Mebege

The Fang, forest farmers and hunters who spread across Rio Muni, northern Gabon and southern Cameroon, know their supreme creator god as Mebege, also called Nzeme. In one Fang tradition he was alone but for a spider, Dibobia, who urged him to make the earth.

Mebege fashioned an egg, which Dibobia set in the sea, and from it hatched three deities: Zame, the firstborn, linked to the sun, his sister Nyingwan, linked to fertility and the moon, and the youngest, Nlona, who stood for evil. Fang religious life centred on reverence for ancestors, whose skulls and bones were kept in wooden boxes guarded by Byeri reliquary figures.