Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the re-use of a photograph of King Njoya of the Bamum and considers the tension between this image and the other media used by the Bamum. In turn, this permits a reconsideration of the role of the photography in the colonial encounter.

Paper long abstract:

Photographs are reproducible and therefore circulate rapidly; this placelessness has frequently been read as a sign of photography's modernity. Yet what status did this modernity have in the colonial encounter?

This question may be addressed by following the trajectory of one photograph, a self-portrait of King Njoya of the Bamum, Cameroon. Taken in 1913, the photograph was reproduced in a missionary narrative published in Basle in 1925 and then incorporated into an indigenous pictorial history of the Bamum, produced between 1927 and 1930. By this date Njoya's authority had been undermined by the French colonial authorities. So what did the re-appropriation of his image mean? Could it figure his fall, and his displacement?