Jacqueline de Vries

Jacqueline de Vries has an MA in Social Science History (1995, Erasmus University Rotterdam). She recently returned to her PhD research on the impact of British and German rule in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, after an extended period away from academia. The working title of her project is 'Your custom was bad. It has been changed by Government': Control over women in colonial Kom (Cameroon). Her research focuses on changes in gender relations and indigenous government caused by European interventions. It builds on findings presented in Catholic Mission, Colonial Government and Indigenous Response in Kom (Cameroon) (ASC Leiden, 1998). Looking in-depth at key historical episodes – the establishment of a Catholic community in the early 1920s, the exodus of royal wives from the palace at Laikom in the late 1940s, and a violent women’s uprising in the late 1950s – her research highlights the dramatic consequences of British administration, which, unlike the label ‘Indirect Rule’ would seem to suggest, was intrusive, irreversible, and far from innocuous. Jacqueline de Vries also recently published a study on the World War One internment, on the Spanish-ruled island Fernando Po, of Cameroonian troops serving in the German Schutztruppe.