Bafaw Erotic

The Bafaw are the people whose land Kumba was built on. The town is the main center of Meme Division in Cameroon's Southwest Region. It grew up in Bafaw country during the colonial era and kept growing, drawing traders, plantation workers and farmers from the Grassfields, from Nigeria and from across Anglophone Cameroon. The Bafaw are a small community by any measure. They are still the town's customary landowners and chiefs, hosts in a place where newcomers far outnumber them. The easiest way to understand who the Bafaw are today is to see them as the original owners of a town full of people from somewhere else.

Their language is usually grouped with that of their Balong neighbors as a single language, Bafaw-Balong. It belongs to the Lundu-Balong group of Bantu languages, a cluster of forest languages near the northwestern edge of the Bantu-speaking world whose relatives include Oroko. Like every small language in the region, it shares ground with English and Cameroonian Pidgin, which carry school, trade and the market. In Kumba, where Pidgin is the language everyone has in common, keeping a small language in daily use takes deliberate effort.

Over the last century, Bafaw history followed the borders drawn over the region. German rule ended during the First World War and Britain took over. The area was then run as part of the Southern Cameroons, attached to Nigeria, until the 1961 plebiscite brought it into Cameroon. The Bafaw paramount ruler Nfon Victor Mukete was part of that story: he was a politician in the Southern Cameroons years, served in Cameroon's Senate in his nineties and lived past 100. Since 2017 the Anglophone crisis, the armed conflict in the Northwest and Southwest, has reached Kumba directly. In 2020 gunmen attacked a school in the town and killed several children.

Most Bafaw are Christian. Presbyterian, Catholic and Baptist congregations have long been established in the area, and church life runs alongside the customary authority of chiefs and village councils rather than replacing it. Outside town, farming is the backbone: cocoa, the cash crop that made Meme an important growing area, plus food crops for Kumba's market. The big public occasions are enthronements and funerals. The community turns out in force, women often in the loose kaba and men in wrapped cloth, and each gathering quietly restates who belongs to this land.