Kwele Erotic

The Kwele, who call themselves Bekwel and turn up in older books as Bakwele, are a forest people of the corner where the Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Cameroon meet. Most outsiders know them through one thing: the heart-shaped masks, whitened with kaolin, that sit in museum cases from Paris to New York. The people who carved them are still there, farming and hunting along the upper Ivindo, the Dja and the Ngoko, around Souanké, Sembé and Ouesso in Congo and Mékambo in Gabon. Their language, also called Bekwel, is Bantu of the Makaa-Njem cluster, which ties them more closely to the Njem and Koonzime of southeastern Cameroon than to their Kota and Fang neighbors on the Gabonese side.

The usual account of how they got there is a nineteenth-century flight. Rivals armed with guns from the coastal slave trade drove them inland, a conflict remembered as the Poupou war, and they regrouped between the Dja and the Ivindo. What they built was loosely held together. A village was a bundle of lineages that had agreed to live together, each with its own head and no chief over the lot, and villages split easily. The counterweight was beete, a ritual cycle called when things went wrong: an epidemic, a run of deaths, failing hunts. Men left for the forest to hunt antelope for a closing meal cooked with protective medicines, while masked figures called ekuk, forest spirits, danced in the village to keep it animated until the hunters came back. The white faces carry the point: white clay stands for light and clear sight, the opposite of the witchcraft blamed for a village's bad luck. Many masks now in collections were never danced at all but hung indoors. Marriage was sealed in iron, with large anchor-shaped forged pieces called mandjong that circulated mainly as bridewealth.

Colonial rule, missions and the cash economy wore beete down over the twentieth century. Most Kwele today are Christian, Catholic or Protestant, with respect for ancestors and worry about witchcraft still working underneath. Daily life runs on cassava and plantain plots, hunting, river fishing and, around Souanké and Sembé, cocoa. Old exchange ties with Baka foragers continue, not always on equal terms. The forest itself is now divided among logging concessions, iron ore prospects and parks such as Odzala-Kokoua, and the Ebola outbreaks of the early 2000s struck this same country around Mékambo and Mbomo. The written record still leans on Leon Siroto's fieldwork from around 1960, which means far more has been published about Kwele masks than about Kwele people now.