Vestiges: Traces of Record 2019 Volume 5

A Digitized edition of Abbia Cameroon Cultural Review: Editors’ introduction

We are delighted to be able to launch as an appendix to this issue a digital edition of the journal Abbia: Cameroon Cultural Review with the permission of the Minister of Arts and Culture for which we are very grateful. Abbia was published on paper from 1963 to 1982 and we have digitized the entire run.

Loreto Todd provides an introduction to its founding editor Bernard Fonlon and the journal itself.

The significance of Abbia Cameroon Cultural Review has been discussed by Milton Kreiger (1996). We are very sorry to report that we asked the publisher (Indiana University Press) for permission to reprint his article in Vestiges but they refused copyright permission not only for the original English version but also for a new French translation which we had considered making.

A note on the digitization

We have made a low quality, easy access version of the entire run of Abbia available in late 2019. We note that this means that the underlying searchable text generated by OCR is far from perfect. We plan to slowly add higher quality versions over time which will resolve many of the current problems. For reference, higher quality versions of Volumes One and Two have already been added and more will be added over the coming months.

Reference: Krieger, Milton. 1996. ‘Building the Republic through Letters: “Abbia: Cameroon Cultural Review,” 1963-82, and Its Legacy.’ Research in African Literatures 27 (2): 155-177.

Link to the online edition of Abbia