Cameroon’s national literatures: An introduction

Abstract

In the Afterword of my book The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba (2008), I wrote the following: “My earliest impressions of Cameroon were gleaned from the stories told by older people. Their comments revolved around two things: first, that Mount Cameroon—also known as Mount Fako, the Throne of Thunder, and the Chariot of the Gods—the highest peak in West and Central Africa, is the site of the earliest recorded volcanic eruption in the region; and second, that the country they call home was named after prawns by some white people. It is said that in the fifth century BCE, while sailing along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, Hanno, the Carthaginian explorer and ship’s captain, observed Mount Cameroon erupting and inscribed in his travel writings the name Theon Ochema, Chariot of the Gods. He is said to have noted that the fires from the mountain were so hot and so bright that the flames reached up and touched the stars. Firm believers in this historical version point out that Mount Cameroon (also called Mount Fako because it is situated in Fako Division of the South West Province) is the only active volcano on the coast of West Africa, erupting seven times in the twentieth century alone. They also point to the fact that the mountain is known locally as monga-ma loba—Seat of the Gods. I was born in the South West Province but was raised through my teenage years in the grasslands of the North West, where Beba, my village of origin, is situated. Mount Cameroon has therefore held a kind of mystery for me. As a young girl, I was fascinated with these stories of the so-called discovery by Hanno, of flaming arrows reaching for the stars, and with the fact that Debundscha, the wettest place on the African continent and the place with the second-highest rainfall in the world, lies at the foot of the Seat/Chariot of the Gods. I found it amusing that my country was named after big juicy shrimp, and by a bunch of white men we did not know. I could not grasp what that act of naming really entailed, but the teachers who taught me in primary school and the adults who told us stories by the evening fire were not amused. They insisted that branding us with the name of shrimp was an invitation to a feast. The metaphor was lost on my young sensibilities. As I got older and attended primary and secondary school, our curriculum was tailored to the British education system of O Levels and A Levels. In our history lessons, little was afforded the various peoples who migrated to and now inhabit the sahel and plateau regions of the mostly Muslin north, or the grasslands, littoral, and forest regions of the mostly Christian south. History lessons were dominated by European and Cameroon’s colonial history. Only later, at the University of Yaounde, did I, on my own, read all the books I could that addressed the various kingdoms, chiefdoms, and indigenous civilizations of the people who today call Cameroon home.