Being a mother in Cameroon

“Dip your fingers in anything on the table, even spicy things, and let baby suck.”

“What is the baby blues?” “, I ask the other mother who shares my room in the maternity ward. I have recently been in France, so the advice in Laurence Pernoud’s book “J’élève mon enfant” often amazes me… “What is an allergy? », Asks my mother in turn when I read to her, on the phone, a passage explaining everything that I must not feed the baby!

But a month later when my son looks longingly at what is on my plate, I give him fish crumbs. I’m still afraid to tell my French pediatrician. I laughed with my husband: maybe we were going to put us in jail? ! So I consult my mother in Cameroon, who tells me that he must taste everything: “Dip your five fingers in everything on the table, even what is very spicy, and let him suck them” , she advises me. And she tells me a legend: “Once, in a village, a couple was invited with their child to come and eat a goat. Everyone was enjoying themselves. Suddenly the little one asked his parents angrily: “Why am I only allowed milk and tasteless vegetables?” So he left and never returned. The moral is that you should always treat your child with respect, just like an adult!

I am raising my three boys “à la française”, while maintaining my family customs. My mother often tells me: “Your children may be black, but they have white antibodies. She thinks they are still sick, because in France, we are obsessed with germs. Several times a year, she sends me “home” remedies, such as palm kernel oil (extracted from the seeds from the kernel of the palm fruit, not to be confused with palm oil) which are applied to the skin. babies’ skin to lower fever. Sometimes some mixtures don’t work, but mom tells me you have to believe in it for it to work. It is also a question of faith.

In Cameroon, to give birth in good conditions, you have to pay a private clinic or give a “bribe” to the doctors. There, life is nothing. If you’re poor, we don’t care about your child. Perhaps this is why women, from the start, are surrounded by their family and “good spells”. After birth, to strengthen the baby, it is bathed in herbs, sometimes even accompanied by a gorilla bone with which it is massaged. To speed up mom’s blood circulation, pat her stomach with a ball of dried leaves soaked in boiling water. It brings out the “bad blood” and finds the line. We call it the “traditional broom”. 

Right after birth, when we come home with the baby, the newborn’s grandmother comes to live with the new parents until the baby’s cord falls off. During the two months following childbirth, we are prohibited from making love. It would delay the growth of the newborn … But in reality, it is to prevent the young mother from getting pregnant again. The second month, the father presents his child

to his parents, but in general he does not seek to care for the baby. It is women who manage the education of toddlers.

What I miss about Cameroon is freedom. In France, people always tell me “don’t do this, don’t do that”. At home, we are much more relaxed. We also say that we have a duty to explain everything to our children. Once my aunt said to her baby who cried all the time, “Before you came into the world, we slept well. Why don’t you let us rest? Today, we will let you sleep on your own, you will surely manage. The little one understood, and since then he has been sleeping through the nights!