PAUL JENKINS

phy was a new and very effective medium for spreading the news of his power and majesty.
As we have seen, Christraud Geary made "German colonial photography at the court of
King Njoya" (including the work of Basel missionaries) the subject of a landmark exhibition
in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in 1988.31 One particularly talented
missionary-cum-writer-cum-photographer, Anna Wuhrman, created a broad, dignified, and
anmutig (appealing) photographic portrait of inhabitants of the Bamum capital, Fumban, in
the years immediately before the seizure of the kingdom by British and French forces dur-
ing the First World War.32 Geary has repeatedly shown that the body of photography from
Bamum before 1914 can yield good results to an anthropological analysis. But in the case
of Bamum I think it is true that a major motivation for mission photography was a joint
wish among missionaries and the King to make the quality of life and rule in Fumban, the
Bamum capital, known in Europe. The King had his eyes partly on the German political and
commercial elite. But both King and missionaries will have understood the role of the Basel
Mission as a popular movement in South-West Germany and in Switzerland in support for
the Basel Mission's presence in his kingdom.
As in Ghana the Basel Mission was expelled from Cameroon during the First World
War, and was never allowed back into what became Francophone Cameroon, being re-
placed there by the Paris Mission.33 This meant that the involvement with Bamum was
broken off-and indeed the defeat and expulsion of its German Christian allies undoubtedly
played a major role in the Kingdom's adoption of Islam as its main religious identity, during
and immediately after the First World War. The Basel Mission was allowed back into those
parts of the British mandate area, however where it had been working before the War, and
which now correspond to the North-West and South-West Provinces of Cameroon. And
Anglophone Cameroon quickly became its major area of emphasis in Africa, with energetic
efforts at pioneering work in setting up congregations and schools precisely in the territories
of the Grassfields kingdoms and chiefdoms. The number of photographs taken in the area
in the inter-war period was correspondingly high and photography as an activity taken up, as
we shall see, by several missionaries.
Defining a Genre: Basel Mission Portraits of
Grassfield Chiefs in the Inter-War Period
Getting a handle on the large number of photographs possibly relevant for this study is not
easy. My tendency right at the beginning of preparatory work for this paper was to concen-
trate on the kind of image which is presumably closest to the relations between missionaries
and chiefs/kings-the portralt. After looking at a large number of photographs I decided
to begin with the relatively unknown body of images from the Cameroon Grassfields in the
inter-war period, partiy in order not to be pre-determined in my analysis by Ramseyer and
Anna Wuhrmann as major figures in the Basel Mission photographic history we have just

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