A Bafou Sociocultural Dataset

Description

A Bafou Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Bafou community of Cameroon (a Bamileke-area chiefdom near Bafoussam known for its dual council of notables), collected under the project "Projet de confection d'un didacticiel sur la composition des peuplements au Cameroun" (a didactic-software project on the composition of Cameroon's settled peoples), coordinated by Prof. Emmanuel Ngue Um for CERDOTOLA (the Inter-State Institution of scientific co-operation for the preservation, diffusion and valorization of the African cultural heritage) during the project's pilot data-collection phase in March-April 2020. Unlike a purely linguistic corpus, the dataset foregrounds the community itself as the unit of documentation: its history, social organisation, religious life and material culture, with onomastics, common expressions and a numeral system providing a linguistic component elicited in the community's own speech (recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or in a Latin-based approximation where IPA was not available to the fieldworker). Bafou (self-designation *afhō*, “those who dig deep, who go into the depths”) is integrated with neighbouring groups such as Baleveng, Bafoussam and Mbouda, and describes itself as relatively homogeneous and largely autochthonous. Oral tradition traces the group's arrival from Baleveng to its present, ancestral territory. Social life is organised around age-sets and two notable classes, the “9” and “7” councils, who deliberate with the chief before decisions are relayed to the population. Descent is patrilineal, and marriage proceeds through mutual consent, family negotiation, consultation of the ancestors (*methō mpfhō*), and bridewealth including hoes, entry and sitting rights, and hand-washing gifts. Religious life centres on the traditional tribunal (*fə̄m*) and an ancestral skull cult, alongside the biennial Lemous cultural festival and the chief's annual enthronement anniversary. Taboos include incest, adultery with a chief's or notable's wife, and murder. The main crops are farmed by men and women alike, with taro in yellow sauce (*apā na'nū*) as a signature dish and raphia, palm and corn wines as traditional drinks. Traditional performance is built around body percussion and footwork accompanied by paired drums (*ŋgu'efɔ*) and bell-drums (*azəŋ*). The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Bafou community's own self-description — its social organisation, kinship and marriage practices, religious and symbolic life, economy and material culture, and internal system of personal, ethnic and place names — rather than only its named language or dialect. This community-centred, ethnographic design distinguishes it from language-only documentation, while the accompanying onomastic, common-expression and numeral-system data still make the dataset usable for lexicographic and comparative linguistic work on the Bafou variety.