Culture
The Duala today are divided into the urban and rural. Those who live in the cities, particularly Douala itself, earn a living at a number of skilled and unskilled professions. Many Duala still own parts of the city, allowing them to live off rents and development. The rural Duala, in contrast, work as fishermen and farmers, mostly at the subsistence level. Fishing is the trade of choice.
Traditional Duala society was divided into three strata. At the top were the Wonja, native Duala, with full rights of land ownership. The next tier consisted of the Wajili, either non-Duala peoples or the descendants of slaves. Finally, the Wakomi, or slaves, made up the bottom rung. Chiefs and headmen sat at the pinnacle of this hierarchy in the past, though today such figures have very little power in their own right. Instead, such individuals are more likely to own property and to have inherited wealth. Councils of elders and secret societies allow communities to decide important issues.
Read more about this topic: Duala People
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“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)