StapleCameroon
Fufu Corn
Maize flour beaten into a smooth stiff paste, eaten with njama njama or huckleberry greens in the north-west. The standard plate of the Anglophone highlands.
Serves 6 · 30 minutes
Kapsiki (Higi)
Farmers and smiths of the Mandara mountains' volcanic plugs, whose blacksmith caste holds funerary, medical and divinatory monopoly, and whose landscape of basalt spires is Cameroon's most photographed.
Identity
Population: Estimated 100,000 to 150,000 across Cameroon and Nigeria
Location: The Mandara mountains around Rhumsiki and Mogodé in Cameroon's Far North, and the Higi areas of Adamawa State, Nigeria
Language: Kapsiki (Psikye) in Cameroon, Higi in Nigeria — varieties of one language
Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Chadic → Central Chadic
Traditional governance: Village-level authority with chiefs of limited reach; the smiths (rerhe) as a distinct endogamous group with ritual functions; Cameroonian and Nigerian local administration.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Kapsiki of Rhumsiki and Mogodé
The Cameroonian mountain villages.
Higi of Michika and Bazza
The Nigerian communities on the western slopes.
Rerhe (smiths)
The endogamous smith group, present in every village and marrying only among themselves.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; the older leather aprons, iron and bead ornament in ceremony; the distinctive gourd and iron ornaments of women at festivals.
Food: Sorghum and millet as the staple in porridge and beer, groundnuts, beans, goat and chicken at ceremony, and the sorghum beer that is central to every transaction and rite.
Ceremonies: Funerals, in which the corpse is dressed, seated and danced with before burial; the annual harvest festival; the makwa marriage sequence; smiths' rites; divination.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous; bridewealth in goats and iron; secondary marriage — a woman leaving one husband for another with a formal settlement — is institutionalised and common, and shapes the community's demography.
Initiation rites: Boys' initiation with instruction; smiths are born into their status; a young man's standing is built through farming, bridewealth and the sponsoring of feasts.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Cameroon and Nigeria, at national rather than community level — 22 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Cameroon
12 dishes
StapleCameroon
Koki Beans
also Koki corn, Ekoki
Black-eyed beans ground to a paste with palm oil and spinach, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed into a savoury pudding. A Cameroonian street and household staple.
Serves 8 · 2 hours, plus overnight soaking
National dishCameroon
Ndolé
Bitterleaf boiled repeatedly to draw out the bitterness, then cooked with ground groundnuts, shrimp and meat. Cameroon's national dish, from the Douala coast.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
National dishCameroon
Mbongo Tchobi
also Black stew, Sauce noire
Fish or meat in a jet-black sauce made from burnt spices — mbongo seed, country onion and njangsa — from the Bassa country around Edéa. Smoky, bitter and unlike anything else in Africa.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Street foodCameroon
Soya
Beef skewers rubbed in a groundnut and chilli spice mix and grilled over charcoal, sold from evening braziers across the north and in every Yaoundé quarter.
Serves Makes 12 · 40 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Festival & feastCameroon
Eru
Wild forest vine leaves shredded fine and cooked with waterleaf, palm oil and smoked fish, from the south-west. Made for celebrations and eaten with water fufu.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Festival & feastCameroon
Achu Soup
also Yellow soup, Taro fufu and yellow soup
Pounded taro served with a bright yellow palm-oil soup coloured with limestone, the ceremonial dish of Cameroon's North West grassfields, eaten with the fingers from a shared bowl.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Poulet DG
Chicken with fried ripe plantain and vegetables, whose name stands for Directeur Général because it was originally what you served a man of importance.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Kondre
also Plantain and goat stew
Goat and unripe plantain stewed with country onion and njangsa until the plantain thickens the pot. A grassfields dish cooked for visitors and for the head of the household.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
Regional specialityCameroon
Sanga
also Maize and cassava leaf
Fresh maize kernels cooked with cassava leaf and palm oil into a thick green-and-gold porridge. A Beti and southern Cameroonian dish of the maize harvest.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetCameroon
Foléré
Hibiscus juice with pineapple, ginger and mint, sold from freezers in the north and served cold at every celebration. Cameroon's name for what is bissap elsewhere.
Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus chilling
Drink & sweetCameroon
Bil-Bil
also Millet beer, Bilibili
Sorghum beer of northern Cameroon, brewed by women in great clay pots and sold from the compound door. Sour, cloudy and drunk from a shared calabash.
Serves Makes about 8 litres · 1 hour active, plus 4 days germinating and 3 days fermenting
Nigeria
10 dishes
StapleNigeria
Pounded Yam and Egusi Soup
White yam pounded to a smooth elastic mound with a soup of ground melon seeds, greens and meat. The centrepiece of Yoruba and Igbo tables alike.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
StapleNigeria
Tuwo Shinkafa
also Rice swallow
Soft short-grain rice cooked and beaten into a smooth mound, the northern Nigerian staple eaten with miyan kuka or miyan taushe.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
National dishNigeria
Nigerian Jollof
Long-grain rice cooked in a reduced pepper and tomato base until the bottom of the pot lightly scorches, which is where the smoky flavour comes from and is not a mistake.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 20 minutes
National dishNigeria
Miyan Kuka
also Baobab leaf soup, Luru
Dried baobab leaf powder cooked into a dark, faintly slippery soup with dried fish and locust bean. The Hausa soup of northern Nigeria, eaten with tuwo.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodNigeria
Suya
Thin beef skewers rubbed in yaji, a groundnut and chilli spice mix, grilled over open charcoal by Hausa mallams and served on newspaper with raw onion and tomato.
Serves Makes 12 · 40 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating
Festival & feastNigeria
Ofe Nsala
also White soup
A pale peppery soup of catfish thickened with pounded yam and scented with uziza and ehuru. Made in Anambra for a woman who has just given birth, and served at important occasions.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Regional specialityNigeria
Moi Moi
Steamed bean pudding of peeled black-eyed peas, peppers and onion, wrapped in leaves and studded with egg and fish. Eaten alone or beside jollof at every party.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Regional specialityNigeria
Efo Riro
also Yoruba spinach stew
Shredded greens cooked into a base of blended pepper, onion and palm oil with assorted meat and stockfish. The Yoruba vegetable soup, and the one Lagosians argue about most.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Regional specialityNigeria
Banga Soup
also Ofe akwu, Palm nut soup
Palm nut pulp cooked with catfish and the Delta's particular spices — beletientien, oburunbebe stick, ataiko — into a thick orange soup. The Urhobo and Isoko signature.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Drink & sweetNigeria
Zobo
Hibiscus infused with pineapple, ginger and clove, bottled and sold cold at every Nigerian gathering. The non-alcoholic drink of choice at weddings.
Serves 8 · 40 minutes, plus chilling
Stories & Oral Literature
The SmithsSocial institution
Kapsiki smiths are a separate endogamous group who forge iron, bury the dead, cure the sick, divine with crabs, make pottery and play the funeral music. Other Kapsiki neither marry them nor, traditionally, eat with them, and simultaneously cannot conduct a funeral, a healing or a divination without them. Walter van Beek's four decades of fieldwork have documented the arrangement in unusual depth: a despised caste that holds a monopoly on everything a village most needs at its most difficult moments.
Divination by CrabKnowledge tradition
A Kapsiki diviner places a freshwater crab in a pot with a set of small marked objects — sticks, potsherds, calabash pieces — representing people, illnesses, causes and outcomes. The crab moves them; the diviner reads the resulting arrangement. The practice is a smith speciality and remains widespread. It is among the more distinctive divinatory systems in West Africa and has been recorded in detail only because one anthropologist kept returning for forty years.
RhumsikiLandscape and tourism
The volcanic plugs around Rhumsiki — sheer basalt spires standing hundreds of metres above the terraced fields — were described by André Gide as one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and Rhumsiki became Cameroon's best-known tourist site. Boko Haram violence in the Far North from 2014 ended the tourism almost completely, taking with it a village economy that had been built around it for thirty years and leaving guides, crab diviners and craftsmen without customers.
Proverbs
“You do not eat with the smith and you do not bury without him.”
The central Kapsiki paradox, stated plainly.
“The crab knows what the client will not say.”
On divination.
“A woman who leaves twice is talked about; a man who is left twice is examined.”
On secondary marriage.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Shala as the high god, associated with the sky and rain; ancestral spirits; the volcanic peaks, springs and particular trees carrying prohibitions.
Beliefs: Shala addressed at household and village level; ancestral offerings with beer; crab divination; smiths' ritual monopoly; Christianity and Islam both present and, in the mountains, comparatively shallow-rooted.
Ancestors: Ancestors are addressed at household shrines; a Kapsiki funeral, in which the dressed corpse is seated and danced with, is the most elaborate rite the community performs.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Shala
The high god, of sky and rain
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at household shrines with beer and offerings
Peak and spring powers
Presences of the volcanic plugs and named water sources
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Compounds of round thatched huts linked by low walls into a single enclosed unit, scattered across terraced mountainsides among the volcanic plugs.
Building techniques: Dry-stone terracing on very steep ground; round mud and stone huts with conical thatch, linked into compounds; granaries within the compound; iron smelting and forging by the smith group.
Village layout: A compound of linked huts — sleeping, cooking, granary, goat pen — around a small internal yard, with one entrance and terraced fields around.
Artifacts
Crab divination apparatus
Ritual object
Pot, crab and marked objects used by smith diviners to read a client's case.
Linked-hut compound
Architecture
Round huts joined by low walls into a single enclosed household unit.
Rhumsiki peak
Natural heritage
Volcanic plug rising above the terraced fields, Cameroon's emblematic landscape.
Smiths' iron and pottery
Metalwork
Tools, ornaments and vessels made by the endogamous smith group.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Chadic-speaking communities settle the Mandara mountains, terracing the slopes as refuge from the plains.
1800s
Fulani jihad states raid the plains; mountain settlement intensifies as a defensive strategy.
1900s–1960
German, then French and British administration; the international boundary divides the community.
1970s–2013
Rhumsiki develops as Cameroon's principal tourist destination; van Beek's fieldwork documents Kapsiki society.
2014–present
Boko Haram violence in the Far North ends the tourism and displaces mountain communities.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- van Beek, The Dancing Dead: Ritual and Religion among the KapsikiWorldCat
- Institut National de la Statistique du CamerounGovernment of Cameroon
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: Psikye and HigiSIL International