The gourna of the Tupuri is a dance from Northern Cameroon. It incorporates long sticks that dancers carry upright in a circle. Cameroon has more than 200 traditional dances, each of which is associated with a different event or situation. Dance is part and parcel of most ceremonies and rituals.

Dances accompany births, christenings, weddings and funerals and invoke the spirits of ancestors to cure the ill a and/or increase fertility. Dance in Cameroon is an integral part of the tradition, religion, and socialising of the country's people.

Colonial authorities and Christian missionaries discouraged native dances as pagan holdovers. However, after Cameroon's independence, the government recognized traditional dance as part of the nation's culture and made moves to preserve it.

Many traditional Cameroonian dances follow strict choreography, although improvisation is common. Dancers move different parts of their bodies independently, focusing motion on more than one area. Dances are often associated with specific regalia or props.

Traditional objects used include leather fans and small pieces of cloth. In the grasslands, masks are common. A village in distress is a dance that shows the inhabitants of a village going about their usual peasant chores. However, eventually the harvest will be attacked by a neighbouring village demanding the occupied territory. A war is therefore committed. The special number for this dance is that everything tends to be well arranged.

The Bamileke perform war dances, for example, and the motio of the southwest incorporates the slaying of a goat with a single blow to demonstrate the dancers' prowess. The Baka dance the luma to celebrate a successful hunt.Among some groups, dancers work themselves into a trance and communicate with the spirit world. For example, members of the ntsham society of the Kaka people in Cameroon's northwest dance to bring about spiritual possession.


There are also the dance of hunting and the dance of cleanliness. It is a dance that shows the way village ancestors hunt and the weekly work of wives waiting for their husbands returning from the hunt. The dance of fishing in Northern Cameroon. It is a dance that shows the way to fish in northern Cameroon, without forgetting the way women live.