A Kanuri Sociocultural Dataset

A Kanuri Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Kanuri community of Cameroon (the Kanuri of the Far North, self-described as “those of nobility”), collected under the project "Projet de confection d'un didacticiel sur la composition des peuplements au Cameroun" (a didactic-software project on the composition of Cameroon's settled peoples), coordinated by Prof. Emmanuel Ngue Um for CERDOTOLA (the Inter-State Institution of scientific co-operation for the preservation, diffusion and valorization of the African cultural heritage) during the project's pilot data-collection phase in March-April 2020. Unlike a purely linguistic corpus, the dataset foregrounds the community itself as the unit of documentation: its history, social organisation, religious life and material culture, with onomastics, common expressions and a numeral system providing a linguistic component elicited in the community's own speech (recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or in a Latin-based approximation where IPA was not available to the fieldworker). Although the source questionnaire was labelled “Mandara,” the community it documents self-identifies, both administratively and emically, as Kanuri (“those of nobility”); it is integrated with the Mandara, Podoko, Mouktele, Gamergou, Arab Choa and Fulbe. Oral tradition traces migration from Yemen by way of Kouka and Maiduguri to its present location, where a founding sheikh is credited with establishing Islam. Social organisation rests on royalty and kinship, with decisions taken collectively but dictated by the chief at the level of the chiefdom; descent is patrilineal. Marriage begins with contact between the couple and a formal hand-request by the parents, sealed with bridewealth, gifts and kola symbolising commitment and testimony. An ancestral cult addressed to a divinity is celebrated once a year by the whole Kanuri community. Recognised taboos include discussing sex openly, theft and causing public disorder. Men farm, herd small ruminants, trade and hunt; women trade, dress hair and farm; red millet, sorghum, fonio, beans and okra are staple foods. Facial scarification, shared with neighbouring Mandara and Gamergou, is a notable aesthetic practice, and the gandoura, boubou and sleeveless waistcoat are everyday dress. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Kanuri community's own self-description — its social organisation, kinship and marriage practices, religious and symbolic life, economy and material culture, and internal system of personal, ethnic and place names — rather than only its named language or dialect. This community-centred, ethnographic design distinguishes it from language-only documentation, while the accompanying onomastic, common-expression and numeral-system data still make the dataset usable for lexicographic and comparative linguistic work on the Kanuri variety.