Mitsogo

The Mitsogo, or Tsogo, are a Bantu people of the forested highlands of central Gabon, above the valleys of the Ngounie River and the middle Ogooue. Their oral traditions recall a migration from east of the Congo basin, and Tsogo-speaking clans had settled these mountains long before Portuguese ships began trading along the Gabonese coast in the 1470s.

They lived in small, mobile villages, practising slash-and-burn farming, hunting and fishing, and were known as ironworkers. Society was ordered through matrilineal clans and initiation societies, including Bwiti: in ritual huts called ebanza, initiates took iboga root powder to induce visions linking them to ancestral spirits, accompanied by gongs and harps.

As Bantu movement and warfare reshaped the interior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tsogo clans clashed with neighbouring peoples and sometimes took refuge among the Punu and Apindji.