ABSTRACT
In the mid-1930s, African women in Bamenda, Cameroon, encountered domesticity and low-grade technology through European colonialism. This system of alien administration was also a process of exploitation; and a production system geared towards the creation of capitalist relations and the economic and sociocultural dependence on European products. This chapter maps colonial strategies of conquest and subjugation of Africans through science and technology, and explores how Christian and elite women’s identities formed especially through missionary education and the cult of domesticity, and also through economic and cultural changes. I argue that British colonial authorities in the Cameroons consciously and deliberately withheld advanced and appropriate technology and scientific knowledge from Africans and from women in particular during the British colonial period from 1916 to 1960, only introducing them to the minimum low-grade science and technology needed to better serve colonial administration and her related agencies. To do otherwise would have been contrary to European colonial policies. I examine development through the prism of science and technology and conclude that European colonizers did not have the Africans’ best interests in mind when they colonized them, and British rule in the Cameroons, as elsewhere in Africa, was not necessarily an agent of development but of exploitation and gender bias and exclusion.
