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“Human Lorries:” Labour mobillity and Transport in British Southern Cameroons, 1922-1961
| The social history of labour and transport in Africa are invariably related and has caught the attention of researchers in time and space. Labour at the onset of the colonial enterprise became a conditio sine qua non for several reasons. One of these reasons was that labour was indispensable if the colonial adventure in any “meaningful” way was to score any success. Most studies in Cameroon history about labour have attempted to focus on the movement of labour to the plantations which were/and are found in the littoral quadrant and construction of railways and roads. The pith and kernel of this paper is an attempt to examine how the British colonial administration in the British Southern Cameroons procure labour for the day to day running of the territory with special focus on the transportation of the goods of colonial officials going on tour and transportation of mails that were meant for the colonial officials during the colonial period. I find this aspect of labour and transport captivating and stimulating because so far it has remained a terra incognita in the historiography of the British Southern Cameroons. Secondly we need to start knowing how the colonial officials on tour transported their goods as well as the effectiveness of the mailing system during the nascent years of colonial rule. The salient questions which the paper wishes to tackle therefore are the following: How were the goods of the government officials transported in the territory when they were on tour and when they were transferred from one place to another when there were no vehicles? How much was the labour paid? How was the labour procured? Which were the roads used? How were mails and other important issues of administration transported in the territory? What were the distances covered and who cooked food for the labour? What were the consequences on this type of labour when the motor car and postal services were introduced in the territory around the mid 1940s. The approach will be social history-that branch of history which according to the celebrated Africanist historian, Professor Ade Ajayi, defined “as a study of the change in patterns of daily life, the emphasis being on how people lived at different times in the past, what music, dance, architecture, marriage, and family life they favoured, what religion insofar as this impinges on daily life, and the pattern of change in the totality of life that these imply”. The emphasis of this type of history is on continuity and change in how people lived their lives. In other words, the basic challenge of social history can be said to be a fuller understanding of the complex processes that have led to the emergence and transformation of human society to its present form. Sources will be mostly gotten from archives in Cameroon and interviews when necessary will be conducted.
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