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ETHNOGENESIS AND FRACTAL HISTORY ON AN AFRICAN FRONTIER: MAMBILA–NJEREP–MANDULU

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2003

DAVID ZEITLYN  and
BRUCE CONNELL
DAVID ZEITLYN
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
BRUCE CONNELL
Affiliation:
York University
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Abstract

This paper explores the notion of fractals – structures that display a similar degree of complexity at whatever scale they may be viewed – in relation to investigating African history. A case study of developing ethnicities in the Mambila region of the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland is presented from a fractal perspective: five levels of the history of this region, covering different time, population and physical scales, as well as different objects of explanation for each, are explored. Our general conclusion is that the different scales, or levels, at which one may view history may contain features or imply generalizations that mask features found in, or generalizations implied by, other levels.

Keywords

CameroonNigeriahistoriographylinguistics
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 117 - 138
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Thomas Spear and three anonymous referees for the Journal of African History for their comments and guidance, and to Paul Lovejoy and José Curto for their comments and suggestions. A version of this paper was presented as a Harriet Tubman Seminar at York University, Toronto. We gratefully acknowledge comments and discussion received on that occasion, and we thank Richard Fardon for comments on a much earlier version of the paper.