Responsible Leadership

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RESPONSIBLE FAMILY LEADERSHIP.

TRADITIONAL AND CHRISTIAN

APPROACHES IN CAMEROON

Richard Ondji’i Toung, Cameroon

Introduction

This paper will examine family leadership in our cultural setting,
identifying its limitations and offering solutions in the light of Chris-
tian ethics. Why reflect on the subject of responsible leadership in
families today? It is clear that we are experiencing a kind of social
crisis, a crisis that has affected the family and resulted in the disloca-
tion of the family unit in our villages and in our cities. For us, this
raises the question of who exactly carries responsibility in the socio-
political units which these families represent. Specifically, to use our
own language, we want to know what it means to be the Nya mbôrô
in our families and in our villages today, and who fulfils that role.
Taking Southern Cameroon as the cultural context for our study, and
bearing in mind the task assigned to us as part of the Globethics.net
study programme, the question is : ‘What is the family leader respon-
sible for, and what is he not responsible for, in the traditions of South-
ern Cameroon, and from the perspective of Christian ethics ?’ This is
the question that makes this study relevant and of interest. Our inten-
tion is to contribute to resolving and healing the crisis mentioned above.

1. Definitions

First I would like to give a working definition of the content of
what seem to me to be essential concepts : family ; clan ; tribe ;
Cameroonian tradition ; leader and leadership ; responsibility ; respon-
sible leadership ; Christian ethics.
Family :in a broad sense, the family may be considered as a group
of people linked together by marriage and filiation, or, exceptionally,
by adoption. It can therefore be understood as a succession of indi-
viduals descended from one another, from one generation to the next.
In the Fang setting, the family is described by the term Nda bôt,
which literally translated means : the ‘men’s house’. This definition
points to two things : first, the people dwell in a place, the house,