Bamum Erotic

The Bamum are a kingdom people of the Cameroon Grassfields — the volcanic highlands northwest of Yaoundé where ridges and crater lakes break the country into a patchwork of small chiefdoms. Their seat is Foumban, and unlike most of their neighbors the Bamum have a written history of their own making. Around 1896, King Njoya invented a script — eventually called Shü-mom — to record the kingdom's chronicles, laws, and pharmacopoeia in a Bamum hand rather than in Latin or Arabic letters. The script went through several revisions, dropping from several hundred pictograms toward a tighter syllabary, and remains one of the very few indigenous African writing systems devised in the modern era. Manuscripts in Shü-mom still sit in the Foumban palace archives.

The language itself belongs to the Grassfields branch of Niger–Congo, closely related to the dozens of small Bamileke tongues spoken in the surrounding hills but distinct enough that Bamum and Bamileke are not casually mutually intelligible. Bamum is tonal, like its neighbors, and is the working language of Foumban's markets and palace court alongside French. Religion in the kingdom moves on two tracks. The dynasty converted to Islam in the early twentieth century — Njoya again, after a flirtation with Christianity — and most Bamum today are Muslim, though the older royal cult, with its masked societies and ancestral shrines, has not disappeared so much as braided itself into the Islamic calendar. The biennial Nguon festival, in which the king is ritually called to account by his subjects before being reaffirmed, predates Islam by centuries and is still the kingdom's defining public event.

Bamum craftsmanship has a particular reputation in the region: lost-wax brass casting, beaded thrones and pipes, carved double-faced masks, and the long-stemmed tobacco pipes that show up in nearly every museum collection of Cameroonian art. Foumban's artisan quarter is the most concentrated workshop district in the Grassfields and supplies dealers across West and Central Africa. The kingdom is structurally still a kingdom — the mfon reigns from a palace built in the 1910s in a mixed Sudano-Sahelian and local idiom — operating in parallel with the Cameroonian state rather than against it, an arrangement the Bamum have negotiated, more or less continuously, since the German colonial period.