ABSTRACT
Peer culture is central to supporting African children’s learning and development of norms. However, it has not been well analyzed or researched and remains a largely uncharted developmental niche. This chapter examines parent-child relationships, child-to-child sociability and how both interact with each other in the family traditions and peer cultures in sub-Saharan Africa in general and Cameroon in particular. Interpersonal relationships and social interactions presuppose social development; they constitute the social fields in which the dynamics of individual development and identity formation play out. The chapter depicts a context of social development wherein the centrality of the family and mixed-aged peer groups is evident and where traditionally parents have not retained the sole responsibility to care for and manage children; rather they delegate several aspects of social protection and care to older siblings, who are ‘better together’ in peer learning cultures. The chapter also discusses how the respective roles of children, parents, other adults and peers in social development have been transformed and reconfigured by changing circumstances such as the increasing number of children attending formal schooling in institutions and migration to urban areas and out of Cameroon. It also reveals the process of developing a sense of self as the dynamic connection of individual personal identity to a changing social identity (Woodhead 2008), as a function of a given child’s group affiliations at various stages of development. This genre of relational individuation in Cameroon, as in much of Africa, does not leave out ‘individuality’, that sense of personal identity, which collectivism research so far has largely trivialized or failed to track in African children (Nsamenang 2008a).
