Men and Women
What is a country’s pride? It is its people and its history! Being the heirs of that history men
and women are changing and influencing it by participating in the continual flow of events
and encounters, enduring the bitter failures and enjoying the successes of what they have
been struggling for. We are not talking here only about great men and woman whose lives
and achievements are being praised and biographies written on but also of ordinary men
and women, those who have lived, seemingly, in the shadow of events, those whose lives
have mostly been determined by others but fully endured by themselves.
The Cameroon Photo Press Archives Buea although a governmental institutions and thus
concentrating rather on the grand lines of the country’s history, nevertheless give shelter
to images which document a history lived and shaped both by protagonists and bystanders.
African Photography Initiatives has succeeded in the partial digitization of the holdings of
this valuable Archives. The images are now available for research for scholars both national
and international. The present booklet is only a small extract from approximately 25’000
negatives that have been digitized and approximately 100’000 negatives the Archives hold.
It is dedicated to the people of Cameroon, the people who made and make their country’s
history.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “the capacity to build a new
future depends on our ability to see a fundamental continuity with the strengths of the
past”. We hope that the discussion of and confrontation with the images in the Cameroon
Photo Press Archives Buea which are now easily accessible will contribute to this ability to
link future, present and past.