Introducing: Walter Gam Nkwi
Walter Gam Nkwi is lecturer at the Institute for History, University of Leiden since 1 September 2019. He also lectures at the Den Haag campus. Walter introduces himself below.
After teaching the history of Africa in the University of Buea, Cameroon, Central/West Africa, and also given guest lectures at the Babes-Boylai University (Roumania); University of Ghent, Belgium and keynote address at the International Conference on Maritime and Global History, Hamburg, I thought I should share my expertise with students and scholars beyond the borders. This was my conviction. In developing ambition to teach at Leiden University, I was in fact framing my experience within the Africa saying that, “until the lion starts to tell his own part of the story, only the hunter will tell it.” Therefore, I felt that African history has come of age and needs to be taught by Africans so that it will succinctly reflect African realities. Teaching African history and mentorship of young scholars and the desire to expand new research frontiers with new methodology skilled me to apply and to successfully get the job. The University of Leiden impresses me with its stimulating intellectual environment, aligned with my teaching and research background and interests.
I am currently working on two draft projects. “The Unwanted Women?”: Female Mobility and the Conundrum of ‘Prostitution’ in Cameroon Province, 1928-1959, is an attempt to analyse women not as objects but as actresses of historical processes and goes beyond African Women being described in terms of roles and statuses. The project argues that the women interact with their societies and alter their environments, they become visible and thus part of history. It critiques history that assumes women as passive agents and shows how, despite the patriarchal controls placed on the geographical mobility of women by the British colonial regime and native authorities, women in the sub-region circumvented these laws and moved to the ‘city’ in the twilight of British colonial rule. Women’s voices are very present in this book. Investigation of these voices appear to reveal findings that contest and questions the assumption of women simply being acted upon by historical processes without any agency of their own. The evidence demonstrates that some of the most modest and seemingly “inconsequential of colonial subjects” – female prostitutes so to say in the mind and perspective of colonial administration – could expose contradictions in colonial settings. The second is Mirroring Mobility Patterns: The Dutch in Cameroon- Cameroonians in Holland, c.1930s-Present, seeks to understand geographical mobility of Europeans from Europe to Africa and back to Europe by the Dutchmen. With the help of mobility theory I focus on reverse mobility. The main thrust is to question new forms of mirroring migration taking the return Dutch migrants as a case study. It questions why and how these returned migrants have remained connected to areas in Africa like Cameroon and with what consequences. In all these I intend to wed ethnography with history and at the same time giving an African historical approach.
Before I joined Leiden, I was benefitting from an Oxford-African grant at Oxford university in which I was working on a project with Professor David Zeitlyn at the Department of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Moving Bodies: Vernacular Autopsies in Cameroon and Mortuaries. In this project we are concerned with vernacular autopsies and mortuaries in the nineteenth and twentieth century Cameroon. Historically, vernacular autopsy was an indigenous medical practice widespread in West Cameroon over the last eighty years (establishing the scope is one of our goals). It is well attested in two separated groups-Northwest and Southwest regions amongst the Bangwa which have very different social structures and cultural traditions, and were administered at one time by the Germans and later the British after the First World War.
Leiden is not really new to me. From the 3rd European Conference on African Studies in July 2007, I constantly visited Leiden and Amsterdam for academic imperatives. First in 2008, I was a visiting fellow at ASC to work up my PhD proposal. In the autumn of 2009 I was back in ASC for the writing of my draft PhD thesis. I was again back in 2010 to finalise my thesis and on 24 May 2011 I defended and obtained my PhD. In 2013, I won the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen grant (Royal Netherlands of Arts and Sciences).This permitted me to do research at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam for six months. Four years later (2017) I was back at the African Studies Centre as a Research Fellow.
My current research interest, is to say the least, ambitious. I am interested in Migration, African cultural and social history, relationship between technology and society, African socio-political and conflict history, global and imperial history, contemporary history of technology in Africa and communication studies. Labour history under colonialism, women and Gender issues.
On a personal note I like Netherlands and its people as I knew them more than 40 years ago. However, I have a major challenge which I am battling to overcome- to speak the language. With the help of my teacher, Anne Martens I will redouble my efforts.