Who Are The Bamileke Tribe In Cameroon?
The Bamileke Tribe in Cameroon are a Grassfields people. They are the biggest ethnic group in Cameroon and dominate the country’s West and Northwest Regions. The Bamileke are organized into numerous groupings, each under the supervision of a chief, or fon. They speak several dialects of the GrassField language family that are all closely related to one another.
However, there is a tight relationship between these languages, and seventeen or more varieties are recognized as constituting a Bamileke Tribe dialect continuum by certain classifications. The Bamileke are famed for their elaborately beaded masks, particularly the remarkable elephant mask.
History Of The Bamileke Tribe
The Bamileke Tribe, whose ancestry may be traced back to Egypt, arrived in modern-day northern Cameroon sometime between the 11th and 14th centuries. To avoid being compelled to convert to Islam, they moved further south and west in the 17th century. Christians now make up the majority of this population group. The Bamileke Tribe originate from the western, northern, and southwestern parts of Cameroon, respectively.
Even though the majority of Bamileke Tribe live in the West, it is believed that the majority of them live in the English-speaking North-West (there are 123 Bamileke groupings in this region, compared to 6 in the South-West and 106 in the Western region). Therefore, all of Cameroon’s western and northern western regions, as well as a portion of the southwest, fall under the Grassfields’ purview.
Other than the Bamileke Tribe, there are recently settled foreigners (Fulani, Haoussa, Igbo, etc.) and tribes that are historically more or less linked to the Bamileke, either through blood or through certain cultural intercourses (Dieudonné Toukam, “Histoire et anthropologie du peuple bamiléké”, 2016).
The Bamun and the Bamileke Tribeformerly formed a single nation. Nchare, the leader of the Bamun tribe, was the younger brother of Bafoussam’s namesake. The Bamiléké Tribeare a confederation of many tribes. There are several obvious cultural differences among the Dschang, Bafang, Bagangté, Mbouda, and Bafoussam.
The ancestors of the Bamiléké fled the North in the middle of the 17th century to avoid being converted to Islam. They moved all the way down to Foumban, in the south. Conquerors who traveled all the way there imposed Islam on the people of Foumban.When fighting broke out, many fled, while others stayed and converted to Islam. This is where the Bamun and Bamiléké cultures diverge.
The largest of these Cameroonian ethnic groups is the Bamileke; however, there are many more that make up the Cameroon-Bamileke people cluster.
To avoid being compelled to convert to Islam, they moved further south and west in the 17th century. The struggle against slavery in the Atlantic Slave Trade was another motivating factor for migration. Christians now make up the majority of this population group.
Political Structure And Agriculture Of The Bamileke Tribe
The Bamileke Tribe have established their communities in a systematic and orderly fashion. In many communities, little fields surround clusters of houses that belong to the same family. The fields are usually cleared by the men, but the majority of the labor is done by the women. Machetes and hoes are the main instruments of labor. Cocoyams, groundnuts, and maize are all examples of staple crops.
Many chiefdoms are in charge of Bamileke communities.In many societies, the chief (also known as the fon or fong) serves as the de facto head of state. The Chief also has the title of “Father” in the community. As a result, he enjoys widespread acclaim among the populace. The ‘Father’ selects a child from among his own offspring to be his successor. The identity of the fon’s successor is usually kept hidden until after the fon’s death.
Nine ministries and other councils and advisors make up the fon. The new fon will be crowned by the ministers. Kamveu is the name of the government’s advisory board, which is also known as the Council of Notables.
And for certain fons, a “queen mother” or mafo had a significant role in the past. A number of ward chiefs, each in charge of their own section of the village, report directly to the fon and his advisors. Sub-chiefs, or fonte, are also acknowledged in some Bamileke communities.
Ceramics Of The Bamileke Tribe
Fertility, majesty, and enlightenment are the traditional subjects of religious sculpture.
A chief and a group of esteemed elders provide direction to the Bamileke community. There was a time when people thought the chief could magically assume the form of an elephant, buffalo, or leopard. The welfare of the people, the administration of justice, and the success of agricultural endeavors all fall under the chief’s purview.
The Bamileke Tribe created a lot of art for royal rituals. The chief is typically depicted in Bamileke sculptures. Objects of art were used to symbolize a person’s social standing. The materials used and the quantity of pieces varied as one moved down or up the social ladder. Ancestral figures and masks, headdresses, bracelets, beaded thrones, flutes, necklaces, swords, horns, fans, elephant tusks, leopard skins, terracotta pots, and dishware can all be found at the home of a chief. The chief utilized all of this to demonstrate his authority.
This tribe is well-known for their beadwork and masks. Beads, copper, and cowrie shells were commonly used in mask decoration. Male and female faces, a deer, a buffalo, birds, and an elephant were all depicted in their carvings. Both the elephant and buffalo masks have symbolic meanings. Traditional occasions for donning a Bamileke Tribe mask include funerals and yearly celebrations. Because of the region’s complicated migratory history, distinguishing between the grassland tribes’ artistic forms may be difficult.
Masquerade performances in Bamileke Tribe are organized by the Kuosi society, which answers directly to the monarch. This group of strong and affluent men is descended from an ancient military civilization. At the public dance known as a Kuosi, conducted every two years to show off the kingdom’s wealth, even the monarch himself may wear a mask.
The Kuosi masqueraders may be seen to the left, wearing elaborate feathered headdresses and beaded elephant masks. You may also pair one of these feathery headresses with a simple outfit. Masks in the Kuosi community are sometimes designed to look like elephants or leopards, both of which have high social status.
Although Bamileke Tribe masks and masqueraders have been known to make an appearance at royal events, they are more commonly connected with secret male clubs with links to the palace and the King. The societies are exclusive, and only members and those with proper credentials are allowed to take part in the numerous events. When operating on behalf of the monarch, each society’s special house employs its own masks, costumes, dances, and secret language to maintain social and religious order across the realm.
One such group is the Kwifo (meaning “night”) society, which serves as a police force while the monarch listens to grievances and gives advice to the people during the day and carries out executions and other penalties after dark. The Kwifo acts as the King’s representative in civil and criminal matters, settles major disputes, and hands down judgment. Each Kwifo community has its own mask that acts as a spokesperson and symbol.
This mask, known as Mabu, is used to communicate societal norms to the populace. The villagers are warned of the Kwifo’s impending arrival and are forced to act respectfully while the group makes its way through the village. Some masks are thought to symbolize the aggressive and menacing spirit of Kwifo civilization since they are attributed with supernatural strength created by the medicine of the community. The wearers do not break into dancing because of the seriousness of the circumstances surrounding their arrival.
Kwifo masks are traditionally performed by groups of eight to thirty people, backed by a drum, xylophone, and rattle orchestra. Special appearances at funerals and memorials for deceased members of the group are met with awe and respect.
The huge, helmet-shaped mask is placed on top of the head and worn at an angle; the masquerader’s eyes are covered with fabric so that he may see out of the corners of his eyes. The carved headgear evokes the style of a prestige cap used by kings and officials (see below), highlighting the society’s elevated position. The earth spider design (shown above) is often carved into the masks of the Kwifo civilization, and it represents the formidable might of the ancestors and spirits.
This kwifo mask depicts a hairdo typical of the Bamun, Bamileke, and Tikar, and may be seen on several examples of brass, bronze, and wooden sculpture. The Bamenda call this crown the Ndam Tcheu Dop, while the Bandjan call it the Tcho Dung Dung.
The majority of sculptures, including memorial statues and masks, use this hairstyle. It was first seen on a knitted or crocheted royal cap made of raffia or vegetable fibers, which served as its inspiration. It had two pronounced lobes, or lateral projections. Its distinctive tails, bumps, blades, or small rolled-up-cloth lobes each hide a thin wooden peg that stiffens or stabilizes the structure.
Marriage
Bamileke Tribe practice polygynous marriage. At a young age the boy to men will attempt to gain a title and money to be respected to buy a bride. There are wife givers and wife receivers. “In bride-price marriage, the groom gains reproductive, sexual, and domestic rights by giving gifts of palm oil, goats, blankets, firewood, and money to the family of his bride.” The bride’s father and the groom never do the bride price exchange.
The father of the bride gains rights over the marriage on the patrilineal side of his daughter. “Christian marriage can still take place with or without bride-wealth, marriage by a justice of the peace, elopement, and single parenthood.” The bride price depends on the amount of education the woman has but also on how much the groom ability to pay is.
The term for marriage is to “to cook inside” that symbolizes the women’s confidence to her kitchen. This is a literal term for the woman to cook each meal for her husband but to also “cook” or procreate children.
Inheritance patterns
The Bamiléké Tribe place significance on agnatic male lineages. All rights to the village, its land, buildings, and women are passed down through the male line, or patriline. After two generations have passed, non-heirs are no longer required to make sacrifices to patrilineal skulls. Titles, personal property, and moral and legal obligations are passed down through a family’s female line.
Interactions and conflicts between parents and offspring: Rivalry among a man’s several wives can sometimes coexist with close friendship and affection. Some of the elder spouses are tasked with “fostering” the younger ones. The mother and full siblings are often quite close, whereas half siblings may compete with one another for parental attention and inheritance.
“Social roles are modeled through one’s actions and explained through tales told around the family table,” says the proverb. According to the Bamiléké, “relations among full siblings are particularly warm, and they attribute this solidarity to hearthside conviviality and storytelling.” Mothers often take the lead in childrearing, although an older sibling or co-wife may step in to assist when necessary. The Bamiléké are exogamous, meaning they forbid marriages within their own family line beyond the fourth generation. Avoiding marriage within the maternal family.
The male parent is the heir, whereas the female parent is the heiress. In common usage, however, cousins are not simply referred to by their sibling’s name. There are specialized naming conventions for each birth order of siblings. Children born after a set of twins are also given special names, and there is a whole system of praise names that proclaim the parents’ hometowns. Kingdoms and age divisions are both designated by generational names.
Different types of inheritance (such as bilateral or matrilineal): “Male elites are singled out in discussions of how ties to one’s hometown affect one’s political standing.” Through agnatic ties, the Bamiléké place significance on the male bloodline. All rights to the village, its land, buildings, and women are passed down through the male line, or patriline.
After two generations have passed, non-heirs are no longer required to make sacrifices to patrilineal skulls. Titles, personal property, and moral and legal obligations are passed down through a family’s female line. The sons make an effort to farm the area around their father. To prepare for battle, young men formed groups called mandjo.
Political system
There were kings who owned all land then trickled down a laddered hierarchy to women of the land owning men. Bamilekè Tribe boys in their youth go out seeking jobs in return for cash to buy consumer goods, bride wealth, and to gain title.
Village and house organization: The kingdoms are divided into quarters, villages, compounds, and houses. The kingdom government and administration live in the “quarter” also referred to as the “village”. If the family were monogamous then the living arrangement would consist of a conjugal house, a kitchen, and an outhouse.
If the family were polygynous the living arrangement would consist of just “the husbands house surrounded by a semi-circle or two rectangular “quarters” of his wives’ kitchen-houses.” The wives live in their kitchen houses with their children. The children (boys and girls) will live there until they get married or go off to school. The kitchen house has one room with a hearth in the middle and a granary of raffia bamboo above the hearth.
They are most commonly made out of mud bricks and roofed with thatch or tin. The house used to be made of raffia bamboo with sliding doors and thatch with conical roofs. They would all be square. During the pre-colonial era, rural compounds commonly had a fence.
They rarely do nowadays. All of the royal houses follow a specific floor plan and are always located/built on a slope. “Below an entry gate made of spines of the raffia palm (“bamboo”) and either thatch or corrugated iron, a wide path (the “foot” of the compound) divides the two wives’ quarters, each quarter ruled by titled queens.”
Specialized village structures (mens’ houses): “A gate leads to the king’s palace, a variety of meeting houses of secret societies, a traditional court building, and a sacred water source used only for the king’s meals.” They consider the are above the gate to be “dry and infertile” while the area below the gate is considered “rich, moist, fertile, and spiritually complicated.”
Shamans and Medicine
The community had diviners and spirit medians that determine the need for a ceremony and in healing. Healers and witches use the same supernatural powers.Many healers combine divination with herbal medicine. In the past, diviners, spirit mediums, and religious specialists had higher status than herbalists. This relation is now reversing, along with a trend toward more individual and fee-for-service treatment. Contemporary Bamiléké seek medical assistance from both private and public hospitals and clinics as well as from their rich array of traditional practitioners (see “Religious Practitioners”).
Passage rituals (birth, death, puberty, seasonal): It is ritual that the mother buries the placenta and umbilical cord after birth. Baby boys are then circumcised and girls are secluded until pre puberty. For the king: “Royal rituals enact the transformation of a new king from a mere mortal to a divine being, the embodiment of the office of kingship. These rituals include capturing the new king, and enclosing him and two of his queens in a special temporary structure ( la’ kwa ) for nine weeks.
During this time they are fed medicines and taught their new duties. A ritual—complete with the symbolism of birth and feeding—marks the emergence of the king from la’ kwa. He fully becomes king only after he has sired at least one male and one female child.”
Royal Tradition and the Arts
Masquerades are an integral part of Bamileke culture and expression. They are donned at special events such as funerals, important palace festivals and other royal ceremonies. The masks are performed by men and aim to support and enforce royal authority.
The power of a Bamileke king, called a Fon, is often represented by the elephant, buffalo and leopard. Oral traditions proclaim that the Fon may transform into either an elephant or leopard whenever he chooses. An elephant mask, called a mbap mtengis a mask with protruding circular ears, a human like face, decorative panels on the front and back that hang down to the knee and are covered overall in beautiful geometric beadwork including lots of triangle imagery.
Isosceles triangles are prevalent as they are the known symbol of the leopard. Beadwork, shells, bronze and other precious embellishments on masks elevate the mask’s status. On occasion, a Fon may permit members of the community to perform an elephant mask along with a leopard skin, indicating a statement of wealth, status and power being associated with this masquerade.
Buffalo masks are also very popular and present at most functions throughout Grassland societies, including the Bamileke. They represent power, strength and bravery and may also be associated with the Fon.
Succession and kinship patterns
The Bamileke Tribe trace ancestry, inheritance and succession through the male line, and children belong to the fondom of their father. After a man’s death, all of his possessions typically go to a single, male heir. Polygamy (more specifically, polygyny) is practiced, and some important individuals may have literally hundreds of wives. Marriages typically involve a bride price to be paid to the bride’s family.
It is argued that the Bamileke Tribe inheritance customs contributed to their success in the modern world:
“Succession and inheritance rules are determined by the principle of patrilineal descent. According to custom, the eldest son is the probable heir, but a father may choose any one of his sons to succeed him. An heir takes his dead father’s name and inherits any titles held by the latter, including the right to membership in any societies to which he belonged. And, until the mid-1960s, when the law governing polygamy was changed, the heir also inherited his father’s wives–a considerable economic responsibility.
The rights in land held by the deceased were conferred upon the heir subject to the approval of the chief, and, in the event of financial inheritance, the heir was not obliged to share this with other family members. The ramifications of this are significant. First, dispossessed family members were not automatically entitled to live off the wealth of the heir. Siblings who did not share in the inheritance were, therefore, strongly encouraged to make it on their own through individual initiative and by assuming responsibility for earning their livelihood.
Second, this practice of individual responsibility in contrast to a system of strong family obligations prevented a drain on individual financial resources. Rather than spend all of the inheritance maintaining unproductive family members, the heir could, in the contemporary period, utilize his resources in more financially productive ways such as for savings and investment. […] Finally, the system of inheritance, along with the large-scale migration resulting from population density and land pressures, is one of the internal incentives that accounts for Bamileke success in the nontraditional world”.
Donald L. Horowitz also attributes the economic success of the Bamileke to their inheritance customs, arguing that it encouraged younger sons to seek their own living abroad. He wrote in Ethnic groups in conflict: “Primogeniture among the Bamileke and matrilineal inheritance among the Minangkabau of Indonesia have contributed powerfully to the propensity of males from both groups to migrate out of their home region in search of opportunity”.
Bamileke elephant masks
Elephants are the world’s most commanding land creatures, unsurpassed in grandeur and power. Thus elephant masks, while rare in Africa, are fully appropriate symbols of important leaders or, at least, their respected deputies or messengers. The societies that use these masks in fact act as agents of chiefs’ control and as formal royal emissaries.
Elephant societies that originated in Bamileke and spread elsewhere in the Grasslands consist of three graded ranks attained by wealth. These elephant masks, signifying kingship and wealth, were worn by the powerful members of the Kuosi regulatory society, which included members of royalty, wealthy title holders, and ranking warriors of the Bandjoun kingdom of western Cameroon.
In the past, payment of a slave or a leopard pelt to the chief who owns the society was necessary for entrance to the highest rank. The glass beads used on earlier masks were nineteenth-century trade beads of Venetian or Czechoslovakian manufacture, used as well in exchange for slaves. Elephant mask costumes were thus called “things of money” since their beads were both objects and symbols of wealth (Brain and Pollock 1971:100; Northern 1975:17-21).
Elephant masks comprise cloth panels and hoods woven from plantain fiber over raffia. On this background multicolored beads are stitched in geometric patterns. The basic form depicts salient features of the elephant—a long trunk and large ears. The hood fits tightly over the masker’s head, and two hanging panels, one behind and one in front, partially conceal the body.
The front panel is the elephant trunk, and the two large, stiff circles hinged to either side of the head are its ears, which flap as the masker dances. While the mask symbolizes an elephant, the face is human. Eyeholes provide visibility, and a nose and mouth with teeth are normally present.
Such masks are often worn with robes of dark woven fiber covered with small fiber knobs or indigo and white tie-dyed “royal” cloth. The robes contrast greatly with the maskers’ bright red legs, dyed with camwood. Costumes also include beaded vests with broad belts and leopard pelts attached at the back. Since a chief owns or controls the masking society, both leopards and elephants are apt metaphors for symbolic impersonation.
Maskers dance barefoot in these colorful costumes to a drum and gong, moving slowly as they wave poles with blue and white beaded tips trimmed with horsehair. They whistle “mysteriously and tunelessly,” brandishing spears and horsetails. Maskers are later joined by chiefs and princesses, parading by an elaborate tent in which high-ranking men sit to observe.
A masker hurls his horsetail to the chief, the crowd cheers, and the celebration continues with various feats performed primarily by younger maskers. When the festivities end, the favorites are rewarded with kola nuts and wine (Brain and Pollock 1971:100-104; Northern 1975:17).
The mask’s lavish use of colored beads and cowrie shells displayed the wealth of the members of the Kuosi society; and its colors and patterns expressed the society’s cosmic and political functions. Cowrie shells are also symbols of wealth and power and were used in the some examples of these masks.
Also Read: Who are the Mandinka: The Great History Of the Mandinka/Mandingo People
