Reflections on historical-geographical research in Yaoundé

This month, I have been working in Yaoundé, Cameroon. It has been an important and valuable period of fieldwork for the project. Whilst over the past year we had already found some brilliant material in European archives, this could never be sufficient to unpack and begin to explain the politics of African post-independence diplomatic training. Working at an important African diplomatic training school provided an important opportunity to learn from colleagues there, as well as to speak to some of those involved in shaping diplomatic training in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Here I provide a brief account of three weeks of historical-geographical fieldwork (using archival and interview methods) along with some practical details that might help others in their research in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

Earlier in 2022, I approached the Institut des Relations Internationales du Cameroun (IRIC) in Yaoundé as it was the first international diplomatic training school to be established in Africa, in 1971. Building on a long-standing regional training programme for junior diplomats in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and with further Swiss cooperation through the Graduate Institute, the Cameroonian government founded IRIC as a bilingual institution with pan-African reach. It continues to this day, occupying the same campus and continuing to train future diplomats. It recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, providing a serendipitous moment of collective reflection on its history.

IRIC 50th Anniversary Mural (Photo: Jonathan Harris)

Meaningful research would have been impossible without the generous help and support of IRIC’s leadership and staff. Director Dr Daniel Ndongo generously invited me to work at IRIC, and his warm welcome was replicated by head librarian Mr Emmanuel Ebai and the IRIC library staff who made space for me to work and helped me delve into the library’s back catalogues. Dr Rodrigue Tassé organised various valuable interviews with former IRIC students. Their welcome and vital help opened doors to numerous interviews and archival sources, and their advice and guidance helped to make these research encounters more fruitful. I record my thanks here and we are excited by early plans to collaborate on writing projects in the next few months. My thanks also to Caitlin Barker for her invaluable advice as a fellow historian of international relations, with far longer experience working in Cameroon.

IRIC’s library, which was well-resourced from the earliest days of the Institute, remains a rich archive of research in international relations. It contains decades of journals and reviews from across Africa and the world relating to international relations and international law, as well as the masters’ dissertations and doctoral theses of its students running back to the early 1970s.

Selected IRIC student dissertation covers (Photo: Jonathan Harris)

These are valuable works of scholarship in their own right, and provide evidence of the intellectual contributions of those who would go on to shape African diplomacy and international relations in subsequent decades. These documents also contain various clues to the circulation and production of knowledge within IRIC, particularly within acknowledgements and bibliographies. These small details also provided useful prompts and aide-memoires when interviewing their authors about their time as students.

IRIC’s scholarly archive did not include the kinds of administrative reports and correspondence similar to what I had already found in Swiss public archives. The Cameroon National Archives in Yaoundé have been closed for significant renovations since 2017, but the secretary there suggested I might try the Ministry of External Relations (MINREX). Whilst the MINREX archive was also closed for refurbishment, I was fortunate enough to be granted access to the archive catalogues and allowed to request documents for consultation. This was in no small part helped by a letter of introduction from IRIC, a school that had trained many staff at MINREX and whose name carried significant weight. The MINREX archive is a rich collection of materials dating from the final years of French administration, a time when the issue of diplomatic training was a great preoccupation for the new Cameroonian Foreign Ministry. It also held several files on the creation and early days of IRIC, including the annual course that pre-dated it at MINREX.

One final archival source formed a part of our Cameroon fieldwork – the Buea National Archive. It is a legacy of the separate governmental administration that existed there under British tutelage, and which survived in independent federal Cameroon until 1972. Owing to ongoing insecurity associated with an armed insurgency aimed at reinstating the region’s autonomy, it is not advisable for foreign researchers to travel to visit this archive. However, it remains open and accessible and we were able to work with a local historian, Kum Adrian, to access a small selection of documents related to our study. This material provides a unique account of diplomatic training as statecraft: as the anglophone Western Cameroons government adapted to simultaneous decolonisation and reunification, it came up against questions of sovereignty and autonomy as well as problems with bilingualism relating to the training of its officers for the new federal Cameroonian foreign service.

Beyond the written record, working in Yaoundé brought the opportunity to interview former lecturers and trainees at IRIC. Here, the benefits of IRIC’s 50th anniversary were particularly tangible, as one of its earliest graduates H.E. Ambroise Behalal (class of 1974) had written a short reflection, entitled “Souvenirs de ma vie d’étudiant” (Memories of my life as a student). My interview with him was consequently richly detailed, filled with poignant recollections prompted by his existing written reflections. Similarly, former IRIC director Professor Joseph Owona (1977-1985) was well prepared for our interview, owing to the speech he had delivered only a few weeks previously on the history of his period at IRIC. These circumstances lent greater agency to the interviewees who, without much prompting on my part, were prepared to speak far more to the affective and everyday politics of training than most of the material we had accessed so far in the archives of European institutions.

Researching African diplomatic training from Cameroon has altered our perspective and added invaluable contacts and context to our project. We have been able to access and analyse IRIC student work and intellectual contributions, perspectives of the newly independent Cameroonian government, the views of those constructing IRIC and making it work in its early years, and the names of students from across Africa and the world who came through its doors and stayed in its boukarous. We continue to make plans to undertake further fieldwork with African diplomatic training centres, and to produce quality historical-geographical research in collaboration with African colleagues.