THE BAMILEKE: HISTORY AND ART

(Bamileké)

Cameroun

The North part of Cameroun is islamizada and lacks sculpture. The savannahs of the west, you Grassfields according to the English terminology, are inhabited by three ethnic groups with common ancestors, of bantú language and similar social structures: bamileké, whose members reach million individuals, distributed by the plains of the southwest, in units qeu oscillates between the fifty thousand and one hundred thousand people.

Bamileké came from the north and they became sedentary between centuries XVI and XIX, mixing itself with the native ones. The suicide or the revolt resisted to the esclavismo deciding on and contributed to populate the New World. The Grassfields was divided in a mosaic of 90 kingdoms governed by a king, the phon, supported by nonsecret the consuetudinarias societies. The king was inheriting direct of the founder, who was possibly a great soldier or a hunter of elephants and who assured the protection his town and guaranteed the fertility of the fields and the fecundity of the women. In other times one thought that he was equipped with supernatural powers that allowed him to metamorfosear themselves in animal, preferredly in elephant, leopard or buffalo. Within the palace the dignitaries and the servants civil employees attended the king in the exercise of the power. Tchinda, which they entered very young the service of the king, took care of the domestic tasks, while nvala performed the functions ritual and was simultaneously priests and ministers. The princes of real lineage did not participate in any association of being able. On possible object to avoid complots, they counted however on his own association, ngirih. The phon had to its position the ritual of seedtime and the harvests, the annual festival of the dry station, the opening of real the collective hunting and the expeditions single-breasted uniform jackets. They were, on the contrary, the regulating societies those that distributed justice, and when Cameroun became German colony the administrators only forced the phon to assume the judicial function. The phon was designated by its predecessor between the direct heirs, excluding the one from more age. The lineage heads rendered cultured to the ancestors.

In the Bamileké country, the phon concentrated on its person almost all the powers, whereas in other places it only performed cultural and religious a function, and was the advice of notables the one that held the authority. The phon trusted to some members the safekeeping of the sculptures, because the dispersion of the treasure supposed a guarantee against frequent fires. The masks that instilled fear and panic made the societies in charge of the repression. All the boys comprised of associations by age groups, with differences of five years among them and allowed to make a learning of technical and military character.

The headquarters or calls to account of the head included/understood several huts ready throughout a slope, to both sides of a wide way. The house of the headquarters was at the time a great finished quadrangular construction in a conical ceiling: an outer gallery formed by pillars surrounded the hut and beyond the sacred forest extended whose trees were used for the sculpture after a ceremony.

The exemption and the objects of prestige were created by the phon and the dignitaries of the different regions, which explains the multiplicity of styles. The art objects were symbols of the position within the hierarchy: their number, the materials whereupon were made and their iconography changed as it was descended in the social scale. It used to have great competition between escultores, because the escultor position was not hereditary. The sculpture had like purpose of commemorating and of celebrating the real ancestors of the present phon. In their palace, next to the ancestral figures and the masks, also were the perlados hairdos, thrones, bracelets, necklaces, pipes, skins of leopard, defenses of elephant, suits of crust, etc. In order to limit the risk of an excessive diffusion, some phon put to defense their treasure and only of exceptional way they exposed some pieces. The different societies also had their masks, like for example those of kwifon, that according to the tradition had been created and consecrated by the ancestors. Mabu or nkok inspired great fear; to those of ngirih greater enhancement with per them occurred them, receives and cauríes. Almost all the kingdoms used types of masks such: the buffalo, the red deer, the elephant, the birds and the masculine human heads. The masks of the buffalo and the elephant represented the force, and the spider, intelligence; at the present time, nevertheless, most of the meaning it is had lost.

All the offices craftsmen had their representation: ivory, orfebrería, ceramics, to per them. The artistic offices, the architectonic sculpture, as well as the meticulous arts like the embroidering, the perlado one, tinted by reserves and the smelting of the close lost one abounded.