Do I really want one hundred mothers in law?
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 14/Jan/2011 14:43, 34 days ago
In Cameroon the family is incredibly important, providing support services, a cultural identity, and a social network. It can also be incredibly quirky, and my‘adopted’ Cameroonian family, the royal family of Pouss, is no exception. I live in the house of its head, the Sultan, but because his father had more than hundred wives and over a hundred children almost the entire population of Pouss and half the population of Maga is also related. He himselfonly has four wives and three (legitimate) sons who refer to me as their little sister.When I was on my Christmas holidays in the South I went to stay with the Sultan’s son Aboubakar, who is a railway mechanic in Douala, Cameroon’s second city. He suggested that I go to visit his sister, Iyaparis (who is also married to his first cousin). Aboubakar and Iyaparis were born one month apart, but to different mothers. He assured me, as had his father and mothers,that it didn’t matter that I’d never met her and that she’d be delighted to meet me, so I set off with some trepidation for her home in the city of Bafoussam.I needn’t have worried. I was greeted as a long lost family member, interrogated about every single neighbour in Maga, and Iyaparis confused her cleaning lady by introducing me as her sister. I liked her so much that after Christmas I went back to stay for almost a week.With Iyaparis' childrenIyaparis’ family is in some ways very modern. Her husband is an influential provincial delegate for water and energy, her four children go to a private bilingual school and speak French as a first language rather than Mousgoum, their tribal language, they own three televisions, and her husband brings thechildren Snickers bars when he comes home from business trips.On the other hand the children kneel before their father when they want to talk to him, they are beaten with a copy of the Quran when they are bad, and Iyaparis does not eat nor sit in the same room as her husband. She told me one of the things she finds strange about the Western couples she sees on Hispanic soap operas on the television (Cameroonians love Hispanic soap operas) is the way the men and the women talk to one another. Often, if she sees something on the television in the bedroom that she thinks her husband would like she sends one of her children to tell her husband so that he can watch the same programme in the living room.While I was staying in Bafoussam there was a promotional trade and food fair with stalls and live music. Normally Iyaparis is cloistered in the house and wouldn’t have been able to go, but because I was visiting it was okay, as she would have a female companion. Nevertheless we still had to go with her husband’s nephew as a chaperone. She wanted to know whether her father lets me go out on my own when I’m living at Maga; when she was a girl she wasn’t even allowed to go to embroidery classes.From Iyaparis’ house I wanted to travel on to visit her cousin Madji Kolo, whose mother lives in my compound. We tried to call Madji Kolo and her husband to tell them I was going to visit but there was no signal in their village.“Just go,” said Iyaparis, “and when you get to the village just ask someone to show you the house.”“Won’t they mind?” I asked.“Of course not. I’ll send a text message and if it gets through they’ll know you’re coming.”When I finally turned up in the tiny mountain village of Acha Madji Kolo and her husband were delighted to see me (and, to my relief, expecting me). Madji Kolo left school and was married off when she was just seventeen, given away to a husband who worked as a vet in a tiny Anglophone village at the opposite end of the country, a five day trip away from her francophone village in the north. Now she has just turned twenty, has two children, and speaks reasonable pidgin.“You’re the fourth person from my family to come and see me,” she told me when I arrived (this total includes Ruth, my English predecessor at Maga).My welcome in Acha was extraordinary; everyone there was amazed that I’d come all the way from the Extreme North to visit their village. Strangers brought me gifts of yams and money to help me pay for my trip and everyone insisted on taking me on tours round the village. I also broke a fourteen year run of vegetarianism: as soon as I arrived Madji Kolo brought out huge plates of chicken, which I was too polite to refuse. I should have been honest: for breakfast the next day she brought out even larger stacks of beef, and when her husband gave me a lift to the nearest town on his motorbike we stopped off to visit some neighbours, who brought me a plate of pork.My only consolation was that I hadn’t given more advance warning of my trip: they complained that if they’d known sooner that I was coming they would have slaughtered a sheep in my honour.With the Sultan and my Mum at his hotel inYaounde. He is really that tall. Meanwhile my real parents have come to visit Cameroon. We went to visit the Sultan in the capital, Yaounde, where he has gone to lobby some ministers. He wasted no time in trying to formalise ties between me and his family. My father, whose terrible French was just good enough for him to understand that he was being offered twenty cattle (a considerable amount) in exchange for his daughter, cheerfully upped the bidding to twenty two cattle. My mother, seeing that things were getting a bit serious, especially when the Sultan offered my parents a farm where they could stay when they came to visit me, was less enthusiastic.