ASSIGNED VIEWING - Pots-are-People-are-Pots

 

Vessels of the spirits: pots and people in North Cameroon 

Been a long time since I did one of these, huh? Maybe I should make 'em more regular - do y'all like documentaries? There are a decent number of ones focused on African topics on YT*, but they tend to suck, so I think it might be worthwhile to keep collecting the good vids with a bit of added context. 

This is part of a three-film series on the material culture of the Mandara Mountains, the other two of which are mostly focused around ironworking. I'm saving those for a bigger forgepost tho, so just hang on a bit longer! This is posted by the actual account of the rockstar archaeologist and ethnographer Nicholas David, who has run the groundbreaking Mandara Archaeological Project since 1984 alongside fellow Mandara scholar Judith Sterner. I'll use the description of the people in question he provides in Patterns of Slaving- to situate us, the upcoming map is from the same source:

I refer to the inhabitants of the mountains, piedmonts and the surrounding inselbergs and nearby plains as ‘montagnards’, descendants of small populations speaking closely related Chadic (Afro-Asiatic) languages who occupied the region in the first and early second millennium AD. From perhaps AD 1200, settlement in the mountains began to increase (MacEachern 2012: 52–5), and there is localized evidence of communities constructing impressive monumental sites in the fifteenth century (David 2008). At this time, most groups are likely to have been organized into petty chiefdoms. They made their living, as did their descendants at the start of the colonial interlude in the early twentieth century, primarily by subsistence farming, small-scale animal husbandry, and crafts including iron smelting and smithing (Hallaire 1991; Sterner 2003). Chiefdoms rarely attained 10,000 people and sometimes consisted of a single settlement. Despite political and linguistic fragmentation, montagnards maintained close relations with their neighbours. Groups in the highlands and those resident in the piedmont, around inselbergs and on the plains adjacent to the mountains drew from the same symbolic and cultural reservoir.

Some of these font choices are...inspired?

The paper I just mentioned - among other work, some listed below - is primarily centered around the Mandaras as a shatterzone of empire. Slaving and colonial states alike broke on the mountains and failed to penetrate their interior, tho in some cases montangards (like with the Mafa and Mandara) themselves were successfully integrated into slave-taking enterprises, but they remained hotzones for raiding (an experience that was actually exacerbated by colonial presences that favored the Fulbe states for indirect rule.) One interesting thing about this is that it led to a microregion that was at least partially insulated from both Islamizing and Christianizing trends, with a vast body of derived premodern ritual remaining in active practice. This has faced a lot of pressure in recent years, both from the usual avenues and ones very particular to the region. 

Worth noting: the capture of the Mandara Mountains in 2014 by Boko Haram (now recovered by the state, more or less) in has accentuated this ‘policy of oblivion’. As Melchisedek Chétima has pointed out, the montagnards see in Boko Haram a return to the slave raids of the precolonial and colonial eras thanks to the group's propensity for burning homes, pillaging harvests, stealing livestock, and massacring people in the mountains. With Boko Haram, women and children are still the targets of capture in a way reminiscent of Hamman Yaji - these events are interpreted not as terrorist acts, but as a repetition of the history of slavery (and resistance to slavery) from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. It's not fair from a historical perspective to say that Boko Haram is, like, the same as (or even close to tbh) the Sokoto Caliphate, but I thought it should be brought up to explain some of the feelings of cyclical loss present in modern montagnard life. Vessels of the Spirits depicts a culture at a very precarious moment in its history. 

Further Reading:

• The Ways of the Mandara Mountains: A Comparative Regional Approach by Judith Sterner 
• Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions by Paul Lovejoy
• Changing Security: Livelihood in the Mandara Mountains Region in North-Cameroon by Annette van Andel
• They Leave Their Jars Behind: The Conversion of Mafa Women to Islam (North Cameroon) by J. C. M. van Santen
• The Way of the Beer: Ritual Re-enactment of History among the Mafa, Terrace Farmers of the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon) by Gerhard Müller-Kosack
• Pots, stones, and potsherds: Shrines in the Mandara Mountains (North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria) by Judith Sterner and Nicholas David
• The Diary of Hamman Yaji: Chronicle of a West African Muslim Ruler by J. H. Vaughan and A. H. M. Kirk-Greene

*My dad used to keep Basil Davidson's Africa series on repeat when I was small, so I was very glad to see that it wound up on YT as well. That "AFRICAAAAAA" bit from the opening is burned into my brain (positive.)

so based