Fang

The Fang, also called Pahouin or Pangwe, are a Bantu people of the West African rainforest, spread across Rio Muni in Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon and southern Cameroon.

Glottochronology places the Proto-Fang homeland in the Cameroon forest, part of the Bantu expansion south from around the 700s, and the Fang themselves pushed south only in the 1800s, leaving central Cameroon for the Gabonese and Rio Muni forests, possibly driven by slave raiding. They speak Fang, a Northwest Bantu tongue mutually intelligible with the speech of the Beti and Bulu.

Fang society is patrilineal and exogamous, built of fiercely independent forest villages of farmers and hunters famed for their forest lore. Their Byeri reliquaries, wooden figures guarding ancestral bones and skulls, were misread by European explorers as evidence of cannibalism, a slur used to justify raids and enslavement.