112 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



traverse them. They are skilled in many crafts, and understand 

 the division-of-labour principle, " farmers, gardeners, smiths, boat- 

 builders, weavers, cabinet-makers, armourers, warriors, and speakers 

 being already differentiated amongst them 1 ." 



From the east or north-east a great stream of migration has 

 also for many years been setting ri^ht across the 



The West 



Equatorial cannibal zone to the west coast between the 



Ogowai and Cameruns estuary. Some of these 

 cannibal bands, collectively known as Fans, Pahmns, Mpangwes 2 , 

 Oshyebas and by other names, have already swarmed into the 

 Gabiin and Lower Ogowai districts, where they have caused a 

 considerable dislocation of the coast tribes. They are at present 

 the dominant, or at least the most powerful and dreaded, people in 

 West Equatorial Africa, where nothing but the intervention of the 

 French administration has prevented them from sweeping the 

 Mpongwes, Mbengas, Okaudas, Ashangos, Is/iogos, Batekes, and the 

 other maritime populations into the Atlantic. Even the great 

 Bakalai nation, who are also immigrants, but from 



Bakalai. , , 



the south-east, and who arrived some time before 

 the Fans, have been hard pressed and driven forward by those 

 fierce anthropophagists. They are still numerous, certainly over 

 100,000, but confined mainly to the left bank of the Ogowai, 

 where their copper and iron workers have given up the hopeless 

 struggle to compete with the imported European wares, and have 

 consequently turned to trade. The Bakalai are now the chief 

 brokers and middlemen throughout the equatorial coastlands, 

 and their pure Bantu language is encroaching on the Mpongwe 

 in the Ogowai basin. 



When first heard of by Bowdich in 1819, the Paamways, as 



he calls the Fans, were an inland people presenting 

 bai Fans" such marked Hamitic or Caucasic features that he 



allied them with the West Sudanese Fulahs. Since 

 then there have been inevitable interminglings, by which the type 

 has no doubt been modified, though still presenting distinct non- 



1 Op. cit. p. 471. 



2 These Mpangwe savages are constantly confused with the Mpongwes of 

 the Gabun, a settled Bantu people who have been long in close contact, and 

 on friendly terms, with the white traders and missionaries in this district. 



