Shared Rituals and Interethnic Relationships Between the Babongo and Massango of Southern Gabon

The peoples who inhabit the central African tropical forests and their neighboring farmers have established mutualistic symbiotic relationships. However, these relationships are not equal according to many previous studies. While the economic disparity between them has diminished because the forest peoples have recently adopted sedentarization and cultivation, their social status still remains lower than that of farmers. However, the forest people of southern Gabon, the Babongo, have established relatively equal relationships with their neighboring Bantu farmers, the Massango. The Babongo and Massango are unique from other forest people-farmer relationships in that they are generally equal not only economically but also socially.In this article, I illustrate that this equality is also apparent in the rituals focusing on the male initiation rite “mwiri” which is an important social event shared between the Babongo and Massango. To demonstrate this equality, I point out that: (1) the number of participants in the ritual is equal between the Babongo and Massango, (2) the Babongo and Massango play equally significant roles in these rituals and (3) both Babongo and Massango obey ritual norms which are shared between these two ethnic groups

Bantu languages · Ethnic group · Geography · Political science · Rite · Sociology · African Studies and Ethnography · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Anthropology · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

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