'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen
Kung, Bamenda area, republic of Cameroon.
Picture credit 2015, Pierpaolo di Carlo
“No! The woman does not pose for the camera. Nothing extraordinary,” a linguist and anthropologist replies. “Common practice. Here, everybody carries things on their head. And, by the way, that is not a booklet - but a wallet.”
As with everything, we can pause and take some time for something. Imagine we would walk around with our wallet on our head. Could that happen?
Observing the picture, we might perceive a contrast between the modern, urban icon of the portfolio, and the rural, timeless idea of an African woman standing in front of her habitat. Why? When did we stop carrying things on our head? This picture seems to shape questions of comparison.
Does this picture tell more about us, than about her?
As with many otherwise trivial occurrences, something very ordinary conceals a door to a closet, and when we open that door we find a chaos of things that, before, we tended not to imagine. Nothing is strange, though there is no such strangeness as to believe that.
A practical note on the picture:
Kung is a small village of about 600 people, perched on a steep hill in the Lower Fungom region, northwest Cameroon. Like any other village in the area, Kung has its own chief and its own language - a true language that should not be confused with a dialect. The language has no written form, and is endangered, although one of the community's central motivations is to safeguard its speech, so that the population can continue to communicate with their ancestors who have passed away.
