I got called a ‘Tontinard’ a few hours ago and I bent over double in laughter. I don’t do social media arguments. I’ve used Facebook enough to know when an argument/disagreement will go south before it even begins. I smelled trouble from a mile away, and so I never responded to what was basically hurled as an insult.
It happened right here on Facebook. Someone wrote an article talking about the state of the country and I chimed in with my thoughts on the issue. Then this other person barged in with a contrary opinion and called me a Tontinard.
Now, I would have loved to be open-minded and say to myself that I was not called that on account of my name which clearly gives away my ethnicity (Bamileke) but I won’t. Not today. Today is one of those days where I’ll take the bull by the horns.
The thing is I am Ok with being called a Tontinard. I am proud to be one. This is not the Bamileke in me speaking. It is something that goes beyond that and it is also the reason why I am writing this article. As a matter of fact, irrespective of your ethnicity, you should be proud to be called such.
Now, it is a truth well known that the Bamileke people are the most prosperous and economically buoyant group in the country. They control many sectors of our economy from financial services, to manufacturing and even to our education. Look at the number of private schools today that are owned by Bamileke people from PK Fokam Institute to L'université des Montagnes in Bangangte.
I’m going to be skating on very thin tribalistic ice here, so please read everything coming next carefully and make sure you understand the article.
Now the term Tontinard, was brought up by Eric Owona Nguini (I heard) during the heat of the presidential campaign to characterise Maurice Kamto and his followers. It was a thinly-veiled attempt to throw Kamto into the opprobrium of people whom we can at this point say have a ‘Bamile-phobia’.
And it worked quite well.
Our slay-queen in chief, Coco Emilia, who has no idea of what public-private partnerships are, watched a policy speech by Maurice Kamto on PPP and said he was going to ‘vendre le Cameroun aux blancs’. Oh good heavens (slaps face in disbelief).
A good number of people that could easily be put under a certain nomenclature vuvuzelad the same thought all throughout the pre and post-electoral period much to my desolation. I’ll not put a name to that nomenclature because like I said, I am skating on thin ice here and people might misinterpret me. And frankly, that is not the main issue of my article. And so, what’s the main issue? Here it is.
What is wrong with being a Tontinard?
For those who do not know, tontine, is the French word for njangi (thrift and loan society for those who do not the English word for it). Most of us are in one njangi group or the other. And when you look at every njangi group what is the MAIN thing that characterises it? If your answer is money, you are not exactly right.
I have a friend who wanted to build a njangi app. The idea has long been abandoned now but I told her at the time that she was missing one important element which should be at the center of all the features of the app. What is it, you ask? SOCIAL COHESION.
Social cohesion is the backbone of every njangi group. In every ‘real’ njangi group, everyone knows everyone. It is not just a forum for contributing money and “chopping” it at the end of the month. It is about coming together and listening to everyone and finding a solution to each other’s problems. It is more about social support and lifting up one another and celebrating their success and milestones in life than it is about financial gain. That is why you will find njangi group members at born-houses and at funerals.
Many Bamileke businesses have taken off from little njangis. They say the Bamileke man is selfish. I say they Bamileke man shows to people what the true meaning of self-abnegation is. People say that a Bamileke man will prefer to live in a small house and have hundreds of millions in a bank. Warren Buffet must be Bamileke then because the man has been living in the same house for the past 60 years. Yet he is a billionaire. Just like him, Bamileke people believe in generational wealth.
They say that the Bamileke man will always buy from his brother. Well, I say take a look at Jewish, Indian, Chinese and Lebanese communities in every country out of Israel, India, China and Lebanon. They are usually the wealthiest immigrant community. Why? Because SOCIAL COHESION.
One of the reasons why Afriland Bank is the most successful Cameroonian bank today is because its first customers were bayam-sellams. Bayam-sellams who were, for the most part, Bamileke, and whose primary source of funding capital was… you can fill in the blank yourself.
It was Nas who said in a song that “people fear what they don’t understand, hate what they can’t conquer.” The French have a nice, beautiful racist word for social grouping of this sort which brings to its beneficiaries some measure of economic power and disenfranchisement. They call it COMMUNAUTARISME. Here, we go by Tontinard. We are really a product of French colonialism.
Et de ce fait, we steer clear of what could have been an opportunity to understand the force that has been the leverage to the economic ‘stronghold’ held by a portion of the population of this country.
If only people that belonged to the political party of policy-makers (CPDM) and just us in general all of us tried to understand the politics, anthropology, philosophy and social constructs of tontines, to dissect it further and go back to its origins and juxtapose it to the context of the present and see in what ways these can be applied further from just being njangis, to becoming lower-level institutions that can cater to members of a social groupings and give them a measure of economic power that can in turn lead to a better local government areas’ development, we would better off as a country, I believe.
Instead, we demonise it and use it in a prejudicial manner to advance political gain, exacerbate stereotypes, and hurl insults on social media.
But when we look it at keenly, we should be taking the best out of it and making it work not just for Bamileke people but for everyone so that many people can attain a certain level of economic freedom.
How about we teach the philosophy of njangi, self-abnegation and the importance of social cohesion in our primary schools? How about all Economics students in our Universities be required to pass Njangi 401 and 403? Why can’t Anthropology students be required to write essays on it?
So I ask again; what is wrong in being a Tontinard? Maybe you can tell me.
- Wandji Wilfred (Un Tontinard)
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