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Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
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Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women's everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author's sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women's newspaper advice columns, Cameroon's first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction. “What the Women of a Nation Are, So Shall the Nation Be”
Chapter 1. Tracing the “Golden Age” of Anglophone Cameroon
Chapter 2. Men Must Not “Die Alone in the Task of Nation-Building”
Chapter 3. “God Will Be Eating Grass”
Chapter 4. “Beauty Contest Not Only for Free Girls”
Chapter 5. The Plague of “Gossips and Vindictiveness”
Chapter 6. “My Husband Stopped Maintaining Me So I Beat Up His Girl”
Women in the British Southern Cameroons wearing the Kamerun National Congress cloth while rallying in support of the KNC, ca. 1950s. Image courtesy of National Archives in the United Kingdom.
A KNDP women’s-wing march, early 1960s. The CWI would become the de facto KNDP women’s wing by 1962. Image courtesy of National Archives of Cameroon in Buea.