Gender and Caste in the Mandara Highlands: Northeastern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon

Abstract

The status of artisans, particularly iron workers, in African societies has long been the subject of ethnological inquiry and dispute (e.g., Cline 1937:114-140; Clement 1948; de Heusch 1956; Dieterlen 1965; Vaughan 1970; de Maret 1980). We will not review here a debate that, in tune with trends in anthropological explanation, has invoked a great variety of factors in order to place smiths in African society at scales ranging from the continental to the local: conquest, societal economic adaptation, the smiths' integration into local economies, their access to wealth and dependence on others for foodstuffs, the nature of indigenous siderological technology and specialization, smiths' symbolic and mythical attributes and structural roles, and so on. Our modest aim is to demonstrate, by reference to the ethnography of small scale Chadic-speaking societies in the northern Mandara highlands of Cameroon (Boutrais 1984) and neighboring Nigeria, that gender, a variable previously ignored, is in this region of fundamental relevance to the question.2 We will focus upon the rural southern Mafa, numbering about 67,000 inhabitants in some twenty settlements, and Sirak, a single settlement of about 1,900 (part of the so-called Bulahay group consisting of four settlements of mefele-speakers [Barreteau 1987]), amongst whom our primarily ethnoarchaeological fieldwork has been concentrated over ten months between 1986 and 1990. Statements made