Mankon Erotic

The Mankon are the people of a single kingdom, and the kingdom now sits inside a city. Their fondom covers much of the lower town of Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon's Northwest Region, where the main market and Commercial Avenue stand on Mankon land, while the palace on the outskirts remains the place where identity is settled. To be Mankon is to belong to one of the clans, nine by the usual count, that federated under a single Fon, each clan carrying its own account of where it came from. The language, also called Mankon, belongs to the Ngemba cluster of Grassfields Bantu languages, close kin to the speech of neighboring Bafut, Mundum and Pinyin. Most people also move through the day in Cameroonian Pidgin and English, since this is the Anglophone part of the country.

The Fon is more than a figurehead. The French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Warnier, who worked in Mankon for decades, described him as a pot-king: a body that holds ancestral substance and gives it out, most visibly at the annual palace dance, when he sprays raffia wine from his mouth over his dancing subjects as a blessing. A Fon does not die. He is said to have disappeared, which is how the palace announced the passing of Angwafo III in 2022 after a reign that began in 1959. He was an agronomist by training, a member of parliament, a senior figure in the ruling party, and the author of a memoir, all while Bamenda outside his gates became the birthplace of the country's main opposition party in 1990. His successor, Angwafo IV, inherited the palace, its regulatory society, the Kwifo, and a museum of royal objects opened in the 2000s.

Mankon memory keeps one date close: January 1891, when its fighters, with Bafut allies, routed a German column led by the explorer Eugen Zintgraff and his Bali Nyonga auxiliaries. A punitive expedition a decade later ended that independence, and the German station on the escarpment above the town became Bamenda. Missions followed, and today most Mankon are Christian, whether Catholic, Presbyterian or Baptist, with the Catholic cathedral of the Bamenda archdiocese standing in Mankon itself. Church membership sits alongside obligations to ancestors, compound heads and the palace without much sense of contradiction. Since 2017 the Anglophone conflict has hit Bamenda hard, with lockdown days, shuttered schools and families displaced to Douala, Yaoundé and abroad, where Mankon cultural associations now carry much of the community's work.