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Kera
Location of the Kera area
Mary worked for SIL among the Kera people. The Kera region is south of Fianga, near Lake Tikem, in the Mayo-Kebbi prefecture in the south west of Chad.
Political map of South West Chad Mayo-Kebbi is coloured in pale pink. (Click on "100" to see a map of Chad.)
(Approximate sketch map)
The map shows the approximate location of the Kera area, around the town of Koupor which is at latitude 9.8167 and longitude 15.1500. Other Kera people live in the cities of N'Djaména and Pala, and there are about 6000 in many of the large cities of Cameroon. In the 1993 census there were 44,523 Kera in Chad.
Agriculture
The Kera inhabit the savanna, and during rainy season (see the climate page) much of the Kera region is flooded. However, even with this they often suffer famine because the soil is poor and there are too many people for the land to feed. They are subsistence farmers, with two crops of millet a year, and mixed livestock raisers. Cattle are rarely eaten, because 9 cows are required for a man to get married - as a gift to his bride's family.
Society
The administrative system including prefects and chiefs is quite recent. The system of traditional chiefs in each village has been around longer. The Kera share many of their festivals and customs with their Tupuri neighbours.
Language
Kera is an East Chadic language from the Afro-Asiatic group of languages. Some Kera also speak Tupuri and/or French although they are not linguistically similar. The nearest language linguistically is Kwang.
Bible passages
Here are some passages from the Bible in Kera. This is John 3: 16.
You can read part of John's gospel, but Kera needs special characters, so you have two choices.
- Download it in
Adobe Acrobat format. To read this you need Acrobat reader.
or go to the text
only version of the Acrobat download page. - Download it as a rich text format file. To read this, you need to download the SIL Doulos IPA font from the SIL fonts download page (includes instructions).
Links
Technical information about the Kera language from the SIL ethnologue.
You can get a satellite map of Chad on the National Geographic site. To find the Kera area, search for "Fianga" (Chad). The Kera area is south of Fianga.
Ethnological information (from Ikuska in Spanish)
content ends: related links follow 
Other Kera links: [ Music]
With Opera 6 you must select "identify as Mozilla 5" in the Quick preferences otherwise it doesn't work at all. When the "loading" icon has disappeared, the
screen is normally still blank. If you then click the reload button, the map usually appears. I have not tested previous versions of Opera. Newer versions of Opera work.
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