Eyí Moan Ndong, Equatorial Guinea’s last great troubadour, fused myth, humour and retro-futurism in his epic mvet performances, keeping whole villages rapt until dawn. His fragile legacy now awaits preservation, translation and recognition on the world literary stage.
In Letras Libres, Luis Castellví Laukamp provides a fascinating account of the life and work of Eyí Moan Ndong (1928-2000), the last great bard of Equatorial Guinea, who called himself “the animator of the people”. Virtually illiterate and suffering from leprosy, Eyí Moan Ndong nonetheless transformed the mvet (sometimes “nvet”), a traditional one-metre cane instrument, strung with gourds, into a vessel for epic storytelling that sustained an entire culture’s memory.
His art began in internal exile. After spending 12 years in the Micomeseng leper colony, his mvet sessions for patients and caregivers became legendary. The Spanish colonial authorities “never disliked him, but they didn’t take him seriously either, as they thought he was a folk clown.” But for the Fang, Equatorial Guinea’s ethnic majority, his presence in their midst was an honour. He performed mostly at night, in the House of the Word, where the community “ate, rested, played akong… debated issues affecting the community, and listened to their bards.” There, Eyí Moan Ndong could keep his listeners spellbound until dawn.
The structure of his art was fluid. “His mvet art began with a song, sometimes humorous. Eyí Moan Ndong then went on to tell the stories of the Ekang, the first immortal inhabitants of Earth.” He interspersed songs and autobiographical poems into narratives that could stretch endlessly, depending on the audience’s energy. Listeners marked time with bamboo sticks, bells or bottles, blurring the line between performer and crowd. Known for his memory and improvisation, he embodied an art that was at once literature, music, theatre and ritual.
The epics themselves are strange, vivid and wholly original. In The Strange Gift from the Other World, a mother sends her son from the afterlife to fetch fish cooked with onions and spices. In Akoma Mba before the Tribunal of God, an accused man faces trial before a divine court. Mbuandong, the Cannibal tells of villagers attempting to capture a monstrous giant, while Mondú Messeng depicts a terrorised village menaced by a beast. As one scholar puts it, “the plot of the Fang epics is somewhat surreal, but it must be understood from a profoundly magical worldview.”
What makes Eyí Moan Ndong most distinctive is his seamless weaving of the archaic and the futuristic. Castellví Laukamp describes how, in his world, “an elephant takes care of all the farming and domestic chores… in Mbuandong, a goat defecates edible fat that feeds an entire village.” Yet these mythical beings also “have many technological gadgets: telephones, cars, trucks… and flying saucers!” The “Mivulú” spacecraft, he notes, “fulfils the function of ships in Greek epics.” With equal ease, Eyí Moan Ndong moves from a magic mirror to “glasses that allow you to see for miles, a gadget that not even James Bond could have imagined.” Long before Afrofuturism gave us Wakanda, Ndong’s mvet conjured a vision of Africa where the past and the future coexisted.
Fragments of this legacy survive thanks to painstaking transcription. Ramón Sales Encinas and Domingo Elá Mbá have edited five epics; Julián Bibang published another in a bilingual edition; others remain unpublished, circulating on recordings or in doctoral theses. Yet the work remains precarious. “We cannot recover the lost epic poems,” Castellví Laukamp writes, “but it would be wise to translate, annotate and publish the untranscribed recordings in bilingual editions.”
The need extends beyond scholarship. Schools for the mvet exist in Gabon and Cameroon, but not in Equatorial Guinea. Without them, the tradition risks extinction. And yet, as Castellví Laukamp insists, Eyí Moan Ndong should be spoken of “with the same admiring respect with which I refer to Homer or Vargas Llosa.” His epics, richly annotated in Spanish but still largely inaccessible, deserve to travel further.
To hear Eyí Moan Ndong, through a surviving line, a fragment of song, is to glimpse an art form that fused myth, humour and science fiction. His voice reminds us that literature is not confined to the page; it can live in rhythm, in gourds and bamboo, in the night air of a village listening to its last troubadour.
Original article (“Las epopeyas del último trovador guineano”) by Luis Castellví Laukamp was first published in Spanish on 17 March 2025.
It is available here.
Letras Libres is a Spanish-language monthly literary magazine published in Mexico and Spain.
Summary by TMH
