The Fang of Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and southern Cameroon share the wide African conviction that the dead are near and that the living depend on them. However, where other people reached their ancestors through a diviner's bones or a dancer's mask, the Fang kept the actual skulls of their forebears in the house, beneath carved wooden figures known as byeri, which served as guardians of the relics. There, they consulted them directly, and when that was not enough, they took the tabernanthe iboga, a root at the centre of the Bwiti tradition, that let the living cross the threshold of death, and walk into the village of the ancestors. The knowledge gained from that encounter could be brought back into the world of the living.
Hence, when misfortune befalls the Fang, they turn to their ancestors. For them, death must not be allowed to cut the line between a family and its dead, and the living cannot prosper unless that line stays open. The foundation behind the Fang's worldview is embedded in the creation story they believe — a creation story that revolves around a god who left, a proud man who would not die and a mortal ancestor who changed the world.
Before we continue, it is important to note that "The Fang" covers a large family — the Pahouin cluster, with the Betsi, Ntumu, Mvai, and Okak among its branches, spread across three modern countries. They are a forest people who migrated southwest over roughly three centuries into their present lands, and they reckon descent through a father's lineage (patrilineal). Their deepest institutions, the ancestor cult and the later religion of Bwiti, are initiatory, and much of their content is deliberately closed to outsiders. Their creation myth reaches us partly through colonial-era collectors whose versions differ and whom popular sources have since muddled.
The First Man
In the beginning, the Fang say, there was a supreme being called Nzame who existed as a threefold power: Nzame, Mebere and Nkwa. This supreme god made the whole universe and gave life to it. He then called Mebere and Nkwa to admire the works of his hand. When the other two came, they decided the earth needed a ruler and resolved to make a being in their image, and named him Fam, a word that means power. This brilliant creation of theirs was made immortal and took distinct characteristics from the three versions of the supreme being, Nzame. From Nzame, Fam took strength, from Mebere, he took leadership and from Nkwa, Fam got beauty. He was thereafter set to rule the earth while Nzame and the others withdrew back into the sky.
Power did what power in these stories tends to do. Fam grew arrogant, mistreated the animals, and decided he had no further need to honour Nzame. In anger the creator called down thunder and lightning and burned the world to a cinder. But Fam had been promised eternal life, and a promise from the god could not be unmade, so Fam alone survived the fire, never seen again. However, it is believed that he is living still, somewhere beneath or within the world, emerging from hiding to work harm on the descendants of those who came after him.
After the earth became scorched to a cinder, Nzame came again, and with his two other forms, he remade the world. He laid fresh earth over the burnt cinder and new grass and trees sprung out. The leaves that fell from the trees became fish and animals. After these, Nzame decided to create a new man in his image yet again. However, for this version, there was mortality. He was named Sekume and a wife named Mbongwe was created for him from a tree. Sekume and Mbongwe, procreated and gave birth to all the generations of people that exist today. It is said that the old scorched earth still lies beneath the new one and if you dig deeply enough, you will find it as coal.
Read the myth closely and the foundation of the Fang belief system begins to show itself. Nzame creates the world, destroys it, creates it again, and then withdraws into the sky. He is the supreme being, yet he is not the god to whom the Fang bring their offerings or build their religious life around. Fam takes the opposite path. He is given strength, beauty, leadership and, above all, immortality, but power without reverence turns him into a danger. He refuses the god who made him and disappears beneath the ruined earth.
Then comes Sekume. He is mortal. He lives, dies, and leaves behind the generations that follow him. Through him, the story moves away from the distant creator in the sky and towards the human dead who remain tied to the living. Mortality, in this telling, is not simply the end of life. It is what allows a person to enter the chain of ancestors. The god may have made the world, but the family continues through its mortal dead. And that is where the Fang turn their attention, back along the line of those who lived before them, whose presence remains woven into the life of those still living.
The Fang Religion
The central institution of old Fang life was the byeri, the cult of the ancestors. When a person of consequence died, a lineage founder, a family head, a great hunter or warrior, or a woman of exceptional power or fertility, the body was buried near the heir. Some months later the grave was opened, and the skull and certain long bones were taken up, cleaned, oiled, and added to the family's gathering of ancestral relics. These were kept in a bark container called the nsekh.
The skulls were more than the remains of people who had died. They were the physical presence of the ancestors. A family did not simply remember the people whose lives had come before it; it kept part of them within reach. The larger the collection of ancestral remains, the deeper and more powerful the lineage behind it.
On the lid of the box, the Fang carved the eyema byeri, a wooden reliquary guardian that watched over the bones. The figure stood over the bones like a sentry. Today, the carving is known across the world as Fang sculpture. Its face is calm, symmetrical, turned inward; its body is both an infant's and a strong adult's. The Fang carved into it the qualities they most admired in a person, tranquillity and vitality, the ability to balance opposites, and they set it to guard the relics from decay, from malicious spirits. The eyema byeri also guarded the bones from the eyes of women and the uninitiated, who were forbidden to see them.
The byeri was not just an ornament placed on the lid. They were also consulted. Before a hunt, a harvest, a move, or a war, or any season of trouble, the family brought its questions to the byeri, and the ancestors, through divination and through initiated young men. A Gabonese anthropologist put the underlying conviction as plainly as it can be put — 'life and death, for the Fang, are not two separate states but one continuous thing, and the living need the power of the dead in order to live, to marry, to bear children, to farm, to prosper. It is the dead who provide these.'
Evu: the Power Within
If the ancestors could bring protection, fertility, prosperity and good fortune, the Fang also had to account for the other side of life, that is the sickness that came without warning, the child who died, the harvest that failed, the misfortune that seemed to have no visible cause. For them, these things were caused by evu, a hidden force lodged in the belly, an inner power that was profoundly ambivalent. Evu was the engine of everything exceptional — the drive of the ambitious man, the skill of the great hunter, the insight of the healer, the force of the leader. But the same power, turned inward against the community, was witchcraft, and the witch was the person who used his evu in secret to feed on the life of his own kin, to consume their vitality, health, and children out of envy and spite. Evu was not evil in itself. It was a power, and power could be used for good or for harm. The danger was what made evu so difficult to understand. The force that could make a person powerful could also make him dangerous. Nothing about it was simple. The same power that raised one person above ordinary ability could, when misused, become the means by which another person was brought down.
The old creation story gives this belief an older face. Fam had been given extraordinary power, but he became consumed by it. He rejected the one who had made him, refused the limits placed upon him and turned his power into destruction. His immortality became a curse, leaving him hidden beneath the world and still capable, in the tradition, of bringing harm to those who came after him.
Fam therefore becomes more than a figure from the beginning of the world. He embodies the danger of power without restraint. Evu carries the same possibility into ordinary human life. Power can protect, build and heal, but once it is turned against the community, the thing that made a person powerful becomes the source of his danger. The Fang response was to protect the community from that danger. Institutions such as the men's judicial society and the feared ngil mask were associated with the detection and punishment of witchcraft and with the enforcement of social order.
So when misfortune came, the Fang therefore had more than one place to look. Had the relationship with the ancestors been neglected? Had the byeri been dishonoured or the obligations to the dead forgotten? Or was someone within the family using evu against his own people? A specialist, the nganga, the healer and diviner, was called to see what ordinary eyes could not. His task was to uncover what lay beneath the visible misfortune and determine where its cause was believed to lie.
The Use of Iboga in Contacting the Dead
Keeping the bones was one way of holding the dead close. The Fang, however, developed another. They took to using iboga, the root the initiates call the Sacred Wood, a powerful plant learned from the first forest peoples of the region, the Babongo and the Mitsogo, who had long known its properties. When taken in small amounts, iboga is a stimulant. During initiation, large quantities of the root were consumed under the direction of a ritual specialist. What followed was an intense experience in which the initiate was believed to cross the boundary separating the living from the dead. There, such a person has the ability to visit the village of the ancestors, to meet and speak with the chiefs of the dead, and to return with what they revealed.
This practice grew into the religion called Bwiti, a religious tradition that developed among the Fang and other peoples of the region. Bwiti cannot, however, be relegated to the status of an old religion that has remained unchanged through the centuries. It is not an untouched relic of deep antiquity. It has taken shape from the late nineteenth century, and rose in large part because the old byeri was coming under pressure from Christian missionaries and colonial authorities. As the old practices were disrupted, some of the religious ideas surrounding the ancestors found another expression through Bwiti.
The new tradition brought together several strands of religious life. Fang ideas about the ancestors became joined with the use of iboga and traditions that had already existed among the forest peoples who knew the plant. Christian ideas also found their way into Bwiti, giving some of its stories new meanings. Iboga could be described as a tree of knowledge and as a means through which a person could come closer to God, while some Bwiti traditions came to associate the plant with Nzame himself.
Bwiti also differed from the older byeri tradition in another important way. Women could take part in its initiation and could become healers and visionaries, giving them a religious role that was much less visible in the male-dominated institutions surrounding the byeri. The religion therefore continued to change as it moved between communities and generations, absorbing new ideas while retaining the older concern with communication between the living and the dead.
The anthropologist James Fernandez, whose work on Bwiti remains among the most important studies of the tradition, saw in it something far more complex than the colonial descriptions that reduced it to a primitive death cult. For those who practised it, the experience of initiation could bring together the individual, the community and the ancestors in a way that gave meaning to both life and death.
The Fang had already found one way to keep their ancestors close by preserving their bones beneath the watch of the byeri. Through iboga, they found another way to cross the distance between the two worlds. What endured through every mutation was the founding Fang conviction that the dead are reachable, and that a life goes wrong when the way to them is lost.
The Unforgivable Theft of Fang Craft by the Colonisers
The history of the byeri in the colonial century is its own parable. For a migrating forest people, the cult had always been portable; each family carried its bark box of skulls as it moved, so that the ancestors were never left behind. Then, around 1910, French authority and the missions moved against the old religion, suppressing the judicial societies and the ancestor cult together, confiscating and burning relics, and breaking up the shrines. In the process, the carved guardians were torn from the boxes and the bones they had been made to protect, and, stripped of everything that gave them meaning, they flowed out into the art markets and collections of Europe.
There they had a second life that their carvers could never have imagined. The calm, inward Fang head, with its balanced planes and its air of contained power, arrived in Paris just as young painters were breaking with everything European art had assumed. Figures like Picasso, Vlaminck, and Derain seized on such objects as revelations. The Fang guardian became one of the midwives of modern art, admired in the gallery precisely for the formal serenity it had been carved to express, while its true office, standing watch over a family's ancestral skulls, was quietly erased from the label. A sentinel of the dead was turned into a trophy of the modern world.
The devotion of the Fang people proved harder to kill than the objects. It survived as Bwiti, today a recognized and flourishing religion, especially in Gabon, where it holds a place close to official life. Iboga, the forest sacrament at its heart, has since begun a further journey, studied in clinics far from the equator as a possible interrupter of addiction.
The Fang Answer
We return one last time to the question the series turns on. When something goes wrong, where do the Fang look? Not up to the god who withdrew into the sky and is given no worship, and not to blind chance. They look to the state of the line between the living and the dead, and to the hidden power, evu, that moves within the community for good or for ruin. Misfortune is a break in that circuit — the ancestors dishonoured or the way to them lost, or the predator within turning his power on his own.
What the myth teaches, in the end, is that mortality is not the enemy. The enemy is power that will not die and turns to devouring the living. The blessing runs through the mortal ancestor, Sekume and all who followed him, whose remembered dead the living cannot do without. A people who kept their forebears' skulls on the household altar, and who walked by night into the village of the dead to sit with its chiefs, understood something that the modern world, with its clean separation of the living from the dead, has largely mislaid — that the dead are not elsewhere, and that a life, or a lineage, holds together only so long as the way to them stays open. Set the Fang beside the Dogon, the Yoruba, the Akan, the Kongo, the Shona, the Kikuyu, the Luba, and the Chewa, and the argument of the whole series holds once more. There is no single African worldview to be filed away. There are African worldviews, plural, and the Fang answer, that we must never let death cut the line, and must keep the road to our ancestors open by any means, is one that resonates.
A Note on Sources
Primary and early record. Versions of the Nzame creation myth and of byeri practice reach us largely through colonial-era collectors, among them Günter Tessmann's Die Pangwe (1913) and the missionary Henri Trilles, whose framings carry the Eurocentric assumptions of their day; Tessmann classed the whole as a "primitive" ancestor cult. The inner rites of the byeri initiation (melan) and of Bwiti are closed to the uninitiated, a limit any honest account must respect, and popular retellings of the creation story vary and sometimes misattribute it.
Secondary and scholarly. James W. Fernandez's Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (1982) is the essential modern study and the source for the reading of Bwiti as a complex religious imagination rather than a death cult. Louis Perrois is the authority on Fang statuary and the byeri; Georges Balandier documented the ancestors and the colonial upheaval. On the reliquary guardians and their reception in European modernism, see the catalogues of the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, and the Brooklyn Museum. On iboga, consult the ethnobotanical and, latterly, the clinical literature.
This piece continues Africa Rebirth's series on African origin myths and cosmologies, following the Dogon, Yoruba, Akan, and Kongo, the Shona, the Kikuyu, the Twa, Hutu, and Tutsi, the Luba, and the Chewa.
