Kele

The Kele, who call themselves Ungom, are a Bantu people of central Gabon. Oral traditions place their earliest settlements around Lopé on the middle Ogooué, from where their clans fragmented and spread through the Ogooué basin, probably during the 1600s and 1700s, some reaching the Estuaire coast and the upper Ngounié.

Reputed as skilled hunters and river travellers, they became one of the main groups trading slaves with European ships on the coast, their clans bound together by initiation societies such as the Ndokwè. Their ethnonym is said to mean people of war, recalling the migration and conflict behind their dispersal.