Fang people
4-faced Ngontang mask of Fang people
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| Total population | |
|---|---|
| ~1 million | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Equatorial Guinea (85%) Cameroon Gabon
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| Languages | |
| Fang language aka Pahouin or Pamue or Pangwe (Niger-Congo) | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity, some syncretic with Traditional religion | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Beti people, Yaunde people |
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 Rio Muni region, the Fang people are its largest ethnic group. 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 language is similar and intelligible with languages spoken by Beti-Pahuin peoples, namely the Beti people to their north and the Bulu people in central. Their largest presence is in the southern regions, up to the Ogooué River estuary where anthropologists refer them also as "Fang proper".
They have preserved their history largely through a musical oral tradition. Many Fang people are fluent in Spanish, French, German and English, a tradition of second language they developed during the Spanish colonial rule in Equatorial Guinea, the French colonial rule in Gabon and the German-later-British colonial rule in Cameroon.
The Fang people are relatively recent migrants into the Equatorial Guinea, and many of them moved from central Cameroon in 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.
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Wikipedia