Chez the Basaâ, the koo is the brotherhood consecrated and reserved for women. koo means "snail". The snail is hermaphrodite, meaning it is both male and female, producing sperm and eggs with the ability to self-fertilize. Note that the snail's shell shows a spiral shape. Hermaphrodite is a character from Greek mythology, son of Hermes and Aphrodite. Hermes is a Greek form of Djehuty (Thoth), the neter embodied in Wisdom. Hathor (Hout-Horo) will become the Aphrodite of the Greeks; to the latter, the Greeks attributed love, beauty, germination and pleasures. We believe that this is a distortion of the Kemite rites koo (Basaâ) and mevungu (Ekañ). Koo, it has been said designates the "snail", the term mevungu is formed from the locutions mevul, "the pubic hair", and ngul, "force, power". "The mevungu initiation, writes Pierre Alexandre, had the result of creating a solid bond between all the married women of a village who, because of the rules of clan exogamy, necessarily belonged to an ayoñ different from that of their husband" (Pierre Alexandre, Proto-history of the Beti-Bulu-Fang group…, in Cahiers d'études africaines, p.520).
It is with Philippe Laburthe-Tolra that we obtain an ethnological description of the mevungu ritual: “We celebrated the mevungu when the village became hard (aled has a connotation of resistance, egoism, drought). (…) While I was alive, our mothers had a ceremony: mevungu. If I did not find any animals in the bush, I would call them: “This village is hard, do your ceremony”. (aken). So we took the ashes of a whole day, we made a bundle of it. They said: "Whoever stops animals, if he continues, let him die". And we pierced the bundle of little raffia arrows. As soon as they had done this, the game filled the village. Only old mothers knew this. Now that it's disclosed, I'm starving for meat (ozàn). (Michael Mve Meyo, Mekamba, 6/2/1967). This is the essence of the ritual seen by an old man initiate. Around Minlaaba, it was first of all the lack of game that led men to ask women for mevungu. (…) We may be surprised by this association of women hunting: but the fertility of women and the fertility of the bush are united. If we compare the fetus to an antelope trapped in its mother's womb, conversely, the traps are endowed with a reproductive power derived from ancestors and from nature; it is also from nature and ancestors that woman derives her fertility, therefore from the same authorities. If the woman is indeed fertile, it is because she is effective with these authorities (but mevungu is in the hands of the most fertile women). (...) Mevungu was also done in other unfortunate circumstances, which boiled down to lack of fertility and fertility: When nothing grows, no game is trapped, women are sick or sterile, mevungu restored the situation (Pierre Ndi, mvog Nnomo, 18/9/1967). (…) Mevungu appeared to be a means of protection and elimination of evil spells in the eyes of all.
(…) Like the Sô which included two main degrees, the mevungu knew two categories of initiates: the largest grouped together all married women (one could not really be integrated into mevungu without being married); these were all invited to the ceremony; but not all were admitted to the secret ritual, carried out between women known for their childbearing capacities (and therefore already mothers), and for which the young candidates, mvòn mevungu, were prepared in Minlaaba by a solitary confinement of nine days (... ). On the tenth day, the candidate was braided, adorned, made up with a canvas [1]. All were gathered around the leader who gave them the prohibitions of the rite, in particular that of not committing the sexual act during the day (which amounted to making adultery difficult, if not impossible). (…) The secrets concerned: 1) the actual composition of the mevungu package; 2) the details of the ceremony from which this package drew its strength. Regarding the package, the woman who wanted to do mevungu at home turned to a specialist, mother of mevungu. In Minlaaba, Agnès Ngono remembers that her own mother had gone to fetch (around 1900?) Bandolo Suga, a woman of mvog Nnomo origin in marriage with the Esom, and had installed her in her hut on a bamboo bed. Bandolo had brought his herbs and bark in a bag (mfàg) similar to that of mfàg so. (…) Before being split, the package must be fertilized by the ritual that will last all night. This is where the candidates will intervene, around the creator of the package who is a woman no longer seeing men, that is to say menopausal but who has proven her fertility.
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