African traditional banking: re-emergence of the ‘njangui’ system in Western Cameroon

Abstract

Banking holds a long history in African economic civilization. The introduction of modern Western practices such as insurance houses, giant financial institutions with remarkable management sophistry, unfortunately thwarted attempts at developing the indigenous enterprise. Throughout the colonial period and decades after independences, lingering economic failure and social backwardness logically inspired a return to ‘njangui’ quite ubiquitously, a home grown banking and insurance system based on the ‘natural history’ of the society concerned, rather than on ‘set characteristics’, with quantificative formulations likely to boost grasping of such aspects as creditworthiness and guarantee. The thriving of the ‘njangui’ in western Cameroon in the last three decades has started attracting serious scholarly analysis on the possibilities of its reliability and expansion. This paper explores successful attempts of the traditional safety net known as ‘njangui’ at re-emerging in a difficult context of economic stagnation.