Kota Gabun

Kota Gabun denotes the Bakota, Bantu speakers of the dense north-eastern Gabon forests, chiefly around Makokou and across the Congo border, including the Mahongwe among other groups. Their traditions bring them south from overcrowded northern lands, and their name is said to recall migrants gathering in one bound bundle on a riverbank during the crossing.

They speak iKota, a Bantu language, in patriarchal farming and hunting villages marked by secret circumcision and widow-purification rites. They are famed for their mbulu-ngulu reliquary guardians: stylized wooden faces sheathed in copper plates and lamellae atop baskets holding lineage ancestors' bones, through which the living spoke with the dead, rare copper itself signalling wealth and spiritual power.

Carbon-14 dates surviving Mahongwe examples to around 1600, showing the bwete ancestor cult and its sculpture fully developed by the seventeenth century and flourishing through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.