Reaction to IF YOU WRITE BANSO', YOU MUST WRITE MUNSO

Dear Dr Viban,

I read with great pleasure your delighted reflection. I found it very interesting and scientifically important. I learn many things from it not only linguistically, but also historically and anthropologically. If you are to publish it in a review, please keep a copy of this review for me. I will quote the text with references in my future assignments, because it inspires me some ideas to develop later especially as what regards the conquest of the Nso’s land by the Germans.

Coming to the content, the analysis you did to come to the conclusion of the preservation of minority values are relevant. How do people continue to think that they have the right to subject others and reduce them to silence under the pretext that they are the most civilized? I agree that we are still being colonized and I wish another phase of decolonization to start. We are in the illusion when we think that we got our independence. I think that you know the books of Fr Jean-Marc Ela who just died there at Vancouver or Montreal last 25^th December. He withdrew himself from the country into exile flying the assassinated power of Yaoundé after Fr Mveng’s dead in 1995. He is the father of African liberation theology. He wrote many books to defend the right of African Churches and African people to develop their own values without harassment in Le Cri de l’homme African (African Cry) , Ma foi d’African (My faith as an African) and other sociological books. I’m thinking that I will continue on his steps of finding solutions for our liberation because God created us for our salvation that is not only eschatological but also actual. The Gospel is the Good News for the oppressed people. Our Lord defends them against crushing powers (Cf Lk 4: 18-19). His mission was to give them hope and means to reach it. Everywhere the Church is, it makes effort to teach people in their home language and the theology of inculturation which is in vogue today in African Churches seeks the way to exploit as far as possible our cultural values to announce the Good News. You are going on the same way and I think that the effort to sensitize the scientists to precipitate the step for the lifesaving of our cultural inheritances must be intensified. We are not only to claim the right but we must start to produce in our home languages fascinated things able to attract our people combining our school’s knowledge in different domains with our traditional tools. School should no more be the cemetery of our cultures as colonizers thought long ago. They are to be transformed as tools to toil the soil for the development of our cultures. I wish governments or associations like the UNESCO to award scholarships to young generation for studies in the purpose of promoting our home languages, our cultures and values. They can also organize prizes to promote fascinated traditional literature, plays and films that can challenge the foreigner’s ones which aim to alienate our youth and deform their mentality.

But the effect of colonization continue to affect us deeply so much so that people will call the person who thinks like us crazy. You know that up to the name of the capital of our country Yaoundé is found nowhere in the Beti’s language. Prior to the colonization the place where our capital occupies today was called Ongolo. Some people thought that maybe Yaoundé would have been the misunderstanding of Ewondo by the white man, Marchand, the French or his wife, who wrote it for the first time. But the gap between the two words is very great.

As for the using of BA before the name of tribe or people I would bring a little correction. The prefix BA is the plural form of MU. Some Bantu languages have vocabularies that are formed of classes which are like declinations in Latin, Greek, or German BA is like French form les or des. Kiswahili has 6 classes, Kikongo and Lingala 5. They are also found in many of our dialects in Cameroon but unfortunately I have studies my linguistic in Congo. Three classes are commonly used in many bantu languages.

Class Mu (sing) and BA or PA (plural) this is commonly used for animated beings. For ex. in Swahili Muntu (sing) – Bantu (plural) = Man - Men; L’homme – les hommes

Lingala and Kikongo- Moto – Banto

Europeans heard many Bantu people using it and they thought that all Bantu used Ba to design people of. For example in my village they would have asked, which people are your neighbors and my people would have answered Pa Fussap that means The= (plural mark or les in French) Fussap= and they would have understood Bafoussam. They mistook twice by using it for the land and the inhabitants of this land. But they used the same form for singular and plural while in Bandjoun the singular is Mue Fussap, Bafoussam’s child (man) and plural Poa Fussap = people of Bafoussam.

Mu in the Bantu linguistic is the diminutive form or the singular of. It comes from two words muana that means child, or moko (Lingala, Kikongo) or modja (Swahili) that means one. Lamb for example is muanakondoo (Swahili), Muapata (Kik. Ling.) Mudjudju in Bandjoun. It’s different from mwasi that means woman or feminine.

So the Bantu languages are not concern with the gender, Masculine –feminine. So we have nothing to do linguistically with the fighting of the feminism, because only our family name gives distinctions between masculine and feminine. We use the same word to say brothers and sister with few exceptions of some languages which underwent for a long time Arabic influence like Kiswahili. Kaka (brother), Dada (sister). They are forged words.

Another common class is KI or LI the plural remains the same. They are used to differentiate the language from the people or the territory. People of Kongo are Bakongo while the language is Kikongo. Bainglesa (English people), Kinglesa (English language)

Thank you very much to have given me this opportunity to reflect a bit.

See you soon

PS. I add to this one text I wrote upon the origin of the word Bamileke.