STATUARY

The statues of the National Museum and the small Cameroonian Museum of Art at Mont-Febe, are made of wood or bronze. This exposes two different technics: sculpture and metal work by the ''lost wax'' method.

African art, or to be more precise Negro African art, is mostly known for its wood sculpture. This sculpture is manifested in Cameroon and everywhere by statues and masks. The wood statues presented in this work belong in most cases to the collection of the National Museum. All these statues bear the fundamental laws of African sculpture. By abstraction and symbolism, the functioning canon is based on the functions and the significance of the different parts of each statue. The wood work is made with a lot of care following a well precised objective which is the Canon.

The symbolism here is very remarkable. Most of the statues symbolize either maternity, royalty or war. They could be compared to a book which illustrates the life and the origin of communities of Bamouns, Bamilekes, Tikar, etc... It is the whole life of the Cameroonian traditional communities, life in which the family (maternity) plays a principal role, the child in these societies is considered as essential and the mother is surrounded with much affecrion.Therefore maternity is the symbol of life.