Other ethnographic documentation

Though direct observations of everyday life is important to get an idea of how things work in a group, other data are also very useful. I used several other sources, such as relevant literature on the area, interviews, a questionnaire, and in the case of the school observations, I took care to observe several different classes in the area, some of which had other ethnical mixes. I also observed some classes outside the area entirely.

Keeping a field journal

Throughout the two first periods of fieldwork I kept a field journal to record the observations I made, besides making notes of my own movements. I did approximately one hundred hours of class observations all together, with quite detailed notetaking. I also wrote down episodes I witnessed outside the school context, what was said and done, by whom; if possible I asked for further

3This was complicated by the fact that if I used some other common name on a person, it was quite likely to apply to someone else in the group. I had no way of controling this, as I never had access to complete classlists or knew all the people present at various occasions.

3.2. COLLECTING DATA

information from ‘insiders’, such as Patouma or other people who knew French.

Some of the interview material is in the form of journal notes only, not recorded.

Working on my data later, I have found my notes indispensable aides for my memory.

For easier consulting I have entered much of my notes in Shoebox databases.

The Shoebox program⁴provides useful software solutions for organising anthro-pological material as well as linguistic analysis and data.

About one third of the school observations are fully entered into a database in Shoebox, while the rest of the school visits are entered as short notes of place, date and time spent in what classes. An associated file contains facts about the schools such as size, number of teachers, date of creation if known, and student numbers.

Another database assembles the parent interviews I made, organised by name of parent. An associated file contains biographical data on a good number of the people I met, birthdate, civil state, number of children, relations to other people in the material, and remarks on life history if known. The biography file was also useful for the ethnographic material.

A further database contains ethnographic material organised by date of observation. Specifications of places, participants, sources of further information are again given alongside each entry.

The Shoebox databases can be searched electronically and are much easier to use than scribbled journalnotes. On the other hand it is less easy to incorporate such things as sketches of blackboard drawings or a map over myquartier in Mipom.

Ethnographic and historical literature

I used the existing historical and anthropological literature on the area as much as possible, to get the larger picture and also to obtain some information on the economic conditions and the history of the Nizaa as a group. It is important to have an understanding of the economic life of an area, what people live from, what trade they engage in and what contacts they make to gain a livelihood.

There are several both Cameroonian and Western historians and ethnographers who have engaged themselves in research on the history of Cameroon before and after the European takeover, and a steady trickle of new studies from MA and PhD students from both the University of Yaounde and the Anthropos project at the University of Ngaoundéré/University of Tromsø. The Annual Reviews of the University of Ngaoundéré, of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and of the Anthropos project, have been important sources of information on Northern

4Available as freeware at http://www.sil.org/computing/shoebox/index.html

Cameroon, together with other literature. Other anthropological literature on groups in the area exist as well, notably Boutrais (1995-96) which minutely describes the life of the nomadic Fuláepastoralists here and in West-Cameroon.

A further source of information is Lode (1990) which presents the history of the Norwegian and American Lutheran missions working in the Adamoaua, later theEglise Evangelique Luthérienne du Cameroun(EELC), from 1925 to the late 1980s. All of these works come together to provide a quite detailed backdrop to present-day Nizaa life, explaining some traits as longstanding historical processes rather than isolated facts. Relevant parts of the historical and anthroplogical material is presented in Chapter 4, or crop up in the analysis.

Interviews

To get more specific data on the Galim area, I interviewed Mrs. Solveig Bjøru Sandnes, a former missionary teacher at the mission’s primary school in Galim in the early 60’s, and Mr. Adamou Luc, who worked as a teacher there a little later. Mr. Adamou is today the leader of the EELC Department of Education.

Mrs. Bjøru Sandnes kindly made available to me her private photographies of a Nizaa initiation ceremony, a very rare documentation of these secret rites, and both contributed concrete historical information.

Another interesting person to interview was Dr. Gabriel Mba, one of the leaders of the NACALCO (National Association of Cameroonian Language Commitees). One of the goals of the association is to promote the use of local languages in the three first grades of primary school. They have developed a two week course for teachers who want to teach using the first language of the children. The Nizaa language project is a member of the association, and dr. Mba had already visited it and other similar projects in Adamoaua a number of times.

The EELC still had several language projects going in 2005, partly doing Bible translation work, and partly literature development and mother tongue literacy.

The last activity was supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) for a number of years (1993–2006). I interviewed the coordinator of the EELC Department of Translation and Literacy, Mrs. Neba Lucie, getting valuable information on how the projects worked both from her and dr. Mba.

An important interview with the local Inspecteur d’Enseignement of the Galim-Tignère district, Mr. Goviata Mathieu, gave me much factual information on the school situation in the area, such as the number of schools and teachers.

To obtain more data on the circumcision and initiation rites of the Nizaa, I interviewed Mr. Adamou Robert, the village chief (jawro) of Gonkira. Unfortu-nately the tape recorder malfunctioned, and most of the interview was lost except the notes I could make from memory. Several conversations with Mr. Hamadicko

3.2. COLLECTING DATA

Daniel, a former worker in the Nizaa language project, also gave valuable infor-mation about both old customs of the Nizaa, and what it was like to be a student at the mission’s school in the late 50’s and early 60’s. These talks were not taped, however, as they were unplanned-for conversations, rather than interviews. I also used my notes from an interview with Mrs. Mama Sambo made in 1996.

I finally made some semi-structured interviews with six parents and two adult sixth-grade students about their view of modern schooling. The number is so small because I found it difficult to arrange for and carry out such interviews. The language was a problem: I could interview directly only the parents who spoke French, as I did not have a suitable interpreter available for Nizaa interviews for most of the first field work period when I focused on the school data.

It was also somewhat difficult to get into contact with parents except in the cases where I had some other point of contact as well. Pieces of written informations sent home with the students was not a solution as there is a great number of illiterate parents in Galim. The teachers of the schools did send out written convocations to parents meetings, but they had to do it by way of copying by hand the necessary information on small slips of paper which they sent home with the students, and it only worked because everybody knew what it said anyways. Even though I had a printer to use with my laptop, I could not just mass-copy a letter to parents, presenting myself and the project and say that I would be along to interview them in the next few weeks. I had to get into some kind of personal contact with parents to be able to do an interview.

I did have one go at arranging an interview with somebody I knew next to nothing about. I told a boy who was one of the better students of the fourth grade that I would like to talk with his parents, and could he please tell them to be home in the afternoon tomorrow? Though he came across as knowing some French in class, he obviously had great problems to grasp what I meant in this case, but I got him to come and fetch me the next day. But nobody was at home when we came. After a little waiting around his mother and aunt came back from the fields with a load of sweet potatoes. They spoke no French at all, but was friendly inquisitive about what brought this white person into their courtyard. After some halting conversation in Nizaa where we agreeed that the boy certainly was an intelligent young person (M`E´E` ´a k´e`! ’There are thoughts!’), we washed all the sweet potatoes and I went home with a good heap in a bag. As a parent interview it was a complete failure, but I did get a nice supper.

Questionnaires

To get some information on an important group in the data, I prepared a questionnaire (see Appendix) for the teachers. I had 21 responses, from a total of 43 teachers in the district, that is to say from practically all the teachers I met

on my school visits. I normally had a little conversation with the responding teacher as he or she handed back the sheet, to clear up any difficulties (see 6.3.4 for an example). An interesting information to be had from the data of these questionnaires was on their ethnic origins and knowledge of Cameroonian languages. There were for example only two Nizaa teachers in the group, and one of them taught in a school with few, if any, Nizaa children. Many teachers knew some Fulfulde, the main regional languge, but by no means all.

Focus schools and other schools

In the school materials, I focused on two schools, the Group 2 public school in Galim, also known as the “Nizaa” school, and the village school of Mipom.

Within these materials again, the recordings of the two lowest grades, SIL and CP, seemed most relevant to the project goals. In the case of Mipom these were the only grades in the school. It was however necessary to visit several schools and different grades, to get a broader view of what schooling is like more generally, and what could be seen as personal teaching styles and what was common practices in all schools. I also visited two schools outside this area for the same reason. These other schools with few or no Nizaa students, then functioned as informal cross-checks vis-à-vis the focus schools with most or all Nizaa students.