In the Bamileke kingdoms of the Cameroon grasslands, beads were wealth, rank and memory. Thrones, masks and commemorative heads were covered in imported glass beads, and the right to wear them belonged to the court: the Fo, the chiefs, the Mafo, the queen mothers.
A beaded head was not decoration. It carried the presence of a person: an ancestor kept in the room, watching over the household. That is the tradition these portraits continue: molded in clay, dressed in glass, given a name.
Each Terra Naza portrait is made today, by hand, in that lineage: not an antique, not a replica of a specific royal piece, but a living continuation of the craft by a Cameroonian artisan.