Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin

4. Ambiguities: Interethnic Marriage and Descent

122 If one of my children loves a Baka, who am I to stand between the love of a man and a woman?—Ngonda, a Bangando elder My daughter will marry a Bangando. She cannot marry a Baka. I could not agree that my daughter would marry a Baka. I could not. I absolutely could not.—Pando, a Bangando man who is married to a Baka wife T he ethnic distinctions among the Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam are clearly delineated, with the fundamental social solidarity of speakers of each language linked through a communally held, sentimental belief in the origins of their community. However, these seemingly unambiguous lines of ethnic difference are socially permeable. chapter four Ambiguities interethnic marriage and descent ambiguities 123 Intimate relations transcend ethnic lines, often resulting in children whose ethnic affiliations are ambiguous because of their duality. Many intimate relationships in the Lobéké forest region are interethnic. These crosscutting ties of social and familial intimacy complicate straight and narrow prescriptions for ethnicity, bearing evidence that social affections are at least as influential as formal prescriptions of kinship in shaping sentiments of belonging and social identities. Because Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam families have lived as close neighbors for many generations , children grow up together, understanding and often speaking each others’ languages, and knowing and sharing each others’ ways. Such social intimacy leads, not infrequently, to ethnic intermarriage. In addition to the robust core of shared historical experiences that have brought the communities of southeastern Cameroon together, shared everyday relationships and experiences provide common ground for generating senses of belonging among individuals at all ages and stages of life. The social currents that bring people together in friendship, in partnerships to achieve shared economic or political interests, and in daily contact in the forest and in the villages have enabled people to form social ties that transcend lines of ethnic affiliation. Even as interethnic marriage may serve as a useful barometer of integration among the communities of southeastern Cameroon, it also highlights the countervailing tensions that characterize interethnic relations. For example, children of interethnic parentage embody the discordance between patrilineal inheritance of ethnic affiliation and maternal influence in children’s acquisition of language, bringing the fundamental markers of ethnic continuity—descent and language—into tension. Individuals of mixed descent articulate their uncomfortable attempts to reconcile personal preferences for particular individuals and public perceptions of their ethnic affiliation(s). People of interethnic descent express incompatibilities between ethnic affiliation as it is formally declared and ethnic relations as they are socially enacted and emotionally experienced. Discussions about interethnic marriage illuminate the emotional dynamics of amity and animosity in interethnic relations, as individuals simultaneously embrace relations held in the private sphere that may disregard ethnicity, but still recognize and even participate in the perpetuation of ethnic prejudices that may characterize public discourses. The prevalence of interethnic couples and families does not indicate that prejudices based on perceptions of ethnic differences are either nonexistent or irrelevant. On the contrary, examining cases of ethnic denigration within interethnic households brings lines of tension into sharp relief. 124 chapter four Conversations about interethnic marriage with people throughout southeastern Cameroon bring several conceptual issues to the fore: the relationship between ethnicity and gender in the constitution of power; interethnic marriage as cause for ostracism or means for alliance; changing attitudes toward interethnic marriage; and interethnic prejudices. Discussions of these issues comprise the first half of this chapter. The second half of the chapter offers three extended cases of interethnic marriage and descent, underscoring the complex emotional, social, and political dynamics inherent in intimate interethnic relations. The ethnography of ambiguities resulting from interethnic marriage highlights that identification is a process of working out relationships for oneself and between oneself and others, and of negotiating this personal process in the context of structured rules, roles, and expectations of what it means to belong in a family and in a community. Ethnicity, Gender, and Power Interaction and mutual support among ethnic communities is the rule, not the exception, of social relations in southeastern Cameroon. Because human relations are formed at both individual and collective levels, and because Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam communities have lived alongside each other for at least a century and a half, intimate personal relations between individuals of disparate ethnic backgrounds are common. It is also important to bear in mind, however, that residents of southeastern Cameroon...