The "abia"

Until not long ago, in the forest clearings of Cameroon, and perhaps even further afield, the men engaged passionately in a game of chance in which they might sometimes wager everything they owned and even risk losing their freedom itself.

This game was played with counters, which were generally oval, about three or four by two or three centimetres, cut from the bony seed husk of the fruit of a tree called the elang in Ewondo (Autranella congolensis). These counters were carved on one side and each player had his own. At the start of the game, each player chose one and placed it in a basket which the judge shook and threw on the ground with a certain solemnity.

The winning counter was decided on a "heads-or-tails" basis-as we would call it-, suitably modified so that the game could be played by more than two players. The lucky winner pocketed the sum of the wagers and sang a song or scattered words of triumph in the wind on the theme of the engraving on one side of his counter.

With these short phrases, adorned with onomatopoeia or ideophones and sometimes even sung, the winner celebrated the speed of the antelope in flight, the misfortune of the bat, the dishonesty of a woman or perhaps the memory of some ridiculous or tragic event known to all.

The game was called abia and the counters, mvia. Today it is no longer played. First the German colonial administration (1896) and then the French, with the help of the "civilising" action of the Christian missions, took care to abolish it. This prohibition put an end to one of these societies' chief forms of play, of course, but above all what was lost was a type of artistic expression with its accompanying series of oral expressions which could perhaps be considered an original form of communication combining words and images as we do in our audiovisual media.