Interview sur Afrique Media - 2016

Comments

Post a Comment

Please let me know your thoughts and questions. Also, if you feel that anything is incorrect, please let me know.
I need to moderate the comments, as in recent years there has been a spike in spam.

Popular posts from this blog

Duala Men's Attire

Image
In daily life: work, parties... Cameroonian men usually wear the same clothing as in Europe, the US, Australia, and much of the Middle East and Asia: shirts, slacks, and so on. Traditionally, however, Duala men wore, and still wear for specific occasions, a large fabric fastened at the waist called a Sandja . Originally, sandja fabric was made of tree bark, beaten till it was fine and soft enough to be draped. In Congo, a woven style of tree bark fabric is still made today, called "Kuba" cloth. There were three different ways of wearing the sandja: Held up at the waist to form short sherwal-type pants*; knee-length; and the ceremonial style, still worn today, full-length. That is the style I saw the most, often called "Sandja Ngondo" because it is worn for the Ngondo celebration (which had not been celebrated for 20 years when I arrived in Cameroon). My first experience of men wearing a sandja was at funerals, when men wore a black velvet cloth, with a white shi...
Read more

ESSACA: an architecture school for Cameroon

Image
ESSACA  Since Cameroon’s independence in 1960, the country’s architects have all been educated abroad: many in France, as the country was a French Protectorate after World War I, but also in Germany, Greece, the United States and in neighboring Nigeria. Jean-Jacques Kotto, a Cameroonian architect, former President of the ONAC (Ordre National des Architectes du Cameroun, the Cameroon architects’ association, which manages architectural registration) and current President of the Union of African Architects, decided to take the leap and created ESSACA in 2009. ESSACA stands for Ecole Supérieure Spéciale d’Architecture du Cameroun – translated literally, “Superior Special School of Architecture of Cameroon” which, in French, does not sound incongruous! In practice, it is a private architecture school, offering B.Arch, M.Arch and doctoral degrees. The school started out with all of seven students. Five years later, in 2015, there are 45 students, and the school is celebra...
Read more

West Cameroon - festive traditional dress

Image
Women dancing in celebration, wearing matching "kabas" The neighborhood chief speaking to the community In December, I was invited to a weekend of festivities in Bamendjou, West Cameroon. The occasion was the honoring of my friend, Jeanne Ntopa, to the title of Mafeu. This title appears to have been the title for the Queen Mother, but as I understood it, can now be given to women who have done much good to their community and thus are elevated to Queen Mother status. Among the Bamileke from the region called the Grasslands by the German colonialists, there are many (related) languages. Thus the language spoken in Bamendjou is only barely understood by our Mafeu's own spouse, who is from the Dschang area. I understood nothing at all on the first day; however, I could sense the joy and pride during the Mafeu's neighborhood community celebration. On the second day, the Bamendjou traditional chief, in this title since over 60 years, spoke in French as he ackno...
Read more