Nyok Maurine Ekun. Literature review chapter. A literature review according to Fink provides a description, summary, and critical evaluation of these works in relation to the research problem being investigated. Literature reviews are designed to provide an overview of sources you have explored while researching a particular topic and to demonstrate to your readers how your research fits within a larger field of study (Fink, 2014). It involves a critical evaluation identifying similarities and differences between existing literatures and the work being undertaken. It reviews what have already been done in the context of a topic. Therefore, based on the existing knowledge, people can build up innovative idea and concept for further research purpose (Cooper, 1998). This chapter of the study covers the theoretical foundation, framework, debate, and a summary of the whole chapter. Theoretical underpinning of the study. A theoretical framework is the ‘blueprint’ or guide for a research. It is a framework based on an existing theory in a field of inquiry that is related and/or reflects the hypothesis of a study. It is a blueprint that is often ‘borrowed’ by the researcher to build his/her own house or research inquiry. It serves as the foundation upon which a research is constructed (Grant & Osanloo, 2014). The theoretical framework, thus, aids the researcher in finding an appropriate research approach, analytical tools, and procedures for his/her research inquiry. It makes research findings more meaningful and generalizable (Akintoye, 2015). This study seeks to offer a retrospective analysis of the gendered dimensions and the contemporary legacy of the slave trade whose social memory remains palpable in people’s relationships in Southwest Cameroon and in the Cross-River region of Nigeria. The work draws theoretical insights from a wide range of theories such as gender, social memory, temporality, used in analysing the data elicited from participants. Gender. Gender is a socially and culturally constructed reference to ‘differences between women and men within the same household and within and between cultures that are subjected to change over time’. (Scalise 2013; Mope Simo & Bitondo, 2010: p. 224) Both men and women have different socially defined roles, responsibilities, access to land and other natural resources, constraints, opportunities, needs, perceptions, and views, that have been inculcated into their habitudes through the process of socialization. Without being a synonym for women, gender considers both women and men and their independent relations based on the specific gender roles laid down in each society. In other words, gender is a social and cultural phenomenon that is independent of biological characteristics. It underlines socially acquired and culturally specific attributes that distinguish women and men. One’s environment (society) plays a preponderant role in the development of gender roles through various agents of socialization. Socially established gender roles, social norms, and social control mechanisms inhibit women’s citizenship rights as well as their efforts to achieve economic autonomy and opportunities to break out of poverty. The experiences of men and women with exclusion because of their slave heritage will be explore. It has been realized that men and women differ in their experiences within household as well as in the communities in which they were integrated. Men and women from slave origin experience the same treatment such as exclusion from citizenship, chieftaincy right and limited access to natural resources, (Page et al., 2010, Nyamjoh & Rowlands, 1998, Fonchingong, 2005). To explore perceived discriminatory practices and differences in the treatment of men and women from slave origin, I will draw on Friedrich Engels theory of family structure and gender role. According to Engel, capitalism makes male dominance more powerful, and he has explained this claim in three states. Firstly, capitalism provides power for men by giving them chance to have high income and private property. Secondly, women became the consumer part of society, because they do not produce, but get money from their husband and spend for satisfy their need or enjoy. Thirdly, capitalism divides men and women in working way. It puts men to factory and women to house, however, it does not pay for women’s workings in the house, but pays for men for his working in factory, so it puts importance to male’s job by paying money (Friedrich Engels 1884). The different roles assign for each gender in a society plays a very important role in their daily experiences. In the areas such as right to ownership of land, survey by experts report that, African women contribute to 80% of food production in their communities and they are account for almost all the farm labor. About 80 to 90 % of food processing, storage, transportation, hoeing, and weeding is being done by these women. Despite all their involvements, they are still denied or given limited access to these lands. The right to land is directed towards men and these women can only get access to these lands through their male counterparts. According to Vitalis, women are denied access to land because women are considered as property so, property cannot own property (2017). Ngwafor report similar argument which hold that, if a married woman is given a tenure right over her husband’s lands, upon death or divorce, she will go with them thereby depleting the patrimony of her husband’s lineage. Women are thus not treated as independent personalities with individual identities but seen as either daughters or wives who need some sort of recognition and status from men (1993). The varied experiences of men and women within communities and within household will be explore in relation to lands and other areas of their daily lives such as marriages and voting rights. This theoretical framework articulates the need to understand how gender role in these communities perpetuate the differences in the experiences between men and women of slave descent, and their relationship with the “freeman”. This study will explore contemporary relationships between freemen and descendants of slaves from a gender perspective. Social Memory The past and the present are intertwined. Past violence is re-experienced in relation to immediate and contemporary inequalities and is enacted through memory including refusal of citizenship participation to descendants of former slaves that orchestrate conflict because some individuals are still perceived as ‘slaves’ or of half slave’s origin. Re-experience and interpretation of the past are formed and transformed referentially and selectively. Cultures of memory serve as technologies for elaborating meaningful constructs from the experience of the past (Argenti, 2006, Assmann 1992, cf. Argenti, 2006). The discourse of history and of belonging to a region serve the interest of the political elites in the present configuration (Geschiere, 2011, 2009). Past violence of slave trade is still experienced in contemporary society. During the period of the slave trade, almost all the captured Cameroonians where forcefully sent to the New world where they worked as slaves and were denied their fundamental human rights. Those who remained at the coastal regions of Cameroon were still treated as strangers in their own country of origin. They were denied every single opportunity that any normal Cameroonian could enjoy (Röschenthaler, 2007). They had no freedom and worked under horrible conditions for little or no pay. They served their fellow Cameroonians who were leaders at the time, and mediators between them and the colonial powers, and were poorly treated without any intervention. To fully bring to light the significant of social memory in this work, I will draw on Bartlett’s (1932) theory of reconstructive remembering. He conceptualized remembering as occurring at the dynamic intersection between a person or group of persons and the world to aid environmental adaptation. According to this perspective, remembering helps a person master and enjoy a world filled with change. For a ‘freemen/woman’ to fully enjoy his/her environment without interference from strangers (slave descents), they must remember how the forebears of slaves were treated. Today people still draw on these memories. If people in the past could treat people, the way they wanted and had no opposition why should it be any different today? To understand why they are socially identified as slaves in these communities, there must be a journey back to their past memory. The theory of social memory calls attention to the social context in which the natives of these communities, categorised descendants of slave origin into their group identities. This theoretical framework is important because it explores how the natives of these communities, search for memories of the strangers in their communities just to meet their own political agendas by stripping them off power such as in the case of chieftaincy as well as access to natural resources. By going back to memories of slave trade, natives of these communities have succeeded in reducing the number of contestants when it comes to electing new head of the community (chief) as well as amassing for themselves large portions of lands for cultivation without having to share with these people they considered strangers. They go back to the past, recognise such a memory, agreed on it, negotiated over it meaning and finally execute such memory into their ongoing concerns. Temporality People draw on the past in making sense of the present (Dawson & Sykes, 2018, Jordheim, 2012). This is called sensemaking. Time remains a multiple, rather than a singular, linear concept. There is convergence of time in the way pasts and futures come together in temporal sensemaking of an emergent present (Dawson and Sykes, 2018, Jordheim, 2012) that shape the contemporary perception and wellbeing of former slave descendants. In other words, the sufferings of the past for being slaves or descendants of slave shape social memories that impede the participation of people of slave origin in social, economic, and political life in communities into which they were integrated. I share the view put forward by Kosselleck according to which the idea of the plurality of historical times can be understood only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession’’ (Jordheim, 2012:151) (multiple temporalities). It is in fact, a theory of periodization. The aim of this comparative ethnographic project is to offer a retrospective analysis of the gendered dimensions and the contemporary legacy of the slave trade whose social memory remains tangible in people’s relationships in Southwest Cameroon and in the Cross-River region of Nigeria. To fully understand why the present-day people are treated the way they are treated, I must go back to past events. Why are they treated this way? What majors do they use to classify them as descendant of slave origin? How did the separation between freeman and descendant of slave origin came about? The past is needed to investigate slave descent and their relationship with the people around them and strategies used to deal with this rejection. Goffman in his book stigma (1963), talks about spoil identity, he investigated the world of people who are considered abnormal by society and do not have full social acceptance and are constantly striving to adjust their social identities. Slave descendants face rejection from their own people, the same people whom they fought together with to free themselves from slave masters. According to Eckert, David Mandessi Bell was brought as a slave from the Grass fields region into King Bell’s household in the 1870s. King Bell was one of the strongest personalities during the period of slave trade in Cameroon and commanded much respect from the European. He Was a leader of the Douala people in Southern Cameroon during the period when the Germans established their colony in Cameroon. David Mandessi later became a rich and powerful member of the Bells family and a successful entrepreneur but despite his position in the household of the Bell’s family and the community, he could not aspire for chieftaincy because of his slave origin (Eckert, 2008). In the words of Paul Farmer, it is the researcher’s job to bring to light the unseen connections between large-scale forces in small-scale settings (Farmer, 2006: 9; see also Kalb & Tak, 2005) such as the historical and contemporary impact of socio-economic and political marginalization. This theoretical framework is very important to understand the issue of time. These past events are very significant in grasping the awful situation of these people of slave descent. These theories combine, will help me to transit from simply describing a phenomenon I have observed to generalizing about various aspect of the phenomenon. I will be able to identify the limit to those generalizations. That is, which key variable influence a phenomenon. Conceptual Debates. This unit of the work review literature on the different concepts that are related to this study. It looks at work of different scholar who have explore slave trade from different angles. Social memories of Slave trade. The history of trans-Atlantic slave trade has been greatly explored by different scholars. Most of these scholars (James A. Rawley & Stephen Din, Marcus Rediker, Lisa A. Lindsay) in their works gave an overview of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They focused on the size and profitability of the slave business, the people who engaged in it, and its consequences in European and American history. Others throw light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century, while some presented the African context surrounding the Atlantic slave trade, the history of the slave trade itself, and the changing meaning of race and racism. An increasing number of studies have addressed the legacy of slave trade in Africa countries and many scholars have focused on the negative economic, political, and social effects it left in the continent of Africa. Some of these scholars argued that one of the major impacts of slave trade was the colonisation of Africa by European powers. This colonisation led to the massive exploitation of African lands and resources leaving African devasted by poverty while they (European power) became richer (Acheampong, 2000, Williams,1994) In the area of cultural transfer, the history of the slave trade and cultural transfers from in the Southwest Cameroon and the Cross River region has been explored (see Rösenthaler, 2006, Röschenthaler, 2007, Argenti & Roschenthaler, 2006), as well as the politics of belonging in Southwest Cameroon (Geschiere, 2011, Page et al., 2010, Nyamjoh & Rowlands, 1998, Fonchingong, 2005). Gendered relations between slave masters and slaves and their contemporary reverberations have garnered little or no attention in the historiography of these regions. How has the enduring stigma of the slave trade affected the participation of people of slave origin in politics in both contexts where they are considered as equal citizens before the law in an era of multipartyism that began in the 1990s. Most studies have focused on the dissemination history of societies and cult agencies in the Cross-River region and across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba. These studies demonstrate that through trade and the migration of slaves from one place to another, these institutions were traded and consequently diffused. One key institution, Ekpe was used for village governance, trade facilitation, the provision of other services including the staging of dances at festivities. It also acted as a court in the resolution of conflict and in the collection of debts for members (Rösenthaler, 2006, Argenti, 2006, Pemunta, 2011). Ekpe often known to the early European as Egbo was and is a secret society, a sort of freemasonry which was used to maintain law and order in the villages during the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Aye, 1967, Essien 1993). The origin of the secret society Ekpe has be a point of debate by different scholars. While some hold that it was originated from the Ejaghams in Cameroon, others argued that it was originated from the cross-river state of Nigeria while some focus on Ibibio as the place of origin (Jones &Salmons, 2011, Awana, 2002, Essien 1993, Bassy 2011). The importance of this institution in this study, does not rely on its origin but on the role, it played in maintaining peace and order especially during the period of slave trade which was characterise with fear and tension from slave raiders. Artifacts of the slave trade (art, artifacts, and oral traditions) as an invaluable spectrum for the reconstruction of the history of slavery in the Cameroon Western Grass fields region, the perception of these elements of material culture, while the functioning of slavery and associated practices illuminate the re-emergence of slavery today. African slavers used art objects for procuring slaves, African rulers to regulate the slave trade, but slaves also used artifacts. African arts objects were also spread through the slave trade as they were carted away to Europe, if not destroyed in situ (Fomin & Ndobegang, 2006, see also Chem-Langhe´e, 1995). Apart from these art objects, according to Nicolas Argenti (2007), pervasive images of the slave trade linger on in the Western Grass field in: ‘‘the myths and nondiscursive bodily practices of the chiefdoms (that) are impregnated with veiled references to the institution of slavery and to their effects on the young people who were once most imperilled by them. The mythic memories and the bodily practices of the Grass fields together form a body of social memory’’ pitting youth and elders and in driving political processes at the local and national levels (p.4). Within the context of the politics of belonging in the 1990s, village traditions as a mechanism for taking advantage of the political driving force emanating from the town, ‘became recognized as a feature of urban postcolonial history in West Africa’’ (Nyamnjoh & Rowlands,1998:350). The influence exerted by elites in their home regions is a function of the respect acquired in local politics ‘‘for their knowledge of and influence over external affairs’’ (Nyamnjoh & Rowlands, 1998:350). In other words, the extent to which urban elites will play a significant role in defining a regional identity for their home area depends on the resources they bring with them and the incentives that encourage them to mobilize local political support. The growth of multi-partyism that was associated with the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1990s, led to the ‘‘attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions’’ (Nyamnjoh & Rowlands, 1998:320) and encouraged the formal distinction between ‘natives’(freemen) and ‘strangers’ (slave descendants) in the creation of a politics of belonging. Ethnicized associations as prime movers in regional and national politics replaced political parties at the local level. This politics of belonging is partially responsible for conflicts over land and chieftaincy in both the Southwest regions of Cameroon (Page et al., 2010, Nyamjoh & Rowlands, 1998, Fonchingong, 2005) and in Nigeria. According to Fonchingong (2005), the re-introduction of multipartyism in the 1990s was characterized by widespread ‘ethnic jingoism’. This took place in Cameroon in a political and economic system characterized by divide et impera policies that led to ‘‘the proliferation and fragmentation of stark ethno-regional cleavages’’ (P.363). In their search for political inclusion, political elites appropriated discourses and ideologies of regionalism leading to ethnocentrism, ethno-linguistic regionalism, separatism and bifurcation of regional groupings and minorities (Fonchingong, 2005). In both Cameroon and Nigeria, there was also the entrenchment of male political participation and the complete erasure of descendants of slave origin. They were rejected based on their lack of ‘‘cultural qualifications’’ The infatuation with belonging became a primordial claim: How can one belong more than if one is born from the soil itself? (Geschiere, 2011:321). This was an assertion of identity as being deeply embedded in the local as played out in political struggles between different tribes. Claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders (Geschiere, 2011, 2009) including women. The above-mentioned body of literature has explicitly examined the history of slave trade, cultural transfer because of movement of slaves from one region to the other, as well as the politics of belonging in the South West Region of Cameroon, and the Cross River State of Nigeria. These previous works clearly demonstrated that the problem associated with the politics of belonging to a particular region or community instigated the exclusion of slave descendants from fully participating in the socio-political and economic affairs in the different communities in which they were integrated. However, Little or nothing has been said on the relationship between slave descents and the “freeman “(original owners of the communities). What happened to them after being denied full citizenship in a place were same rules and regulations applies to them? How are these experiences shaping their lives? These questions are very important because how do one join his fellow race (Africans) to get rid of the oppression of colonial masters only to end up being oppressed by same people. This present study therefore, contributes to the already existing knowledge about slave trade by filling a gap in literature on the experiences on slave descents in the respective communities in which they were integrated. This present study offers a retrospective analysis of the gendered dimensions and the contemporary legacy of the slave trade whose social memory remains palpable in people’s relationships in Southwest Cameroon and in the Cross River region of Nigeria. It is important to note that, although little or no attention has been placed in the experiences of slave descendants in these regions (South West of Cameroon and Cross River State of Nigeria), it is also important to point out that there have been discourses on slave descendants in other African countries by some scholars. Denis Regnier for example wrote on slavery and essentialism in Highland Madagascar. In his work, he demonstrated that ‘Unclean people’ is a widespread expression in the southern highlands of Madagascar and refers to people of alleged slave descent who are discriminated against daily and in a variety of ways such as avoidance of marriage between individuals of slave descent and free descent. He argues that psychological essentialism is key to explaining the discrimination against slave descendants (2020). Similarly, according to United Nation Human Right office of the High Commission, in 2001 the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA)acknowledge the suffering caused to slave descendants by colonialism and regretted that the effects and persistence of these practices have been among the factors contributing to lasting social and economic inequalities in many parts of the world today. The contemporary situation of people of slave descent must be understood in the context of both the legacy of slavery and continued discrimination, which perpetuates situations of inequality and marginalisation. Conclusion. From the literature reviewed, there have been many studies about slave trade. These already reviewed literature have demonstrated that the history of slave trade has not only affect the economic and political life of the African continent, but also the social life of the Africans especially the social lives of descendants of slave families as supported by the theory of social memories where the past and the present intertwined. Nyamnjoh & Rowlands (1998) within the context of belonging argued that the growth of multi-partyism that was associated with the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1990s, led to the attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions which inspired the distinction between freeman and slave descents thereby leading to their denials of citizenship as well as limited access to natural resources. This makes the theory of temporality relevant in this study. To understand why descendants of slave families are denied citizenship and why they are excluded in the affaires of the communities in which they were integrated, we must draw from the past to make meaning of the present. “This is called sensemaking “(Dawson & Sykes, 2018, Jordheim, 2012). What is however not known is the experiences of slave descents in the different communities of Cameroon and Nigeria in which they live and how these experiences are shaping their lives. The experiences of slave descendants and their relationship with the freeman is single out in this study. The study explores gender relations and the treatment afforded descendants of former slaves within households and in communities into which they were integrated. References. Anwana, A. O. (2002). Ekpe Imperium in South Eastern Nigeria, 1600-1900. PhD Thesis Submitted to the Department of History and International Studies, University of Calabar, Nigeria. Aye, E. U. (1967). Old Calabar through the Centuries. Calabar: Hope Waddell Press. Bassey, B. E. (2001). Ekpe Efik: A Theosophical Perspective. Canada: Trafford Publishing Essien, D. (1993). Uruan People in Nigerian History. Uyo: Modern Business Press Ltd. Jones, D. & Salmons, J. 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