A Bum Sociocultural Dataset

A Bum Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Bum (also spelled "Boum") community of Cameroon (a Mboum community of Ngaoundéré, today largely Islamised), 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). Recorded under the administrative and self-given name Ngaoundéré (referring to the mountain “with a raised belly and a prominent navel” that overlooks the town), the group is integrated — rather than merely overlapping — with Peul, Kaka, Fulbe, Gbaya, Hausa, Kanuri, Nyangéré, Bamileke and Bassa neighbours. Oral tradition traces an ancient itinerary from Yemen through Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan to Ngaoundéré, and the land is considered sacred through nearly two centuries of Mboum presence reinforced by Islamic land tenure. The group is patriarchal, organised around a chief (Lamido) and recognised trades, with elders commanding respect and land wealth conferring influence; descent is patrilineal. Marriage follows a religiously framed sequence — hand-request, engagement and an Islamic bridewealth (*Sodok*) historically reckoned in an old currency unit, the *Dihad*, symbolising the union of the two families. Ancestral cults have given way to Islamic religious practice; recognised taboos (largely Islamic in character) include incest, punished traditionally by stoning, and specific mortuary obligations for gravediggers. Livelihoods include crafts, divinatory work, farming and herding for men, and crafts and trade for women; couscous, beef, mutton, foleré (bissap) and baobab are staple foods, with boubous and gandouras as everyday dress. Traditional music includes the Mbolo tam-tam, the Ndja balafon and the initiatory Mbuyé drum dance. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Boum 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 Boum variety.