The Krumen (also Kroumen, Kroomen) is an ethnic group living mostly along the coast of Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.[1] Their numbers were estimated to be 48,300 in 1993, of which 28,300 were in Côte d’Ivoire.[1] They are a subgroup of the Grebo and speak the Krumen language.
They are also called Kru, and are related to (but distinct from) the Kru people of the Liberian interior.
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This word has been incorrectly thought to derived from the English word "crew", thus making reference to the fact that Krumen were the first West African people to serve on European vessels. Much more likely, it derived from Kraoh, which is the name of one of their own tribes.
They dwell in villages scattered along the coast of Liberia from below Monrovia nearly to Cape Palmas. Under Krumen are now grouped many kindred tribes, the Grebo, Bassa, Nifu, and others, who collectively number some 40,000. The Krus proper live in the narrow strip of coast between the Sinoe River and Cape Palmas, where are their five chief villages, Kruber, Little Kru, Settra Kru, Nana Kru and King Williams Town. They have numerous settlements along the coast. Sierra Leone, Grand Bassa and Monrovia all have their Kru towns.
They are traditionally from the interior, but have long been noted as skillful seamen and daring fishermen. They are a stout, muscular, broad-chested race, probably the most robust of African peoples. They have skin of a blue-black hue and woolly, abundant hair. Politically the Krumen are divided into small commonwealths, each with a hereditary chief whose duty is simply to represent the people in their dealings with strangers. The real government is vested in the elders, who wear as insignia iron rings on their legs. Their president, the head fetish-man, guards the national symbols, and his house is sanctuary for offenders until their guilt is proved. Personal property is held in common by each family. Land also is communal, but the rights of the actual cultivator cease when he fails to farm it. At the age of 14 or 15, Krumen boys eagerly contract themselves for voyages of twelve or eighteen months. Generally they prefer working near home, and are to be found on almost every ship trading off the Guinea coast. As soon as they have saved enough to buy a wife, they return home and settle down. Krumen decorate their faces with tribal marks: black or blue lines on the forehead and from ear to ear. They tattoo their arms and file the incisor teeth.
Concerning their work aboard foreign vessels, we could say that they were able seamen in any kind of job under any circumstance, but they had difficulty in loading tree trunks from the shore to the ships' holds. The ships were used to anchor on open roads at river mouths along the western coast of Africa from Freetown in Sierra Leone to the Congo river mouth, waiting to be approached by small tugs towing many trunks, which were floating and secured to each other by small steel ropes passing doubly through iron rings stuck with a tongue more or less on the middle of each trunk. Since these trunks, due to their long stay in water, were very slippery, and the ocean waves swayed the trunks, it was very dangerous to walk on top of them.
Wilhelm Bleek classified the Kru language with the Mandingo family, and in this he was followed by R. G. Latham; S. W. Koelle, who published a Kru grammar (1854), disagreed.