Gbaya

The Gbaya, also called Baya, are a people of the western Central African Republic and east-central Cameroon who speak an Adamawa-Ubangi language; archaeology places their earliest homeland in the lower Lobaye valley, where they had formed settled clans by at least the sixteenth century.

They lived in small village communities without central kingship, authority resting with clan and village heads, and farmed yams, maize and peanuts. In the early nineteenth century several Gbaya tribes moved east toward the Cameroon grasslands, just as the Fulani jihad built the Adamawa Emirate on their northern border.

Through the nineteenth century Fulani raiders seized large numbers of Gbaya for the slave trade; some clans accepted Fulani overlordship, while others united under war leaders such as Bafio to resist the raids and keep their forest villages independent.