I wasn’t quite sure what the author was going for at first, and by the end I wasn’t sure she was either. This is unquestionably a record of oral history, of the “as told to” sort, but Ritzenthaler takes enough detours into speculative stuff like detailed impressionistic descriptions of the weather and the way people were feeling and stuff that you have to call this fictionalization. Which doesn’t need to take away from this fascinating anthrolopogical work, all the more valuable since the author mostly allows Achirimbi—the Fon, the same one made famous by Gerald Durrell—and the other central characters to use her as a mouthpiece; but where she departs from that and constructs them, while still operating under the mouthpiece pretext, my colonial-appropriation bullshit detector goes off a little bit.

But it’s a fascinating society, and it’s a pleasure to dig deep into their traditions—the parts that stick with me most are the political structure, with the Fon reined in by a meritocratic nobility, the Bukum, and a prime ministerial leader, the Kweyifon, whose role is to act as a support and a check to the Fon; the Chung, a secret society made up of royals only (as opposed to the ban on royals in the Bukum), whose role is to act as a reserve force for the Fon, a check in times of strife on the Bukum; the complicated, ill-defined, vital-yet-superfluous roles played by the royal women, which can make them ideal scapegoats; the careful balancing of the whole business of governance all symbolized by the moment of the Fon’s accession, where the people pelt him with rocks. The other thing I will remember is the festivals—the descriptions here really get across the sense of spectacle, and Cameroon shoots up my list of places to visit.

I can forgive Ritzenthaler all her prejudices about the bad Germans and the good Brits and the tutelage they gave the natives and so on, because this is of its era, but for someone who wasn’t even a missionary, but just a bored art dealer’s wife (albeit an art dealer who seems to have seen himself as a missionary helper of some sort, but fuck that, no mixing belief and commerce), she gets into weirdly self-abnegating waters when she talks about the present day, ascribing all this noble instruction to the churches of the same people whose sophisticated traditional society she has just described in detail, but whom she now represents as needy forelock-tuggers. (There is some pure absurdity—“the unacceptable lack of protein in the African diet”; also the highly dishonest thing where the missionaries’ squeamishness about booze and dancing is implicitly represented as representative of all of “Christian Europe”—or at least most, because the Germans do convenient duty here as the drunks). In a few places it gets really gross, like where the Fon and his right-hand man are laughing about putting one over on the British district officer when they “knew that he was well aware of their tricks.” Or the more troubling the thing where Ritzenthaler doesn’t clearly telegraph when she comes in, making the one “white woman” whose interactions with Bafut get all this page time seem like this special presence—basically just a very elaborate version of the bore who always knows better about foreign land because he taught English there for six months. So in short, fascinating information, with a presentation that oscillates between workmanlike, inept, and in bad faith. ( )