Abstract

The lands around the Mandara Mountains, in the borderlands between Cameroon, Nigeria and Chad, have been treated by academics as historical ‘landscape of resistance’ at the peripheries of predatory states. They thus provide analogues to the studies in the classic text on such areas, War in the tribal zone. That resistance has been ambiguous, as Mandara communities have also allied themselves strategically with predatory state representatives and predated themselves, when advantage or conviction dictated.

I have worked as an archaeologist in this area since the early 1980s, using the distribution of material culture, to study the historical development of Mandara societies. My research coincided with the steady resurgence of armed violence in the area, from Chad’s civil war in the 1980s to Boko Haram today. That modern violence formed the background for my work, but only gradually became a topic of research itself. Today, we can understand the flow of modern small arms in the region as an instrument for understanding inter-communal violence, in a close analogue to archaeological research approaches.