108 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
school or are mainstreamed. There are no programs for interpreter training and no
interpreting services in Cameroon. Some deaf schools offer some form of tutoring
after school, but often students give up. The limited educational opportunities for
deaf people in Cameroon made me wonder about the lives of deaf adults.
I was introduced to a gathering of deaf people in the seaport city of Douala on a
Sunday afternoon. What followed was a more or less formal meeting in which deaf lead-
ers and deaf community members expressed their anger, frustration, and con cerns
about their lives. A vicious circle of little or no education, illiteracy, unemployment,
and the inability to pay a dowry and/or gain family consent to marry a deaf spouse
has left these people with few prospects for the future.^4 They had seen little change
in Cameroonian society over the past 10 to 15 years, and they felt abandoned by the
government and the Cameroon National Association of the Deaf (CANAD).
Their stories and their raw and energetic anger inspired me to include deaf
lives as part of a three-year cross-cultural comparative study of eman cipation pro-
cesses in deaf communities in Flanders and Cameroon. For the Cameroonian case
study, I collaborated with the University of Buea, where I am affiliated as a visiting
scholar during fieldwork periods. In an initial one-month exploratory visit in Oc-
tober 2009, I introduced my study to CANAD and the deaf com munity. Data from
informal interviews and participant observation during this stay enabled me to gain
insight into native terminology and common themes in the life stories of Cameroo-
nian deaf people and to develop a contextualized list of questions for in-depth eth-
nographic interviews (Spradley, 1997). This is the first study on this topic in Cam-
eroon; therefore, the research is exploratory and employs a bottom-up approach
(Stebbins, 2001; Yin, 1994).^5
Tailoring the study to the collective identification and organization of the Cameroo-
nian deaf community, from an interdisciplinary stance of African and deaf epistemol-
ogies, I have employed a community-based research pro cess (Dei, 2010; Higgs, 2008,
2010). The creative development of the research method during the fieldwork, in
interaction with the Cameroonian deaf community, is an ex ample of performance eth-
nography (Fabian, 1990). The case study includes multiple sources of data (participant
observation, ethnographic interviews, document study, and discussion groups).
During a three-month stay from March to June 2010 and a one-month stay from
Febru ary to March 2011, I interviewed 59 deaf Cameroonians of different back-
grounds (in regard to gender, religion, ethnicity, age, schooling, class, onset of
deafness, and lan guage) from five regions in Cameroon. These participants were
recruited through presentations and discussions of the research and conversations
in local deaf community meetings organized by deaf leaders in the Central, Littoral,
Northwest, and Southwest regions.^6 (Cameroon is divided into 10 regions, which are- Cameroonians currently face considerable obstacles to getting married because of the economic
and moral crisis; they nonetheless regard taking a spouse as a key moment in life (Fleisher, 2007) and a
prerequisite to full personhood (Nsamenang, 1992). This is also the case for deaf Cameroonians, who
experience even more obstacles. - A bottom-up approach has been found fruitful in enhancing democratic participation (Pinxten,
- and in development contexts (Dei, 2010).