The Mambila or Mambilla people of Nigeria and Cameroon live on the Mambilla plateau (in Sardauna Loca government area of Taraba State in Nigeria) and on the Tikar Plain in Cameroon as well as in several small villages further north towards the town of Banyo. The preferred ethnonym is Mambila in Cameroon and Mambilla in Nigeria. "Nor" is also used (the word for person in Nigerian dialects of Mambila).
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The Mambila people of Nigeria and Cameroon regard themselves as a group with a common identity. In Nigerian dialects they refer to themselves as 'bo nor' (the people) while in Cameroon there is a collective noun Ba that is used in the unmarked sense to refer to the Mambila, and also to refer to Mambila in Cameroon on the Tikar plain (see below) contrastively with neighbouring Mambila on the highlands of the Mambilla plateau who can be referred to as Bo ba bo. The populations of different Mambila villages speak different dialects of Mambila or closely related Mambiloid languages. They also share a set of closely related cultural practices, in particular a conjunction of masquerade and oath-taking called "so", "shuwa", "sua" or "suaga". In the Somie dialect this is phonetically written as [ʃwaɣa]. See discussion in "Sua in Somie" cited below.
The Mambila language is a congeries of dialects and related languages. The SIL Ethnologue database gives two codes MYA for the Cameroonian dialects and MZK for the Nigerian dialects. See the survey work of Bruce Connell on the VIMS website cited below, and the article on Mambiloid languages.
Most Mambila live on the Mambilla plateau (Gembu in Sardauna Local Government) in Taraba State of Nigeria. This is a highland plateau, the northerly continuation of the Bamenda grassfields. The plateau is dissected by many rivers (notably the River Donga) leaving a complex geography of steep valleys separated by highlands (all of similar altitude). Villages are on valley bottoms are relatively isolated from one another particularly during the rainy seasons when river crossings can be difficult (and impossible for motorised transport). Agriculture is concentrated on the valley bottoms while the highlands have been extensively grazed since the 1920s. There has been overgrazing and erosion has caused considerable problems from the late 1970s onwards. In late 2000 this led to some herders being driven from the Mambilla plateau and becoming refugees in Cameroon. A smaller number of Mambila are to found on the edge of the Tikar plain in Cameroon at the foot of the escarpment of the Mambila plateau. At an altitude of some 700 m these villages live in a different ecological zone where oil palms grow and gallery forest is found.
There is a dry season from November until April, the rains (which are abundant and regular) peaking in August. On the Mambilla Plateau the altitude is sufficient for evenings to be cool. Daytime temperatures hardly exceeds 25 °C (77.0 °F) making it the coldest plateau in Nigeria[1].