© M. Bartolini
In the north of Cameroon, a parallel world opens up before the visitor’s eyes, a reality far removed, not only geographically, from the powerful central-western chefferies, or from the great capitals of Yaounde and Doualà, where progress is balanced between modernity and tradition.
With the exception of the administrative city of Garoua, the deep north is a region of savannahs long forgotten and desolate, a treasure trove of ancient peoples, only partly Islamised, who continue to live in syncretism, according to the most authentic rural traditions. It is a universe in itself, waiting to be discovered, immersed in natural scenarios typical of the Sahel. Fields of corn and millet, baobabs, acacias and mangoes, mysterious caiman ponds and reserves inhabited by elephants and rhinos, small clay or stone houses scattered in fairy-tale landscapes, ancient lamidat or animist sanctuaries, in the shadow of rocky peaks with surreal shapes.
The markets are the hub of this small universe of peoples and traditions. While the city markets are the main crossroads for people from neighbouring countries, such as Nigeria, Chad and Central Africa, those in the rural areas are the meeting point for Peulh, Bororo, Kapsiki, Musgum, Hidé, Koma and many other peoples. A veritable open-air ethnographic museum.
To the east, not far from Lake Maga, the Mesgum people have handed down the secrets of their traditional howitzer houses, which are made entirely of clay. Little jewels of the deep north, the Pouss houses are masterpieces of spontaneous engineering, in which every apparently decorative element is actually a functional one. According to intuitive physical calculations, their domed structure supports the dizzying heights (up to 9 metres), maintaining thermal insulation, which is also favoured by the material and the ovoid shape, while the grooves in the plaster channel rainwater, as well as providing a valid support for annual maintenance. These dwellings are not only a refined unicum of engineering, but also of architectural aesthetic beauty without equal, a true work of sculpture.
To the west, the fulcrum of the Mandara Mountains, in a surreal lunar landscape, rises the volcanic peak of Kapsiki, under which the population of the same name in the village of Rhumsiki has kept its animist traditions intact, in spite of the spread of the Islam of the ancient lamidat, regulated around the consultation of wise elders and traditional deifeticheur, able to predict the future using a crab and a wooden stick. Among the characteristic stone and thatched-roof dwellings, blacksmiths’ houses and millet beer jars, age groups are still the backbone of traditional Kapsiki society, and the initiation ceremonies introducing young people to adulthood, accompanied by sacrifices and tribal dances, are particularly evocative.
All the peoples of the region who have remained animists, perched on the Mandara Mountains, are defined by the Islamicised peoples with the general and derogatory term of Kirdi, or ‘pagans’. Kirdi are the Kapsiki, but also the Hidé, the Koma, the Mafa, the Mofou, the Potoko and the Toupuri. A small ethnographic mosaic, scattered among the traditional villages, which is easy to come across in the weekly markets, a meeting point for the traditional economies and cultures of these people. Marou, Mara, Mokolo and Tourou are just a few of the names of the towns that host the weekly markets, with their coming and going of people: the Potoko with the grains cultivated in miraculous fertile terraces around Oudjila, and which they store in slender clay granaries with conical thatched roofs, raised on a stone plinth, to which a sacred ox is sacrificed every year, as a propitiatory practice; the Hidé women with their beautiful headdresses made from the dried shells of the calebasse, geometrically decorated with bright colours of natural pigments; the Mafa blacksmiths, custodians of the secrets of metalworking, which they forge incessantly, in a fairy-tale landscape around Koza, among granite rocks, houses shaped like clay sculptures, in the presence of which ancestral rites and sacrifices are performed; the Koma, the magical people of the Alantika hills, with their medicinal plants and traditional pipes, who have remained strongly anchored in the primordial spiritual universe, which revolves around the natural elements, to the point that even today they still wear only a loincloth of leaves, fixed at the waist.
While the deep north was a land of conquest for the Peulh theocracies who settled down, ruling the lamidat region, their Bororo ‘relatives’ remained entirely nomadic, still practising transhumance. If it is easy to meet their beautiful women, elegantly dressed and accessorized as they sell their curdled milk at the market, it is even easier to meet their herds of zebu crossing the region in search of pasture.
