Welcome to the (African) Dollhouse

In "the olden days," there was a larger variety of dolls, of which I'll describe a few.

-The Ashanti doll, from Ghana, a wood circle-face on a stick-like body (photo shown)

-The Mandara mountains Moundang doll, from Northern Cameroon, made of volcanic rock, and decorated with tiny beads. This is the one which arguably least resembles the traditional European-style doll (photo shown). 

-Fali dolls from northern Cameroon: 

> male doll made of a corncob, decorated with cowry shells, European beads, leather strips, with a cotton skirt; 

> "boy" doll made of wood, with cowry shells, bells, leather strips;

-And lastly from this short list, the easiest style to make, in coastal Cameroon: a plant called Ngongui is pulled out of the ground: the roots are cleaned and trimmed, to represent human hair; the leaves are trimmed so as to be able to "stand up" on the ground, representing the human body (sketch shown). 

I have included a few more photos from my own doll collection: a Senegalese rag doll, a doll with a straw head, and a plastic doll wearing Martinique's madras clothes (African diaspora). 

Below are a few links to sites that show African dolls:

http://www.galion-import.com/spip.php?article643 Fali-Namji doll 

http://akwaba-africa.blogspot.com/2007/03/les-poupes-en-afrique.html

http://www.artspremiers.net/poupee-ashanti.php poupee ashanti

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_dolls

How to Save Money: Cameroon Tontines

In various parts of Africa, there are informal organizations, called "tontine," in French-speaking Cameroon. I looked up “tontine” in the English-language Wikipedia, and the definition is not the same; however, there is a link to the word “likelamba,” which describes the everyday African tontine.

Two types of tontines
The usual system is that all the members of a tontine—usually tontines are all-male or all-female—contribute a set amount of money every month to a common “pot,” and every month a different person takes the entire sum, usually to take care of a large expense they couldn't otherwise afford: tuition for a child, household equipment, etc. It is very difficult to save money in Sub-Saharan Africa for all but a fortunate few. Everyday needs are pressing, and there is never enough money; even if there is, a family member may have an urgent need, and there goes any money that was left over!

In Cameroon, there is yet another tontine system, called the "Businessman's tontine." In this tontine, the monthly "pot" is auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the members share the payment. The winner of the bid must pay the fee immediately, and repay the loan at the next meeting. The agreement is based on honor; however, everyone knows that woe be to him and his family, if the loan is not repaid. 

I found several articles/studies about the Bamiléké tontines. The Bamilékés are originally from West Cameroon, and are generally known as enterprising and thrifty people.

I was in two different tontines. 

One was a female Bamiléké "regular" tontine, where not only was I the lone "white" woman, but also the only non-Bamiléké. We would meet on one Saturday a month, taking turns at one another's homes; eat grilled chicken and drink beer, and talk about "women's topics"--husbands, money and children. 

The second one was an indirect tontine: we had created an organization of women married to men native of our Douala neighborhood (formerly one of the three villages that formed Douala). We met in order to try to improve life in our part of the city, and organized a fundraiser with a big luncheon; we used the funds we raised to do some renovations in the neighborhood city-owned health center/clinic. We had our "club outfit"-- a mini-kaba* in a fabric we chose, and we all knew how to sing the local anthem, which provided me with my "15 minutes of fame," when we sang it on national television. The anthem was in Duala language, and it was rare to see a "white" singing in any local Cameroonian language. As we met once a month anyway, we decided to create a small tontine of our own.
Both "clubs" gave me a wonderful feeling of female solidarity, and I have very fond memories of these meetings.

The good and the bad
Of course there is a negative side to some of the tontines; people might aim for monthly contributions that are too high, much like in the United States, people committed to mortgages they could not afford; in order to continue participating, some would engage in dishonest activities. Others, unable to pay, might go so far as to commit suicide.  Unfortunately, even then, family members may be liable for payments!

In Alain Henry's account on his experience visiting a tontine, he is met with suspicion. People are usually co-opted into these associations and outsiders are not welcome. The members, in the organizations I had the honor of participating in, were bound by mutual trust.

*Kaba: the Duala traditional dress inspired by the Protestant missionaries' influence, similar to the outfit the missionaries forced the local Hawaiian women to wear, also. A description is found at "Wakuna's Cameroonian Pidgin - English Dictionary." 

Note: Japanese account of the tontine.

Our Daily Bread (or Plantain)

In earlier blog posts, I wrote about the variety of Cameroonian food. In this post, I'll delve into the daily life of the household in Douala, and the efforts put into getting a meal on the table.

Douala is situated 4 degrees north of the equator, near the coast, at the estuary of the Wouri River. The climate is tropical. Humidity is extremely high and temperatures are most often in the 90-degree Fahrenheit range (30 Celsius).
There is a rainy season that lasts about two months every year, when it gets slightly cooler (in 12 years I managed once to wear stockings, not really because I needed to), but humidity goes through the roof, and it can pour nonstop for several days in a row.

In the first months, I used to go to the food market several times a week to buy groceries. Deido market was the closest (Deido is the Douala neighborhood where we lived, and my husband's ancestral home). It was not a very large market, but you could get everything you needed for regular household needs: meat, fish, tubers, fruit, condiments, etc.
If it was raining, it was very muddy: if you didn't have lightweight rubber boots (rather hard to find), you wore flip-flops, which you could wash when you returned home. Flip-flops are called "no fear water" for good reason; another name is "Dschang shoes," after the name of a town in West Cameroon.

My mother-in-law accompanied me the first weeks so I could get the hang of it. She was able to carry home, balanced on her head, a whole cluster of plantain bananas ("régime de plantains"). I wish I had a photo of her carrying this load!

The merchants sat or crouched at tables with the wares piled on them. If they were sellling flour, grains, powdered condiments... the measuring tool would be old metal cans of various sizes. Condiments such as fresh ginger root, which you couldn't pour, were sold by size. The only item that was weighed was meat. Even fish was sold by size, as only whole fish was sold; nobody had ever seen a filet, or even imagined a fish stick!

Plastic bags were a scarcity too. We'd wash them several times to re-use them, and hang them to dry in the yard. The garbage pail had to be emptied every day, because of the heat and humidity.

Planning meals was different from Europe and other "Western" countries, because you were never sure who might show up. One of the first advice I got was to never cook for a determined amount of people. Stews were the way to go as you cook serve them to a variable number of people. If you had the idea of cooking up 2 little steaks for yourself and your spouse, that would be the day 3 relatives would arrive, and try to cut up two steaks so 5 people can eat! This habit was due to the tradition, in the "old days" (pre-colonialism), to have a cabin available for travelers to stay in. The cabin would have a jug of water and a cluster of plantain bananas, so they could restore themselves before continuing their journey. The custom has remained alive to this day, insofar as a visitor is first offered a beverage (soda or an alcoholic beverage), and if it is meal time, food.

Ma Emilia, our Abo grandmother

Ma Emilia was my spouse's maternal grandmother. Unfortunately, I did not get to know his paternal grandmother, as she died when my husband was a teenager. I did, however, have the good fortune to spend many years with Mama Emilia.

Emilia was from Abo, a group of villages in the Littoral region. The Abos are of a similar ethnicity as the Dualas. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to get there, and in 12 years, I never visited. She spoke Abo, Duala, and Pidgin English, but no French or English. We communicated through sign language and translators, until I learned enough Duala to get by.

She was raised in the village of Besunkan, in the Abo region, and moved to the village of Banseng when she married. Her husband spoke fluent German; at the time, Cameroon was a German colony.

After WW I, Germany, having lost the war, also lost its colonies, and the French took over Cameroon as part of their mandate. Those Cameroonians who spoke German were not dealt with tenderly, speaking euphemistically. The couple moved to Douala to escape persecution, to Bona'Ntone, part of Deido (one of the original three villages forming Douala). Emilia brought along her two younger brothers; their parents were deceased, and she acted essentially as their mother.

Both brothers received an education; the eldest was one of the first "clerks" at the SHO French commercial organization. The second brother studied medicine, and had almost finished, when he had a health setback.

My father-in-law noticed Emilia's older daughter, who was very pretty and fashionable, and fell in love.

By the time I arrived in Cameroon, Ma Emilia was living in our family compound, in my father-in-law's house. Her second daughter lived in another neighborhood; my mother-in-law was her eldest.

I'd try to grow some plants in our rather thankless garden; I'd come out in the morning and find her pulling out my shoots. We'd get into an argument with whatever language and hand signs we could muster; Bello, my brother-in-law, would come running over to translate, and told me she considered my plants "weeds!"

Her "vices" were her little tobacco pipe, and having a small glass of vermouth ("Martini") in our living room in the evening.

During the end-of-year holiday season, she would sit under the mango tree, in the front yard, and put her chin in her hand. When I'd ask her why, she told me that holidays saddened her, because that was the time of year both of her parents passed away.

The first time I had malaria--I took anti-malaria pills for a couple of years, but it's not very healthy to take them for your whole life--I was alone at home, and it was like a terrible flu, with someone beating you up, all at once. I was also sick to my stomach, and had to drag myself to the bathroom. She came over and remained by my side every minute; unused to company in such an embarrassing situation, I asked her to leave for a little while. She refused, saying that when she'd be ill, I'd be around too, to care for her.

When she was about 75, she decided to start a small plantation on a plot of land behind the one we were living in. She'd go every morning around 5 a.m., and bring back various tubers.

She never appeared to care that I was "white," her only concern was communication. When I learned a little Duala, she complained that I hadn't learned Abo!

It was great that she was able to enjoy a couple of her great-grandchildren. We had 4 generations in our compound for several years. That is the nice side of the African extended family (as in other parts of the world, too): no nursing homes where older people are far away from their families.

I hope Emilia is still watching over us as she used to, with the eyes of her spirit, now.

The dead are not dead (Part 2)

From time to time, my posts will feature a person who is not with us any longer. This is not meant to be morbid, quite the contrary. I write about them because they are alive in my memory, and because otherwise, they may be forgotten.

Of course, I'll be writing about those I remember with affection. We still laugh out loud thinking of my father-in-law's expressions, and imagine what his reaction would be to some of the new configurations in the family.

Love lives on, all over the world.

Learning the language

Having been raised in a multilingual household, and encouraged early on to learn the language of the country I happened to be living in, I planned on learning Duala, my husband's native language (albeit not his mother tongue, as his mother spoke Abo, and taught it to all her children).
It turned out to be a different kind of endeavor than in countries which have one main native language, such as Germany or Italy. Anyone could live their whole life in Douala without knowing a single word of Duala. Cameroon boasts about 200 languages, and the official languages are French and English (former mandate administrators). Most Cameroonians speak one of these two languages.
Moreover, Douala is now home to members of just about every ethnic group in Cameroon, as it is the commercial capital. The political capital is Yaoundé, further inland; it has about half the population of Douala.
Less than a hundred years ago, many Cameroonians (from the southern part) spoke Duala, which was the lingua franca in the area. Historically, Douala was the entry point when the first Europeans arrived. However, in recent years, the Duala-speaking population shrank to about 300,000 people. The lingua franca now is Pidgin English.
It was difficult to practice the language, as nobody would spontaneously speak to me in Duala, as I didn't need to open my mouth to be immediately perceived as a foreigner. Except for the people I knew personally, it was difficult for me to know who was a Duala speaker or not. My father's constant advice not to fear ridicule while learning a language was my mantra.
First I tried learning by listening and asking questions. However, this didn't work, as the structure of the language was unlike the languages I was used to and as my in-laws had not learned grammar, they couldn't explain what seemed to be inconsistencies to me. I started attending Friday evening adult classes at Collège Lieberman, a Catholic high school (in France, a Collège is a school that goes from 7th to 9th grade approximately; however Lieberman took its students all the way to the Baccalauréat, i.e. end of high school in the French system).
The students attending class were either foreign wives like me (mostly French), or members of other ethnic groups who wished to learn Duala. We had two teachers, and a slim book. It was not easy! Bantu languages are structured completely differently than Latin or other European languages. Singular and plural happen at the beginning of a word instead of the end: for example, an onion is "janga," onions is "manga." The rest of the sentence follows the same prefix, so you'll have sentences where all you hear is a series of "m," or "j"... unfortunately, I never reached a high enough level to be able to figure it all out, as I didn't get a lot of practice.
After 2 years of classes,  I acquired a general understanding of the language. I purchased the books for Bassa and Ewondo, also, out of curiosity. The structure for these languages, all in the Bantu family, was the same; Abo, my mother-in-law's language, was also similar; the vocabulary and the consonants used were different. I did not get a chance to study Bamiléké, which is a group of "semi-Bantu" languages, or any other the languages from North Cameroon, which were closer in nature to those of West Africa.

Visit to Brooklyn Museum

Recently, I visited the  Brooklyn Museum  to see the new show, Who Shot Rock & Roll. I couldn't resist a quick re-visit of the African section.  I've attached a couple of photos from the Cameroon collection, as well as a a general view of the African galleries. The elephant mask is a new acquisition, however a well-known item in the Grassfield area.