Serge Genest

Savoir traditionnel chez les forgerons mafa

ABSTRACTTraditional education embraces both the socialization process and other more technical skills. The former deals primarily with the transmission of values and the latter with techniques.The Mafa people live in the Mandara mountains, in the Northern part of the Cameroun. About 2¼ to 3% of them form an endogamous group of smiths: persons who occupy a centra! position in both economic and ritual activities. They master smelting, forge, pottery, divination, medecine, and assist others at birth and death.A brief description of those technics preceeds an analysis of their transmission within the group. The time needed to train a smith in a given technic is found to be directly related to its social value to the Mafa.

L'école franco-arabe au Nord-Cameroun

ABSTRACTSchools that taught French together with Arabic were established in Northern Cameroun after independence in 1960. Opposition to these schools by the French colonial administration is discus...

Gerhard Müller-Kosack, The Way of the Beer: ritual re-enactment of history among the Mafa, terrace farmers of the Mandara mountains (North Cameroon) . London: Mandaras Publishing, 2003, 408 pp., £10. 00, ISBN 0 9544730 0 0 (paperback).

developers and urban elites. Alarming to Ful e—and other livestock raising peoples—is, furthermore, the ominous return of razzias and pillaging in the guise of corrupt administrators, demobilised mercenaries, rebels, robbers, etc. As to the prospects of Ful e studies, the chapters by Bonte and Bernardet especially prove that reckoning with neighbouring populations can help to avoid stereotyping or simplifying interpretations. Bernardet argues that conflicts between Ful e and farmers, although perceived in ethnic terms, cannot be explained without considering each group’s internal contradictions. To the author’s call for development approaches that associate rather than separate farmers and herdsmen, one might add that analytical and theoretical tools are needed to facilitate the analysis of farmer–herdsman relations—and competition for resources in multi-ethnic settings in general—within the framework of a single social system. Otherwise, by assuming competing groups’ belonging to different systems, one risks remaining locked up in a vicious circle of difference and separation, the same that also informs many development interventions. This does not mean that one can dispose of the Ful e as a distinctive category, whatever the extent of reification and fiction involved. In their struggle to deconstruct their object, Ful e studies cannot but simultaneously strengthen its reification. They are doomed to deal with this paradox, and whether this is a curse or a blessing depends on the category’s and the field’s capacity to add to our understanding of social reality. This is exactly what Figures peules achieves. Finally, it should be stressed that the book’s relevance extends beyond the field of Ful e studies to broader issues of identitary strategies, of history and anthropology, and of ethnicity and multiculturalism.

The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa

Indiana University Press, United States, 1993. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Midland Book ed.. 226 x 150 mm. Language: English . Brand New Book. . nely crafted scholarship. Elegant and graceful, yet packed with knowledge and information, it embodies the aesthetic qualities which it describes and explores. -American Ethnologist The text is detailed and informative, and enjoyable reading. -Choice The Mande Blacksmith is an important book.sensitive, sympathetic, multifaceted, and thorough. -African Arts McNaughton s Mande Blacksmiths is undeniably the most profound study...