Challenge of “Serious” Scholarship 111
can inform the Cameroonian gov ernment (“You are white, you can do that,” they
said), and, even more important for most people, the outside world could learn
about deaf people in Cameroon. Even if they themselves might not be able to go out
of the country, at least their stories could.
I tried to be sensitive to indigenous African epistemologies and to respect “the
double role of individuals in African societies”; that is, elders and other “epistemic
authorities” (Kaphagawani & Malherbe, 1998, p. 214) “should not only be perceived
as important informants, but also as research colleagues with critical perspectives
on edu cational practices” (Higgs, 2010, p. 2418; see also Dei, 2010). Deaf leaders
introduced me to Cameroonian deaf collective life and advised me on both the
organization of research topics and the interpretation of the findings. They were very
gener ous in their support of my study, in organizing local deaf community meetings,
and in helping me to contact and meet adults who wanted to be interviewed.
As mentioned earlier, the Cameroonian deaf community was involved in all stages
of the research pro cess. Grounded analysis has led to tentative generalizations and
theory development (Stebbins, 2001). Preliminary research findings were discussed
individually with some deaf leaders and key informants during my first periods of
fieldwork. During my visit in February to March 2011, I had the opportunity to
observe the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) Deaf Human Rights and Capacity
Building Training Project in Western and Central Africa for national and regional
deaf board members in the national capi tal, Yaoundé, and to share and discuss the
preliminary findings presented in this chapter with the participants in the training.
During that stay, I also received feedback from discussions with the broader com-
munity in local meetings in Douala and the nearby city of Kumba. A picture of the
Cameroonian deaf community is provided in the next section.PICTURE OF A YOUNG DEAF COMMUNITY
As in many other countries in Africa and elsewhere, the development of the deaf
community in Cameroon is tied to the foundation of deaf schools. The history of
formal deaf education in Cameroon is a recent one; this is in alignment with the
history of special education. Although missionaries provided care for people with
disabilities in precolonial and colonial times, schools were established only after the
independence of Cameroon in 1960 (also see Yuh & Shey, 2008). This section first
describes the establishment of deaf schools in the country by French and American
missionaries in the 1970s, and then goes into educational ideologies and languages
of instruction and communication within the schools. This history has influenced
the current sign language variation within the community. The section then de-
scribes the collective life of the community, as it has been developed through “deaf
gatherings,” and discusses how an ideology of education has influenced deaf com-
munity worldviews, distinguishing “chickens” (deaf Cameroonians who have not re-
ceived formal education) from “educated” deaf Cameroonians. It concludes with
the ambiguity of the sense of collectivity among this “extended family.”
In 1972, French missionaries founded the country’s first deaf school in Yaoundé.
The school em ployed an oral philosophy. Narratives of deaf adults in Yaoundé reveal
the emergence of signed communication among deaf children on the playground