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  As well as clan membership and the rule of clan exogamy, an individual either sex

inherits from his father, and thus in theory shares with all his agnates, an alimentary taboo
which he refers to as “my shile”.7  I recorded 22 from members of 48 different Tikar clans.

One, known as pã-dji, prohibits eating foo-foo and its accompanying sauce from the same plate

and carrying them to the mouth simultaneously; the rest are prohibitions against eating or

harming certain species of plant or animal.  Some are regular dietary items, but many are species

which would not, or could not, be eaten in any case: no one would wish to eat, or even touch,
the lizard called tiçy   ~ç     ~ç, which is believed to cause males to turn into females and vice versa,

nor would they eat  pipiç’  ç’, described as a snake which has a head at both ends and falls

from the sky, which many people claim to have seen.  One of the taboo species of the
MQsç’    Qsç’ clan, which like the royal clan, Gba’, has two, is, oddly enough, the leopard;

yet the leopard is one of the “royal animals” (nyQ-mbè’  nyQ-mbè’), prohibited to non-royals in

any case.

  The alimentary taboo is conceived as a property of the bone matter of a person’s body,

i.e. the parts derived from sperm, and transgression is supposed to lead to




















7The term shile (pl. bushile) is of much wider reference than the personal alimentary taboo
inherited from one’s father.  It is applied to certain species (e.g. the swallow, mkplQ, and the
parakeet, kpQ’hç’) which are prohibited to all Tikar: to eat these would be to risk death.
Further, very many activities have their bushile, or ritual prescriptions, transgression of which
would jeopardize their outcome.  For example, the tapping of raffia-palm has three: sexual
intercourse, eating freshly killed meat and eating okra.  Should the tapper indulge in any of
these activities during the period of wine production, his wine will be spilt: in the first two
cases, it will turn red, in the last, it will become glutinous.  Unsurprisingly, very little raffia-
wine is produced at Ngambe.


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