They continued to face jihads and violence from the north by the Fulani people (also called Fulbe or Fula people), abandoned their settlements and migrated further into southern parts of central Cameroon till the 19th century when European traders and colonial forces intervened as they sought trade and markets.

Later visitors such as the ethnographer Mary Kingsley in 1893–1895, who did not speak the Beti language or live with the local people, saw the same sighting, and titled her book "A Victorian Woman Explorer among the Man-eaters".

[3][11] More accounts about the Beti people began appearing after World War I, but were often stereotypical and most emphasized about their alleged practice of containing bone relics in reliquary boxes.

[3] As scholarship about the Beti people grew in the 1900s, according to John Shoup, the collected evidence suggests that the early rumors and allegations of cannibalism were wrong.

[12][13][14] The initial reports of alleged cannibalism attracted widespread attention, supported the oft-stereotyped and presumed African barbarianism, then became a part of fiction and popular literature at the turn of the 20th century.

[10][16] The story, states Shoup, provided a contrast of "pure uncorrupted" noble Tarzan in the midst of a barbaric cannibalistic society.

The Tarzan syndicate became a global sensation, was widely followed, created some 89 movies in the 100 years that followed, and launched numerous comic strips and television series, many of which providing a distorted stereotyped view about the people from the African equatorial forest.

[1] The traditional Beti society has been organized at the village level, typically with its borders fenced and fortified with watch towers to protect the inhabitants from wild life of the rain forests and intruders.

They store the bones of their ancestors in these reliquary boxes, which were used during rites of passage, with their sophisticated masks called So (animal-faced) and Ngil (human-faced).