ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors aim to establish their scholarly bearings for Africa at large until 1990, then for Africa in the 1990s, and for Cameroon itself, 1960 to 1990. Com-paring Cameroon with neighbors and Africa at large, they found its people rallied to a party and government where civilians remained in office, where competence prevailed over corruption. A linkage developed between the pre- and post-1972 victims and enemies made, and memories forged, by Cameroon’s regime. The authors address questions which lead to their coverage of Cameroon’s major historical processes of the 1990s. Africana thus became by 1990 a repository of important state and class scholarship, lowering epistemological and experiential barriers between stateless and state-like polities, lineage and broader modes of production, primordial and instrumental ethnicities, rural and urban life, the place of men, women and children.
