Matrilineal Kom explained
The Kom society is patriarchal. Males hold
the vast majority of power and privilege, while females in the Kom society
labour primarily in domestic roles in the kitchen and the farm. In the Kom
society, a man's power and wealth is measured by the number of wives that he
has. Polygamy is a thing of pride. This makes a man with one wife voiceless in
a men’s gathering. (In
fact he is described as using the wife as a ‘walking stick’ since you can not
hold two walking sticks with one hand). In the Kom society girls get
married as young as 15 years old.
Interestingly, though Kom males hold
most of the power in day-to-day affairs, the Kom society, which also places
great emphasis on respect for elders, is matrilineal in matters
of succession. In this regard, the Kom society differs significantly from other
tribes of Cameroon.
Lineage in the Kom culture is continued on the side of the mother and not the
father in such a way that when an adult Kom male dies, ownership of his property
including his compound, wives and children is transferred to his nephew (son of
his sister, and only when the deceased is not survived by a brother) and not
his own son. The process of matrilineal succession in Kom society is more
complicated if a deceased male did not have a nephew to leave his property to.
In this case, succession would be continued on the side of first cousin. This
practice is now becoming obsolete, however.
This practice, however, is not the exclusive preserve
of the Kom people. This is what Eugenia Shanklin, one of the most experienced
scholars of Kom Anthroplogy, posits:
“I
can't resist replying to the question about matrilineality, about which many
Kom people are not well taught or informed by their teachers (who have often been
missionaries and somewhat biased against a system that seems so foreign).
Matrilineality
indeed means tracing descent through the maternal line; it also usually
involves inheritance in that line, as it does in Kom, with nephew succeeding
uncle. (The variant that the eldest nephew succeeds the uncle is not
invariable, and any Kom person is already sufficiently familiar with exceptions
to the rule.) What most Kom people seem not to be aware of is that there are
several other matrilineal groups in the Grassfields, e.g., Nyos and Mmen, and
that there is a "matrilineal belt" across Central
Africa. What most anthropologists seem not to be aware of is that
if one were counting peoples, a majority of African groups are matrilineal. If
one is counting heads, however, a majority of the African population is
patrilineal. The outstanding and highly populous matrilineal group in West Africa is the Ashante/Asante and I believe most
people are familiar with their importance in the region.
Several
things are of interest about matrilineality: the first is that divorce is quite
frequent and marriage ties are always quite brittle in such societies, probably
because a primary emotional tie is between brother and sister, not husband and
wife. A second is that - unlike in Kom - women usually retain the rights to
their children following divorce and there is no need for an adjudicated
settlement.
A
third is that women in matrilineal societies usually have much more authority -
through their brothers and their kin group - than women in patrilineal
societies. They are more influential in matters of succession, of rights in
farm land, and such than their patrilineal sisters. I have several times had
the "pleasure" of interviewing a Kom woman in the presence of her
husband, then of her brother, and it is as if one is interviewing two different
people - when she is with her husband, anything he says is agreed to, no matter
how outrageous or wrong he may be. With her brother, the same woman says what
she thinks, corrects him if he misspeaks, and argues for a point of view that
one could consider the feminine, matrilineal viewpoint.
There
is some debate about what is happening to matrilineal societies across Africa but the consensus now is that people maintain
their matrilineality in the face even of modernization. A recent issue of the
journal, Critique of Anthropology, (1997) took this up at some length.
There
used to be a debate in anthropology about whether matrilineality was doomed to
die out because it was the "oldest" form of human social organization
and was being replaced by the more modern form, patrilineality. BoChong/Hon. F.
Nkwain remembers being told about this by Phyllis Kaberry - you can all imagine
his outraged, eloquent reaction - and it was the going view for some time in
the early years of the 20th century, until people noticed that matrilineality
actually wasn't dying out.
Mary
Douglas wrote an interesting article in 1969 called "Is Matriliny
Doomed?" She had studied the matrilineal Lele of the Kasai (River, in what
is now the Democratic
Republic of the Congo), an interesting
matrilineal group that practiced polyandry, among other things - polyandry is
the custom in which a woman is married to more than one man. Douglas
concluded that matriliny was alive and well and not in danger of dying out.
Other scholars have recently agreed with her at some length, for different
reasons, and I may include this discussion in an article on Kom kinship that I
am trying to revise for this new book on Kom I'm trying to get published.
Debating
the 'wisdom' of the matrilineal system is a favorite parlor/chong house game in
Kom, I know, and I don't want to get into those debates. But I hope this
information will place such discussions in their appropriate context - I
couldn't resist adding this because I just wrote an article for Don and April
Gordon's reader, Understanding Contemporary Africa, on African systems of
kinship and marriage and I mentioned some of the aspects I've referred to here.”
Understanding matrilineal succession the Kom way
Hon. Ndim Albert Waingeh, former member of the Caneroonian Parliament, retired
educator and front-line politician of Kom extraction, member of the Kom
Language Committee and of the Itui
Kom Traditional High Court, throws more light on the way of life of a people
that has been summarily dismissed as ‘bad’ even before it is understood for its
intrinsic value:
“There is a period in history that is referred to as
the Dark Ages. One would think that this refers to a period when most of the
inhabitants of the world were dark in colour or a period when the sun refused
to shine, but no! The Dark Ages refers to a period when existing records were
destroyed by barbarians and no written records of what happened within that
period can be found.
There is a continent referred to as the ‘dark’
continent, not because of the colour of the inhabitants but because of the
absence of written records on her way of life in general. In the same way, our
Region, the North West (Cameroon) can
be referred to as the ‘dark Region’ because there is no where one can turn to
for important information on us and our way of life.
As it always happens, what is not known is often
negatively feared. We in Kom particularly fear ponds that are too dark for one
to see to the bottom. We refer to such a pond as ‘achim-a-debli’ (the devil’s
pond). It is the same with our traditions that are not known. They are easily
classified as bad because they are not understood. For example, we only hear of
how widows are ill-treated during burial and mourning of husbands. When one
goes on to find out, the ill-treatment is that the widow must sit on the floor
throughout and cannot go out unless accompanied. Little do we know that this
practice originated from attempts to protect the poor woman who had lost her
husband from over straining or killing herself. Let there be light!”
Hon. Ndim Albert Waingeh goes on to elucidate the Kom way of matrilineal succession:
“It is now a well known fact that the Kom people are
among the few tribes in the world that practice matrilineal succession. A lot
has been written and/or said about it. There are those who have set out to
attack it while others have set out to defend it. I merely set out to explain it
so that those who wish to attack or defend it can do so with full knowledge of
what it is they are defending or attacking.
Matrilineal describes a line of genealogical relationship or
decent that follows the female side of the family. Thus it describes a group
that is related through mothers. Relationship is traced through the woman’s
line of decent.
The understanding of family as father, mother
and children, is foreign to Kom. All Kom people belong to clans. A clan
is defined as a group of people all related through one common ancestor and in
Kom, this ancestor is always the woman. So far nineteen clans have been
identified in Kom to the best of my knowledge and I stand to be corrected:
Membership of the clan
One is a
member of a clan by being the child of their mother. If one’s mother is an Ikui woman, they are automatically a
member of the Ikui clan. If one’s
father is an Achaff man, they remain
a child of the Achaff clan. People
who become Kom people through marriage or through any other means can adopt or
be adopted by a clan. However, women can found clans of their own since the
growth and expansion of the clan comes from them. This explains the existence
of clans like Kidjem, Mejang, Avim, Nguh
and others, which grew from women that came in from Babanki, Mejang, Wum and
Bamungo in that order. This means that if a Kom man marries a woman from the
USA for example, and she does not want to adopt one of the existing clans,
usually that of her husband, then her children and the children of her
daughters could found a clan called USA.
Considering
that clan membership is taken from the mother, one is bound to belong to the
same clan as the mother’s brothers and sisters, and as the sisters’ sons and
daughters.
Ownership of property in Kom
It is
important to note that in Kom, the individual is only the caretaker of any
property they might acquire. The property is owned by the clan and is guarded
and protected jealously by the clan. Thus, if an Achaff man builds a compound, it is referred to by all as an Achaff compound. If a Mejang man acquires farmland, it is mejang farmland. Property extends to
wives and children. A wife of an Ikui
man is the wife of the Ikui clan,
except in the case where that wife’s hand was sought for in marriage by a
father for his son (not maternal uncle), as it often happens for a first son in
the family, in which case, the woman is the property of the father’s clan.
Succession
As
already indicated, all property belongs to the clan and what is succeeded when
a person dies is property. The first right to the property is the closest clan
member to the deceased, and this means, a brother from the same womb. Where
there is no brother from the same mother, a sister from the same mother has the
right, but as the Kom man expects all women to be married, and married out of
the clan, they can only succeed through their sons; thus, the much-talked about
the right of the nephew. The nephew only takes the mother’s place to look after
her brother’s property. In the absence of a sister, the search for a successor
continues within the clan, extending to brothers or nephews from aunts. A good
illustration of this system can be done with the royal succession in Kom.
The first
Fon was Jina, son of Bo, daughter of Nakingtii. The second was Kumambong, son
of Nange, daughter of Bo. The third was Kuo, son of Yimbum, daughter of Nange;
and the table below explains this dynasty:
FOYN
(Fon)
|
NA FOYN
(Queen
Mother)
|
NA
NAFOYN
(Grand
Queen Mother)
|
Jina
|
Bo
|
Nakingtii
|
Kumambong
|
Nange
|
Bo
|
Kuo
|
Yimbum
|
Nange
|
Nkwain
|
Nindum
|
Yimbum
|
Tufoyn
|
Nayah
|
Nindum
|
Kimeng
|
Nayah
|
Nindum
|
Yuh
|
Funkuin
|
Nain-Nayah
|
Ngam
|
Kuo
|
Funkuin
|
Ndzi
|
Kuo
|
Funkuin
|
Alo’o
|
Neng-Chia
|
Funkuin
|
Nsom
|
Ngwe
|
Funkuin
|
Njina II
|
Fintya
|
Nkwain-Funkuin
|
Yibain
|
Finyang
|
Nengshya-Funkuin
|
Yuh II
|
Ni
|
Fintya-Nkwain
|
So, to
trace the royal line of the present Foyn to his ancestor, we have:
Yuh-Ni-Fintya-Nkwain-Funkuin-Nain-Nindum-Yibum-Nange-Bo-Nakingtii.
We can
also see from this royal lineage that two sets of brothers have ruled Kom:
Tufoyn Nayah, Kimeng Nayah; Ngam Kuo, Ndzi Kuo. The rest have been nephews.
Not all
clans in Kom, however, practise matrilineal succession very strictly. Some
units of clans, like the Kidjem clan
and the Ndotitichia clan, founded by
men who moved in from Atumikui or by
Babanki people who chose to remain when the others moved to present sites, have
continued to retain patrilineal succession. Over time, these clans have found
themselves practising both matrilineal and patrilineal succession. The most
prominent example of patrilineal succession in Kom has remained the Aboh compound, where the traditional Bo Foyn, father of the Fon, lives.
It is
also to be noted that in Kom, the word succession is only used to refer to a
case where a nephew comes in because it is only then that the ceremony of
succession is carried out. When it is a brother to take over, he simply moves
into the property. In the case of a nephew, the clan sends a delegation to his
father to ‘beg’ for him. Then a ceremony is organised where other successors
come together to be fed and the children of the deceased publicly recognise their
new father by receiving wine from his traditional cup (their late father’s
traditional cup) and by showering him with gifts during an out-door dance.”
NB
Kom
National Almanac of 1956, edited by John Yuh Ndinyah, indicates that Kom may
have had more reigning Fons:
1.
Batehfuonu
2.
Jinjua
3.
Tangnangkolih
4.
Jinaboh
5.
Kumabong
6.
Nkwo
7.
Nkwain
8.
Tufoin (1830-55)
9.
Kimeng (1855-65)
10. Yuh (Born in 1835)
11. Ngam (Born in 1855)
12. Ndi (Born in 1866)
13. Alo’o (Born in 1890)
14. Nsom (Born in 1895)
15. Njina (2) (Born in 1902)
16. Yibain (Born in 1906)
17. Yuh (2) (Reigning Fon)
