Fertility Doll

The Doayo Inhabit the Northern Province of Cameroon, in the department of Benué-Garoua. Like the Kirdi they are engaged in cattle raising and grazing, which play an important role in their social life and traditions. In a pejorative way they are called “Namji“ by the Peul And it is by this name that they are best known in the Western world.

Among his artistic production are the so-called “dolls” Namji” of a size not exceeding forty centimeters and in multiple forms. These dolls have the same symbolism as the famous Akwa Ba dolls. Ashantiprovide fertility and fertility, both for women and for fields. For this reason they participate in fertility rites that are celebrated for the benefit of sterile women. Infertility is the worst thing that can happen to an African woman, it is her worst disgrace. Women wear them suspended from their necks or against their belly in order for their magical powers to act. Also, touching the belly of the carrier transmits its magic, that is, its ability to enhance fertility. Thus, women who have not had children touch the mothers' wrists to bring them luck and become pregnant.

Women give them many care and attentions and cover these figures usually from several rows of colorful beads and beads that cross the chest and back or surround the waist. The older ones carry ornaments of cauris, seeds, grey-grey (amulets) and all kinds of magical talismans in order to exercise the greatest possible power. When deacralized, they serve as a toy for girls who train to be mothers and carry them behind their backs, in the way of African mothers.

These dolls have remained unknown until relatively recently. The Namji or Doayo are an animist people living in the mountains of northern Cameroon. As is traditional in many other African villages, the smith carves them, with stylized and elemental shapes, with arms perpendicular to the trunk.

Pregnant women cannot fix their eyes on people or deformed things to prevent their children from being like them, on the contrary their children will be more beautiful if they admire beautiful people or things, and especially if the future mother pays due attention to this doll during pregnancy.

Arms separated from bodies and legs separated and arched. Very small head in proportion to the body, neck adorned with small seeds. The torax is crossed by two bands of four lines of coarse seeds while the inferioe part of the body has nine overlapping rows of these same thick seeds. Black patina on the wood part. The seeds are also blackened.