Je suis Bamenda, Je suis Dockta: Accounting for the popularity of Bamenda Grassfields Traditional Medicine men in Cameroon since precolonial times

Les Bamenda as they are called in Cameroon today, are the people of the Bamenda Grassfields or the Bamenda Province, North West Province and North West Region as the areas was referred to at various moments of Cameroon history. These people are known to be robust, hardworking, enduring, exploitable, serviceable, respectful of constituted traditional authority but very opposed to unfair government authority. This account for their presence in household, firms and plantations in the urban and rural areas of the Southern Cameroon. This paper is interested in another aspect of their dynamism. It investigates the survival of their traditional medical practices despite colonial and missionary influences and the presences of Bamenda Dockta all over the economically advanced Southern Cameroon in towns like Buea, Victoria, Kumba, Douala, Yaounde, Edea, Nkongsamba, Ebolowa, Tiko and Kribi. Based on oral interviews, secondary
sources and the observations of the author, the paper reveals that the contact between Western or Scientific Medicines and Indigenous Medicines in the Bamenda Grassfields did not destroy the indigenous heritage like elsewhere and that the migratory character of the populations, the economic value of their medicines and liberty laws of the 1990s opened the wider Cameroon market to Bamenda Dockta. Les Bamenda are therefore also known and distinguished because of their real or imagined indigenous medicinal prowess.

Key Words: Indigenous, Medicines, Herbalists, Bamenda Grassfields, Cameroon.