And here she sits, 5,000 kilometers away from her home, as she has been for the last 120 years. She isn’t particularly conspicuous among the dozens of exhibits in the Cameroon hall of the Ethnological Museum at Berlin's Humboldt Forum. The label somewhat imperiously describes the figure as a "palm wine vessel," since the sculpture, less than a meter in height, is holding a bowl in her lap. Her body is covered with cowrie shells, earrings dangle from her ears and her expression is impassive. She is made of wood.
But Ngonnso, snatched by German colonialists in 1902, is a princess, a deity. She is the ancestral mother and founder of the Nso people.