Eshira

The Eshira, who call themselves Ghisir and are also known as Sira, are a Bantu people of the forests and grasslands south of the lower Ogooue River in southern Gabon. Their oral traditions recall a migration from the east through the Congo basin, said to begin in the sixth century; when Portuguese ships opened Gabonese coastal trade in the 1470s, the wanderers had not reached their home. By their own account they entered the country only in the eighteenth century, driven by wars with the Kele.

Each clan managed its own affairs under its chiefs, while villagers farmed forest clearings and won repute for tobacco and raffia-fibre cloth. They speak Ghisir, or Sira, a Bantu language grouped with Tsogo.

The villages stayed independent through the eighteenth century, until the nineteenth-century slave and ivory trade drew them into commerce with European-backed coastal states.