Bandjabi

The Bandjabi, better recorded as the Nzebi or Nzabi, are a Bantu people who trace their origin to the Congo basin and settled, by about 1800, in the equatorial Chaillu forest, straddling what are now southern Gabon and the neighbouring Congo.

Their clans built shifting villages around Mount Birougou and nearby iron-rich ridges, and they were already famous across the region as iron miners and smiths who forged their own tools and weapons, alongside pottery, hunting and the cultivation of bananas and groundnuts.

Organized in mobile, markedly egalitarian clans rather than under kings, the Bandjabi took an active part in long-distance trade and in the nineteenth century became prominent rubber suppliers to the caravan networks. They speak Nzebi, a Bantu language with several local dialects, and preserved their dispersed village life through the growing commercial pressure before colonial conquest.