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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies

11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands


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Rebel wives, contested bodies. Funerary rituals and burials in Babessi (North-west Cameroon)

Panel 55. Gender and death in Africa
Paper ID110
Author(s) Forni, Silvia
Paper No paper submitted
AbstractThis paper analyzes funerary rituals and burial practices in the village of Babessi (Cameroonian Grassfields) in the light of shifting gender roles. According to patrilinearity and virilocal post-marital residency rule, a wife has to be buried in her husband's compound, where she will be honoured as an ancestor by her own descendants. Unconventional marriages, separations and divorces generate an increasing amount of conflicts concerning the right to bury the corpse and its final resting place. Episodes of contested corpses, on the one hand call attention to meaningful changes in social organization and gender relations, on the other hand they stress the importance of ancestors (both male and female) in defining the relative importance and power of a patrilineage. Taking the move from an episode observed in the field in 2000, this paper analyzes the complexity and contradictions emerging from burial practices that challenge the male-dominated power structure of Grassfields kingdoms. While men are ideally in control of every public aspect of Babessi's society and particularly the political and economic domain, women are increasingly acquiring social and economic roles that question their subordinate traditional role. Divorced women who in their lifetime achieve a certain level of independence, wealth and informal prestige, may after death become object of contention between their father's and their husband's lineages. The burial of the body and the disputes that might originate from this event emphasize the contradictions of contemporary society and the political and symbolic importance of the female body, which is generally negated by the official discourses of the male dominated power structure.