Who’s climate ? Who’s change ? Various views from rural Northern Cameroon
Résumé
In the Upper Benoue area in Northern Cameroon, narratives about weather events and climate change are different according to one's economic and cultural profile. Formal education level, economic strategy and autochtony vs migration are promising explanatory variables to account for the heterogeneity of discourses about so called climate change.
Weather conditions, especially the timing of rainfall, are highly variable from one year to another in the sahelo soudanian part of Africa. Rationales developped by local stakeholders to account for these variations are based on various sources of knowledge depending on their primary socialization within a local territory and their direct experience of it, their formal schooling and linguistic competence, their faith to monotheist religion and their commitment to conservation and development programs. Commenting some quotes from various people in the same region, the communication is a tentative presentation of the differing voices on local changes : global climate change is not necessarily the main relevant explanation.