The sacred king as a waste heap in northern Cameroon Emilie Guitard To cite this version: Emilie Guitard. The sacred king as a waste heap in northern Cameroon. Journal of Material Culture, SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2017, 10.1177/1359183517725096. halshs-02513320 HAL Id: halshs-02513320 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02513320 Submitted on 4 Dec 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. MCU0010.1177/1359183517725096Journal of Material CultureGuitard 725096research-article2017 Journal o f MATERIAL Article CULTURE Journal of Material Culture 1 –13 The sacred king as a waste © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: heap in northern Cameroon sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183517725096DOI: 10.1177/1359183517725096 journals.sagepub.com/home/mcu Emilie Guitard IFRA Nigeria, CNRS/MAEDI, University of Ibadan, Nigeria Abstract In this article, the author considers waste (bodily excreta, the remains of daily activities, discarded artefacts) as the result of a process whereby material items are disembodied or excorporated. In the ancient kingdom of the Guiziga Bui Marva in northern Cameroon, the waste produced by each subject ended up on a large waste heap accumulated by the king. The bodily conducts of the king and his subjects were such as to identify the monarch with the heap according to the tenets of African sacred kingship. Contemporary ethnographic evidence sheds light on the history of the region and vice versa. It documents enduring bodily practices over the last couple of centuries, and the significant changes that affected them in regard to the production of given religious subjectivities. Keywords body, Cameroon, Islam, material culture, sacred kingship, waste In the vicinity of Maroua, the capital town of the extreme northern region of Cameroon, one may observe large earth mounds scattered around the landscape between the Diamare valley and the Mandara hills (see Figure 1). According to the people who live in this neighbourhood, these mounds are ancient rubbish heaps. This contention is sometimes substantiated by the toponymy of the villages next to which they may be found. For example, Ouro Jiddere means ‘the rubbish heap quarter’ (see Figure 2). It is located at Meskine, west of Maroua. Further to the East, Kongola Jiddeo translates as ‘the small rubbish heap’. Both names are derived from the Fulfulde jiddugo, meaning to pile up, hence jiddere, to designate a large accumulation of domestic and cattle waste. Corresponding author: Emilie Guitard, IFRA Nigeria (USR 3336 MAEDI/CNRS), Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Ibadan, 21540, Nigeria. Email: [email protected] 2 Journal of Material Culture 00(0) Figure 1. Distribution of the Diamare’s great waste heaps. © Map: Emilie Guitard. Figure 2. Great waste heap in front of the village chief’s compound, Ouro Jiddere, March 2011. © Photograph: Emilie Guitard. In this article, I will focus on the heaps located in Kaliao which used to be the second capital town of the Guiziga kingdom of the Bui Marva (that is, kings of Marva), after the first one located at Marva (present day Maroua) had been stormed and subjugated at the end of the 18th century by Muslim Fulani raiders from present day Nigeria. Between Guitard 3 2008 and 2011, while doing field research in Kaliao, I had the opportunity to collect oral accounts of the local kuli cult from its priests. This cult was practised, prior to the spread of Islam and Christianity, in connection with the large heaps of rubbish piled up next to the king’s compound at the heart of Kaliao. The descendants of the Guiziga kingdom of the Bui Marva draw the unlikely portrait of a king intent on piling up his waste in front of his abode to which was added the waste of his subjects and a motley collection of pol- luting or powerful objects and substances. Such a practice did not seem incidental to kingship but constituted one of its basic tenets. Could kingship thrive on rubbish, and how? In line with the theme of the present special issue of the Journal of Material Culture, I shall consider waste as the product of the specific material culture pertaining to the bodily conducts of the king and his subjects. Waste as the result of an embodiment/disembodiment process From a praxeological perspective, rubbish can be considered not only in terms of a sym- bolic and spatial order or classification (Douglas, 2001[1966]) or as the final stage in the biography of things (Kopytoff, 1986), but also in relation to the body, as things that have been detached from it. This perspective offers at least four advantages. First, bodily excreta and discarded artefacts (personal belongings, clothes, tools, furniture, etc.) can be grouped together and addressed within a single framework as materials and substances detached from the body (because of their loss of use and/or value) or fallen from it (such as bodily waste). Second, this process raises the question of the physical separation from discarded things and bodily substances that we can call disembodiment or excorporation, and of the ability for a subject to part from them. Yet, concerning the Guiziga Bui Marva context, the things that used to belong to a given subject and to be in frequent use keep being identified with him or her as Mauss (1968[1902–1903]) underscored when analysing the notion of mana. Third, I will take the process of incorporation/excorporation as a technology of the self, in other words, as a means to govern the self and others, to shape one’s identity, that is, in Foucauldian parlance, as a medium of subjectivation that includes the detachment from waste and the techniques pertaining to its disposal, while abiding by a set of given norms, and the implementation of ritual gestures observed to manipulate such powerful substances, in order to acquire some of its potency or to shield oneself from any harm. Finally, it allows one to take into account the spatial dimensions of this process. When one wants to get rid of one’s trash, the question that must be unavoidably raised is ‘Where may one dispose of it?’ Thus, a cartography or geography of waste disposal (Epelboin, 1998; Jewitt, 2011) enables us to grasp the different scales according to which individual and collective techniques of the subject are put into play: at the level of the habitation, the street, the village or the kingdom as a whole. From the small domestic waste heap to the large royal one In the Guiziga rural context, until today, the most common way to manage the objects expelled from the bodily schema and the remains of daily activities consists of gathering 4 Journal of Material Culture 00(0) them in large heaps. Every morning at dawn, just after the call for the prayer chanted by the imam of the small mosque at the entrance of Kaliao (next to the Fulani chieftaincy established there in the wake of the Islamization of the Guiziga kingdom of Marva at the beginning of the 20th century), a soft scratching noise may be heard from within each compound. Using short brooms made of a bunch of twigs tightly bound together, daugh- ters and wives bend over double to sweep the dirt floor of the yard and of the buildings around it. With brisk and short motions of their wrists, they collect kitchen refuse, rem- nants of food, the excrements of small livestock and poultry, together with leaves and vegetable matter left by daily domestic activities mostly connected to sorghum cultiva- tion and cooking as well as small livestock husbandry. Most of the time, sweeping is performed from within each house towards the court- yard, by putting together small heaps of rubbish and dust, later consolidated with other small heaps, ending up in a larger heap to the side of the courtyard, containing mostly dust and organic matter. The latter will be eventually dumped out of the compound – nowadays on the common rubbish heap of the residential quarter, and, in the past, on a small dump by the gate of each compound. In Guiziga language, those domestic heaps are called kitikil sia meaning ‘simple waste heaps’, or na taran, meaning ‘worthless’ by contrast to the large mound that is always found at the heart of the settlement, close to the old royal compound of the Bui Marva, referred to as kitikil madadang or ‘large waste heap’, or preferably as kitikil a Bui or ‘waste heap of the king’. In the past, one could also see, in front of the compound of each village chief of the kingdom, usually appointed by the king from among his kinsmen (see Seignobos and Iyebi-Mandjek, 2004: 57), a kitikil madadang sia, meaning a ‘large simple waste heap’. It signalled to incoming strangers the compound of the village chief, but also, in the flat plain landscape covered with short and scanty vegetation, it provided an enduring materialization of the expanse of the king- dom. At the time, ordinary subjects were forbidden from accumulating large domestic waste heaps in front of their compound, at the risk of being accused of challenging the leadership of the village chief, or else – a far more serious offence – that of the Bui Marva himself.