The Wawa are the original population of the area around Banyo in Adamawa, Cameroon. They lived in that area together with Kwanja, Mambila and Vute populations before the Fulbe arrived. The Fulbe conquered the area and introduced their language Fulfulde as the dominant lingua franca, which has had a massive influence on the local languages.
Wawa: Language and People
The area that is being addressed in this is the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland. Mambiloid languages are on both sides of the border. Most Wawa live in Cameroon but they say that some of them are also in Nigeria. As Connell (2001) puts it borders do not respect languages and vice versa. According to Connell (2007), the geographic diversity is one possible source of linguistic diversity in Central Africa. He lists desert, savannah and forest as three types of environment in Central Africa. It is hard to say which of these three or what kind of environment the Wawa people live in. Most live on the Adamawa Plateau which is adjacent to the Mambila Plateau and the Tikar Plain. These three regions are where the Mambiloid languages are to be found. One might argue that the territory most Wawa people live is in savannah. The Plateau is less green than the plains. It gets colder at night and the plateau is generally less humid than the Plain. The brown clay of the ground is a strong visual aspect of the character of the area in which one will find the Wawa villages. In the rainy season it is very muddy whilst in the dry season dust clouds one's vision very often. Bantuists say that the area where one finds the Mambiloid languages was the homeland of the Bantu people (Connell, 2002) before the Bantu expansion (Vansila, 1995). Thus, these languages are very closely related to the Bantu languages, which are spoken in the largest geographic part of the territory covered by the Niger-Congo phylum (Williamson and Blench, 2000).