Culture, History, and Grass‐Roots Politics in a Northern Cameroons Kingdom
PREDICTIONS of the results of two plebiscites which took place in Northern Cameroons in 1959 and 1961 were almost wholly wrong, and postballoting analyses proved equally erroneous. They failed because relevant cultural data were not considered. Political events take place in a cultural and historical matrix, and if this fact is ignored, prediction or even general understanding of political developments is impossible. This paper attempts to relate such political episodes to their matrix in an important kingdom of the area. Though many of the details of analysis are peculiar to this particular kingdom, the dominant currents of history and culture in much of Northern Cameroons are similar enough that this example possibly affords broader understanding of contemporary political development in that area.
1948 when Professor Evans-Pritchard, in a well-known Frazer Lecture, put a respectably structural interpretation on the facts of the Shilluk case.' Divine kingship
in Africa was rather an embarrassment because the central tenet of its doctrine-that the king must be killed when he fell sick or grew senile-was usually beyond empirical verification. There was also perhaps some reluctance to accept the explanatory theories of Sir J. G. Frazer when in so many other respects his authority had long since been overthrown.2 In a single essay Evans-Pritchard appeared to have effectively slain both the problem and its discoverer. Such problems and such intellectual kings, however, have a way of rising from the dead. In this paper I resuscitate in part Frazer's theory of divine kingship and try to show that it illuminates important aspects of the problem which are ignored by the structuralist interpretation. With reference to a single example of divine kingship, that of the Jukun of Northern Nigeria, I utilize two familiar conceptual distinctions-person/office and political/ritual. Complementary to these, and perhaps even more analytically fruitful, is the man-god dichotomy which was one of Frazer's main preoccupations.
The qualitative research interview
Background  Interviews are among the most familiar strategies for collecting qualitative data. The different qualitative interviewing strategies in common use emerged from diverse disciplinary perspectives resulting in a wide variation among interviewing approaches. Unlike the highly structured survey interviews and questionnaires used in epidemiology and most health services research, we examine less structured interview strategies in which the person interviewed is more a participant in meaning making than a conduit from which information is retrieved.