Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: "On est ensemble." (review)

Cheryl Toman's Contemporary Matriarchies in Cameroonian Francophone Literature: "On est ensemble" is a comprehensive history of Cameroonian feminist writings, which according to Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, includes ignored and marginalized Cameroonian women. It seeks to rewrite feminist theories pertaining to Africa and explores the representation of matriarchy in Cameroonian literature, a most appropriate national literature for the study of matriarchy because Cameroon, with its two hundred and fifty diverse ethnic groups and cultures and its Christian and Islamic religions, is a microcosm of Africa. Moreover, it is the birth site of African female writings, for, contrary to general assumptions, Marie Claire Matip published the novella Ngonda in 1958, before the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo and the Nigerian Mabel Segun produced their pioneering works.

Toman's study includes a forward by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukary; an introduction ("Defining 'Matriarchy' in Cameroonian Women's Writing of French Expression [1954-2007]"); five chapters analyzing, respectively, Marie-Claire Matip's Ngonda, Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury's idea of a matriarcat nouveau, Werewere Liking's conception of matriarchy (which she calls Reine-Mère), Calixthe Beyala on féminitude and nouveau mevengu, and Philomène Basssek's consideration of the ritual of anlu and the theme of matriarchy in La Tache de sang; and a conclusion.

The introductory chapter presents a survey of a myriad theories on matriarchy, although all of them consider it a social system whereby African women, claiming an invisible and nonlocalized power, assert themselves differently from Western women as fully complementary to men. This matriarchal arrangement, dismissed by Western scholars before the rise of comparative ethnographical approaches, existed historically alongside patriarchy and was, according to Cheik Anta Diop, an economic system of dualism within the African matrilineal family based on solidarity and accepted by both men and women. Other observers have seen it differently, however. According to Kamen Okonji, it is a dual-sex system that allows men and women to manage their affairs separately. Ifi Amadiume sees it as a "checks and balances system" within a matrilineal system that grants women political power, although they willingly delegate it to men with the hope of reappropriating it if they are abused. Toman concludes the summary of literature on matriarchy with a discussion of the importance of ethnology in literary interpretation, a survey of contemporary Cameroonian female writings, and a consideration of the diverging ideological representations of women by male writers (who foreground their own superiority) and women writers (who seek a unified voice through complementary female and male voices).

The first chapter, "A Village Voice and a Nation's Women Coming of Age: Marie-Claire Matip's Ngonda," focuses on Matip's novel Rencontres essentielles (1958), an imaginative literary work that is also political in that Matip wrote at a time when African male novelists focused on the re-emasculinization of African men and ignored questions of matriarchy and female empowerment. Because men and women occupied different sociopolitical spaces, men were excluded from such ritual spaces as the Koo, the anlu, and mevengu. Toman examines the autobiographical nature of Matip's preindependence literary work and the place of her narrative in male-dominated Cameroonian literary history. Her discussion highlights the oral basis of the autobiographical narrative, the Bassa matriarchal characteristics of the novella, the nature of the heroine's hybrid subjectivity, the nature of traditional female power (which is complementary to that of males and not easily defined in Western terms), and women's resistance to male domination. The chapter provides many insights, yet one wishes the author had better articulated the tensions between modernity and tradition, how the heroine's Afrocentric perspective informs her understanding of events, and how anthropological approaches contribute to an understanding of the literature.

The second chapter, "Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury and 'matriarcat nouveau,'" focuses on Rencontres essentielles (1969) and examines themes of female solidarity, the complementary nature of male and female relationships, the matriarchal concept of motherhood, the difference...