Though only fifteen tsesah crests survive today, they have a prominent place in the repertory of sculpture from sub-Saharan Africa. Their grandeur and originality captured the attention of early 20th-century art critics such as Carl Einstein and James Johnson Sweeney, who presented the genre in their pioneering African art surveys of 1920 and 1935, respectively. A dozen early examples, including the four presented here, came to the attention of Western scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s; only three were known previously, all collected by colonial officers and missionaries in the Bamileke region (specifically the centers of Batcham and Bamendjo) between 1904 and 1925.

The tradition is now said to have originated in Bandjoun: not only were several crests collected there, but local artists also identify themselves as heirs to the earlier masters. Beyond the precolonial examples now in Western collections, Paul Tahbou, a renowned artist and high-ranking Bandjoun court official, produced a number of tsesah crests between 1970 and 1990; several of these entered the art market, while others were integrated into the Bandjoun royal treasury. Tahbou claimed kinship with a long line of Bandjoun-based sculptors who created such crests, and is a key source regarding their history and function. Art historians have since nuanced his claim of a direct tie to the sculptors responsible for the invention of this tradition in consideration of the political and economic benefit of being identified with such a magisterial art form.

At the apex of the political hierarchy in each Bamileke chiefdom, the fon is an all-powerful, sacred leader who commands territorial, civil, and military authority. To keep his power in check, he is surrounded by a number of associations of high-ranking officials. The tsesah crest's rare appearances in dances symbolizing a chiefdom's sovereignty were closely associated with these governing structures.

A tsesah was among the primary symbols of a fon's leadership. It represented dynastic continuity by underscoring the transfer of power from one ruler to the next: it may have been present during the council held to select a new fon and used in performances at a fon's funeral and at the enthronement rites of his successor. In this way, the use of these crests visually echoed the statement made at the moment of the king's death and the establishment of a new king in the French monarchy: "The King is dead, long live the King." According to oral history, the last time a tsesah danced in the powerful chiefdom of Bandjoun was during the funeral of fon Fotso II in 1925.

Art was traded over vast distances across the Grassfields region, and it was not unusual for fons and high-ranking officials to commission works from renowned carvers working in distant centers. The patronage of tsesah crests attests to this cosmopolitan mobility, as well as to the widespread impact the form had across the region after its prototype was introduced by an unknown Bamileke carver in the early eighteenth century. Examples of the genre have been collected in at least eight chiefdoms as far as sixty miles apart.

Although the distinctive form of these crests—the strong vertical and horizontal projections and the planar surface of the brow adorned with vibrant geometric patterns—is consistent, significant stylistic variations indicate that they were created over several generations by different artists. In 1972 the Bandjoun carver Paul Tahbou provided the names of some of these individuals, including his father Tehgah and the carver Moube Nde. They themselves had studied and trained under a previous generation of master carvers whose names are now lost. The Cameroonian art historian Jean-Paul Notué established that in Bandjoun, tsesah were created by several families of elite carvers, which he traced back as far as Duygnechom, the chiefdom's second chief who probably ruled in the early eighteenth century. Tsesah crests testify to the transmission of knowledge over several generations, each of which contributed its own creative innovations to the continually evolving genre.