I spend the night with my family but I know the prince will come looking for me the next morning. I don’t want him to worry so I return to my room before he wakes up. He comes looking for me as soon as day breaks. “My father was very…

Except among the peoples for whom neck rings are still an important part of traditional or ceremonial garb, neck rings are no longer a common sight across the African continent. This is a different picture than a mere century ago when neck rings and collars made of copper, brass, bronze…

The following is an excerpt from Helen Nde’s upcoming book “The Runaway Princess and Other Stories”, a collection of short stories recounting the deeds and misdeeds of memorable women from African history, legend, and folklore. We stay in the tree all night and when morning dawns, still and peaceful, we…

Whether they are statements of historical fact or molded from our wildest imaginations, the stories we tell ourselves about who we have been, who we are, and who we could be, have the power to determine who we actually become. This is the power of storytelling, a power born on…

Grassfields History A Great Beginning The people of Cameroon’s Grassfields mainly inhabit the North-West and West regions of the country. While often considered the birthplace of Bantu languages and the source of one of the most ancient sedentary cultures in Africa, their origins are still up to debate. …

For many Africans, the words “rituals” or “rites” conjure up images of blood, incantations of questionable, possibly evil intention, and practices which should be left alone (Thank you, Nollywood!). Others might understand the words in their literal sense: rituals as sequences of activities performed in a sequestered place and according…

Proverbs are concise statements which summarize, often in metaphorical, witty, and rhythmic fashion, the morals, wisdom, truths, or traditional views of a group. The ideas stored and transferred in proverbs are an important source of cultural instruction and orientation for people around the world. To most African peoples, and Cameroonians…

Divination refers to the process of using a standardized ritual, which is itself part of a larger system of knowledge, to seek knowledge or insight from highly trained specialists about past, current or future events, usually for the purpose of decision making or to solve a problem in the present.[i]…

It happened during dinner with my then partner, his father and his brother. We were seated in a busy family restaurant munching on fries and sipping beers while waiting for our meals to arrive. In the meantime, we continued a discussion about Cameroonian culture which we had begun at home…