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

African Arts, Spring, 2002 by Rosalinde G. Wilcox

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.