Nguon — the trial of the king

Nguon is the biennial festival of the Bamoum, and its central rite is unlike any other royal ceremony in the catalogue. Over its days the Sultan is brought before his people and symbolically judged: charges are laid, the people air their grievances against the year's governance, the Sultan is made to step down from his throne and withdraw, and he is re-installed only after the accounting is complete and he is, in effect, re-chosen. It is a built-in check on royal power, performed in public, that the Bamoum trace back more than six hundred years to the kingdom's founding — older than the court's adoption of Islam, and often described as a forerunner of the participatory politics the modern world claims as its own invention. Around this core run the full resources of one of Central Africa's great courts: parades of the Sultan and his notables, horsemen and mock battles, royal music and dance, the masked societies, and a major market and craft fair drawing on Foumban's famous bronze-casting, beadwork and weaving. The festival is held at the palace — among the oldest continuously occupied royal residences in Africa — and is staged every two years by decision of the Sultan; the kingdom has pursued UNESCO recognition for it. For a visitor, Nguon offers a rare thing: not just the pageantry of an old court, but the public performance of its political philosophy, in which the king is answerable to the people who make him.