Wovea people
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (Total: 600 (1977)) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Cameroon | |
| Languages | |
| Wovea, Duala | |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Christian and/or ancestor worshippers | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Bakole, Bakweri, Bamboko, Duala, Isubu, Limba, Mungo |
The Wovea are an ethnic group from the Republic of Cameroon. The people inhabits the coastal areas of the Fako division of the Southwest Province. The Wovea are one of the ethnic groups that comprise the Sawa, or Cameroonian coastal peoples.
Wovea oral history names a man from the island of Bioko as their forebear. His ship washed ashore at Mboko, the area Southwest of Mount Cameroon, where he married a local woman. They then moved southeast and settled at Ambas Bay. The Wovea likely lived along Ambas Bay in the 17th or 18th century, and they could have participated in the same migration from Mboko that brought the Bakweri and Isubu to their current territories.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Wovea came under the dominance of the Isubu. When the Spanish ousted Protestant missionaries from their base at Fernando Po (modern Bioko) in 1858, the Isubu king, William I of Bimbia, sold part of Wovea territory to British missionary Alfred Saker. The area became Victoria (today known as Limbe), and the Wovea living there were forced to move to Mondole Island. Victoria came to be a mixture of freed slaves, working Sawa, and Christianised Sawa from all the various coastal groups. Cameroonian Pidgin English began to develop at this time.
In 1905, under German colonial rule, the Wovea were relocated once again to their present home west of the Wouri estuary when Mondole Island became a leper colony. After Germany's defeat in World War I, Wovea territory fell under a British League of Nations mandate.
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