Some Aspects of Religion and Tradition in the West and Far North

Although Foumban seemed predominantly Muslim, Christianity (mainly Protestantism) is also strong in West Cameroon. In fact Islam, Christianity and traditional religions have roughly equal shares there (an invention of one of the Bamoun kings was a religion that was a fusion of all three, but this did not last). We passed a large number of Christian, mainly Protestant, churches along the road, some very impressive constructions. There are also pockets of Christianity in the Far North, some quite fundamentalist. One volunteer in a village in the Far North told me about a church service that she was obliged to attend since the school she works in is strongly religious. She said that the preacher worked people into a frenzy and demanded that “fornicators and masturbators” come forward and repent, whereupon several complied.

The brand of Islam in Foumban is very modern whereas in the Far North it seems a little more fundamentalist and less flexible, e.g. with respect to dress, the role of women and frequency of prayers. In the Far North work is punctuated by prayers and buses stop for prayers. One of the practices which I least like here (because it seems to imply that women are subservient to men), and which happily is not very common, is that when some women need to address a man for a purpose such as to buy a bus ticket they crouch before him and present their money on outstretched palms of their hands, from which the man removes the money and in which he places the ticket and any change. A few women in the Far North are completely hidden behind black veils but some of them greet me quite cheerily when we pass on the road. Most Muslims of every age seem to practise, though a surprising number drink alcohol on the quiet (some of them hide their drinks underneath the table between hasty gulps). Nowhere in Cameroon have I seen any signs of militancy or sympathies with terrorist causes.

Last month in Maga I had to endure lound music and shouting from a neighbour’s wedding celebration which lasted four days and continued through each night. I was told that the bride-to-be’s mother invites her friends to a party at which they make contributions to wedding expenses, then the father, then the bride-to-be and then the groom-to-be each has a party, and after all that they have the marriage. A dowry is paid to the bride’s father (or to an uncle, if the father is dead). In both regions marriages are still arranged by parents, uncles and aunts. In an earlier blog I mentioned that a friend had been persuaded by his parents to marry a girl whom he had not previously met. Since then she ran off with another male friend and happily my friend does not have to go through with this arranged marriage. I heard of a particularly disturbing case of a young man who wanted to marry a young girl but his family could not afford the dowry. There was another suitor who was able to pay the dowry but the first young man deliberately made the girl pregnant to prevent the marriage. He later lost interest in the girl and did not marry her, which led to him having custody of the child, once weaned. It was brought up by one of his female relations. There can be somewhat devious aspects to the marriage transaction, as I learnt when a local man died at the age of 97 leaving 40 children, the youngest being aged 10. I commented on the fact that if one has a child at the age of 87 one clearly will not be able to provide for all its schooling. I was told that this is only considered important if the child is male and that in this case he can be married to a 14 year old girl who will have her education terminated and will be sent to work in the fields to provide for her husband’s education. Hopefully this practice is not very common.

It is currently Ramadan which is observed strictly here in the Far North (I have not been to the West during Ramadan). In Maga the range of foodstuffs available in the market is very restricted (but prices are higher than usual), the local bank closes early and work in general is at a slower pace since people pray more and are listless from hunger and from getting up very early. The first call from the mosque is at 3:00 a.m. rather than the usual 4:30 a.m. (in fact on some nights non-stop preaching is broadcast from the mosque). I think the 3:00 a.m. call is to wake the women so that they may cook a meal which can be eaten before dawn. During the day not even a drink of water can be taken, which must be very unhealthy since it becomes extremely hot most days. A practice which I find disturbing is that some Muslims (thankfully few) spit every minute or two all day (I think spittal is considered impure) and must therefore deplete what fluids they have. After sunset (6:30 p.m.) there is a big meal which starts with a sort of soup called “buie” which is easy to digest. The few who can afford it have another meal later. There will be a big feast at the end of Ramadan and everybody seems to need a new “boubou” (this is a traditional outfit, and the way people feel about it reminds me of the attitude to holy communion outfits among poor families in Ireland). Times are hard this year since the global energy and food crises have really hit prices here and severely affected people, many of whom were already struggling to make ends meet. Also Ramadan this year coincides with return to school, which has to be paid for and for which a new school uniform is also needed.

Ramadan is clearly a significant spiritual experience for most Muslims. A friend’s bar in Maroua which is usually buzzing every night of the week does virtually no business, even at week-ends. However it is said that some Muslims eat more during Ramadan than in other months because of the tendency to gorge themselves before and after the long day’s fast. I have heard different versions of the prohibition of sexual relations during Ramadan, one being that only those who are not married must desist from sex during Ramadan. I know of just one teenager who does not always observe the fast and does not always go to prayers. Other teenagers pray in my house and at times ask me to pray with them.

p.s. The prayers at the end of Ramadan were very impressive in Maga. A huge number turned out in colourful outfits and prayed in a large field beside the Mosque. I am told that business was booming in the bars in Maroua.

Perhaps it is not appropriate to consider sorcery under the heading of religion but it is interesting to note that most people in the Far North believe in it. In fact I have not spoken to a person who does not believe in it. Recently in Maga, Guirvidig and Pouss there were similar incidents where suspected sorcerers were beaten up by the crowd and then handed over to the police. They were reputed to have the power to remove a testicle from anybody who shook hands with them. It is hard to work out what was really going on since even university educated people believe in sorcery. I think the explanation may be that sorcerers in Nigeria are prepared to pay large prices for boys' testicles for use in their rituals and perhaps those who forcibly remove them (hopefully not their parents) use sorcery as a smoke screen.

Photos of Foumban

Foumban and the Bamoun

We spent a week in Foumban. It is a very interesting town since it is the seat of the Bamoun dynasty. The current king of the Bamoun, who is the local Islamic sultan, is the 21st in a line that stretches back many hundred years. Some of his predecessors were quite inventive, e.g. one invented a new language and script and wrote a history of the Bamoun in this script. We visited the king’s palace which has a museum containing lots of interesting artifacts, including some of the past kings’ inventions. Foumban is also Cameroon’s centre for arts and crafts and acts as a channel for exports (including some from other African countries) to Europe and the United States. It has an interesting museum of arts and crafts and an extensive “artisanat”.

Most people in Foumban are either Bamoun or Foumban. I don’t know much about the latter except that they are the traditional ennemies of the Bamoun. I met a large number of Bamoun since I visited the family of a Bamoun friend. I attended a ceremony for the death of her mother at which around 100 uncles and cousins gathered in a large room for prayers followed by a feast at which everybody was given gifts of coins, sweets, dates and kola nuts (which have some hallucinogenic properties) as well as local dishes. There were as many women as men but they were housed in the periphery and did not take an active part other than helping to prepare and serve the food.

There was also a similar but more extensive ceremony for the anniversary of the family’s “grand-father”. I should explain that the Bamoun are made up of “families” which trace their origins to some past king. Nearly everybody I met was part of one large family, which is not surprising when you consider the effects of polygamy (one king had 681 wives). Each family has a grand-father who acts as its chief and representative. When a grand-father dies his eldest son becomes grand-father. When the previous grand-father died last year his eldest son was already dead so the latter’s eldest son, a student at Yaounde university, became grand-father. He was very personable and looked a bit like Tiger Woods. There was a very large crowd at the previous grand-father’s anniversary ceremony, including a representative of the king (the king had gone to Beijing for the Olympics). It was held in the open, with marquees beside the mosque, and there were many prayers from the immam and speeches from notables.

While I was there an uncle died and I was able to observe a Muslim burial. He died at night and was buried the following morning. The body (with no coffin) was placed in a narrow trench at the bottom of the grave and planks were placed over it before the earth was put in. Only men took part actively in the prayer ceremony which preceded the burial, the women having done a sort of wailing, rather like Irish keening, in the house before the removal (I was kept awake one night in Maga by horrendous wailing when a neighbour died suddenly). After the burial the deceased’s close male relations sit around for a couple of weeks and receive the salutations of visitors. There is a ceremony, which is similar to the anniversary ceremony, after a few days and again after 40 days as well as on each anniversary thereafter.

Although women had a secondary role in the formal ceremonies in the Muslim household that I visited in Foumban, women and men otherwise mixed on a fairly equal footing there, except that virtually all the preparation of food was done by women (in Muslim households in Maga women are more in the background except when they bring food). The clear leader of the Foumban household was a grand-mother who was a sprightly 85 (in Cameroon, life expectancy is in the low 50s, but probably higher than this in the West and lower than this in the Far North, where people die at an alarming rate). She had brought up many of her grand-children, as well as her own children, and probably also children and grand-children of her late husband’s other wives. The household currently has a number of women and children. The women could be her daughters, wives of her sons or the equivalent of her fellow wives. These women currently live in this household rather than with their husbands, who work in places such as Douala and Yaounde. The children, though not full brothers and sisters in every case, relate to the “family” in the household and refer to the other children as brothers and sisters. Not all the children of the women in the household live there, some being brought up by other relatives. If this sounds complex, it is!

The main form of amusement in Foumban each evening before dusk was a football match on a pitch carved out in a most unlikely space at the intersection of a few dirt tracks. It was of quite an irregular shape because of the adjoining buildings and there were undulations and some steep inclines over which occasionally an over-enthusiastic player would plunge, to loud cheers. Motos regularly passed through while the football was in progress. The standard of football was actually quite high but methods of scoring goals included bouncing the ball off adjoining walls to score on the rebound, and hitting the ball into a tree above the goal in the hope that it would drop into the goal.