In Dutch society, it is generally assumed that children have to grow up with their birth parents in order for them to develop into wellbalanced adult people. In contrast, Cameroonian parents are supposed to respect the rule that children cannot stay with them all the time, for the latter must be granted the opportunity to live with different kin members. Parents who keep their children at their side are accused of being selfish and antisocial, as they prevent close kin members from sharing in their upbringing. Such children are sincerely pitied because they are isolated from their extended kin network and thereby jeopardised considerably in a context of everchanging household compositions. From babyhood onwards, children learn not to become attached solely to their birth parents but to see different aunts and uncles as their ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’. This essay explores how kinship knowledge – in particular, knowledge about which kin can be seen as reliable parents – is transmitted from parents to children. What are the ideological and practical reasons for plural parenthood? How do children get used to it? And how easy is it, for both parents and children, to follow the kinship rules? But first, I will briefly introduce the Cameroonian setting on which this ethnographic essay is based.

Batouri is a small provincial town with 25,000 inhabitants in the savannah area in East Cameroon, 500 kilometres from the capital Yaoundé. One part of town, called Mbondossi, is inhabited by approximately 1,500 people who have their ethnic origin in Batouri or its surrounding villages. Social life in Mbondossi is characterized by practices of matrilineal descent, high frequency of polygyny, high marital flexibility, and high numbers of temporarily fostered children (children not living with their biological mother). One out of three children lives with foster parents, and school surveys show even higher percentages: 49% of primary schoolchildren between 9 and 15 years old and 94% of secondary schoolchildren between 13 and 18 years old live with foster parents. Even children who actually stay with their first parents have usually already experienced living in a foster family. This reveals that all children, simultaneously and successively, have to deal with plural parents.