MY CULTURE (Heritage and identity) [email protected]

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Hello great people of this ecosystem. Accept warm greetings from The South West Region of Cameroon, where i will be thrilling you with our beautiful, outstanding culture. Well for the sake of the contest organised by our beautiful friend @uzoma24 which i am very grateful for that, i will be brief and bring in just the essentials because a 50000pages book will not still be a enough to explain and showcase my beautiful culture.

Let's get to the real business??
What is culture???
Let us consider the following definitions;

• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
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• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
  Culture is communication, communication is culture.
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• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
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Thus a culture of a people is a way of life , their behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Their style of dressing, what they eat is also an important part of the people's culture.

So the culture of a people is practiced on daily basis, how ever there is always a day set aside to show these values inherited from the past. And this the core of our discussion in this post.

To start with i hail from the South West part of Cameroon, from a tribe known as the "Bangwa" we are called the "99 sense people" Don't ask me why because that will be another topic of another day .
Our cultural celebration holds once a a year during the summer holidays. All villages in the Sub division do a very separate event.

In my village in particular this show is done under the association Nwametaw cultural Development Association(NWACADU).During the week sporting activities are organized before the D day where cultural dances are displayed
To make the occasion hinge free there are masquerades who act as the police , putting calm where there is any disorder.

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Village police , traditional called "Juju." Due to modernity , their role is gradually been taken by the forces of law and order.

A numerous dances are performed by people from different quarters. Below i am going to showcase some of these traditional dances.

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This is the "Azing dance" , a dance of peace and and also use to be performed when our forefathers where victorious in wars.

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This is "Tomendong" performed only by notables and chiefs. It is believe to a source of cleansing of the land after a an abomination is committed.

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This is another breed of "Azing" dance where everybody is free to participate. It is dance of joy and it is aim at promoting coexistence and harmony.

Special instruments are used to pass different messages and also animate the show such as this

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Everyone is not oblige to dress in a tradition attire but you just feel like you should belong. And by belonging you need to be embedded in the culture. This is how i looked some few months back during a mini cultural celebration.

During this particular and special event government officials are part of the event and people travel far and wide just for this special occasion. In the past when the sociopolitical atmosphere was less tense, we use to have European tourists who come to witness the special event.

conclusion

Your culture is your identity and you are lost without your culture. I am proud to belong to the Bangwa tribe, i am a proud Cameroonian and a proud African.