Cameroon
Tikar

Bronze bell / lost wax casting
Early 20th Century
Height: 12.5 inches
Idiophone-Struck Directly – Metal Bell

Tikar bronze bell with stylized frog motif finial. Bells often served as alter objects that were usually placed towards the front of ancestral altars where they could be readily rung to signal the commencement of a ceremony.

The Tikar, an ethnic group of about 12,000 people, live in the Cameroon Grasslands, east of the Bamoun. Some of the tribes of the former British province of Bamenda, in the north-west region of the Grasslands, are also considered to be Tikar. They intermarried and mixed with the Tuma, and the Mundop, and founded the first settlement in Bamkin, north of the Mban. From here they exercised a form of ritual hegemony over villages inhabited by other tribes. Sultan Noya of the Bamoun traced the origins of his dynasty back to this first settlement, as do the Bamileke and the Bamenda. Althought the Tikar seem to have brought the art of bronze casting to the western part of the country, and their art is original with no parallel in the Grasslands, one should nevertheless not make the mistake of considering them the only cultural inspiration of the region.

Scholarly research and description by Christa Ellison of Ikenga, Inc.