#byeri

The Fang people, also known as Fãn or Pahouin, are a Central African ethnic group found in Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon, and southern Cameroon. Representing about 85% of the total population of Equatorial Guinea, concentrated in the Río Muni region, the Fang people are its largest ethnic group.The Fang are also the largest ethnic group in Gabon, making up about a quarter of the population. In other countries, in the regions they live, they are one of the most significant and influential ethnic groups

  The Fang people speak the Fang language, also known as Pahouin or Pamue or Pangwe. The language is a Southern Bantu language belonging to the Niger-Congo family of languages

The Fang people are relatively recent migrants into the Equatorial Guinea, and many of them moved from central Cameroon in the 19th century. Early ethnologists conjectured them to be Nilotic peoples from the upper Nile area, but a combination of evidence now places them to be of Bantu origins who began moving back into Africa around the seventh or eighth century possibly because of invasions from the north and the wars of West Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.Their migration may be related to an attempt to escape the violence of slave raiding by the Hausa people,but this theory has been contested. The Fang people were victims of the large transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade between the 16th and 19th century. They were stereotyped as cannibals by slave traders and missionaries, in part because human skulls and bones were found in open or in wooden boxes near their villages, a claim used to justify violence against them and their enslavement. When their villages were raided, thousands of their wooden idols and villages were burnt by the slave raiders. Later ethnologists who actually spent time with the Fang people later discovered that the Fang people were not cannibalistic, the human bones in open and wooden boxes were of their ancestors, and were Fang people's method of routine remembrance and religious reverence for their dead loved ones.

They have a patrilineal kinship social structure. The villages have been traditionally linked through lineage. They are exogamous, particularly on the father's side.Polygamy was accepted in the culture of the Fang people.The independence of villages from each other is notable, and they are famed for their knowledge of animals, plants and herbs in the Equatorial forests they live in. They are traditionally farmers and hunters, but became major cocoa farmers during the colonial era. Under French colonial rule, they converted to Christianity. However, after independence their interest in their own traditional religion, called Biere, also spelled Byeri, has returned, and many practice syncretic ideas and rites.One of the syncretic traditions among Fang people is called Bwiti, a monotheistic religion that celebrates Christian Easter but over four days with group dancing, singing and psychedelic drinks. The art works of Fang people, particularly from wood, iron and steatite, are regionally famous.Their wooden masks and idol carvings are on display at numerous museums of the world

The Beti people are a Central African ethnic group primarily found in central Cameroon.They are also found in Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon. They are closely related to the Bulu people, the Fang people and the Yaunde people, who are all sometimes grouped as Beti-Pahuin peoples.

The Beti are found in northern regions of their joint demographic distributions, the Fang in the southern regions, and others in between. Estimates of the total Beti population vary, with many sources placing them at over three million spread from the Atlantic coastal regions near Equatorial Guinea into the hilly, equatorial forest covered highlands of central Africa reaching into the Congo

The Beti people are Bantu people who once lived in northern parts of Central Africa, with a complex, undocumented and debated prehistory. They likely moved into equatorial Africa in the seventh or eighth century, then further southwest in central Cameroon between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, likely after waves of wars and slave raids from the Fulani people. They were also a targeted source for slaves and ivory by the Hausa people.

Their initial migration in the 17th century was from highlands and forested regions east of the Sanaga River towards south and west. They continued to face jihads and violence from the north by the Fulani people (also called Fulbe or Fula people), abandoned their settlements and migrated further into southern parts of central Cameroon till the 19th century when European traders and colonial forces intervened as they sought trade and markets.The first European power to create a colony that partly included the lands of the Beti people was the German Kamerun colony in 1884. After the first world war, the German colony was taken over, divided by the French and the British colonial powers

Allegations of cannibalism

In 1856, Paul Du Chaillu met the Beti people. He published a memoir about them in 1863. The memoir mentions his arrival on the Atlantic coast and being told by local people about the cannibalistic Beti people. When Du Chaillu met the Beti people, he saw skulls and bones near their settlement. He immediately took these for cannibalism and wrote about it in his memoir. Later visitors such as the ethnographer Mary Kingsley in 1893–1895, who did not speak the Beti language or live with the local people, saw the same sighting, and titled her book "A Victorian Woman Explorer among the Man-eaters".

In 1912, a Christian missionary named Father Trilles visited them, learned the Beti language, and wrote a more objective ethnographic account of the Beti people. More accounts about the Beti people began appearing after World War I, but were often stereotypical and most emphasized about their alleged practice of containing bone relics in reliquary boxes. These alleged practices were used to justify violence against them and the enslavement of Beti and Fang peoples.When their villages were raided, thousands of their wooden idols and villages were burnt by the slave raiders.The French and the British colonial officials suppressed these practices.

The Tarzan character (1918) was set among the Beti people of equatorial central Africa.

As scholarship about the Beti people grew in the 1900s, according to John Shoup, the collected evidence suggests that the early rumors and allegations of cannibalism were wrong.The Beti people were not cannibalistic, the skulls and bones in the open and in the reliquary boxes were actually of their ancestors. The practice of collecting the bones were a way of remembrance and religious reverence for their dead

                                 The Tarzan story The initial reports of alleged cannibalism attracted widespread attention, supported the oft-stereotyped and presumed African barbarianism, then became a part of fiction and popular literature at the turn of the 20th century. Among the most famous was the novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which created the popular Tarzan character. Burroughs set his novel near the village of Mbonga, among the Beti people and their closely related ethnic group called the Fang people.

The initial Tarzan story, where infant John is discovered by apes and raised by a female ape, built on the colonial era stereotype of cannibalistic Africans in the equatorial forests.The story, states Shoup, provided a contrast of "pure uncorrupted" noble Tarzan in the midst of a barbaric cannibalistic society. The Tarzan syndicate became a global sensation, was widely followed, created some 89 movies in the 100 years that followed, and launched numerous comic strips and television series, many of which providing a distorted stereotyped view about the people from the African equatorial forest.

The traditional occupation of the Beti people is farming, particularly of yams, cassava, corn and plantains as staples. Since colonial times, many have adopted cash crops such as peanuts and cacao.They are skilled artists and craftsmen, particularly in iron and wood handicrafts. However, these craftsmanship are nearly extinct because of urbanization and modern trade flows.

The traditional Beti society has been organized at the village level, typically with its borders fenced and fortified with watch towers to protect the inhabitants from wild life of the rain forests and intruders. Outside the village compounds were carefully concealed traps, as another line of defense against slave raiders. The villages have tended to be politically independent of each other, centered on a lineage called Ayon or Mvog.They are a patrilineal people, and disputes are typically settled by a due process led by a headman. The Beti revere their ancestors, and known among other things for their artistically produced reliquary boxes called the Byeri. They store the bones of their ancestors in these reliquary boxes, which were used during rites of passage, with their sophisticated masks called So (animal-faced) and Ngil (human-faced).