Portraiture and Photography in Africa by JOHN M PEFFER & Elisabeth L. Cameron

Author:JOHN M PEFFER & Elisabeth L. Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Bamum circa 1900: A Fertile Ground for the Introduction of Portrait Photography

Nineteenth-century Bamum saw the rules of several important kings, among them King Mbuembue (ca. 1820–1840), who expanded the realm of the kingdom by subjugating many small, independent chiefdoms in its orbit. According to the 1952 Histoire et coutumes des Bamum, a chronicle of the Bamum dynasty compiled by King Njoya and several important courtiers in indigenous script during the latter years of his rule (referred to as Chronicle in the following text), Mbuembue brought artists from the defeated kingdoms to the royal court, who excelled in carving, beadworking, and bronze casting. By moving the artists to living quarters adjacent to the palace and having them work exclusively for the court, Mbuembue appropriated the means of production in the visual sphere, only one indication of the importance of the visual in the construction and maintenance of royal might.4 Although the information remains sketchy, these artists most certainly created royal portraits in sculptural form, a practice also common in other kingdoms in the region. Several nineteenth-century large-scale figurative works may well be idealized portraits, memorializing long-forgotten retainers, noble men and women, and even monarchs.5 They were part of a pervasive memory culture which to this day manifests itself in every aspect of Bamum life.

Photography and with it representational portraiture in two-dimensional form arrived in Foumban around the turn of the twentieth century when Kamerun was a German colony.6 It fell on fertile ground and soon found its place in the Palace’s instrumentarium of visualizing, legitimizing, and asserting royal power vis-à-vis the populace of the kingdom and the new players on the local and regional stage—the colonials and Africans from other parts of Kamerun and from more distant West and Central African colonies.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the photographic portrayal of African sitters by African and European photographers, and some from other parts of the world, had well-developed conventions and aesthetic parameters, which reflect what I would call an expanding “photographic culture” shared by peoples along the West and Central African coasts. The innovative and modern nature of the medium itself and the cosmopolitan character of the photographic profession facilitated this wide acceptance. African photographers of diverse origins were highly mobile, establishing businesses along the African coast all the way from Senegal to Angola.7 Some of the most distinguished and successful African photographers even traveled to Europe.8 Their products, the photographs, were portable and could be easily multiplied and transformed into printed formats, even into postcards, which moved from place to place as well.

Bamum was on the periphery of this large photographic ecumene. It should be noted that Foumban, the capital of the kingdom, was some four weeks’ trekking distance from the coastal regions of Cameroon and nearby places such as Calabar—not really an insurmountable distance, especially since well-established trading routes connected the Grassfields with regions beyond. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, royal trading missions brought men in the service of the Palace to the Cameroonian and Nigerian coasts.

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