2 - From fishermen to middlemen: the Duala inland and on the coast in the formative period, c. 1600–1830

Summary

Nowhere do the multiple possibilities for constructing any history come into such obvious confrontation as in accounts of beginnings. In the case of the Duala, even more than for other African peoples, statements about the earliest stages of development appear most fully articulated in the form of oral traditions. Yet the references in Duala accounts to such distant centers as Egypt, Ethiopia, Moses at the Red Sea or even the more proximate Congo and Northern Cameroon savanna are difficult to accept in empirical terms. They seem rather to be attempts at establishing an identity in terms derived from a world encountered long after the events they claim to describe.

Against the claims of these traditions, however, the evidence coming directly from the period prior to the 1800s is very thin: no indigenous texts, virtually no archeological materials, scattered and fragmentary European observations, and a few clues from comparative linguistics. Oral tradition, with all its ideological overtones, will thus have to be used as a major source for this chapter. Where it is most plausible and can be checked to some degree against other evidence, it may help reconstruct events. And where the ideology in such traditions derives from longstanding local experience, even as this includes contact with the outside world, it can be used even more fruitfully to comprehend the relationship between events and Duala historical consciousness.