Abstract
The title of this paper is rightly “Likoda Li-Mbog.” It is a summary of a finished Ph. D. thesis in Systems Analysis. In the thesis, we examine the events of power and authority relations and the various ways in which they articulate an underlying epistemology and world-view. Specifically, the problem area relates to aspects of social control which arise from the grip of a world-view on a people’s behaviour. The purview – in terms of a view of society – of our study is a system with a specifiable mode of organisation based on yet another at once implicit and explicit. “Mbog”, to name the system, permeates every aspect of Basaa life. As a system of meanings, it amounts to a complete view of the world – ways in which a people perceive their shared reality. We, for the case of the Basaa people, have tried to show an organic relationship between the manner in which a people are organised politically, and a system of knowledge, itself an adumbration of a world-view that we have named.
Key words: World-views, knowledge systems, social control, authority relations, the tribal assembly.
