ABSTRACT
In Cameroon, a west-central African country, rumors have public health as well as political consequences. They encourage Cameroonian women to seek certain kinds of reproductive health care and avoid others, and they sometimes interfere with preventive health care. Since the earliest colonial incursions into the Bamileke highlands, rumor has been an important form of information dissemination and interpretation regarding disruptions to political and reproductive life. In the early months of 1990, Cameroonian schoolgirls squeezed through windows to flee vaccination teams that were visiting their school as part of a campaign to decrease neonatal tetanus. Rumors and collective memories, sociologically understood, are both forms of knowledge that serve to define situations and social relationships and to construct reality. Collective memories of the troubles create a fertile ground for the plausibility of reproductive rumors. The rumors in turn become part of the repertoire of memory.
