LA RUE DES ARTISANS

It leads to the Musée des Arts et Traditions bamoun, and is a good place to discover Cameroonian handicrafts and take home some souvenirs. You can watch basket-makers, cabinet-makers and sculptors at work. The visit is a colorful one, with vendors vying with customers to show them their workshop and store, and insisting on selling them something.

In these stores, you'll find masks galore, bronze and wooden objects, drums and reproductions of traditional weapons. Particularly interesting and popular with collectors are the passport masks. These very small masks (barely 12 cm high) once served a purpose. Indeed, when there were no identity papers, the mask-passport was presented at the border between two territories to be able to cross; it was a way of identifying individuals, their social status, but also their ethnic origin. We can also provide you with small furniture items: tables, typical chairs, carved doors and chests, stools adorned with beads and cowries, you name it. Other craftsmen will offer you pottery, drums, pipes or statues, in terracotta or wood, painted or unpainted, representing warriors with menacing faces and important figures from the Bamoun people. Carved and engraved hippopotamus teeth, decorated buffalo horns, terracotta calabashes, leathers and fabrics are also sold.