Family
Society & Culture
The Marriage Spectacle and the Defense It Teaches
A meditation on how public discourse around high-profile marital collapse—specifically the Edoho case—transmits destructive defensive postures to younger people forming their own views of partnership. The piece argues that the spectacle teaches both men and women to enter marriage as strategic positioning rather than mutual construction.
Protection and the Postponement of Growth
A reflection on how well-intentioned parental protection can inadvertently delay the development of essential life skills—communication, assertiveness, emotional awareness—by replacing trial and error with restriction. The writer traces how this safety-first approach creates compliance rather than confidence, and traces her own journey toward reclaiming agency in adulthood.
For Better or Worse: On Marriage, Vows, and the Limits of Unconditional Commitment
The writer reflects on the marriage vow—particularly the phrase 'for better or worse'—and argues that while couples should weather life's circumstances together, they should not be bound to tolerate a partner's deteriorating character or toxic behavior. The piece challenges the assumption that marriage vows create an unconditional obligation to endure harm.
The Indecency of Social Affection: On Children as Brands
The writer examines the trend of parents creating Instagram accounts for toddlers, questioning whether the practice stems from genuine documentation or parental hunger for social validation. The post distinguishes between legitimate child modelling—governed by safeguards—and the uncontrolled exposure of infants to digital platforms driven by addiction to likes and followers.
A Letter to Cameroonian and African Men
A young woman confronts the contradiction between the idealized image of the African man as protector and the reality of contemporary masculinity she observes—one that reduces women to wife-material categories, demands their submission, and offers no reciprocal regard for their wellbeing or autonomy.
100% Jeune, 100% Accolades Merited
A reflection on the role of 100% Jeune magazine in shaping sexual health literacy for a generation of Cameroonians, contrasted against the silence and taboo that surrounded sex education in the writer's own upbringing. The piece argues that as that generation becomes parents, breaking inherited silence on sex and sexuality becomes both possible and necessary.
Thirty Going Twenty, or Eighty Five: Purpose as the Measure of a Life
A reflective essay on the gap between societal timelines for marriage and the deeper question of personal purpose. The writer traces her own journey—from ending a promising relationship over differing marriage timelines a decade earlier to arriving at 30 unmarried but increasingly clear about what she actually seeks in partnership.
Okep: The Manyu Herb That Sustains and Sanctifies
This essay explores okep, a traditional enema practice central to Manyu and Bayangi culture in Cameroon, administered across the lifespan from newborns to adults for health, fertility, and spiritual cleansing. Through personal family narrative, the writer examines how these herbal remedies—passed orally across generations without formal medical training—serve simultaneously as medicine, ritual, and economic resource.
Woman, Choose Yourself First
A Cameroonian woman interrogates the gendered conditioning that teaches girls to perform femininity and domestic competence for male approval, rather than for themselves. The writer argues that women's self-love and autonomy—in education, ambition, appearance, and life choices—are not threats but necessities, and that societal pressure to prioritize men's comfort over women's flourishing is both unjust and self-defeating.
The Invisible Strength: Single Motherhood in Contemporary Cameroon
A frank, unflinching account of the realities of single motherhood—the abandonment, the financial strain, the social stigma—and a quiet insistence that despite these hardships, a single mother can build a fulfilled life. The writer speaks from lived knowledge, offering practical and emotional counsel to women navigating this path alone.
The Mummy-Nanny Compact: Professionalism, Boundaries, and Care
A reflection on the fraught emotional terrain of the employer-caregiver relationship in the home, arguing that professionalism—clear contracts, regular communication, and realistic boundaries—paradoxically deepens rather than diminishes care. The writer draws on personal experience with multiple failed arrangements to outline three practices that serve both mother and nanny.
Sexual Education in the Pentecostal Household: Eleven Seconds and a Magazine
A writer reflects on the poverty of sex education in his own upbringing—a breathless eleven-second warning from his mother—and credits the magazine 100% Jeune with filling the gap for his entire generation. He argues that while the magazine's role was vital then, today's teenagers face vastly different media landscapes and deserve equally earnest, ongoing conversations from the adults around them.
Dear Mama: There's More to Your Daughter Than Meets the Male Gaze
A letter from daughter to mother reflecting on the care and intention behind maternal guidance, while questioning the limiting framework that reduces a woman's value to her utility as a wife. The writer traces how the maxim 'Men want assets not liabilities' echoes through family, church, media, and popular culture—and gently pushes back against its narrowness.
Letter to My Daughter: On Beauty, Integrity, and Unexploited Potential
A mother writes an intimate letter to her daughter, offering five lessons drawn from her own life: that life's beauty lies in its challenges, that integrity matters more than others' judgment, that faith anchors ambition, that big dreams require both vision and persistence, and that every person harbors untapped potential waiting to be claimed.
A Letter to My Son: On Love, Mistakes, and Becoming Yourself
Written as an open letter, the writer distills hard-won wisdom for his son—advice on self-love, the necessity of mistakes, the courage to speak truth, and the importance of defining one's own path rather than chasing external validation. The piece moves across love, work, strength, and character with the tone of someone who has lived enough to know what matters.
The Stories Fathers Never Tell
A reflection on the hierarchical, high-context nature of parent-child relationships in Cameroon, where emotional distance and one-way communication prevent children from learning through their parents' lived experience. The writer argues that fathers who withhold their failures and vulnerabilities rob their children of the stories that actually stick—and offers forty-one questions to bridge that gap.
The Logic of Uncertainty: Inheritance, Kinship, and the Absence of Proof
A writer from Wum in Cameroon's North West Region examines a matrilineal inheritance practice—where a man's property passes to his sister's son rather than his own—and traces its logic to a pre-scientific world where paternity could not be verified. The piece questions whether the tradition survives in a modern era of law, choice, and DNA testing.