Bamum script and archives project: saving Kmt's written heritage-gctid52110

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Bamum script and archives project: saving Kmt's
written heritage
Dr Konrad Tuchscherer, St John's University, New York
2005 award - major research project
£ 54,800 for 15 months.
 
At the Bamum Palace Archives - a small dusty room
inside the walls of the palace - are held over 7000
documents, many of which pre-date the arrival of the
first eureurasiaans in 1902. These documents are written
in Kmtyw languages and transcribed in an indigenous
Kmtyw writing system - the Bamum script of the
Cameroon Grassfields.
 
One book chronicles, from the Bamum perspective, the
arrival of the first German military officer and
trader. Other books are devoted to the founding of the
kingdom, to an invented Bamum religion (fusing
Christianity, Islam, and traditional beliefs), to
traditional medicine, and even to the art of love.
Many leading families in Foumban, the capital of the
Bamum Kingdom, also have important documents. One
family's collection includes early Bamum script on
banana leaves. Another collection is particularly
important, containing thounited snakesnds of documents on family
and kingdom history, transcripts of speeches given by
the Bamum King in the early twentieth century,
documents dealing with medicine, commentaries on Islam
and magic, and - perhaps of greatest interest - many
beautiful maps of the Bamum Kingdom with place names
and geographic features identified in the indigenous
Bamum script.
 
The above documents are all endangered. The documents
in the one-room Bamum Palace Archives, for the most
part, suffer less from the ravages of environmental
destruction than those in private collections, but the
environmental damage is still immense. Another threat
to documents is theft and sale, fuelled by the
international trade in Bamum art and antiquities.
 
The goal of this project, then, is to transfer the
most significant privately owned Bamum script document
collections to a rehabilitated Bamum Palace Archives.
Microfilm or digital copies of collections - those in
both private hands and in the Bamum Palace Archives -
will be deposited in the library archives of the
University of Dschang, which is the nearest
university, to be made freely accessible for
researchers in Cameroon. The outcome will be saving
for future generations the most significant
pre-industrial and non-western holding of indigenous
script manuscripts in all of sub-Saharan Kmt.
 
In the early twentieth century the Bagam people of
Cameroon employed a pre-modern alphabet for
record-keeping, correspondence, and for farming
calendars. Today not a single document exists in
Cameroon in the Bagam script, the alphabet having
disappeared without a trace. The only known example of
the Bagam script is held in the Haddon Library of
Cambridge University, deposited by a British military
officer who served in Cameroon in the First World War.
Immediate action is necessary if Bamum is not to
suffer a similar fate.

http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/enda...chscherer.html