The Kambou Family
According to Mr. Kambou Koudjora Gabriel (35 years old), a freelance journalist, being is nothing without family. For him, the family is constituted by the blood bond, but also by the clan bond. Mr. Kambou explains the genealogy of their family.
Family Concept According to Some Authors
The family is a social unit which, in most societies, ensures the primary socialisation of individuals. “The family is definitely a privileged sociological object: it is in the family, from early childhood, that values and norms, linguistic and cognitive skills, attitudes and body techniques are transmitted, a set of dispositions that will characterise individuals throughout their lives. In this sense, the family is always at the heart of the social reproduction process” (cf. Sociologie de A à Z).
Biography of the Kambou Family
According to Mr. Kambou Koudjora Gabriel (35 years old), a freelance journalist, being is nothing without family. For him, the family is constituted by the blood bond, but also by the clan bond. “Therefore, in our culture, we are the children of several men or women.”
Mr. Kambou (Birifor) then explains the genealogy of their family. For him, in the Birifor culture, the child does not only belong to the parent, but to the whole clan. As he says, there is no possible discrimination between children of the same descent. All children of the same clan of at least two generations are inseparable from each other in the family.
“The person I knew as my father was actually my father’s elder brother. He is the one I know as my father. My dad is my progenitor, but I didn’t know him as my father, because the greatest sin in our country is discrimination.”
Marriage among the Birifor
Speaking of marriage, the Kambou Family explains that there are three possibilities of getting married in the Birifor culture. Firstly, the son’s parents give presents (shea butter or other) every year, and cultivate in the in-laws’ farm after the birth of a female child, whom they intend to marry to their son when they are both adults. The second possibility is that the boy’s uncle is entitled to find a wife for his nephew. And the third is the kidnapping of the young woman, which is carried out with the complicity of the two lovers.
However, these practices are increasingly disappearing with modernity. This is the case of the Kambou Family, who married with the consent of both the husband and wife. Mr. Kambou Koudjora Gabriel got married by the sacred bond of marriage on October 22, 2016 with Mrs. Kambou Jessica (25 years old), a solar installation technician.
Conciliation: Family, Religion and Education
According to them, religion enables them to live in symbiosis. “Religion plays a significant role, as it could be said that we have been converted by modern religions, which is not part of our tradition”. Christian values such as respect for parents, welcoming strangers, and community life are also family values. Moreover, it is for this reason that the education of a child in the Birifor culture is not the responsibility of a single individual or the parents, but of the whole family, or even the whole clan.
Conciliation: Family, Marital Strategy and Rituals
What role do rituals and matriarchy play in the Birifor culture?
The Kambou couple gives a brief explanation of the matriarchy system in the Lobi culture in general. Actually, this system gives the mother the right to name the child, which for them is a way of honouring the woman, because she is the giver of life. “That’s our culture. Recognising that the child belongs to the mother is a way for us to honour the mother.” However, with modernisation, this system tends to disappear in favour of patriarchy.
The elderly live with other family members. They have no well-defined dwelling place. This is because in the Birifor or Lobi culture, these people are the custodians of the tradition. They are supposed to pass on the values of society to the younger generation. This also explains why, according to the elderly, the dead live with the family in the Lobi culture. There are no cemeteries in Lobi land. The dead are actually buried in houses, because they are not completely gone.
Moreover, the specificity of this family is their ability to reconcile the so-called modern life with their tradition, which according to them, enables them to live in harmony with the rest of the family.