Meinowei, commonly Mein, is an ancestral progenitor named in the oral genealogies that Kalabari narrators recite to trace the origins of the clan. He belongs to the wider stock of Ijo founding ancestors and is remembered in Kalabari tradition as the father of Perebo Kalabari, the eponymous ancestor from whom the people take their name. Such founding ancestors stand at the head of the ancestral order, the duein, whose remembered dead anchor the lineages and houses of the community.