Koning’s book is a sophisticated dissertation on the complex management process of the agro-industrial plantations in Anglophone Cameroons caught up in the prolonged effort to fight poverty and an especially severe and prolonged economic recession. The partners in the struggle are a composite mixture of localized and regionalized ethnic peoples in evolutionary time and places, changing managers with their different management structures, the state with its political power and financial resource manoeuvres, the land owners with their inherited cultures of land ownership and the partition of labour between men and women, and the immigrant labour population. The milieu is one of perpetual striving for modern capital accumulation for survival and modernization, which is interpreted as sustainable socioeconomic development. Whereas the organized labour forces (or proletarians) are perpetually committed to the pursuit of production, the necessary control of management systems and the tendency for over-exploitation by capitalists to sustain scarce resources often leads to threats or real industrial conflicts which must be minimized for the sustainability and economic progress of the shareholders and the entire nation.
For thorough mastery of this complex dynamic system, the author has applied, through his erudition and scholarship, the combined knowledge of several academic disciplines: Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Geography, Political Science, Social Psychology, Political Sociology, Management Theory and Industrial Relations.
This work is indeed a combination of several studied themes related to various agro-industries in time and place, each of which is presented as one of seven chapters, and then reorganized and synthesized as underlying theoretical principles in chapter one, captioned “Civil Society and Anglophone Cameroons Agro-Industrial Crisis and Reforms”. Chapter two treats ethno-regional groups and association’s responses to agro-industrial crisis by liquidation and sale of PAMOL oil plam plantations. State withdrawal and privatization of the Cameroon Development Corporation are highlighted. Chapter three dwells at length on the CDC Workers’ Union and trade unionism among tea pluckers. Further, trade unionism and changed reactions to the PAMOL oil palm crisis and liquidation is treated in Chapter four. Bakweri Chiefs’ sustained claim to the ownership of CDC lands follows in chapter five. But the successful privatization of Tole and Ndu Tea Estates reveals the forest and grassland ethnocentricism in CDC Estates in chapter six. The smallholders’ development picture at CDC from 1946 to 1995 is described in chapter seven. The dynamics and responses of PAMOL’s contract farmers and cooperatives to survive the economic crisis in the land-locked sub-region is fully elaborated in chapter eight.
The period covered by the work is so recent and contemporary that some well informed elders of Cameroon society can, with chagrin, identify some individual actors and confirm their socio-political and psychological attitudes and leanings.
Certainly, Koning’s book is a melting pot of attractive compulsory knowledge for all scholars of the human sciences, and it is an invaluable reference for students pursuing terminal degrees, thanks to its methods of investigation, scholarship and erudition. As such it should be available in city, university and departmental libraries for wide consultation. Some Cameroonian political elite will derive direct benefit from its demonstration of socio-political attitudes. Students of management will learn a lot from the book so that they will be able to defend modern capitalism and economic liberalism. I strongly recommend that this revealing story should be updated every ten years to teach the up-rising
generations that the mastery of management skills is very necessary and effective for socio-economic development and capital accumulation.
Daniel Noni Lantum, University of Yaounde I
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