A documentation of the Bagyeli/Bakola forest foragers of Cameroon

The documentary collection focuses on the endangered forest forager lifestyle of the Bagyeli/Bakola and activities related to their everyday life. It includes a wide range of text genres, such as natural discourse and conversations, interviews, procedural texts (usually including an observational part), folktales, ceremonial songs and dances, as well as stimulus-based experimental data and grammatical elicitations. Naturalistic and semi-naturalistic texts are almost entirely available as video and audio recordings, while the majority of elicitations has been done as audio only; experimental data is mixed. The topics of naturalistic and semi-naturalistic data encompass activities i) in the rainforest, such as hunting, building traps and huts, collecting honey, and describing plants, and ii) in the village, for instance preparing hunted animals, making musical instruments and ceremonial outfits, telling stories, brushing teeth and cleaning the dishes, night recordings of dance and healing ceremonies, or weaving baskets. The recordings also reflect upon the relationship between the Bagyeli/Bakola and the documentation team, capturing their interactions, for example, during greetings, price negotiations, joint walks in the rain forest, and leisure time.

The Bagyeli/Bakola corpus is organized into three sub-collections that align with different Gyeli/Kola dialect zones: Kola in the Basaa (Bantu A40) contact region (Emmanuel Ngue Um), Gyeli in the Bulu (Bantu A70) contact region (Nadine Grimm), and Gyeli in the Kwasio (Bantu A80) contact region (Daniel Duke). While the entire team contributed to data collection in all targeted contact areas, one team member was mainly in charge for one region with respect to transcriptions, annotations, and translations. While almost all of the primary data (audio and video recordings) has been archived for the Bulu contact region by now, data from other contact regions are still being processed. Transcriptions, annotations, and translations are still in progress in all contact regions.