Migration, Architecture and the transformation of the landscape in the Bamileke Grassfield of West Cameroon

This paper seeks to explore how Bamileke emigrants from the Grassfields region of West Cameroon (re)imagine their community, and how they construct through architecture defensive identities based on communal principles and parochial solidarities. Through the example of some successful Bamileke expatriates, the paper shows how architecture embodies the desire of these affluent emigrants to reconnect themselves to their native village, to assert their ethnic identity, and more importantly to recover their alleged 'lost roots'. It also discusses the use of architecture by successful Bamileke emigrants, who are for the most part former marginalized social juniors, as a means to challenge the dominant regime of chieftaincy and notabiity that generally excludes disinherited and untitiled people from access to lands and wealth. The paper will show how by choosing to construct their imposing houses, not on the depressed or low-lying sites - as the customary elites and the local bourgeoisie used to do - but instead on heightened layouts such as the top of the hills or mountains, well-off Bamileke emigrants have imposed over time new configurations of architecture and dwelling in their native region. More importantly, their actions, which dramatise the 'high' as the new site of power, prestige and majesty, have reversed the traditional Bamileke cosmology that generally gives primacy to the 'low' over the 'high'.