Abstract

The paper contains the ethnographic description of a funeral celebrated in a peripheral borough of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroun. The event is narrated from the beginning, in the city's morgue, to the end, the solemn mass celebrated in the dead woman's house, in the presence of hundreds of participants. The story is told by an European (Italian) ethnographer on his first trip to Africa and it offers a constant comparison with a secularized society like the one from which the ethnographer comes.