Troh / Night Society (Bangwa regulatory association)
The secret regulatory association of the Bangwa chiefdoms, active exclusively at night, whose inner council of nine held executive judicial and ritual power including the authority to conduct ordeals and executions.
The troh (sometimes rendered 'night society' in the English-language literature following Brain and Pollock) is the executive arm of Bangwa governance and the institutional counterpart to the aristocratic lefem gong society. Where the lefem operates in daylight, managing ancestral veneration and peaceful succession, the troh functions in darkness and commands the domain of punishment, witchcraft, and metamorphic spirit power. Its inner nine members are described in Bangwa cosmology as capable of transforming at night into leopards, elephants, or serpents to patrol the chiefdom's boundaries while the population sleeps; they administer the poison ordeal and carry out death sentences. This dual system of daylight-aristocratic and nocturnal-executive power is analysed by Robert Brain in his ethnographic work on Bangwa social organisation.
The masks produced for troh performances are formally distinct from lefem commemorative figures: they are heavy, architecturally compact forms — often Janus-headed (double-fronted) to signify all-directional surveillance — with reduced facial features, voluminous cheek masses, and sometimes multiple pairs of eyes referencing the clairvoyant sight of initiated witches. Their surface carries a thick encrusted patina of herbal preparations, sacrificial blood, kaolin, and copal resin, materially encoding accumulated ritual power rather than dynastic commemoration. Troh masks were deployed exclusively at night and at secluded forest meeting sites; smaller Janus masks on poles marked the perimeter of assembly grounds as barriers carrying the threat of lethal sanction for uninitiated intruders.