NICOLAS ARG ENTI

Remembering the future: Slavery, youth and masking in the Cameroon Grasselds1
The experience of the slave trade and the role that local interest groups played in selling people into it is not often openly discussed in the chiefdoms of the Cameroon Grasselds today. As has been noted with respect to much of west and central Africa, the subject of slavery in oral tradition seems to have spawned a fathomless, implacable silence (Austen 2001; Baum 1999: 16; Shaw 2002: 89). Likewise, the exactions of the forced labour of the colonial era under the Germans, and then the British and the French who replaced them after the First World War a period that in many ways represented a continuum with slavery rather than a break from it are very seldom mentioned today, even by those old enough to have personal memories of these events, or to have known those who did.2 Far from generating the rich if conicted body of discursive traditions that has grown up in the Americas, the subject of slavery seems to gnaw at the bowels of historical consciousness in Cameroon, hollowing out the body of the past and leaving only a ghostly, eviscerated efgy in its place. And yet, the socio-economic conditions that spurred on the trade in slaves in the Grasselds have not changed as much as one might expect in these patriarchal chiefdoms. In a hierarchically stratied and gerontocratic society, conservative palace elites are still pitted against a young, marginalised and frustrated majority upon whose labour and wealth-generation they depend. Such conditions cannot fail to recall those

This article was presented at the 2003 African Studies Association conference in Boston in the panel entitled Cultures of exile. Youth, slave trade and translocality. I would like to thank Ute Roschenthaler for organising the panel as well as for her help with this paper. I am very grateful to Christraud Geary, Peter Geschiere and Jean-Pierre Warnier for their participation in the panel, and their invaluable comments on the paper. I am also extremely grateful to Alex Argenti-Pillen for critical comments. Rather than coming to an end in the colonial era, the historical cycle of patriarchal domination and the exploitation of subordinates by elites that thrived under slavery could be said to have recurred in the 20th century: the colonial period re-introduced large-scale forms of coercive displacement, forced labour, high death rates and generalised insecurity instigated by a foreign force. By midcentury, however, this process had once again been largely taken over by the elites of the strongest states in the Grasselds, who had established themselves as middlemen for the colonial authorities wielding power locally on their behalf while perpetuating the hegemony of the palaces. Finally, with the emergence of the post-colonial state, the violence of a modern, centralised autocratic regime was once again internalised as a few entrepreneurs often of commoner origins obtained access to the single party. Again, they were rapidly inculcated as neo-notables into the palaces of the Grasselds, which were thereby called into service on behalf of the state. As in the late precolonial period, the great majority of the young, the poor and women were once again marginalized and exploited by their own elite and a new predatory state (Argenti 2004).

Social Anthropology (2006), 14, 1, 4969. 2006 European Association of Social Anthropologists doi:10.1017/S096402820500193X Printed in the United Kingdom

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of the period of the slave trade, in which traders were sold bachelors and young women and children, many of whom were destined for resale into the trans-Atlantic trade on the coast. As Jean-Pierre Warnier (1995) has shown, it was not typically exogenous enemy raiders who seized people for sale into slavery in the Grasselds, but rather local people from the victims kin group often even the very household who arranged for their furtive abduction and disappearance. Often the victims own compound or lineage head was implicated in these betrayals. As Warnier (1995) who aptly terms this pivotal character in the slave trade the Judas Peter Geschiere, Eric de Rosny (1981) and Robert Pool (1994) have all made clear, the violence that the slave trade nurtured at the very heart of the household has not been forgotten; it has passed down in the contemporary notion of the cannibal witch, again a Judas gure who feeds upon a close family member. As in the era of the slave trade, the prey is devoured, but invisibly; the witch who feeds upon victims at night, from a distance and from within. In both cases the Judas or the cannibal witch cannot feed upon whomever he pleases, but must prey upon those people who belong to him: those over whom he has rights, his children. And just as the hapless victim continued to live in the compound for a time after being sold, unaware that arrangements were being made for their abduction, so the victim of cannibal witchcraft still roams for a time about the village after being feasted upon, like a zombied carcass unaware of his or her tragic and abominable fate. I therefore chose the opening metaphor of the silence surrounding slavery in the Grasselds today advisedly: the notion of a disembowelled or eviscerated historical consciousness is a metaphor not of my own making, but one that has been produced indigenously in response to the traumatic conditions of slavery. It continues to haunt the people of the Grasselds to this day. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more potent or evocative image with which to call forth if not actually to remember a past of internecine violence, gross inequity and domestic predation than by the wholly abhorrent notion of the cannibal invisibly devouring his own children in nocturnal feasts, sapping them of their strength so that he may grow fat. The metaphor of cannibal witchcraft highlights the silencing effect of slavery in two ways: rst, it is a nondiscursive practice grounded in physical sensations; a somatisation of the inequities of the past and the present. Secondly, the image itself speaks of silencing through the trope of cannibalism, parasitism and the rich metaphors of the belly the site of power par excellence in Cameroon.3 The victim no longer eats, but is eaten; no longer full, but sucked dry. Witchcraft effectuates a somatic apprehension of the hollowing-out effect that slave traders had on the community, leaving behind only empty husks, like weevils in a sack of corn. Not only, as an embodied practice, is witchcraft itself silent, then, but it also dramatically highlights the way in which traumatic histories hollow out and silence the past, hiding from consciousness that which was beyond comprehension even as it occurred.4

Bayarts (1985; 1989) insights regarding the politics of the belly in Cameroon apply every bit as much to the anglophone Grasselds as they do to the francophone region of the country in which he conducted his research. Dori Laub (1991: 812), writing on the Holocaust, reveals that the system of the Nazi death camps was foolproof in that it excluded the possibility of witnessing. In order to bear witness to a crime and thus to inscribe its presence in history one has to be able to stand outside it and look on. But the nature of the Holocaust was such that no one was able to stand outside or beside its events. Most crucially, even the victims of the Shoah were not able to bear witness to their own demise,

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And yet, precisely because the metaphor of cannibal witchcraft is an indigenous one, the silence or absence to which it points does not signal a total obliteration of the past the ever-present danger of traumatic histories that Derrida has called incineration (1986: 83, my translation) and Laub (1991: 812) the annihilation. Rather, the presence in the Grasselds to this day of the disembowelled zombie points to the fact that something albeit something beyond the realm of the overtly discursive has been remembered. The particular salience of the zombie comes from the paradox that the disembodiment of the past is remembered precisely as an embodied experience: people know the unspeakable past of the Grasselds today through the claustrophobic and terrifying physical experience of cannibal witchcraft: the knowledge of something lost or the presence of an absence which continues to stalk the young and the disenfranchised in the present.5 The case has already been made very convincingly for the connections between slavery and witchcraft in Cameroon and further aeld. In this article, I examine the possibility that the practice of masked dancing can be considered as a further memorial or somatic sequela of the slave period and of forced labour in the colonial period that followed. To this end, the article examines on the one hand the role that masking might have played in addressing slavery and forced labour as they were actually being practiced in the Grasselds, and on the other hand how masking may have taken on a memorial role in the postcolonial period, evoking memories of a deeply buried and elusive past in an embodied, non-discursive form to address not only the past, but also relations between youth and elders in Cameroon today. Performance is not like verbal discourse: where the latter is typically xed, referential, demonstrative and open to critique, the embodied practices of performance are aporetic and indeterminate. Masking could thus have been used agonistically by all protagonists for their own ends in the veiled debate about slavery, and may have constituted the site of a silent, embodied struggle a struggle that continues to this day in the analogous socio-economic conditions of the postcolony, where young people now face contemporary forms of oppression and exploitation at the hands of anachronistic

and Dori Laub calls this aspect of it the annihilation: not only did the event erase six million lives even as it erased all record of having done so, but it also erased the possibility of effectively bearing witness. Thus the Shoah produced among its surviving victims rst and foremost a prolonged silence (Caroll 1990; Langer 1991: 61; Laub and Podell 1995; Levi 1989: 834). In the aoristic words of Maurice Blanchot in The writing of the disaster (1995: 42), the central question facing survivors of terror and their descendants is how one is to keep watch over absent meaning. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1990) clearly identies the paradox of silence at the heart of the initial traumatic shock: it is a shock which is not experienced. This is not to say, however, that it is consigned to oblivion that, psychically speaking, it never happened. Rather, it is encrypted, or entombed, within the subject. Far from being a mere absence, this crypt or tomb will come to inuence the conscious life of the person, but only later. Something . . . will make itself understood, later. That which will not have been introduced will have been acted, acted out, enacted [in English in the original], played out, in the end and thus re-presented. But without the subject recognising it. It will be represented as something that has never been presented. Renewed absurdity . . . This will be understood as feeling fear, anxiety, feeling of a threatening excess whose motive is obviously not in the present context. A feeling . . . which therefore necessarily points to an elsewhere that will have to be located outside this situation . . . And how can this site be localised without passing through a memory, without alleging the existence of a reserve where this site has been retained . . . ? (Lyotard 1990: 13).

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palatine aristocracies and an autocratic national government that is closely afliated to them. The terms k@kum (sing) and @mkum (pl) in the Grasselds chiefdom of Oku are polysemic and cover a much wider range of referents and connotations than does the western category of masks. Certain performers who do not wear headdresses, such as the jesters of the palace kwifO n society, are nonetheless thought of as @mkum. @mkum are rst and foremost people or beings in a state of transformation.6 Whether confronted with an unmasked palace jester or with a masked dancer in full costume, protocol requires that one pretend that one does not recognise the performer whether or not one does. The ordinary identity of the performer is effectively eliminated for the duration of their performance as a k@kum, and headdresses and costumes are only one among several means of achieving this end.7 The term k@kum primarily refers to any person thought to possess the power of metamorphosis and to undergo transformations. The emphasis is thus not laid upon masks as objects, as it is in the West,8 but rather upon the power of transformation and access to another world of ancestors and deities. As such, masking is a source of power and of danger that the palaces of the Grasselds do their utmost to control and monopolise. The fact that the masks of the Grasselds have access to another world raises questions about what that world might consist of, and what realm of experience it might provide access to. The etymology of the word k@kum provides a starting point from which to address this question. In Eblam Ebkwo, the language of Oku, the verb kum means to lock, to touch or to be adjacent to. K@nkum is a lock of any sort, whether a door lock or a padlock. ykum refers to locking, touching, being adjacent to or being next in line. Knkumten accordingly refers to a follower: the knkumten refers to the adjacent one, or the next in a queue or line of people (c.f. Blood and Davis 1999). These words, all sharing the root kum, show a close family of meanings centred around the notion of locking, of standing in line, and of being interlinked: actions reminiscent of the way slaves and, later, forced labourers were taken from the Grasselds, bound to each other, in single-le lines and marched down to the coast by guards. Just as the bewitched on the coast still dream of being bound and gagged and led off by guards (de Rosny 1981), so too the etymology of masking in Oku seems to recall or refer to the slave trade of the past. In Oku I have seen a masked dancer wearing the mask of a lineage elder pretend to devour members of the audience he had got hold of. The identication between masks and cannibal witches in the Grasselds poses certain questions about what the exemplars

6 7

For studies of masking in the Grasselds, cf. Brain and Pollock 1972; Harter 1986; Northern 1973, 1988; Ruel 1969; Savari 1980; and Jean-Pierre Warnier 1985. As Sydney Kasr puts it (1988a: 5), The universe of forms which we call masks is simply part of a larger universe which might be called vehicles of transformation. Phillip Peek, (1994: 484), similarly remarks that the visual presentation of spiritual beings at festivals and other rituals is frequently secondary to their awesome acoustic dimensions, and he concludes (ibid.) that because our experience of the world is multisensory, so must our study of that experience. In the Grasselds, as Christraud Geary (1979: 64) points out with reference to the kweifo of the small chiefdom of We, to see a masquerade signies having undergone a primary initiation which is largely acoustic. Cf. Kasr (1988b) and Zeitlyn (1990: 57).

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for such illicit consumption of human esh might have been.9 In this article, I suggest that such dances, like experiences of witchcraft, have their origin in the experience of the slave trade: where references to the slave trade tend to refer elliptically to the practice of cannibalism, the performative practice of masking may evoke the undomesticated and anarchic violence of the mask as a reference to the unfettered appetites of the slave-traders of the pre-colonial and early colonial eras. In the case study that follows, I examine a masking group (k@kum k@nO n sing., @mkum @mnO n pl.) in Oku, a chiefdom of 65,000 people in the Cameroon Grasselds region. The group, known as ful@NgaN, is the only masking group to belong to the palace (as opposed to the many single masks of the various palace societies). It is owned by the palace regulatory society known as kwifO n, and is closely associated with some of the major ceremonies staged at the palace. This article describes the ful@NgaN performance in the light of what we know of the practices that gave the slave trade its particular experiential or lived reality in the Grasselds and beyond. If one speaks of the choreography of a performance, then one also needs to take account of the choreographies of terror of the slave trade. The inverse of this point is that a work of dance is very much a physical labour. This is to some extent a universal aspect of dance: not only is a single performance painful and exhausting even when its aesthetic seeks to hide the fact,10 but the apprenticeship that the single performance recapitulates entails years of exertion and discipline. In the Grasselds, the work of dance is not elided in the performance, but highlighted as part of its aesthetic. Not only do the performers perspire, but the masks themselves are sprayed with the perspiration of the mask, which is considered beautiful. The dance steps and movements, far from alluding to weightlessness, grace and ight, emphasise the groundedness, weight, bulk, power and hence physical exertion of the dancer: the greatest compliment that one can pay a mask is that it smashes the stones [under its feet]. Ful@NgaN is the most prominent and prestigious of all the masking groups in Oku, including as it does the mask known as Mabu, which appears on its own as the lictor or executioner-mask of the palace regulatory society. The ful@NgaN group as a whole performs on the occasion of all the major ceremonies at the palace. These are held to commemorate the death of high-ranking royal gures, notably of the chief or fon himself, the queen mothers,11 or the princes.12 Such commemorative ceremonies are not necessarily held on the occasion of a death itself an occasion for mourning rather than celebration but often a year or so later. The emotive distinction between a burial and a memorial celebration is evident in the names applied to each one: while both
9 Bellman (1984: 93) has noted a very similar association between Poro society initiates and cannibal devils in Sierra Leone. His informant Flumo makes the connection quite literally:

Flumo: There are some people yeah there are some people who learn . . . how the devil eat person, and like that. [Bellman]: What are they called? Flumo: The people who do that? Oh, they are the devil. 10 While the usual distance of the audience from the performer, articial lighting effects and music all serve to mask the physical strain of dance in classical western staged performance, watching a dancer perform at close range can be a shocking experience, revealing as it does in the case of the Grasselds the smells of the dancers perspiration and of the smoke-dried costume, the sounds of halting breath, and the reverberation of unprotected feet slamming painfully on to the ground. 11 No ntok, mother [of the] palace. 12 Wan ntok, child [of the] palace.

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F IGURE 1. The palace KwifOn society Ful@NgaN masking group makes its way from the KwifOn compound into the palace courtyard. Note the fringes of cowry shells on the masks gowns and the swords in their hands.

are known by the single term cry die in Pidgin, in Eblam Ebkwo a burial is known as the die of tears (ekwo @ mnshie), and a memorial as the die of dancing (ekwo ebinenene). This distinction applies not only to the palace, but to the majority of men in Oku.13 In this respect, the ceremonies occasioned by the death of the fon are exceptional. While no dancing takes place for an ordinary burial or die of tears, the ceremony marking the fons burial is closely followed by the events surrounding the installation of his successor, and this installation does involve the performance of masks. The successor is chosen in secret before the death of the fon referred to elliptically as his loss is made public. During this interim period, the incumbent fon is kept inside the palace and only emerges at the climax of the installation ceremony. The late fon Sentie, who had been installed in 1956, passed away after my rst visit to Oku in 1991, and I was able to witness the installation of his successor, fon Ngum III, soon after my return to Oku in 1992. The description of ful@NgaN that I provide below is taken from that occasion, as well as from the memorial celebration that was held a year later.14

13 14

This is the case provided that the man was married and had children. Memorial celebrations are not held for women except in exceptional cases, such as for queen mothers. I was able to witness the events described below (the rst enthronement since 1956) in the early stages of my eld research in Oku, which lasted two years from 1992 to 1994. For a full description of the enthronement ceremony, see Argenti (1996: 261ff.).

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Masking violence, masking memor y: t h e f u l @N g a N d a n c e

At 5:30 am on the 20th of June 1992, as dawn breaks, the long-expected announcement of the loss of the fon is suddenly shouted out from the palace kwifO n compound, rending the silent mist of a cold rainy-season morning: The sun has set! The sun has set! The sun has set! The proclamation is immediately followed by danegun volleys, at rst thick as a fusillade, then peppering the soundscape sporadically throughout the day as people made their way to the palace to join in the events. The ceremonies that would culminate a few days later in the appearance of the new fon from the palace were underway. As part of these celebrations, all of the masked dance groups of the chiefdom are called upon to perform at the palace, but none of them are permitted to dance before ful@NgaN has done so rst. Ful@NgaN is spoken of in Oku as the archetypal group of the chiefdom. Many say it is the oldest a metaphor of rank in a gerontocratic society and many say it is the most bad (bm@); an ambivalent means of praising the groups medicinal powers and its awe-inspiring appearance while denoting its fearful dimension. It is the medicines that ful@NgaN possesses that make it fearful. Some of these are contained in the dried lianas worn around the necks of the masks, while some are said to be contained inside the masks or rubbed on to them. The most visible sign of the medicines carried by the masks are the green shoots held in their right hands as they dance, and which the musicians keep clenched between their teeth as they play the xylophone and other instruments.

The performance
Unlike the musicians of other groups, those of ful@NgaN must remain speechless throughout their performance, and the plants in their mouths ensure that they respect this rule. The plant is a species of dracaena (known as Nk N @bwaren, or large Nk N in normal circumstances). The name highlights the fact that this variegated species of dracaena is larger than the more commonly found dark green one.15 While commonly known as the large Nk N (Nk N @bwaren), however, the long, pointed leaves of the larger plant are called sword (ar) of ful@NgaN when used in this performance, and the two leaders (kam) of the masquerades do in fact dance with real swords or cutlasses, which I was told by more than one informant were Fulani-style swords from the Islamised region to the north of the Grasselds. Cutlasses and knives are often used in medicine in the kingdom, where they are considered an essential means of warding off the spells cast by witches and evil-wishers. In spite of the general view among Oku people that a mask represents a single, identiable animal, many of those in ful@NgaN are polymorphic gures made up of disparate elements from several different (identiable and unidentiable) animals. This
15 The common dracaena species, known in Pidgin as a peace plant, is used as a symbol of ofce for fons in the Grasselds. It is often cultivated around peoples houses and considered both decorative and functional. It is used in certain medicines and considered effective in warding off sickness. Because in its natural state it tends to grow in dark, wet places, it is associated with coolness. The word san means both cool and wet and has positively valued connotations of fecundity, as opposed to heat and dryness which refer to bareness, unruliness and disorder, chaos or insanity.

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is true not only for the appearance of the headdresses themselves, but also for the combination of certain animal headdresses with feather bodies, such as the monkey (the fth in line) which has a monkeys head but a body of feathers. In my position as his apprentice, I used to spend many of my days with the palace master-carver Francis Wandjel16 a member of kwifO n and of ful@NgaN, who often plays the xylophone when the group appears. I therefore took the opportunity one day to investigate the polymorphism of kwifO n masks, and of Mbui the mask occupying the last position and arguably the most difcult of the group to identify. Why does it look like many different animals at once? I asked. Because its a strong mask, he replied, and it has things that are quite simply bad.17 The polymorphism of many of the ful@NgaN masks was so unsettling to Wandjel his membership of kwifO n notwithstanding that it had become a signicant aspect of the aesthetic of the performance for him. Wandjel emphasised to me that the polymorphism of Mbui bothered him intensely. It makes me suffer! he exclaimed of the fact that certain masquerades were unidentiable even to him.18 Taking the aesthetic of ful@NgaN as a whole, the features that are exceptional to the group all share one common quality they denote exogenous origins and the mystery of foreign lands and distant worlds. To an extent, every mask group in Oku strives for this quality of transcendence, but ful@NgaN takes this aesthetic to new heights by confounding the very principles that all other groups use to achieve it. In this way, the sensation of being in the presence of the unknown and the mysterious is clearly cultivated by the polymorphism of the masks of ful@NgaN, and brought out still more strongly by the highly abstract, geometric masks such as that of Mbui, the leader of the back.19 The name of this mask, which means the universe, further connotes the enormity of the mystery that surrounds it, as do the two chameleons rubbed in white kaolin and mounted on the back of its headdress. Chameleons have strong connotations with witchcraft in the Grasselds, their ability to change colour being seen as akin to the capacity of witches to transform themselves into animals at night. This power, known as nte, is shared by the fon, who is said to transform into a leopard or a snake and to roam throughout his realm in the night. The transformations of the fon and the palace masks are thus metonymic of one another, each serving to emphasise the powers of the other to negotiate other worlds. The gowns of ful@NgaN again referred to only euphemistically as the bags of the masks also stand out from the Oku canon. In the rst place, many of them, including that of Mabu, are made of raptor feathers. Ful@NgaN is unique in combining wooden headdresses with feather gowns, and in achieving the resulting polymorphism of bird and beast. While some mask groups, known as NgaN, which are not associated with the palace also have feather gowns in Oku, they never wear wooden headdresses. They are said to be headless, and the loosely woven mesh hoods that the dancers wear to conceal their features are read as the headless necks of the gures. Masks that do make use of wooden headdresses, on the other hand, are never adorned with feather gowns.

16 17 18 19

See Argenti 2002. Ka lu k@kum k@taa, lO kil @bfwa n@ bmk@ kn di. K@ faa-ki fO Ngk s@ m! In contrast to the aesthetic principles of many west and central African mask traditions, the headdresses of the Grasselds are carved in a relatively naturalistic, representational style, making the bold and highly geometric features of a mask such as Mbui stand out all the more.

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F IGURE 2. One of the Ful@NgaN masks, this one representing an old man, shufes round the xylophone, arms akimbo, as Mbui comes up menacingly behind it.

The headdresses of ful@NgaN follow the groups aesthetic of exception by breaking the Oku canon yet again. Wooden headdresses generally conform to a strict aesthetic throughout the Grasselds, being blackened with hot irons to give them a uniformly black glossy nish before they are used. Many of those of ful@NgaN, however, are covered with animal pelts (made from an assortment of forest mammals). The use of pelts on masks in Oku is exceptional, restricted solely to ful@NgaN. Furthermore, while the wooden headdresses of Grasselds lineage masking groups tend to be restricted to one set of about twelve different well-known forms, each of them easily recognisable as an example of the young woman, the lineage elder, the bush cow, the elephant, etc. The wooden headdresses of ful@NgaN include many unique forms in addition to these. Apart from the ambiguous Mbui a highly stylised representation of an ape, these include a bat, a Banermans Touraco,20 and an ape with alligator-like jaws. Several of these headdresses are surmounted by a set of two or three chameleons. Headdresses and feather gowns aside, the cloth gowns worn by the other masks of ful@NgaN are also exceptional. Firstly, many of them are red a colour no other mask is permitted to wear.21 Secondly, they are fringed with cowry shells along their

20 A rare forest-dwelling bird that survives uniquely in the montane forest of Oku; its red tailfeather is used as the insignia of military society ofcers in the Grasselds. 21 It is noteworthy in this vein that those attending a burial are not allowed to wear red, but that the white cloth used to wrap the deceased gradually turns red as those paying their last respects rub camwood on it with their hands as they pass by the bier. The red gowns of the ful@NgaN dancers at a palace memorial celebration thus recall the red gowns of corpses, and would have more vividly still in the days when red cloth was produced locally by dying white cloth with camwood.

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bottom edge a prerogative of the fon once used as a form of currency in the prestige economy. In line with the general aesthetic of the ful@NgaN masks, the red cloth and the cowry shells worn by some of the masks also strongly connote connections with the world beyond the connes of the Grasselds. Imported red cloth was scarce and highly prized in the Grasselds in the nineteenth century, and constituted a prestige item of exchange, small patches of which were woven into the gowns of elites to mark their status.22 Cowry shells likewise were a product of the long-distance trade. They were part of the prestige economy of the north-eastern Grasselds in the nineteenth century and were obtained by selling slaves to the north.23 The fringe of cowry shells that decorates the hems of the ful@NgaN gowns to this day thus recalls the role of the palace in the slave trade in undeniably concrete terms. These are the very cowries for which strong-heads, alleged witches, criminals and recalcitrant wives were once sold to the long distance trade put on display by the palace kwifO n society for all to see.

Ful@NgaN and the slave trade

Just as the cowry shells bespeak the trade in slaves in which the palace once took part, so too the swords (ar ful@NgaN) of the masks recall the period of the razzias the Fulani and Chamba incursions. The leaders both dance with a sword specically said to be Fulani rather than local. The sylvan versions of these swords held by the other dancers then serve to propel the symbol of the Fulani warrior into the realm of myth and witchcraft, transforming the manufactured into the realm of the forest that is the proper place of the witch and the foreign invader alike. This transformation effectively transposes historical memories into the landscape, naturalising the political and presenting it anew. The Fulani are still spoken of with barely concealed horror by the sedentary peoples of the Grasselds as people without a home, or wanderers24 who go round and round (kaal@ kaal@). The fact that they do not make a living off the land suggests that they must have other, invisible sources of income and such invisible sources of wealth are a classic sign of witchcraft and slave trading in the Grasselds and

22

23

24

According to Elizabeth Chilver (1961: 247), red cloth, to judge by Zintgraffs account of Fon Bombis dress, had reached Bafut: local legend has it that the uncertain attitude of Bafut towards his expedition was the result of coveting the red sailor-blouses of his carriers for dance outts. At the same period in Bali-Nyonga, red cloth was reserved for titled elders, who possessed the right to wear a small dorsal moon of it on their gowns (ibid.). The sphere of exchange negotiated on the basis of the cowry as a measure of value included the Grasselds at its southern extremity, and reached northwards to the Adamawa region, in the economic zone controlled by the Hausa and Fulani emirates. Cowries entered this sphere of exchange in Kano in exchange for prestige goods, including slaves. From Kano, traders passing through Kontcha, Banyo, Bauchi and Yola transported the cowries back to the south. They were then brought into the Grasselds via the expanding states of Nso and Fumban, where they were once again used to buy slaves for the northern trade route (Warnier 1985: 8790, 1434; Jeffreys 1955: 4). Cowry shells were so desirable to slave dealers along the west coast of Africa that European slave buyers had to supply up to one half of the payment for a slave in cowry shells, despite the desirability of the other trade goods that they carried (Hogendorn and Johnson 1986: 110). The Royal African Company found the shells almost a sine qua non for trading at Whydah, Ardra, and the Bight of Benin (K. G. Davies 1957, quoted in Hogendorn and Johnson 1968). This stereotype recalls the terminology used with reference to prostitutes, who are called wanderers (k@djl from s@ djl to walk).

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beyond.25 So too, when the masks of ful@NgaN come out of the kwifO n compound, any other masks who might be performing at the time ee the place,26 and ordinary people also avoid any type of contact with the masks, which are seen as a source of pollution and disease. And like the Fulani, as they start to dance, the masks of ful@NgaN too go round and round in the courtyard, menacingly ailing their swords at the crowd. In addition to the cowries and the Fulani swords of ful@NgaN, one could mention the loss of social identity of the masked dancer and the loss of social identity of the slave at the point of sale. Just as masks are explicitly viewed as non-human creatures that belong to another world, and are only trespassing in the visible world of the living temporarily, so too a slave is structurally speaking, simply not a person (Kopytoff and Miers 1977: 15). Rather, s/he is a captive outsider precisely the way that masks are said to be and, as with masks, the relation to him is a non-relation (Simmel 1923: 407, in Kopytoff and Miers 1977: 15). Indeed, anonymity is so obvious a feature of masking that it either gets treated in functionalist terms or ignored altogether in the literature. When the loss of identity conferred by the mask is addressed, the literature tends to focus on the advantages it offers in carrying out unsavoury police activities on behalf of traditional authorities without implicating individuals in such acts. In the eyes of ordinary Grasselds people, however, masking may not only be a means of highlighting the impersonal nature of the power of the palace so much as a reminder of the desocialised and alienated position of the slave disappeared and forced to leave their community forever, becoming a non-person or a ghost (Nkvosay) within their lineage. While the anonymity of the mask may mark the power of the palace within the palatine discourse, in the counter-hegemonic discourse of the ordinary villager or of the members of the oating population, it may be more noteworthy for the desocialisation that it indexes, and the sense of dread or of eeriness so effectively cultivated by palace masks would thus index not the legitimate police authority of the palace so much as the guilty secret of its wealth. Within the terms of the hegemonic discourse of the palace, this secret is effectively whitewashed by a reversal of logic whereby the internal violence of the palace is projected outwards, making the rest of the world appear to be the source of all danger. Just as the palace discourse portrays slaves and members of the oating population as dangerous outsiders, thus reversing the real direction of coercion,27 so too in this instance the kwifO n masks and musicians allegedly need the swords they carry for self-protection: witches are everywhere, forever inltrating the chiefdom to ruin their performance and to harm the people of Oku. The ful@NgaN performance thus effectively appropriates the notion of a threat, transforming its source from a local into a foreign one, and by the same token transforming the memories of its own predatory past into a necessary evil at the heart of the community: the purgative medicine needed to keep invisible enemies at bay. An announcement made by the kwifO n society at midday on the 21st of June, just prior to the opening performance of ful@NgaN at 1.30 pm, made this explicit. In the early afternoon, as the crowds at the palace had started to swell, some kwifO n society members stepped from their compound into the main palace courtyard. On their arrival,
25 See Ardener (1970: 24360) and Geschiere (1997). 26 I have mentioned that ful@NgaN is always the rst mask to perform, opening the ceremony before the other mask groups can begin. It often reappears after its initial performance, however, and it is at the time of these subsequent, impromptu appearances that the other groups are forced to ee. 27 See Warnier (1975: 37486) and Argenti (forthcoming).

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the seething crowd stretching as far as the eye could see stopped everything and fell perfectly silent. The kwifO n members proceeded to make their formal announcement, which ran as follows:

r There is someone on the other side of the lake trying to bring poisoned gunpowder to the palace to harm the people. Heads of manjON (the military society) are to keep a close watch on the number of daneguns in their group so that no treated gun can be red surreptitiously. r Food from a womens group in the village of Jikijem is not to be allowed into the palace as it has been poisoned. r Dancing jujus should not dance with spears, cutlasses or guns but only plant stems as a plan is abreast to murder someone, taking advantage of the tumult to make it look like an accident.
If kwifO n is dangerous, it is only so in the way that powerful medicines are understood to be in the Grasselds: their power is ambivalent, and potentially harmful as well as curative. Any harm that they cause to the body is seen to be necessary for defence against greater external pathogens. What goes for the body also goes for the body politic: kwifO n may prey upon its people, but this is what it takes to build a strong state.

Mabu, the slave driver

The place of Mabu in this conception of protection, necessary evil and the greater good of the community now becomes clear. Apart from being an integral member of the ful@NgaN group, Mabu is one of several masks belonging to the kwifO n society that performs on its own, in a performance known as a display in Grasselds Pidgin (shi N@ in Eblam Ebkwo). In the course of this dance, Mabu appears as a wild predator and a hunter. In addition to its shi N@ dance, Mabu also performs a specic role in the ful@NgaN dance. In this role, Mabu is known as the k@shi Nn; a title which has the term shi N@ (display) as its root, and which we could translate roughly as the one who displays. All mask groups in Oku possess a mask that plays the role of the k@shi Nn, the purpose of which is largely consistent from group to group, and essentially twofold. In the rst place, the k@ shi Nn of ordinary lineage masking groups is the only mask to appear on the occasion of a burial ceremony (as opposed to the later death celebration). On the day of burial for one of the members of the mask society, this mask appears alone by the graveside to mourn the loss of the society member.28 On the occasion of a memorial celebration, on the other hand, the k@shi Nn is the rst of the group to appear. Again it comes out alone, but this is not the subdued affair of the burial. Its role on this occasion is to rally its unmasked members behind it, egging them on in a display of the might and fearsomeness of the group. As the members all chant behind it, it surges forth boldly into the crowd, making a show of leaping toward onlookers, or lunging menacingly back toward its members, who crouch down before it as they chant in urgent tones. On the occasion of this display, the mask is no longer
28 On such occasions the mask behaves in a solemn, reserved and subdued manner. No other members of the society accompany it, and no musical instruments are played. The k@shiNn does not carry its customary weapons, but only lingers in silence by the graveside for a short while, often keeping its arms crossed across its chest and clasped on both shoulders as a sign of grief. It sometimes throws a handful of earth over the cofn before slipping quietly away.

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F IGURE 3. Mabu, the k@shiNn mask of the palace Ful@NgaN group, performs its shiN@ at the palace with spears and cudgel in hand.

grieving and mournful, but angry, and even triumphant: the deceased member of the group is to become an ancestor. Finally, when the masking group comes out of the secret society house to dance around the xylophone and the assembled musicians, it is the task of this mask to keep all the other masks in line as they stamp rhythmically round the centre of the courtyard. The masks are known to be unruly, ailing their spears and horse-tail whisks about menacingly at the crowd and regularly stepping out of line or losing the rhythm altogether. In the course of the dance, the k@shi Nn stands beside the line, running up and down along the row of masks with an exaggerated stamp, keeping the others in step. Because of its corralling or shepherding role in relation to the other masks, we can call this mask the driver in English. It is the role of the driver that Mabu plays in relation to the rest of the masks of the ful@NgaN palace group. If the ful@NgaN masks seem menacing in relation to the crowd of onlookers, they are cowed by Mabu, their indomitable driver. Ful@NgaN does not dance with the verve of ordinary mask-groups in Oku, but more slowly, with smaller steps, and only for a short period of time. And while other masking groups not associated with the palace societies all have a set of at least three steps that they perform to the changing rhythms of the drums and xylophone, ful@NgaN has only one. Onlookers admire its laborious shufe as a sign of its relative seniority and venerable age, and excuse the brevity of its appearance on this basis too: old men tire sooner. But viewed in relation to the violent driver mask that storms up and down the line of dancers, club in hand, they seem meek and browbeaten. They dance with their heads bowed, huddled close to one another. Their body-language is restricted, as if they were moving under a great weight or had been sapped of all their strength. The only one to retain freedom of movement and vigour is Mabu, the driver, who never stops stamping his feet and ailing his club like an enraged beast.
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Contemporary informants in the Grasselds today no longer remember the German colonial period, let alone the pre-colonial period. In the course of my interviews regarding masking, no one ever mentioned the historical (as opposed to the mythical) past, or connected masking with broader political phenomena. Rather, they nearly always meticulously stayed within the bounds of the discourse of masking: that masks (the term for which, k@kum, makes no reference to the wooden headdress) are not people but forest beasts; that they are not controlled by people but come and go of their own volition; and that their costumes are not man-made, but simply the outer surface of their very bodies. Nonetheless, one cannot help but wonder how those who saw ful@NgaN perform (or participated in it) in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries might have reacted to it in relation to what events it might have gained its salience and its emotive impact for them. Looking at the relation of Mabu to the rest of the ful@NgaN masks, it is hard not to think back to an early-twentieth-century description of the colonial caravan that was recorded by Marie-Pauline Thorbecke, the wife of a German ethnographer who travelled with him through the Grasselds:
During the whole length of the portage, certain elements try to drop behind, or to escape into the bush. Thanks to treating them regularly to the twenty-ve [the maximum number of strokes of the whip permitted by German law], the majority of them nevertheless manage to remain in line . . . (Thorbecke 1914: 915, quoted in Van Slageren 1972: 889, my translation)

Like the masks of the Grasselds, the German colonial caravans and the slave caravans before them all had drivers (at times German, at times local or Liberian) who made liberal use of whips to drive the porters on. Is it conceivable that people who had never experienced forced labour and the torment of caravan portage could have developed the cultural tradition of the driver mask? To put it another way, how could the nightmarish role of the driver have become such a central feature of the culture of the Grasselds were it not for the exactions of forced labour and the ubiquitous experience of the caravan and its violent discipline, enforced by armed overseers? Once one makes the connection, everything falls into place:

r The perplexingly slow shufe of the masks and the state of perpetual hunger and exhaustion in which carriers were kept. r The stooped gure of the masker gingerly balancing his unwieldy headdress, and the porter staggering under his headload. r The need to have a policing gure in a masquerade, as well as armed masks known in Pidgin as Captains at the front and rear of the line of dancers, and the fact that caravans were often led by German ofcers with the rank of Captain, and that they were guarded by drivers armed with clubs and whips watching out for those attempting to escape into the bush. r The uncomfortable closeness of the dancers one to another in their line and the strange restriction of their movements on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that porters like slaves were often kept in wooden fetters after their recruitment, and bound to one another during their portage or when being delivered by the recruiters (Van Slageren 1972: 78).
If dance normally expresses the transcendence of ones ordinary physical limitations, the ful@NgaN performance imposes the habitus of slavery and of colonial domination

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like a set of irons.29 The root of the word for mask, kum, to lock, here recalls the double meaning of followers, knkumten, in the line of masks: at once followers in a dance and locked ones in a caravan. One could take the view that this interpretation of the dance is a mere construction on my part, lacking the empirical evidence of what really happened in the past of the dance. My response would be two-fold: in the rst place, if we want to assume that my interpretation is nothing more than a construction, then we have to come up with an alternative explanation for the parallels I cite. Is it plausible that the four similarities of the dance to the slave caravan and the etymological links between masking and slavery are all fortuitous and coincidental? Or that each of the parallels have discrete and unconnected explanations? As we know from experience, such Copernican models tend to be much less convincing in their complexity than simpler, cohesive explanations. The second point, which I attempt to make in the next section, is that the presumption that some form of empirical reality is there waiting to be discovered in the past of the Grasselds misses the point in the rst place.

Choreographies of captivity
From a western academic historical perspective, the possibility that the events at the palace refer to more than one period poses questions about when these performances were developed, when they were xed in their present form, and whether their contents can be trusted as accurate. It might seem inconsistent from the point of view of such a perspective that some of the elements of the ful@NgaN performance recall the chaotic pre-colonial period of slave raids and abductions while others seem to address the colonial period of the caravans and forced labour.30 The awkward shufe of the masks, for instance, might recall the pre-colonial practice of locking slaves in wooden fetters after capture while awaiting a long-distance trader and the fact that slaves were chained to one another on their long march to the coast. But the same movements can equally be interpreted as an embodied memory of the colonial era: of the caravans of porters and of forced labourers on their way to the coastal plantations. They too were bound to one another (though with ropes rather than chains), forced to walk in single le, and guarded by armed men who brought up the rear and beat stragglers, just as the captains (as the kam are known in Pidgin), or the drivers of contemporary mask groups do today.

29 Speaking not of masked performance, but of mixed-gender group dances, Warnier has noted the inexpressible boredom of Grasselds dance, putting the lack of exuberance it betrays down to the tight control over sexual relations enjoyed by the elite of the Grasselds: In almost twenty years of intermittent residence I have never observed the slightest touch of eroticism (1995: 261, note 8). As with mixed dancing, the severity of the bodily discipline of masked dances may relate to the control of elders, connoting in this instance their control not only over mens sexuality, but over their commodication. 30 Charles Piot (1999: 378) similarly notes how the oral history of the Kabre peoples of northern Togo in the village of Kudwe includes two exegeses regarding a corpse said to lie in the forest near the village: one version has it that this was a German soldier, another that it is was slave raider killed before the arrival of the Germans. Rosalind Shaw (2002:1415) highlights this story as an example of how one historical event inevitably comes to be remembered through the lens of another, and adds that we dichotomise between discursive and practical memories at our peril.

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Similarly, the fact that Mabu, the driver of ful@NgaN, at once represents a hunter, an ape and a bird of prey makes of this mask not only a perfect representation of the slave driver and the caravan leader, but also, on a broader level, of the predatory nature of the palace and of the colonial and post-colonial states alike in Cameroon. If one sticks to meaning-centred approaches, one will not be able to account for the multivalence and the endless interpretability of the ful@NgaN performance seen from a diachronic perspective. Performances and bodily practices in general do not refer to, or represent, anything sui generis in a straightforward semiotic manner that is xed in time. Rather, they acquire their salience at any given time in the light of the experience, knowledge, values and aspirations that their participants bring to bear upon them. Even where the form of a rite does not change over time, its relevance is necessarily measured in relation to the wider experiences of those involved with them. With respect to the ful@NgaN performance, one can see how successive generations not only gave the performance its form, but how they would have by the same token reinterpreted the experience that this form addressed. These rites are not works of history, their contents referring to an immutable and xed past, but rather ways of putting learned bodily practices to work in the negotiation of the contemporary realities of the participants involved participants who may have had widely divergent agendas from one another at a given moment, let alone from one generation to the next. Just as myths and oral histories are known to telescope or concatenate disparate historical periods, consolidating them into memories of a more coherent and homogeneous past, so too the elements of the rites performed during the enthronement of the fon recall more than one historical period, bleeding the pre-colonial period of the slave-abductions seamlessly into the colonial period and serving as a platform to address the political continuities between them continuities that were more salient than the contrasts that the colonial powers emphasised. Moreover, this same process would seem to have facilitated the absorption of these unprecedented periods of violence and insecurity into the performative culture of the Grasselds. Non-discursive performative events such as the ful@NgaN dance should therefore not be seen merely as evidence of a failure to be historically accurate; rather, their subversion of ordinary chronological time reveals the ways in which history seen as a xed and immutable past from which subsequent generations can clearly separate themselves fails to address the lived world of political relations in pre-colonial and colonial Africa. For one thing, the fact that one performance genre simultaneously addresses the pre-colonial period of the slave trade and the colonial period of forced labour reveals the essential political and experiential continuity between these two periods from the perspective of the elites and the young oating population of the Grasselds alike. To all intents and purposes, the terror of the slave trade recurred in the colonial period and persists in the post-colonial period in various forms, and it is still being actively addressed by the people of the Grasselds today. In the languages of the Grasselds, Jaman (German) refers to a moral quality and a discourse of power that transcend historical periodicity and gain their salience with reference to contemporary political events.31 Furthermore, as mentioned in the introduction to this collection of articles, Cathy Caruths work (1991a; 1991b), among others, shows how the ordered chronology

31

Bongfen Chem-Langh e and E. S. D. Fomin (1995: 194) reveal that slave traders well into the e colonial era disguised convoys as caravans of carriers by giving the slaves loads to carry on their

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of conventional western understandings of history is radically questioned by mass traumatic events. In their intrusive recurrence in the form of bodily enactments and their ambiguous psychological status somewhere on the boundary between memory and experience, such events confound and destabilise normal periodicity and question the assumption that the past can be clearly delineated from the present.32 And yet, as Stephan Palmi also demonstrates in this issue, it would be reductionistic e to apply the trauma model wholesale to these embodied practices. There are important differences between traumatic re-enactment and dance performance: for one thing, while the former is involuntary, the latter is learned and willed, the movements if not their ultimate signicance are under the conscious control of the performer.33 Furthermore, while traumatic re-enactment (even in the case of trans-generational traumatic memory) appears to be nothing more nor less that the return of the repressed traumatic event that causes it, dance and other embodied practices are enculturated; as such, they can be associated with new socio-political realities of which they become a form of embodied knowledge, negotiation and struggle as is the case in the competing discourses regarding the performances of the palace masks in Oku. In contrast to traumatic re-enactment, these performances are not the trauma. They are dances! In this manner, the dance both is and is not the forced march of slaves or forced labourers; it plays on the ambiguity of this double inscription. Poised between being and non-being, presence and absence, silence and expression, oblivion and repetition, trauma and play, history and difference, memory and mimesis, the dance brings the past into presence as the new.34 Young people in the Grasselds today are in the structural position once occupied by potential slaves. As such, they are still forced to emigrate in search of work for much of their adult lives if they are ever to be able to return to marry in their chiefdoms and thus to become people (Gel) rather than children (Gon). For them, masked performance will never be what it is to the palatine elite, but rather may provide a means of working through the traumatic abuses of the past and their contemporary
way to the coast. This similarly suggests that the embodiment of the caravan might by the same token serve to index bodily memories of slavery. 32 Derrida (1976) brings out the relationship of traumatic memory to common memory in all of its paradox when he refers to the realm of deep memory by analogy as a crypt or a forum, a place hidden within or beneath another place, a place complete unto itself, but closed off from that outside itself of which it is nevertheless an inherent part. Derrida thus emphasises the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of traumatic memory. The crypt is formed in violence, by violence, and yet also in silence. In order for this act of violence to remain silent and unheard, one places it as far as one can apart from oneself, but this place is in fact deep within oneself. The cryptic enclave thus becomes a space of incorporation rather than of introjection, as is the case with normal experience and narrative memory. This failure of introjection, in other words, is at the root of a somatic embodiment of memory. 33 It could be said on this basis that possession rites provide a liminal case between trauma and performance. 34 Homi Bhabha (1990: 293) identies a similar alienation in the transnational experience of metropolitan modernity, which, he argues, also requires a kind of doubleness in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centred causal logic. He refers to Derridas (1993: 210) proposition that in such circumstances the present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present) . . . [as] a present of which the past and the future would be but modications.

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incarnations in the inequities to which they are themselves subject in the present.35 The fact that these performances remain salient for contemporary audiences reveals that they now address not only the past, but also necessarily the contemporary experience of those involved with them. The symptom of trauma (the re-enactment) is thus, seen from another perspective, also the cure, the failure to remember a means of bearing witness, and the evisceration of the history of the Grasselds at once the cause of its embodiment. The result is a recapitulation of the fragmented history of the Grasselds in which centuries of tension between violent insertion into the Atlantic and later global worlds on the one hand and discourses of locality on the other are brought to bear on the contemporary experience of ordinary people. If, then, history is about a xed, empirically determined and linear past from which one can clearly delimit oneself, then the mass traumatic episodes that have characterised the history of African modernity evade normal experience and allow themselves to be known only in their anteriority. Because it is traumatic, the past of African slavery is belated. This belatedness prevents the event from being known or even properly experienced as it occurs, ensuring that it will only come to be experienced in its re-enactments: it is what will have been.36 The fact that such knowledge is incorporated rather than introjected means that it is necessarily evanescent, difcult to reect upon, and forever to come. The past of slavery and forced labour in the Grasselds is not open to historical observation because, from an experiential point of view, it has yet to happen. In its embodied re-enactments the past is an anterior future it is forever about to happen. The fact that dance is a non-discursive bodily practice makes the expression of the past aporetic and indeterminate: exactly what is referred to is always open to question. Thus, because dance is undetermined, it becomes overdetermined applying to many different periods at once. It may therefore

35

36

Some analysts have called attention to the healing aspect of traumatic re-enactment as a means of working-through: a sort of psychical work which allows the subject to accept certain repressed elements and to free himself from the grip of mechanisms of repetition (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974). Saul Friedlander (1992) presents the task of working-through as a means of positioning oneself in relation to the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, for a history to account for the subjective reality of the events it describes, it must avoid the temptation of closure which represents an obvious avoidance of what remains indeterminate, elusive and opaque (1992: 52). On the other hand, while the protective shield of closure prevents any real understanding (thus mimicking the effects of dissociation), so too would a headlong dive into the horror of the events described a total relinquishing of affective distance which would do little more than reproduce the trauma as trauma rather than as memory. What he proposes instead of these two extremes is a middle way that would include the mythic memory of the victims in order to provide the experiential reality too often erased by the normalising effect of writing history. In the words of Laurie Vickroy (2002: 171), working-through may counteract the force of acting out and the repetition compulsion. He refers to La Capras (2001) suggestion that a literature of trauma can immerse readers in a state of empathetic unsettlement through which one puts oneself in the others position while recognising the difference of that position and hence not taking the others place. Homi Bhabha thus asks (1990: 308), How does one narrate the present as a form of contemporaneity that is always belated? This paradox leads Cathy Caruth (1991a: 182) to envisage a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential, and Lyotard to argue that standard narrative histories do violence to histories of violence. In purporting to reinstate the positivist chronology separating the rst blow from the second causal effect from secondary affect such positivist history is false to subjective experience. It instantly occults what motivates it, and . . . is made for this reason (1990: 16).

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be more appropriate to speak of postmodern historicities in Africa than to highlight the lacunae of modernist historiography. One of the benets of the broken glass through which the past of the Grasselds must be glimpsed is that it frustrates essentialist attempts at memorialisation, on the part both of historians and of the elite of the Grasselds. The past is kept alive as a form of embodied memory that is always about to be known (again, but always for the rst time). In remembering a past that is always belated, the people of the Grasselds remember the future that is to say, they remember a past that will only have been known in its recurrences. These are forever new for two reasons: because they are not part of the canon of discursive memory, and because they are overdetermined, each re-enactment introducing the new and supplementary. These memories of slavery are therefore the very opposite of a body of cultural heritage, but rather a form of perpetual engagement with a contemporary political reality a reality that cannot pretend it is separated from its past either. For better or for worse, the rites of enthronement in Oku burst the dam of the past, allowing its murky waters to come ooding out of the palace gates. While the audience at the palace may seem to be swept away in the inexorable tide of past terror, however, the effect of these rites is to emphasise the contemporary relations of violence, suffering and predation that still characterise Grasselds political reality and give immediate salience to performative memories of slavery, forced labour, witchcraft and cannibalism. While the palace authorities attempt to contain the symbolic effect of masked performances within the bounds of their memorialising discourse, according to which violence and domination have always been of exogenous origin, the young audience appropriate the performance to their own life-world. As they ee pellmell from the masks, the paternalistic discourse of the palace is replaced by centuries of experience of political violence in which distinctions between the chiefdom or the state and the outside world are pulverised by the legacy of the transatlantic trade in slaves that introduced African communities to the forces of globalised modernity. As the Oku proverb has it, As you go forth, you know [what lies] behind.37
Nicolas Argenti School of Social Sciences and Law Brunel University Uxbridge Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom nicolas.argenti@brunel.ac.uk

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37 W lO ndu mbui, w ke ebam. Behind, ebam, here referring to witchcraft and violence as well as to the past.

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