Ethnographic accounts of the Mbuti, forest peoples of the Ituri region of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, beginning with the early twentieth century fieldwork of the missionary-ethnographer Paul Schebesta, describe megbe as a vital force possessed by both humans and animals, present within the living body and bound up with the individual's continued life and vitality. Mortuary custom recorded among some Mbuti groups treats megbe as something that does not simply vanish at death: a close relative, often a son, is described as placing his mouth over the mouth of the deceased to inhale part of the megbe, a practice understood as a form of continuity between generations rather than a belief in reincarnation in the fuller sense found elsewhere.
Megbe belongs within a wider Mbuti religious orientation that later ethnographer Colin Turnbull, in his influential fieldwork of the 1950s, described as centered on the forest itself as a living, benevolent, encompassing presence, sometimes addressed directly in song and ritual as a caring parent, rather than on a pantheon of separate named spirits; Turnbull argued this made Mbuti religion distinctive among Central African forest peoples of the period. Because Turnbull's interpretation diverged in emphasis from Schebesta's earlier account, which described a more developed cosmology of discrete beings, scholars of Mbuti religion, including the entry on Pygmy religions in the Encyclopedia of Religion, treat the two accounts as complementary rather than fully reconciled, a genuine scholarly disagreement about how systematized Mbuti belief actually is.