A Day in the Life... Somié Village, Province de l'Adamaoua, Cameroon
There follow a series of clips that
were taken at approximately one hour intervals throughout the period 6am-7pm of Wednesday
21 April 1999. The clips were taken in three locations: the central village square,
a cross-roads near the village dispensary and outside the ethnographer's house in
a residential part of the village.
Later I give some diary entries written
by several villagers that give some idea about what was happening in the village
that day.
Background
April is early in the rainy season and
is in the time of the year during which the most intensive work is undertaken. The
village is relatively empty during the day - whenever possible people are working
in the fields hoeing the maize that was planted in February and March to keep the
weeds down and let the maize grow. The soil is mounded up into furrows that provide
better support for the stalks a they grow. Some people have paid for a tractor (there
are three in the area) to plough their field before planting. This considerably reduces
the growth of elephant grass and makes the work of hoeing much less, but it is expensive.
Often people will only pay for the tractor once every three years.
The village has a population of some
two thousand people and it lies forty kilometres off the main road. It is located
at 6.30° N 11.30°E at an altitude of 750 metres and has a single annual
rainy season from March until October with November to February being the dry season.
The villagers grow maize as their principal staple and coffee as a cash crop. Many
other crops are grown.
Shooting started at 6am in the early
light of day. There is life in the village at 5am when ethnographers are still abed.
The cry for dawn Muslim prayers wakes many in the village even if few pay much heed.
Some people, whose fields are some distance away, leave the village before dawn.
Others may choose to leave in the cool, for example, if they are walking to a neighbouring
village. Most rise between 5.30 and 6 am. By 7pm it is already dark, and the camera
can only see people close to using its nightvision setting. Lightening is visible
in the distance behind the mountain. The rain was preceded by strong gusts of wind
which can damage roofs. It started around 8pm driving everyone indoors and continued
until after 10pm.
The sites chosen
The three sites at which the clips were
shot were selected as follows:
1) outside the ethnographer's house
in a residential quarter of 'old Somié' - it was settled when the village was
originally established in the early 1960s, and contrasts with the major influx of
immigrants that has occurred over the last decade. The location is typical of residential
areas (apart from the ethnographer) that are off the main roads and paths.
2) The centre of the village square
in front of the chief's palace. The main road to the village enters one side of this,
and turns a corner down the hill towards the plain. At the bottom of the slope is
the dispensary, market place and Catholic church.
3) The cross-roads in front of the dispensary.
At the bottom of the slope the road forks. Many houses have been built behind the
dispensary over the last decade. The paths go to the fields. The left hand path (looking
at the dispensary) continues to Mbonjanga village and Mayo Darlé town and also,
to Gumbe hamlet at the bottom of the escarpment at the top of which is the road that
connects Ribao village in Cameroon to Dorofi village in Nigeria.
The Data
The following table contains links to
the video clips. Clicking on an image will start a relatively small movie playing
(it is possible to have more than one playing at once depending on the power of your
computer). Clicking on the button to the right of each image will open a new window
in which a larger, higher quality version of the movie will play.
What I would do different the next time.
Chose my sites slightly differently.
Rather than standing by the tree in the centre of the square I would stand at the
cross-roads so the circle took in the road down and the veranda of the bar (which
is hidden from the camera by the house on the left of the cross-roads). The shops
and vendors would be far closer to the camera that way. If I did repeat the shot
from outside my house I would shoot for 180° from my veranda since from there
you can see more houses which were hidden by the kitchen near which I was standing.
Nothing of interest was going on in my house so why point the camera so much at it?
Only half-way through the exercise did this occur to me!
I would consider making two sweeps
at each place, one zoomed out the other zoomed in. It is hard to know which would
be easier to deal with at either a practical or analytical level. This needs experiment
on different settings and ways of realising the idea. Also a pole or a walking stick
might have acted as a swivel base keeping the camera steady (at the risk of swaying).
One of the attractions of not using a tripod is that there was no delay in starting
shooting and packing up to move to the next site. This helped reduce the crowds of
small children saying in tones of great excitement 'he is filming us' and running
round to staying in shot. These are endemic problems (if problems they be) with this
sort of work.
Exercises for Students
a) Pick any two clips and describe
them as if you were writing fieldnotes. Now examine you notes. What assumptions have
you made in your descriptions? Are there terms that you have used that might note
be comprehensible to the people in the clips (apart from the choice of language)?
b) Pick one sequence of clips and
describe the flows of people. What sensible divisions are there? Can you distinguish
three or four periods into which the day divides? Justify your divisions on the basis
of evidence contained in the clips.
c) Look at the backgrounds. Summarise
the material basis of these people's lives. What evidence is there for different
types of livelihood?
d) Discuss the problems and possibilities
of generalising from such records to make general statements about how people in
Somié live their lives.
e) How much (or how little) can we
learn from visual records alone?
How much difference does the introductory
text (above) make to your viewing of the images? It may help to imagine what information
an alien anthropologist could learn about life on earth if the only data available
were these video clips (had they been broadcast to outer space). What questions would
be outstanding?
f) Is the idea of 'representative
locations' meaningful? If it is then how should one go about choosing them? How could
the locations used here be improved? If it is not then how can one go about presenting
an account (visual or otherwise) of a population's activities and behaviours (let
alone reasons for such things)?
A diary entry for the day
Dans la famille de Martin est neé
un garçon ou il a été marier de Yaneque, et dans le dispensaire sa
belle mère Tchieve Pauline n'a rien payer quelque chose pour l'accouchement
de son enfant et juste lá dans la nuît même sa belle famille donc
Mbiti la mere de Christine la tailleur on fait effort de faire le mieuse possible
à trouver 2 pieces de pagnes pour couvriri à leur fille et sa mère
Yanalé 4 savons plus emporter quelques serviettes chez Monique.
