Yakuba

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Traditional mask of the Dan
Anklet

The Yakuba , also Dan or Gio , are a West African ethnic group living in the Ivory Coast and Liberia .

800,000 Yakuba-Dan live in western Ivory Coast, where they make up 5.9 percent of the population. Your settlement center is the area around the city of Man . 250,000 Gio-Dan live in Liberia. In total there are over a million Yakuba and Gio in West Africa. The different groups share the common language Dan ; they belong to the Mandean people .

history

The Yakuba-Dan come from today's Mali and Guinea . Around 1300 they settled in the northwestern savannahs of the Ivory Coast, and since the 16th century in the southern highland forests. Since then the ethnic group has been divided into two tribes:

  • the Danmenu in the northwest
  • the Butjulömenu in the southwest.

The Yakuba have been pacified since around 1900. Many Yakuba were brought to the United States as slaves. Their descendants live mainly in Texas and the northeastern United States.

Society and culture

The Yakuba-Dan were originally a warlike peasant people who also raised animals (→ agropastoralism ) . They lived patrilineal and polygamous . Society was controlled by secret men's societies into the 20th century; there were also approaches to the formation of political structures. Today the Yakuba-Dan live mainly from the plantation economy. According to the ongoing surveys of the evangelical-fundamentalist conversion network Joshua Project , 73% of Dan are still professing their traditional religion . 25% converted to Christianity and 2% to Islam.

The traditional masks of the Yakuba made of thin wood, which show an idealized human face and are blackened in a mud bath, are known. The Yakuba know a large number of masked figures who represent bush spirits and perform various social, political and religious tasks.

Web links

Commons : Yakuba  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dan ( Memento of April 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) in M. Paul Lewis (Ed.): Ethnologue: Languages ​​of the World . SIL International, Dallas (Texas) 2009.
  2. ↑ Joshua Project: Liberia ( Memento from February 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (Dan, Da), accessed June 22, 2016.