Abstract
This paper focuses on “families of newness”, which amongst the Kom of Northwest Cameroon are known as azai dosi kfaang. It argues that because of geographical and social mobility experiences, families have not remained static, and consequently, the further they go from the village the more modernized they become. In recent times, African societies as well as family histories have been concerned with connecting with those who have been left behind. As a result, the blueprint that marks out the African family today is found in its mobility both within and out of the continent. At the same time, what glues the family together is the newer forms of technologies encapsulated in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), which include amongst many others the cell phone, internet, WhatsApp, and Twitter. Letters pre-dated these new technologies and were significantly used by migrant families to stay “in touch”. Families began in the village, and as newer technologies were introduced—motor cars, a postal service and motorable roads—they moved or thought about places further away. With later technological developments, such as air travel and the mobile phone, families found themselves in distant diasporic spaces. This paper therefore hopes to make a contribution that relates family history and the history of migration to technology and social change. It also has the great value of discussing an area that gets too little attention in historiography. Fundamentally, the paper attempts to compare and contrast the use of technology, the news that could be shared (welfare, births, or obituaries), the length between contacts, the ability to make visits in person, the tensions that cropped up between family members abroad and those back at home in two periods, the 1930s–1940s and the 1990s to the present. What did these periods have in common? What was different and why? For the purpose of clarity, I will start the paper with a short introduction about the area, the issues of family formation, and kfaang. The second part of the paper will focus on the discussion of the “newness” of those who migrated to more modern places and the role of technology. The third part compares/contrasts the connections of families in the two periods (1930s–1940s and 1990s-present) in order to flesh out the argument.
Highlights
Stating the Study Area, Issues of Family Formation and Kfaang (Newness)The Kom is a Fondom which is located in the Bamenda Grassfields in the present-day northwest region of Cameroon
In Africa, the concept of the family is different from the concept in the western world
This paper has attempted to trace Kom family history and focuses on how technologies have facilitated the mobility of Kom families
Summary
The car (a Renualt 4) was bought from a French volunteer worker whose contract of work had finished and was going back to Europe They decided to take a family photo and send the picture to their kith and kin in Njinikom, another village in the Kom. See Figure 2. Historians and policymakers alike, still clinging to the last vestiges of Modernization Theory, tend to treat mobile capital as the most important agent of modernization, but in Africa, taking the Kom of Cameroon western Grassfields as a case study, the Africans themselves, more often than not, brought the trappings of modernity into their villages (Giddens 2005) In the process, these returners initiated a fundamental revolution within the hierarchical organization of their societies. Some Kom families in the diaspora are constantly in courts suing for divorces, and children are most often the casualties of these unstable or broken homes
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