Book Launch : In Those Days…

Growing up is a wonderful experience and different environments have their peculiarities in the life of a person. Ernestine Tatah Lukong in her book titled “Back In Our Days,” outlines some fun facts and unique experiences growing up in a typical village milieu in a Cameroonian context.  The setting is Nso, precisely the village of Melin in Bui Division of the North West Region. In 154 pages divided into five chapters, recently unveiled during the International Book Industry Exhibition at the National Museum in Yaounde, the author gives a synopsis of growing up in an area void of technological advantages such as cars, phones, computers and internet services. The book documents a practical reality without any complex historical or geographical analysis. 
 Chapter one, titled “Hunts in Jungly Farms” explains how children back in the days went hunting for termites, mushrooms, raffia fruit and traditional berries. Dieting according to the writer did not exist at that time and food for the Nso person was nothing other than fufu corn (a paste made out of corn flour) and eaten with vegetable, stew or other soups. Tubers and sweet yams were eaten as snacks. “We hardly knew and did not care much about the composition or constitution of the foods. If it filled your stomach and killed the huger, it was simply food. The idea of a balanced diet was not yet en vogue,” Ernestine Lukong states in the book, something which today modernization has completely affected. To the writer, Mother Nature practically provided all their daily foods as little or no processing was done on food harvested in the farms. Bottled drinks and food in cans were seen with the bourgeois living in cities when they came visiting their family in the village. Interesting with the change in times, researchers have resorted to domesticating some wild fruits, due to their nutritive value, things which were initially looked upon as good only for the “primitive” locals. 
Aspects of cooking, laundry and water are handled in the second chapter of the book titled “The Grit of Daily Needs.” Firewood was the only means of cooking...