Fang Gabun

The Fang, once called Pahouin by European travellers, are a Northwest Bantu people whose homeland spans southern Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and northern and central Gabon; the Fang Gabun are the branch settled around the middle Ogooué.

Over many generations Fang clans moved slowly south through the rainforest from central Cameroon, driven by warfare and the search for new farmland, and reached the Moyen-Ogooué by the early 1800s, displacing or absorbing earlier inhabitants along the way.

Fang society is patrilineal and exogamous, built on largely independent village lineages of farmers and hunters, and its history was carried in the Mvet, a cycle of sung oral epics. Religious life centred on the Byeri ancestor cult, whose carved wooden reliquary guardians and the white masks of the Ngil society count among the most famous works of Central African art.