A Bakoko Sociocultural Dataset

A Bakoko Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Bakoko community of Cameroon (an Édéa-area group (self-named Adie) with an oral tradition of Egyptian origin), 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). The group calls itself Adie (“sons of Mpoo, under the name Likande”) and is administratively known as Bakoko; it lives integrated with Bassa, Bati-Mpoo, Beti and Bamileke neighbours. Oral tradition traces a distant origin to Egypt, with intermediate stays at Logbikoy, Mfoundi, the Lékié, Kribi and Lolodorf before settlement on land the group has occupied since before colonisation. The group comprises two intermarrying sub-groups, the Benanes and the Dogtomèn, with one exception: marriage is barred when a woman's mother originates from the other clan. Descent is patrilineal; decisions were traditionally taken by consensus at the level of the chiefdom, and marriage historically began with bride-capture before evolving into a formal sequence of hand-request, bridewealth and celebration. The *djee* cult, performed by initiated members, was the group's strongest ancestral cult. Recognised taboos include adultery, incest and betrayal of the group's rules. Livelihoods combine hunting, fishing, logging and farming for men, and farming and household work for women, with dishes such as *kona ngond* and cassava, taro, sweet potato and macabo as staples, and raphia and palm wine as traditional drinks. Ritual dance is gender-specific: the *kòɔ* for women and the *djee* for men, alongside social dances such as *bisana* and *béya*. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Bakoko 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 Bakoko variety.