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RALPH A. AusTEN and JONATHAN DERRICK, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: the Duala and their hinterland, c. 1600-c. 1960. African Studies 96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 264 pp., L40.00, ISBN 0 521 56228 7 hard covers, L14.95, ISBN 0 521 56664 9 paperback.
Although the Duala of the Cameroon littoral are a rather small community, never numbering more than twenty to thirty thousand, they have achieved a certain renown in African history. They were quintessential pre-colonial middlemen who managed to retain a role in later Cameroonian history to a far greater extent than comparable groups elsewhere along the western African coast. In the pre-colonial period the most lucrative activity of the Duala was gathering goods (palm oil, ivory) obtained through canoe expeditions inland for imported commodities brought to the Cameroon coast by European shippers. The Duala area also functioned as a minor but steady supplier to the Atlantic slave trade until the 1830s. In the colonial period the Duala managed to shift from trade to commercial agriculture and urban real estate business, and also to take on the...