Fang Erotic

The Fang are the dominant population of mainland Equatorial Guinea — the inland province of Río Muni — and they spill across the borders into northern Gabon and southern Cameroon. They migrated south into this stretch of equatorial forest in waves during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pushing through and partly displacing earlier coastal peoples, and the memory of that movement is still carried in clan genealogies that older men can recite back many generations. A Fang household in Bata or Oyem is essentially never far from a forest village where someone's mother's brother lives, and that lateral kin network — clan rather than chiefdom — is the social fact that organizes most of the rest.

The language, also called Fang, belongs to the Beti–Pahuin cluster of Bantu and is mutually intelligible to varying degrees with Ewondo and Bulu spoken further north in Cameroon; a Fang speaker from Mongomo and an Ewondo speaker from Yaoundé can usually reach an understanding without much trouble. Spanish is the official language of Equatorial Guinea and French of Gabon, so educated Fang typically operate in three registers depending on whom they are addressing, and code-switching mid-sentence is unremarkable. Most Fang are Christian — Catholic on the Equatoguinean side, a mix of Catholic and Protestant in Gabon — but the Christianity is layered over an older substrate concerning ancestors and the moral weight of lineage, and the two systems coexist without much visible friction.

The institution outsiders most often associate with the Fang is Bwiti, a syncretic initiatory religion centered on the iboga plant, though it is more accurately described as Gabonese in distribution and is not practiced by all Fang; many devout Catholics regard it warily. Older and more universally Fang is the cult of ancestor relics — the carved guardian figures known as byeri, which once sat atop bark reliquaries containing the skulls of distinguished forebears. The figures themselves are now famous in the history of European modernism, having passed through the hands of Picasso and the Paris dealers of the early twentieth century, but their original function was domestic and protective rather than aesthetic. Politically, the Fang have dominated Equatorial Guinea since independence in 1968, the ruling Nguema family belonging to the Esangui clan from the eastern interior, a fact that continues to shape the country's internal politics in ways residents discuss only carefully.