Commercial transactions and cultural interactions from the Delta to Douala and beyond.

Like others who do research in Africa, I frequented local and regional markets during my stay in Cameroon, from November 1988 through July 1989. The large markets draw traders from all over the country as well as from Nigeria, Ghana, and the Republic of Benin. Many are women selling local goods; men sell furniture, electronic equipment, and automotive products. On one trip to the market in the coastal town of Limbe, I saw a woman offering fabric she described as "George" cloth (1) obtained in nearby Nigeria. The seller identified herself as Suwu, an indigenous ethnic group of the Limbe and Bimbia regions of Cameroon's Southwest Province. After Limbe, her venues included small markets on the way to Bimbia. Since our itineraries coincided, I offered to take her by car, but she declined, preferring her canoe. I then left to visit villages bordering the neighboring creeks formed by the Mungo and Tiko rivers, especially Mabeta, Bimbia, and unmapped Ijo fishing settlements.

When I arrived in Mabeta the next afternoon, there she was, the same market woman, offering her George cloth. Having gotten there hours earlier, she had already set up her stall, displayed her goods, and was busy selling while I was still reassembling my body parts dislocated from the bumpy ride. When we met again at a later point in her itinerary, I bought cloth that the woman had purchased from a local Ghanaian trader. I learned that her George cloth had sold out in Bimbia.

The lessons of this experience were significant. First, today as in the past, canoe travel in the swampy coastal areas of Cameroon is the most efficient method of portage--not only for goods but also for ideas. Second, commerce is impervious to modern political boundaries.

Inhabitants of Africa's eastern Guinea Coast live in similar ecological environments and have similar political and religious beliefs, particularly a belief in water-spirit cults. Their colonial histories were repeated along the coast. Peoples in riverain and littoral communities where canoes were dominant, especially those living in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Liberia, shared parallel historical and economical experiences. They utilized their environments for fishing and salt-production economies, and engaged in trade with interior groups. Coastal societies traded with Europeans during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, capitalizing on and expanding their pre-European contacts and hinterland trading networks well beyond modern political boundaries.

The colonial history of Cameroon's Southwest Province reinforced the region's interethnic character. Ijo, Igbo, and Efik have long lived along the coast between Douala and the eastern border of their native Nigeria. Southwest Province is the former British Mandate Southern Cameroons territory, a consequence of the League of Nation's system for distributing Germany's foreign territories according to the Treaty of Versailles. (Germany annexed Cameroon in 1884.) Under the United Nations, the British Mandate Southern Cameroons became British Southern Cameroons. For the next forty years, it was part of the history of British Nigeria (Mbaugbaw, Brain, & Palmer 1987:81). On October 1, 1961, Britain's authority over the region ended, but the Nigerian population remained at a significantly high level. It is not unreasonable, then, to suggest that the large numbers of Nigerian residents participated in a Cameroon coastal art style during the colonial period and probably before. Furthermore, both the distinct and related peoples living between the Wouri estuary, where Douala is located, and the Niger Delta have contributed through the years to an international coastal art complex. And finally the formal conventions present in Duala, Ijo, Ibibio, and Efik art probably dispersed in the same manner as they do today.

In 1973 Rene Bravmann demonstrated the shortsightedness of viewing ethnic groups as "closed artistic entities." He argued for a broader approach, citing the porous nature of ethnic and cultural boundaries. Along the eastern Guinea Coast, art forms such as paddles and masks associated with religious practices also share affinities and correspondences. (2) In what follows, I examine representative examples from several categories of objects in terms of stylistic identification and context, and intercultural similarities and transmission of style and function.

THE DUALA AND THE COASTAL TRADE

The Duala inhabit the estuarine area of the Mungo, Wouri, and Dibamba Rivers, but they are concentrated in the port city of Douala, fifteen miles from the ocean. (3) Except for Mt. Cameroon, rising in a series of wooded foothills to 13,350 feet, the coastal zone is a flat, low-lying area of sedimentary soils fronting the Gulf of Guinea. Four large rivers--the Wouri, Dibamba, Sanaga, and Nyong--and the smaller Mungo and Bimbia form a labyrinth of creeks, streams, and sluggish channels (Neba 1982:40; Nelson 1974:41).

The Wouri estuary allows the Duala frequent interaction with coastal and inland peoples, with whom they exchange fish and Salt for agricultural products (Austen 1983:3). For centuries the economy of coastal Cameroon had two components: fishing in coastal waters and European trade that commenced in the Wouri estuary on a limited basis in the sixteenth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans traded directly from their ships, preferring to wait for Duala traders to bring their goods by canoe (Underhill 1884:26; Austen 1974:10). By the 1830s they had established "floating hulks"; moored in coastal waters, these ships, their sails and masts dismantled, became temporary or permanent trading stations. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Duala and Suwu were serving as intermediaries in the commerce between Europeans anchored offshore and hinterland groups.

When Cameroon became a German territory in the late nineteenth century, the Duala controlled a trading network from the Wouri estuary inland along the numerous river systems of the Cameroon littoral. In this watery environment, the dugout canoe served the fishing and trading economies of the region, constituting the enterprise capital of its owner.

DUALA ARTISTIC TRADITION

As middlemen in the European trade, the Duala generated cultural exchanges and stimulated artistic responses. German and French population statistics show that during and after European colonization a large population of non-Duala Africans lived in Duala territory. Duala artistic tradition is the product of complex local, regional, and external relationships, namely with the Grassfields, Cross River, Niger Delta, and Europeans. In the mid-nineteenth century, agents of European companies, soon followed by missionaries and colonial government officials and administrators, collected carved masks, stools, paddles, racing canoe prows, and other objects identified as Duala. Subsequently accessioned into British, Swedish, German, and Swiss museum collections, these items were accompanied by sparse, vague, and inconsistent written documentation. While the provenience is cited as Duala, it is not always clear if this term refers to the ethnic group, the location of the same name, (4) or all groups, no matter their ethnicity, who inhabited the region at the time of collection.

Canoe Paddles

The Duala artistic corpus includes unique traditions such carved canoe-prow ornaments. Their canoe paddles, however, share correspondences with several Nigerian coastal groups, especially those of the Niger Delta. Since the nineteenth century, European ethnological institutions have acquired Duala paddles (pai) whose leaf-shaped blades were decorated with precisely incised designs that were then filled in with polychrome paints. These designs include stripes and geometric motifs as well as trilobe and quatralobe patterns. Duala craftsmen still produce similarly elaborated paddles (Fig. 1).

The Duala also claim a tradition of carved pierced paddles, examples of which are seen in museum collections--one example in the Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde, Munich, was collected in Douala in 1888. This type has a leaf-shaped blade distinguished by carved openwork designs (Fig. 3). Such pai often depict animals, such as the chameleon, which appear on the blade or haft or both. They may have a short shaft or a blade at each end.

For the Duala, the paddle historically served a socioeconomic purpose. The number of pai showed how many paddlers a man had, and thus his wealth. The pai is a personal object, and often the owner engraves his name or his father's on the blade (Harter 1960:76). Maria Kecskesi writes that the painted paddles in the collection of the Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde, Munich, were used in festive boat processions and regattas (1987:228), a claim substantiated by archival photographs. She doubts, however, that all surviving examples were so used, adding that by the turn of the century these were being made for sale to Europeans. Today in dugout racing competitions (Figs. 4, 5), the paddlers and the prowman use pai with narrow blades and handles approximately four to four and one-half feet in length; the sternman's broad-bladed paddle, which also serves as a rudder, is about five and one-half feet long. The prowman and sternman are known for their navigational skills and their power to harness the energy of the water spirits that propel the dugouts to victory. Thus, their pai are special both in size and vested power.

Paddles are metaphors for direct involvement in Duala social and religious life, symbols that describe a man's profession, rank, and economic status. They appear in situations removed from their utilitarian function, where they are transformed into objects associated with prestige and ritual. An early-twentieth-century photograph taken in Duala territory shows a pai with a blade painted in horizontal stripes and located in front of what Henri Nicod described as a "fetisher's hut" (1948: fig. 18). Nicod wrote of coastal Cameroon men, Duala among them, whose knowledge of various plant medicines enabled them to contact powerful spirits, including those that inhabit local waterways (1948:47-49). The painted paddles may symbolize that connection.

Water-spirit beliefs abound in the Niger Delta, Cross River, and Wouri estuary. Duala performers and celebrants carry paddles in a wide variety of water-spirit performances. Ngondo, a ceremony celebrating Duala identity and ethnicity, includes water-spirit rites (Figs. 6, 13). At the funerals of important men, mourners dance with painted and pierced paddles, characterizing the deceased as a fisherman, race paddler, ritual specialist, wealthy entrepreneur, or all of the above. Duala women carry paddles during marches and dances as demonstrations of their unity (Fig. 6). The leader of a women's group frequently dances with a pai, symbolizing her position as the navigator for those assembled. She opens a path for the dancers following her.

Elaborated paddles like those used by the Duala have been attributed to the Urhobo, Itsekiri, and Ijo of the Niger Delta For example, the booty from the 1897 Benin Punitive Expedition included a carved pierced paddle identified as "Jekri," or Itsekiri (Pitt-Rivers 1976 [1900]: pl. XXXIII, fig. 257). Reginald Granville suggested that similar paddles collected among the Itsekiri were probably carved by the Ijo (1899: pl. VI, figs. 1, 2). Kecskesi describes three such pieces as "typical ceremonial examples from the Itsekiri, Urhobo, and Ijo" (1987:229).

In the 1960s Robin Horton documented an elaborated paddle as part of a Kalabari Ijo water-spirit ritual (1965: fig. 26). His photograph of the interior of a Kalabari "minor water-spirit" shrine shows implements such as fishing spears and paddles that reflect simultaneously the economic and spiritual "life in the creeks" (1965: fig. 22). When associated with the spiritual world, these mundane objects are transformed through the surface carving and painted patterns. Striped paddles similar to the Duala variety also appear in other Ijo water-spirit shrines photographed by Horton (1965: fig. 67) and Martha Anderson (1983: fig. 25).

Horizontal Masks

Masks are another art tradition of coastal Cameroon that shares styles and spiritual associations with those of the Niger Delta. Most of the Duala masks collected by Europeans were painted horizontal headdresses, and these now exemplify the Duala masquerade tradition (Fig. 7). Currently, these masks are identified according to particular formal elements. These include engraved geometric designs, in bright European paints and a flat morphology, but a variety of forms exist in the Duala corpus of horizontal masks. (5) The element that ties them together is polychrome paint.

It is presumed today that the masks were worn atop the performer's head with the image facing upward and generally not visible to the audience. This position is shown in a drawing in Leo Frobenius's Die Masken und Geheimbunde Afrikas (1898: taf. 9). The headdress has either a collar carved from its underside or a collar of braided or twisted raffia fitted into a carved depression for the head; raffia cords passed through the collar were tied under the performer's chin.

The Duala headdresses conform in type to those found on the West African coast, especially in the Niger Delta. Most Duala examples depict more than one animal stacked up on the horizontal plane of the headpiece (Fig. 2). Such combinations often refer to buffalo, antelope, and humans. This multiple representation is consistent with Ijo artistic conventions. Additional shared formal considerations include a smooth, round forehead, a humanoid nose that bisects the vertical facial plane, projecting ovoid or round eyes, and an open mouth with teeth bared. Conceptual parallels also exist: for instance, the aquatic creature surmounted by a human head represented on a headdress of the Ijo Ekine water-spirit association (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; see Drewal 1986: fig. 7) appears on two Duala examples shown here (Figs. 8, 9). In the Duala headdresses, the animal is an antelope, perhaps the African water chevrotain that was once common in the Delta and the Wouri estuary (Drewal 1986:39).

The Duala horizontal masks documented in European museum collections and photo archives reveal numerous unexplained formal variations. A few of these works emerge as anomalies; others are found in greater numbers, but still do not exhibit the canonical criteria for Duala artifacts. Among such uncharacteristic masquerade forms attributed to the Duala is a headdress with a superstructure of human figures. Several examples of this type are distributed in German and Swiss museum collections. The surmounting figures, usually seated or standing, have torsos carved from one piece of wood to which separately carved arms have been added. They often hold a baton and/or a carved wooden beverage glass or bottle (Fig. 10). Similarly constructed independent figures, whose function remains unexplained, have been also attributed to the Duala (Fig. 11). Their pierced hands indicate that they were intended to hold objects.

These representations, both freestanding and on headdress superstructures, of the human figure with jointed limbs and the gesture of holding a baton or bottle suggest non-Duala influences. I propose two sources: 1) the Ibibio figural and puppet tradition, examples of which were photographed by Jill Salmons (1977:12), and 2) Ijo sculpture, especially full figures, such as the seated representation of a lineage founder documented by Horton in Okrika Town (Fig. 12), and figures on the ancestral screen, nduen fobara, of the Kalabari Ijo. The facial features of the Duala sculptures differ from those in the Ibibio and Ijo works, but the similarities in their articulation, gesture, and form, such as the stylized egg-shaped head, remain striking. G.I. Jones (1963:v) de fined the Eastern Delta, in which he included Kalabari, Bonny, Nembe, and Okrika, all Ijo peoples. He noted that "in their relations with the European world this formed part of a wider area which included Old Calabar and some villages on the Cameroons River." Horton proposed that artistic exchanges occurring among the Kalabari resulted from influences beyond the Ijo-Kalabari frontiers:

   Kalabari style diverged from that of Ijo proper through exposure to
   influences deriving from the non-Ijo cultures on the delta margins. Such
   influences, he wrote, probably came in, ... through Andoni, Ogoni, Ibibio
   and Ibo fragments. The Kalabari imported new masquerades for their ekine
   dances ... some masquerades almost certainly came from non-Ijo neighbours.
   (Horton 1965:42)

Given the mobility of coastal peoples, their proximity to one another, and the ethnic diversity of coastal Cameroon, such cross-cultural exchanges probably occurred freely and frequently, and included the Duala. As Nigel Barley observed, Kalabari woodworkers mastered European carpentry skills that greatly influenced their nduen fobara (1988:80). William Fagg also suggested a carpentry tradition for the screens (1964:87). One source may have been the Basel Mission-trained Ga cooper-carpenters of Accra, who worked along the west coast on ships, hulks, and in factories (Kingsley 1897:645). European joinery and carpentry influences probably contributed to the variety of Duala masking forms as well: Basel Missionaries also established schools for Duala youths. Furniture production based on contemporary European models was one such enterprise.

Despite discrepancies and incomplete descriptions found in the early literature, we know that masquerades occurred in conjunction with Duala male secret associations known as losango (sing. isango). Frobenius commented on the bewildering array of these in the region in the nineteenth century:

   One can almost say secret societies sprout in northern [forest] Cameroon as
   mushrooms after a spring rain. Unfortunately, they disappear even faster,
   without having been documented. One Basel missionary learned over forty
   names of secret societies and another still more. (Frobenius1898:75)

Losango reflected the nineteenth-century Duala social system, which was organized according to a person's status as freeborn, half-free, or slave. Each category had its own association. Slaves used their own losango not to gain freedom from the Duala but to partake in the Duala trading enterprise. German colonial administrators and missionaries recognized such associations as governmental bodies that interfered with their own control over the region (Ittmann 1957:135). They took great pains to penetrate each isango's secrets in order to subvert power and render it "harmless" (Ittmann 1955:86); for this reason, missionaries confiscated masks and secret association regalia at Susa, a Duala slave village.

Nineteenth-century European accounts mention four major Duala losango; three of them--Ekongolo, Elong, and Jengu--used masking forms, but information is inconsistent as to the types worn. (6) In one of the earliest descriptions of specially costumed, but not necessarily masked, performers (Allen 1848, vol. 2:240-41), the author likened the performance, witnessed in 1841, to one he had seen in southeast Nigeria known as Egbo. In 1884, Max Buchner, the curator of the Staatliches Museum fur Volkerkunde, Munich, witnessed a Duala Ekongolo society funeral and noted a masquerader wearing a carved wooden antelope mask with horns. He observed that European and African fabrics decorated the masquerader's "body" (Buchner 1887:26). Buchner's description of this masking form became the basis for subsequent identifications associating horizontal painted headdresses with Ekongolo.

Jengu, a water-spirit cult connected with healing, is still found throughout the Littoral and Southwest Provinces. Membership is not gender restricted. Among the Duala today, however, Jengu is predominantly a male organization, and mixed-gender membership may be a relatively recent phenomenon. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century travelers and missionaries observed Jengu rites along the coast. In ceremonies held in dugouts along the Wouri River, its tributaries, and in the coves and islands, men and women summoned the water spirits, offering them food and drink.

In recent times, Duala water-spirit rituals have been held publicly in conjunction with the Jengu celebration called Ngondo. A photograph of the 1963 Ngondo water-spirit ceremony shows a dugout adorned with raffia palms (Fig. 13). The men's regalia includes raffia skirts. Several participants wear plant material around their heads, and three have their heads covered with raffia palm. In a 1972 photograph of a public Ngondo Jengu ceremony (Fig. 6), five figures wade out into the water. (7) The leader of the procession carries raffia palm, and three followers hold small paddles. All are dressed in raffia skirts--one wears an additional skirt made of leaves--and four participants wear raffia capes. The headdresses of two people on the right are made of raffia and plant material which extend to the shoulders and cover the face. The headdresses appear to include carved figures ill the typical Duala style, with slender curved images such as those seen in a nineteenth-century Duala Elong society shrine (Fig. 14) and an Ijo headdress in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As late as the mid-twentieth century, written accounts specify that the principal person representing the association always appeared masked during the course of the Jengu meetings. He or she was called ekale, or "masked cult dancer" (Bureau 1963/64:112; Ittmann 1957:139, 1976:151). Unfortunately, the accounts do not describe the masks.

In 1893 the Field Museum in Chicago acquired a wooden model of a Duala dugout in which the central figure wears a horizontal headdress. During my stay in Cameroon, Duala informants identified the replica as a water-spirit ceremony dugout, bolo ba jengu. The mask worn by the standing figure resembles one collected by members of the Basel Mission in Bodiman among the Ewodi, a Duala-related people. It has the incised lozenge patterns of Duala headdresses, although they do not act as frames for polychrome paint, as they do for the Duala.

One is tempted to see correspondences among Duala (and Cameroon neighbors), Ijo, and Ijebu Yoruba water-spirit ceremonies. According to Henry Drewal, the Ijebu (and other coastal Yoruba and Yoruba-related groups--Ilaje, Ikale, and Itsekiri) acquired their water-spirit masquerades from the Ijo. The parallel antelope masking forms of the Ijebu Agbo society are associated with a water spirit of Ijo derivation based on the African water chevrotain (Drewal 1986:32, 38; 1989:144). The Ijebu Agbo masquerade shares affinities with the Kalabari Ijo Ekine festival (Drewal 1986:36) and the Duala Jengu ritual: in all cases a large boat visits the water-spirit shrine up river, and spirits are summoned to visit their hosts. The geometricism of sharp planar edges, facial features projecting from a flat surface, and emphatic horizontality are paralleled in the sculptural forms of the Kalabari, the Ijo, and other Niger Delta groups, and the Duala and related coastal peoples; these characteristics are intrusive, however, in the Yoruba sculptural style (Drewal 1986:37).

Body Masquerades

The Duala no longer produce carved wooden headdresses or perform with them. My interviews in 1989 revealed that most Duala did not know that painted horizontal masks were part of their cultural heritage. (8) They claimed a different masking tradition, one that nineteenth-century Europeans rarely collected but frequently observed--a constructed form that entirely encloses the masquerader. Written accounts and archival photographs document several types: a series of hoops covered with fabrics; a woven-raffia tower-like construction, sometimes covered with fabrics or raffia palm; a textile body mask representing an animal; and a knotted body suit. Basel Missionary Jakob Keller documented a Duala mask in which the entire body was hidden by an animal construction fashioned from cloth. In festivals, the animals represented those associated with the major lineages (Keller 1892-1907:78).

My Duala informants acknowledged the tower-like masquerade. In the Southwest and Littoral Provinces it was made of woven raffia fiber supported by a masquerader underneath. While he danced, he raised and lowered the structure with a set of telescoping poles.

Elong Society Tower Masquerades

Two Duala associations, Ekongolo and Elong, performed masquerades that included the tower type. Early observers describe Elong as a very powerful organization that superseded ordinary laws and "exercised a great tyranny" (Gippert 1911:10; Smith 1868:608-9; Hawker 1909:76-77). (9) Max Buchner believed Elong to be among the most important Duala associations (1887:25). In 1868 a Baptist missionary wrote about an Elong masquerade as "a man under an immense crinoline with a figurehead covered with white buff and gaudy trappings," which threatened his property and his life (Smith 1868:608-9).

By contrast, in 1897 Jakob Keller described Elong as an "association of joy," and the society's decorated tower as beautiful but innocuous (1892-1907:74); and still another observer described Elong as an important Duala shrine (Gippert 1911:110). An early-twentieth-century field photograph identified as an "Elong Klub Fetisch" (Fig. 14) depicts a masquerade construction that conforms to written descriptions, as does a color sketch in Deutsches Kolonial--Lexikon (1920, vol. 2: opp. 196). Specific rites were reserved for initiated members of Elong, and the uninitiated were often prohibited from viewing its masquerade (Ittmann 1953:17). Members held Elong rites within specially erected compounds, concealed behind temporary walls (Buchner 1887:25). In 1989 my Duala informants identified a late-nineteenth-century photograph of a tiered construction located behind a fence as Elong in its special enclosure (Fig. 15). This photograph also corroborates nineteenth-century descriptions.

Today, Dualas describe Elong as a public celebration. It is remembered as a beautiful masquerade; to characterize a woman as Elong is to say that she is exceptionally beautiful. As in the nineteenth century, informants tell of an Elong tower lavishly decorated with donated silks, velvets, and other ornaments (Keller 1892-1907:74; personal communication, Rev. Eugene Malo, Douala, 1989). The masquerader danced through the town accompanied by drummers, singers, and celebrants, its extravagant appearance and display of expensive fabrics allowing neighboring villagers to gauge the wealth of their hosts.

Ekongolo Society Tower Masquerades

European travelers in Douala around 1850 referred to Ekongolo, which also used a tower-like masquerade, as an important society in the region. Thomas Hutchinson described its "spirituality" (Fig. 16) as a "series of hoops, surrounded with grass cloth; the tenant inside of which has the power of lowering or elevating the structure by an elastic contrivance, known only to themselves" (1858:170). (10) The Ekongolo masquerader appeared before a general audience, but at a specific signal those who were uninitiated fled to escape punishment for being present. In his 1884 account of an Ekongolo funeral ceremony, Buchner (1887:26) observed that the masquerader's "body" was decorated with European and African fabrics.

Ekongolo and associated masquerades were widespread throughout the littoral and coastal forest zones among groups well known to the Duala. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ekongolo was described as the primary closed association of freemen in Aboland, not far to the north of Douala (Wurm 1904:17). The Kundu peoples of Nyososo, about sixty miles northwest of the city, also participated in Ekongolo, but it is not known if they (and related forest groups) performed in raffia constructions surmounted by wooden horizontal headdresses associated with the Duala Ekongolo.

Similarities with the Ekongolo tower are found in the Elephant society (Njoku Male) of the Bakweri of Buea and Limbe, Southwest Province. Its performers wear body masks consisting of large, spreading skirts of palm frond, and the rest of the body completely enclosed in loose headdresses of sacking with a shaggy raffia covering. From these extend "tusks" of ironwood, held inside by the dancer, who can extend the whole headdress to twice its height by raising the tusks above the head (Ardener 1959:34). Senior members of the society pretend to hunt the elephants, which in turn charge the hunters and strike their tusks furiously into the ground (Ardener 1959:34). The Basel Mission Photo Archives contains late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century photographs that document masqueraders wearing body suits resembling the Bakweri type. It is not known, however, if they were members of Njoku Male or Ekongolo.

Tower-type masquerades associated with Ekongolo persisted well into the twentieth century. In 1989 the Reverend Eugene Malo described Ekongolo as a secret society that performed publicly but without its former threatening aspects. In response to my questions about masquerading, Rev. Malo drew an Ekongolo mask he had seen perform in 1957 at Mangamba, not far from Douala. His sketch of a raffia tower is similar to a sketch in the accession records of the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Leipzig, illustrating a raffia body mask, now lost, that had been collected in Douala. A Basel Missionary collected the same type of raffia body mask in the late nineteenth century at Susa (about twenty miles northwest of Douala), documented in a photo in the Basel Mission Archives (Fig. 17). Although I did not show Rev. Malo that photograph, his illustration includes the same round vertical carving. Roy Sieber (personal communication, April 9, 1998) observed that this carving and the raffia topknot in the museum accession and field drawings resemble the uppermost portions of the cloth ancestral mask found in central and southwestern Nigeria. Ekpo Eyo performed in such a cloth-covered tower 0communication, April 10, 1998).

Parallel masquerade traditions involving similar body mask constructions are found outside Cameroon in the Niger Delta and the coastal lagoons. According to Henry Drewal, two such forms worn during Ijebu Agbo ceremonies--one a "tall conical basketry frame covered in lavish brocades" and another involving a series of hoops--have clear antecedents among the Ijo and other Delta peoples (Drewal 1986:39; 1989:144).

DISSEMINATION POSSIBILITIES

Economic and historical circumstances promoting wealth fortified spiritual institutions and encouraged the adoption of ritual objects along the Guinea Coast, east and west. I propose that, in addition to shared beliefs in water spirits, two factors aided the dissemination of masking forms and traditions among the coastal and Delta cultures of Cameroon and Nigeria: trade and temporary and permanent migration patterns.

Trade by Canoe

Artifacts and ideas leapfrogged along the coast via African entrepreneurs and European trading ships. (11) In coastal Cameroon and the Niger Delta, the canoe was critical to commercial success (Smith 1970). Duarte Pereira Pacheco, in one of the earliest observations of dugouts along the Niger Delta, described a large village (possibly Bonny) of 2,000 inhabitants and their canoes. He noted that the "bigger canoes here are made from a single trunk, [and] are the largest in the Ethiopias of Guinea, some are large enough to hold 80 men, and they come from a hundred leagues or more up this river ..." (1937:132).

In the nineteenth century the Duala transported slaves, ivory, and palm oil to the coast in eighty-foot dugouts (Buchner 1887:33; Romer 1890:13). An incident that occurred in the Wouri estuary around 1830 between English traders and Duala and Kru paddlers speaks to the size of the canoes and the maritime skills of indigenous peoples.

   The two [Duala] Chiefs [Bell and Akwa] accompanied us on board to witness a
   race between a canoe paddled by 65 [Duala] men and Colonel Nicoll's Deal
   galley paddled by 22 Kroomen. The canoe was much larger than any I had seen
   amongst the Eboes, and measured 65 feet in length; an immense length for
   the single tree of which she was composed and that tree hard wood.
   Notwithstanding the exertions of her crew, she was easily beaten by the
   galley, to the great astonishment of the natives, and the triumph of our
   Kroomen. (Laird & Oldfield [1837] 1971, vol. 1:288-89)

G.I. Jones (1965), Robin Horton (1965), and Nigel Barley (1988) have written extensively on the importance of the canoe to the Kalabari, among whom the social organization referred to as the canoe house replaced local descent of trading families. More than a trading corporation controlled by an independent trader, the canoe house served as a military unit manning a thirty-man war canoe (Horton 1965:46).

From the mid-seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the Duala exercised a monopoly as intermediaries between European merchants on the coast and African inland suppliers. Their strategic location was not the only reason for their commanding commercial advantage. At the time European trade expanded, the dugout was already the vehicle of Duala communication and their economic mode. Fishing expeditions had given them the managerial and organizational skills required to gather large quantities of goods from distant regions. Though small in population, the Duala dominated canoe navigation on the Cameroon coastal rivers, controlling trading enterprises from the Wouri estuary to the Sanaga River (Austen 1983:3). Duala trade reached north into the Grassfields and the Bamum trading network (Wilhelm 1981:492), where European goods, handled by the Duala, were known well before German annexation in 1884 (Wilhelm 1981:492; Rowlands 1979:4).

The canoe provided an important communications link between Cameroon and the Niger Delta. The Duala were present linguistically, if not physically, in territories outside their Wouri estuary homeland. Word lists compiled by Dutch traders in the seventeenth century document the Duala language in Calabar and the Cross River (A. Jones 1995:203-9).

Duala traders remained active in British Cameroon territory after the World War I partition (Migeod 1925:49, 62, 69-70). Trading connections into the coastal and forest zones of Nigeria were then and are now in operation. Efik and Duala traders, moving goods in and out of the Cross River and Wouri estuary, knew of long-established alternate routes that bypassed Europeans on the coast (Wilkie & Simmons 1956:38, 43). E.J. Alagoa (1970) suggests that while Europeans accelerated intercultural exchanges, the structures for such transfers were in place in the Delta before their arrival. Such was the case in the Wouri estuary.

Migration Patterns

The spread of the masking traditions under discussion can also be attributed to the continual flow of peoples into and out of coastal Cameroon. Douala has been the site of a large non-Cameroonian population ever since European contact. African foreigners residing in Douala and environs today include Nigerians (Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Ijo, Efik), Ghanaians, and ethnic groups from Togo and the Republic of Benin. That phenomenon is repeated along the coast. Fishermen from Nigeria (Ijo, Efik, Ejagham, Yoruba), Ghana, and the Republic of Benin live among autochthonous Cameroonians in Limbe and Bimbia.

Most African foreigners were in the service of traders, missionaries, and government officials (Buchner 1887:77, 104-6). Hausa traders and soldiers were stationed on the coast. German administrators and traders employed "Lagos" laborers in large numbers (Scholl 1886:75-77; Bundesarchiv Koblenz 7432:76-77). While the Duala population remained constant, other groups increased in number. Basel Mission-trained artisans from what is now Ghana were indispensable to European traders engaged in commercial activities on the Cameroon coast (Harford 1899:567).

Figures from the 1880s record a Douala population of 20,000, about 13,000 of them designated as non-Duala slaves (Johnston 1908, vol. 1:31). Many worked for the Duala, supplying labor and food for workers on palm-oil plantations. German and British plantation administrators encouraged the influx of large numbers of non-Duala workers. Edwin Ardener (1996:158) assessed the number of fishermen in the Victoria division in the early twentieth century to be about 7,500, mostly Duala, Ibibio, and Ijo. Migrant Nigerians in the same region, living in accommodations provided by the Cameroons Development Corporation, numbered 24,564 (Ardener 1996:166).

European commercial activities encouraged intercultural exchanges. For instance, those between the Ijebu and the Duala may have been transmitted by Ijo, since Ijo fishing villages that supplied food to government plantations have flourished along the Cameroon coast since at least the nineteenth century. Artistic exchanges may have been more direct. German colonial population records note "Lagosleute" (people from Lagos) in Douala (Bundesarchiv Koblenz 4732:76-77). Two helmet masks in the collection of the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Dresden, clearly conform to those used in the Yoruba Gelede society. Museum accession records identify the masks as Duala, but the designation may refer to location and not the ethnic identity of the producers. Duala artists may have carved the masks; or possibly they were made elsewhere and transported to Douala; or outsiders may have carved them in Douala.

The Kru Connection

Kru workers from Liberia and Sierra Leone were the most numerous of the alien African peoples who lived and worked along the Cameroon coast in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if not earlier (Bundesarchiv Koblenz 7432:76-77). (12) These laborers were frequently referred to as "Krooboys," but over time their specific ethnic identity became blurred. The Krooboys, or Kroo, represented many different peoples recruited from eastern Liberia, Sierra Leone, and present-day Cote d'Ivoire. Europeans hired as mariners men originating from the five towns identified with the Kru name (Martin 1982:1). (13) Migrant workers came from the Kru and Grebo of Grand Cess and the Grebo and other groups inhabiting the region around Cape Palmas and areas in Cote d'Ivoire. Later, other peoples from the interior as well as from western Liberia who were hired as migrant laborers came to be known as Krooboys (Martin 1982:1). Any reconstruction of Kru ethnicity and history is, at best, difficult (Brooks 1972:71).

The Kru were indispensable to European success in Africa, and constituted "the backbone of white effort" especially in West Africa (Kingsley 1897). They were employed as deckhands and laborers on European ships plying the coast. According to George Brooks, "the earliest reference to Kru shipboard employment ... is on a Spanish vessel which stopped at Elmina in February 1645" (1972:2, n. 2). G.I. Jones (1961) accounted for approximately 2,000 Kru laborers hired annually in the Niger and Cross River Deltas by the mid-nineteenth century. Many returned home and took foreign artistic conventions with them, including those of the Niger Delta and environs.

In the early nineteenth century, British Anti-Slavery patrols contributed to the transmission of Ijo conventions when they intercepted slaving ships and deposited the freed men and women, which included Ijo and other Delta peoples, in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Dike 1959:8-10; G.I. Jones 1963:74-75). Both G.I. Jones (1961) and Lou Ann Lambeth (1968) observed the parallels between Ijo and Kru masking forms. Arnold Rubin noted that the abstract, austere, and additive style of the Ijo offers a striking contrast to the smoother, more naturalistic styles found among the Mende, Dan, and Guro-Baule which surround the Kru complex. He suggested that the "impact of Ijaw [Ijo] style may even have extended from Nigeria as far as southeastern Liberia" (1976:22), proposing the Kru as the distributors of Ijo artistic forms. These masking forms then traveled eastward to coastal Cameroon, the routes of dissemination being from both Ijo and Kru to Duala. Many Duala masks are reminiscent of the horizontal Ijo mask style combined with the Kru style of surface protrusions. As Patrick McNaughton stated, the "flat elongated surfaces and tubular eyes and mouth that typify many of these southern Nigerian masks seem echoed in the Kru and Grebo masks we know from Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire, even if the latter compositions are not worn horizontally" (1991:85). The same mask type is often identified in the literature as either Kru or Grebo.

Pierre Harter made clearcut distinctions between the stylistic characteristics of the two peoples, citing the flat-surface type, especially with multiple tubular eyes, as "Kru masking type 2" (1991:64, photo 8). Monni Adams identified a mask similar to Harter's example as Kru, and proposed the Kru as the disseminators of this particular style (1995:465). Harter further proposed the flat-surfaced, multiple-eyed mask with horns extending from the back of the form as "Kru masking type 3" (1991:67, photo 9). Masks similar to that type are illustrated in Bernard Holas's book on the Kru (1980: fig. 2); another, with a slightly extended forehead, is pictured in Westafricanishe Masken (Krieger & Kutscher 1960: fig. 16).

The resemblance of Kru multiple-eyed masking forms to the terracotta mask, also with multiple eyes, from Ke, an archaeological site in the eastern Niger Delta, is impressive (Anozie 1988: pl. 6.6). Among Duala and other West African peoples, multiple eyes are associated with spiritual vision that transcends the physical world (Adams 1995:465). Seeing beyond the visible world is a powerful component of the Duala belief known as ndimsi, which refers to four eyes. Multiple eyes also appear on Duala masks (Fig. 18). Archaeological discoveries not only provide evidence for the antiquity of this masking tradition, but also add credence to a Niger Delta origin.

Fernando Po Island, now known as Bioko, located about twenty miles off the Cameroon coast, constitutes an important geographical link in the dissemination of forms and ideas. Many of the West African colonists who worked on the cocoa plantations established by the Spanish were Kru, "the mainstay of agriculture and other activities on the island of Fernando Po" (Sundiata 1975:25). Some of these Kru never returned home. Other ethnic groups working on the island included coastal Cameroonians (Sundiata 1996) and Ijo (E. J. Alagoa, personal communication, April 10, 1998). The historical Ijo-Kru-Duala links are still seen today. According to Martha Anderson, an Ijo man she met pirated goods between Bioko, Cameroon, and the Niger Delta during the Biafran War. Philip Peek told me of meeting an Ijo man who spoke only Spanish and was returning to the Delta to learn Ijo (Anderson and Peek, personal communications, April 9, 1998). The Bioko link is a fruitful one because of the easy access to the mainland by an island population for whom the canoe was the mode of travel. It is the largest island in the region, but only one of many, each of which served as embarkation and landing points for coastal peoples.

Of course, other factors figured in the dissemination of ideas and forms. Patronage, for example, would have played a significant role. Were the superstructure headdresses and pierced paddles produced by Duala artists, or were they commissioned by Duala patrons from non-Duala craftsmen? Both types of exchange surely occurred. Just as the Kalabari imported new masquerades for their dances, some of which certainly came from non-Ijo neighbors (Horton 1965:43), so the Duala adopted masking forms and masquerades from surrounding peoples. Photographs taken in the Duala area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict Duala masquerade performers wearing costumes similar to the Ekpe knitted suits more familiar among the peoples of the Cross River region. Basel Missionaries recorded similarly attired performers in coastal Cameroon (Fig. 19). Strong beliefs in regional water-spirits that were in place before European arrival served as a foundation on which to graft new masquerades and related artistic forms, modified to satisfy local beliefs and specific community identities.

The parallels and correspondences of the artistic traditions discussed here indicate a shared art history along the Nigerian and Cameroonian coasts that includes the coastal lagoons, Niger Delta, and Wouri estuary. Although Europeans found the continuous zone of coastal mangrove swamps impenetrable, cultural exchanges between peoples of this region were unimpeded. Today, political and ethnic boundaries remain as porous as they were in the past. In this arena of still-fluid cultural interaction exists an international style, a complex of art forms that traveled along the coast and inland waterways, cultivated by similar religious beliefs and promoted by shared economic experiences.

[This article was accepted for publication in September 2001.]

(1.) "George" is the Ndoki Igbo (Akwete clan) term for both the actual Indian madras cloth and their woven imitations of it. Because of the close historical ties with the Ndoki, the Ibani Ijo also occasionally refer to Indian madras as George cloth. Most Eastern Ijo people, however, tend to call it injiri (Lisa Aronson, personal communication, April 9, 1998).

(2.) Various studies have concentrated on masks and their distribution in the Nigeria-Cameroon coastal region and beyond. In 1969 Lou Ann Lambeth, a Sieber graduate student, addressed coastal horizontal masking traditions in West Africa, notably a "Creek International" style, that Robert F. Thompson proposed in a lecture at Indiana University on February 28, 1968 (see Lambeth 1969). G. I. Jones (1984) included the arts of southern and western Cameroon with the arts of eastern Nigeria. Sidney Kasfir (1985) studied the formal aspects of the Idoma ancestral masquerade in central and southwestern Nigeria. Simon Ottenberg and Linda Knudsen (1985) documented the dissemination of the Ekpe masquerade in Southwest Province, Cameroon. Douglas Fraser (1962) and Monni Adams (1963) wrote early studies of horizontal and composite animal-headed masks, and recently, Patrick NcNaughton (1991, 1992) addressed art history and horizontal headdresses.

(3.) American scholars distinguish between the name of the city, Douala, and that of the people, Duala. In the German literature, however, one finds the spelling Duala for both, while the French use Douala.

(4.) The city of Douala was known as Cameroons in English and Kamerun in German in 1884, when Germany annexed the territory. It was referred to as Duala when Germany expanded its territorial claim into the interior.

(5.) Duala horizontal headdresses share affinities with those of the Abo from Mangamba, 30 miles north of Douala. The Abo played an important role in the Duala trade network, and Mangamba was a noted carving center. The Abo forms are painted with black, white, and red pigments. The painted patterns on Abo headdresses usually follow the contours of the image, emphasizing the animal's features. In contrast, those on Duala headdresses are geometric embellishments of the surface. Buffalo images prevail among the Abo. The horns are rounded instead of extending straight back from the head, a characteristic of Duala masks. Many of the Abo headdresses and several of the Duala now in museum collections include a tongue fashioned from an iron hoe blade.

(6.) Another secret association, Mungi, named after one of the most feared animal spirits of the forest, was the policing arm of the Duala chiefs. Special costumes and body painting are associated with this society, but masking forms do not appear to have been part of Mungi's ritual regalia.

(7.) The Cameroon government banned public Ngondo Jengu ceremonies in 1981. Ngondo was reinstated in 1991, the year Ngondo Jengu ceremonies reemerged.

(8.) Some Duala did not recognize that the masks were worn horizontally, but said they were worn vertically and concealed the face. Others denied the tradition, attributing the masks to completely different ethnic groups, such as the Bamileke, a Grassfields people located to the northeast.

(9.) Basel Missionaries observed a type of Elong among the Abo, but ultimately this masquerade became identified as primarily a Duala performance (Wurm 1904:14).

(10.) Hutchinson (1858:170) also described Ekongolo as an association on the order of the Nigerian Egbo society.

(11.) As Patrick McNaughton notes, "Commerce is an obvious wellspring of agency" (1992:79). Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor claim trade as an important factor in the exchange of ideas, citing the example of Igbo long-range professional traders (1984:7). The Igbo participated as traders, citizens, and leaders in river towns and trading centers beyond their borders and disseminated both an Igbo visual idiom and non-Igbo artistic forms and ideas.

(12.) German colonial archives include population figures of men from West and Central Africa living in Douala at the turn of the nineteenth century. The statistics, organized by country of origin and occupation, do not include migrants working on the German plantations or seasonal fishermen. The largest non-Cameroonian population at the time consisted of 655 harbor workers and ship laborers from Liberia, presumably Kru and possibly Mende. Both Kru and Mende men were documented in Douala during the nineteenth century (Bundesarchiv Koblenz 7432:76-77).

(13.) Settra Kru, Nana Kru, Little Kru, Krobah, and King William's Town.

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ROSALINDE G. WILCOX is a professor of art history, Saddleback College, Mission Viejo.