us collect the original samples, he suggested that we ask additional questions of the informants, i.e. their caste-like affiliation. Without that local intimate knowledge, the subsequent study on the origin of the royal house of Nso described in this chapter would not have proved possible. Although much of our readership will be familiar with the details of Nso history a summary is needed for those approaching it for the first time. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the history of western Cameroon was dominated by rival city states (also called kingdoms or fondoms). Their rivalries were a...