Islam and Good Practice: Constructing Indigenous Muslim Identity in Cameroon

Abstract

The paper looks at modern indigenous identity construction in contemporary Cameroon with a special emphasis on how religion is incorporated in this process. It focuses on the Muslim Mbororo Fulani, traditionally known as pastoralists, and their development association MBOSCUDA (the Mbororo Social and Cultural Development Association of Cameroon) that was founded in 1992. The status of the Mbororo as indigenous people has been recognized by such transnational bodies as the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the African Commission of Human and People's Rights (ACHPR). MBOSCUDA has respectively attained international visibility e.g. through its Special Consultative Status in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The paper links the contemporary identity construction project among the Mbororo with a broader socio-religious change which is related to an increasing outside pressure put on the Mbororo to transform and refine their culture. It looks at how the MBOSCUDA activists deal with this pressure by striving to reshape certain Mbororo sociocultural practices and get rid of others. A special focus is on the notion of Islam and “good practice” which in the MBOSCUDA discourse is seen as the opposite of “negative cultures” and which forms a central constituent of the specific Mbororo ethnic identity launched by the association. The paper explores the differing, or even conflicting, motivations that instruct people's views concerning various debated Mbororo practices. As the discussion shows, there are, on the one hand, those who are motivated by a need to cleanse the Mbororo identity of socially and culturally backward customs that are hindering progress and deflecting people's attention from educational activities, whether these customs are seen as “purely” indigenous or resulting from a negative mixture of tradition and “imperfectly” understood Islam. On the other hand, a large number of MBOSCUDA officers see the protection of the Muslim identity – which they regard as the only imaginable one for the Mbororo – through the eradication of heathen practices as the chief goal of the organisation. In order to examine the divergent viewpoints within MBOSCUDA the paper takes a closer look at several debated Mbororo practices, including the youth dance (wamarde), arranged marriages (nangaaru) and the women's milk selling rounds (sippal). As the paper concludes, the differing views on these practices should be seen against the overall project of transforming the Mbororo self-perception towards one that would better be in tune with, and adjust itself to, the requirements of the contemporary society. The discussion is mainly based on interviews that the author has conducted among the MBOSCUDA activists in Cameroon in 2009–2015. It also draws from her extensive anthropological fieldwork in the country since 1994.