Bassa

The Bassa, who call themselves the children of Ngog Lituba, the pierced rock, are a Bantu people of the Cameroonian coast, speaking the Basaa language across the lower Sanaga and Nkam river basins.

Their traditions tell of a migration from the Logone valley and Mandara Mountains south into the forest, where they settled at Ngog Lituba before spreading on the eve of the fifteenth century into clans along the Sanaga and Wouri. Farmers and fishermen, they held the Wouri estuary until the Duala arrived and drove them inland, dated by tradition to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

By the sixteenth century the Duala were the leading merchants of the Cameroon coast, and through the 1700s the Bassa supplied them with slaves and produce from the interior for European ships, keeping their clan society in the forest behind the coast.