Announcing the Village Diary Project
We’ve been hard at work for the past couple of months laying the groundwork for a new free and open source software (FOSS) initiative. I alluded to this in an earlier post, Gearing Up for an Offline Application.
Around October of last year Roland Musi, the director of the Link-Up Development Group, mentioned his idea for something called the “village diary” to me. Link-Up has done exceptional work providing direct assistance to orphans and vulnerable children throughout the southwest of Cameroon (see The Hard Road to Nguti and Human Terms as examples). Over the years, Mr. Musi has noted a common thread in many of Link-Up’s cases. Namely, a substantial number of the children assisted by them were deprived of their rightful inheritances. Following the death of one or both parents, in nearly every case guardians lost control of the homes and property left behind. Access to legal services for the poor is almost non-existent, so documents such as wills, property titles, birth certificates and so on are rarely established in advance. As a result, most children either end up in orphanages or are forced to abandon school for work.
The concept is simple: work with families in the community to help them secure legal records of inheritance, thereby protecting the future of children by preventing them from falling into this abusive cycle. In the event of the death of one or both parents, the diary will be used to direct assistance from social workers, state attorneys and local NGOs to the survivors. At the same time, the diary will serve to record the culture and histories of families and, ultimately, entire villages.
What Mr. Musi described is essentially a tool for aggregating and disseminating information. Moreover, we realized that the problem that exists here in Cameroon is common throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa. I suggested that the best solution was to make it into a software initiative that we could provide for free to any organization who wanted it. The Village Diary was born.
The idea gathered momentum and we were soon introduced to Mambe Nanje Churchill, the young CEO of the AfroVisioN group, located here in Buea (I recently interviewed Churchill for this blog). He came on board without hesitation and offered to perform the principal development on the project.
If you’d like to learn more about the Village Diary project, visit our website, find out who’s working on what, get an overview of how it works, or dig into the details of the software platform over at the developer’s wiki. If you’re a software developer with a desire to get involved, find out how you can help. Current news is available on our project blog. You can also follow our up-to-the-minute project status, breaking news and announcements on our Twitter feed.
@VillageDiary, Because this important, much-needed project deals with children, and because it is also a grass-roots development project, I thought this book might be a good resource to have for your administrators and fieldworkers. It is now available on Google Books, but can view a summary here. http://www.eupjournals.com/book/9780748618156?cookieSet=1
Here are a few other literary and ethnographic resources, but I know for sure there are more out there with information on contemporary Cameroon/West Africa (I have cut-and-paste this list from a Word document, so I apologize if it is garbled). Topics: women, marriage, widowhood, Cameroon, Africa.
Beti, Mongo
1958 King Lazarus. London: Heinemann.
Burnham, Philip
1987 Changing Themes in the Analysis of African Marriage. In Transformations of African Marriage. David Parkin and David Nyamwaya, eds. Pp. 37-53. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela
1995 Cooking Inside: Kinship and Gender in Bangangté Idioms of Marriage and
Procreation. American Ethnologist 22(3):483-501.
Geary, Christraud M.
1986 On Legal Change in Cameroon: Women, Marriage, and Bridewealth. Boston:
Boston University African Studies Center Working Papers.
Guyer, Jane I.
1986 Beti Widow Inheritance and Marriage Law: A Social History. In Widows in African Societies: Choices and Constraints. Betty Potash, ed. Pp. 193-219. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Guyer, Jane I.
1994 Lineal Identities and Lateral Networks: The Logic of Polyandrous Motherhood. In Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Contemporary Anthropological and Demographic Perspectives. Caroline Bledose and Gilles Pison, eds. Pp. 231-252. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mope Simo, J.A.
1991 Royal Wives in the Ndop Plains. Canadian Journal of African Studies 25(3):418-431.
Nkwi, Paul N.
1987 The Changing Role of Women and Their Contributions to the Domestic Economy in Cameroon. In Transformations of African Marriage. David Parkin and David Nyamwaya, eds. Pp. 307-321. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Potash, Betty, ed.
1986 Widows in African Societies: Choices and Constraints. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Robertson, Claire, and Berida Ndambuki
2000 We Only Come Here to Struggle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sudarkasa, Niara
1986 The Status of Women in Indigenous African Societies. Feminist Studies 12(1):91-103.
@BB, this is a very valuable list. I can tell you already that a number of these titles will appear on our bookshelf soon. Pleased to see “Cooking Inside: Kinship and Gender in Bangangté, Idioms of Marriage and
Procreation”. I was in Bangangté for 2-3 weeks in 2007, which was also my first extended visit to the west province. I’d like to know more about the culture in the area.
BIG thanks to you on behalf of Village Diary. Amazon.com should be thanking you as well.
Feldman-Savelsberg is a medical anthropologist and you might know this already, but she was a PCV in Bangangte, I believe, before returning as an ethnographer.
In my first year in grad school, I read her book, “Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields.” I really liked it. The metaphors of food used to talk about reproduction provide very rich imagery & insights into the dialogue between men and women. Other than that, I am like you, I wish I knew more about the area. 
***
I haven’t read this one but you might have come across it: “Men Own The Fields, Women Own The Crops: Gender And Power In The Cameroon Grassfields” by Miriam Goheen.
More books! Just because the Village Diary rocks, and so does fufu corn! And as long as there is fufu corn to eat, then there is time to read.
These books are very enjoyable, accessible reads, with lots to say about gender (men/women), marriage, and children in African societies.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi (1988) Nervous Conditions. New York: Seal Press.
Emecheta, Buchi (1980) The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller.
Stambach, Amy (2000) Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in East Africa. New York: Routledge.
Hi! More books! Are you overwhelmed yet? Feel like you are back in college? Feel inexplicably angry at lists of books you don’t want to read? If so, I am sorry. I promise to make it up to the Village Diary. Cookies anybody?
Well, here is a list of books that are actually incredible reads. They are sure to be insightful and deeply relevant to the African context.
Ruth Behar. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. (Mexico, Latin America, USA, women, men, gender, marriage, children, poverty, legal system, storytelling, life/oral histories)
Frederick Cooper. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. (Modernity in Africa, African history, persistence of culture and cultural change)
April Gordon and Donald Gordon. Understanding Contemporary Africa. (Excellent reader/anthology or writings on EVERYTHING in contemporary Africa, from history to kinship to gender to religion to economics and politics)
Book recommendation for Village Dairy courtesy of @downeym.
“The Betrayal of Africa” by Gerald Caplan.