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.