Content area
Full Text
MIRIAM GOHEEN, Men own the Fields, Women own the Crops: gender and power in the Cameroon grassfields. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, 252 pp., ISBN 0 299 14674 X.
One of the charms of this book is the self-evident way in which gender emerges as a crucial issue in what some might see as a different topic: the articulation of local and national politics. Goheen describes how, starting from an investigation of politics in Nso, one of the main chiefdoms of the Grassfields (northwest Cameroon), her research soon made it clear that gender relations `lie at the very heart of both the precolonial and postcolonial political discourse'. She analyses the articulation of these discourses, especially in terms of 'hegemony'. Her main conclusion is that the only real `counter-hegemonic discourse' against the hierarchies of male power, reproduced by the interaction between local authority and the (post)colonial state, comes from the women. While this might suggest that this is a book d these-another specimen of what Achille Mbembe once dared to call `authoritarian North American feminism'-the opposite is true. Goheen's subtle writing convincingly shows that such considerations emerged from the daily practice of her research. This applies both to the choice of hegemony as a central concept and to the focus on gender as crucial in politics.
An interesting aspect of Nso is that 'hegemony' acquires a double meaning here. The Nso chiefdom itself is often quoted in the literature as a potent example of a 'traditional' hegemony. Especially in the course of the nineteenth century, consecutive Nso chiefs succeeded in encapsulating ever more groups and chiefdoms in a remarkably dense framework of authority. Indeed, presentday Nso elites are apt to boast that `if the Germans had not stopped us, we might have conquered the whole of Cameroon'. The post-colonial state in Cameroon, on the other hand, rapidly acquired hegemonical pretensions of its own, especially under Ahidjo. Goheen builds on Bayart's analysis of Ahidjo's politics as a projet hdgdmonique by showing in more detail...