Nso and Its Neighbours. Readings in the Social History of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon: Readings in the Social History of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon

Preface

vii Preface Phyllis Mary Kaberry (1910-1977): A Biographical Sketch We have dedicated this collection of essays to the memory of Phyllis Kaberry, better known to many of us as Yaa woo Kov. This brief preface introduces her to a younger generation. Phyllis was born in California of English parents. The surname (pronounced Kay-berry) is common in Yorkshire. Her father, an architect, took his family to Australia, where Phyllis was educated and grew up with ‘her brothers. She went to the University of Sydney, where she took a first degree in history, philosophy and social anthropology and then went on to a Master’s degree, awarded with a First Class in 1935, in social anthropology. Her first fieldwork was conducted among the Aboriginal groups of north-western Australia, the topic of several papers and the subject of her London University Ph.D. thesis. In 1936 she came to the London School of Economics to complete it under the supervision of the famous Polish anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski. Her thesis, Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane, was published in 1939 and was hailed as a pioneering work. An Australian Research Fellowship then took her to New Guinea to study the Abelam people, in an area which had only been ‘opened to administration’ two years earlier, for a twelve-month. She wrote some substantial papers and was then invited to Yale University where she lectured and edited Malinowski’s unpublished papers. Though she could well have sat out the war in the United States she returned to London and its air-raids in 1943 and worked on various post-war policy assignments for the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 1944 the Nigerian Government asked the International African Institute to organize a study of the social and economic position of women in Southern Cameroons, as it then was. Phyllis was persuaded to drop her plans to return to New Guinea and accept this assignment. This involved two 14-month field trips in 1945-6 and 1947-8. She trekked many hundreds of miles in the then undivided Bamenda Division, including Nggi, Esimbi and Mbembe in her itinerary, before settling down to a more intensive study in NSO’, Soon after she returned from Cameroon she was appointed to a lectureship at University College, London, and prepared her material for viii publication while getting up new courses, teaching over a wide field. Her book Women of the Grassfields was published in 1952. It was influential in promoting steps to improve the health of women – Elizabeth O’Kelly’s work in self-help and adult education for example – and encouraged work on parallel lines elsewhere. In 1951 she was promoted to a Readership and with it came a heavy load of teaching and administration. But she was determined to revisit the Grassfields when opportunity offered. In 1958 a Leverhulme Fellowship enabled her to return to Nso’ with her for part of the time came E.M. (Sally) Chilver, a historian who had escaped from the Colonial Office Research Department to Oxford, who was anxious to study colonial administration on the ground before it vanished. In 1960 and 1963, with the help of travel grants, Phyllis returned to undertake a survey of traditional political systems, again with Sally Chilver. Several papers resulted from these research trips, some jointly, as well as a locally published book, Traditional Bamenda, first circulated in draft form for comment and criticism to the Federal Ministry of Education, headmasters and many helpers. Phyllis continued to publish until the early ‘seventies despite increasing ill-health, and corresponded frequently with old friends in Cameroon, always hoping to return once more and meanwhile encouraging research in the region. But academic research was by no means her sole interest: the welfare and careers of Cameroonians concerned her too. Phyllis’s fieldwork in, and publications on, three very different areas were recognized by the award of the Rivers Medal and then the Welcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, but the honour she most prized was her elevation, in 1958, to the title of Yaa woo Kov by the Fon of Nso’, which made her, as she said, ‘a Nso’ person’. She died on October 30, 1977. Numerous obituaries followed. Her lif was celebrated by a choral memorial service in the London University Church of Christ the King, and later a student prize and lecture were set up in her honour. In Nso’, the news of her death was received with shock and pain and profusely regretted. There...