Photographer: Michaela Oberhofer | Rights management: Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International
Around 1900, kings, dignitaries and heads of families in the grasslands of Cameroon liked to smoke tobacco. The higher the rank of the smoker, the more splendid the pipe had to be. This tobacco pipe is made of cast brass. It is decorated with an image of a small bird, narrow spirals and a hollow cone. Despite its modest size, it shows the high level of casting and metal technology in the Kingdom of Bamum in the early years of the 20th century. It is not clear whether it was ever smoked. Around 1908, the ethnologist Bernhard Ankermann (*1869 - †1943) commissioned dozens of tobacco pipes from local artists during a research trip to Cameroon. He bought other pipes in local markets. They were unused when the then Royal Museum of Ethnology acquired them. Main catalogue: "Tobacco pipe, bowl and pipe cast from brass. Bowl decorated with 2 rows of spirals, a bird sitting on the front surface, a hollow cone formed from spirals on the knee."
