The Masque of Africa (24 page)

I asked him if he could define the religion of the forest more closely.

He said, in a precise academic way, “We cannot call it a religion. It is a set of beliefs. We don’t pray to God because in our understanding
God is not accessible to humans. It [he meant the idea of God] has many other problems and has no time for humans.”

In forest belief the organic world, the world that mattered, was like a pyramid. “The first level are the minerals and ore, the second level are the trees and flora, and the third level are the animals. The fourth level are the human beings.”

If it had stopped there it would have sounded like a version of the Elizabethan chain of being. But he went on, and it soon became clear that this concept was a local one.

He said, “In the human beings you have divisions. Children are spiritually stronger than the middle-aged, who are useless and blind. The elderly, like the children, are spiritually strong because they are about to go to the new place. Children are strong because they have just come from the new place. They are pure and still have the sight. They can sense evil as they have an open mind. Sometimes they cry because they see too much, and then you have to take them to a strong traditional master. He places a stone on their forehead to stop the sight, but you have to be very careful, because too much of the stone can turn the child into an idiot. As for the old, they are special because they have power and they are close to the ancestors. Only the ancestors can intercede with God. You have to keep the bones and skull of your ancestor and feed it rum and talk to it when you are in trouble.”

This was what Rossatanga himself did. So in this matter at least he was not talking with the distance of the anthropologist.

He said, “Before leaving the village I go and put alcohol and food on my mother’s grave and my grandfather’s grave.”

I liked him for saying that. Were there other ways of worshipping the ancestor?

He said, “Every family has an elder who can talk to the ancestor. There is one man in every family chosen for the job. This elder keeps the bones and skull. The way to worship is through initiation. Initiation is a fundamental rite and practice.”

I had heard much about initiation. Everybody in Gabon talks about
it, or so it seems. It requires a master, an all-night ceremony with dancing and drumming, and eating the bitter root of a hallucinogenic plant, the
eboga
. The rite is secret, and even at the end of my time in Gabon, I didn’t feel I had begun to understand the idea or importance of initiation.

I wanted to know whether in this ritual of honouring the ancestor there was also contained the idea of virtue, the good life.

Rossatanga said, “No. The ancestors are there only to provide answers for your problems and give you what you want.” And about initiation he said, “You have no say in the village or its matters until you are initiated. To be recognised as a man you have to be circumcised in the village. And that itself is a ritual. You take the child’s foreskin and bury it in the ground. Then you plant a banana tree or sucker. This is the boy’s banana, and you watch it grow. When it gives its first fruit there is a big ceremony, since the banana is a sexual symbol of the boy’s manhood. The boy will eat the first banana, and the rest of the fruit is rubbed all over his body. No woman must be nearby or see this ceremony.”

I asked him, “Are you saying that if you follow the various rituals you need not be afraid of the forest?”

“You remain afraid. Initiation and ritual only give you a path through the forest. You are not protected against others, women especially. Women are very important in this society. They are the real power. A woman may not exercise power, but she gives it to her son. We are a matrilineal society, and women give life. This country was not made for men. Women’s bodies are stronger, and so they are witches. There are many ritual sacrifices where the eyes are removed and tongues torn out of living victims. Every day there is a ritual sacrifice. White skin is very prized here, and for that reason I cannot let my light-skinned children out in the evening.”

“What is the importance of the tongue?”

He said, “They remove the tongue to get energy.”

“What do you think about that?”

“There is no name. It is too shocking.”

It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of “energy” in such a positive way I thought he might have been more accepting.

He said, “Power is everything. It is always sought out. There is a lot of rural migration and so you have many forest people living in the cities. During elections you have to be very careful because of ritual sacrifice. You have to go every day to pick your children up from school. I was twenty-five when I did my Ph.D., and they think because I am a lawyer and successful and work late into the night I am a wizard and in a secret society. At night normal people sleep! They will think that you are a wizard too. And so far as the president is concerned, he is the king of kings of the wizards.”

“When the forest gets thinner, with the logging, will these forest ideas fade or change?”

“Maybe. But I’m not sure. People who have not gone to a village for twenty years still have the same mindset. It is still a forest mind. It is a challenge, and I’m not sure that we will win. You will see people here in Libreville splashing about in the sea. But, generally, Gabonese people will not go to the sea because it is not our domain.”

“Does this fatalism depress you?”

“It doesn’t. I know a lot of educated people who go to the witchdoctor and spend a lot of money. This society works with this belief. All our music, painting, sculpture, everything is linked with the forest.”

I
T WAS
from Professor Gassiti that I first heard of the Gabonese miracle plant, the
eboga
. It was not especially rare, and it looked ordinary enough, with the spindly stem and the leaves of a kind of pepper plant. The root, suitably, was bitter. When the patient or aspirant, after due psychological preparation, ate this root it emptied his stomach and gave hallucinations. And (since we can hallucinate only about what we expect) local people could be sent on a dream journey to meet their
ancestors in the other world. It also this other world (since it took you behind the scenes, so to speak) that showed the other side of reality and revealed clearly, as in daylight, whoever might have sought to damage you with charms or witchcraft. Once you had this knowledge you could protect yourself.

The professor taught at the university and was a pharmacist in his own right, with a famous modern pharmacy in Libreville. He was also known as an expert on local medicine and traditional ways of healing. He compared this medicine to the Indian ayurveda. It was based on metals, animals, and above all on plants. It had a spiritual side; it literally dealt with the spirits. The plants were aromatic herbs from the forest collected by traditional healers.

He learned about traditional healing from his paternal grandfather and his ancestors who were healers. His grandmother’s name meant “the tree is medicine.” The whole family was inspired by this lady, but his main influence was his grandfather’s cousin. She was a very famous healer. She healed many patients all over Gabon.

“I went to France for my studies. There I met a Gabonese man who told all the students there that they should acquire skills and go back to Gabon. He told me to become a pharmacist. Actually my elder brother was to have done it, but he did engineering instead. So I did pharmacy and plant specialisation. It was the time when everybody was talking about the
eboga
plant. It is a plant that is found in central Africa. In Gabon it is used to cure many things. It is now used as ‘methadone’ in the West. It is a substitute for heroin and morphine and is now used to help addicts to break their habit. It has fifteen substances in the roots. Since time immemorial
eboga
has been used in initiation rituals, and these initiation rituals are unique to Gabon. It can be called the Gabon patrimony. The first tribe to know of the
eboga
were the pigmies.” The small people of the forest, gradually worn down by the bigger people. “They are the true masters of the forest. They know and distil every kind of poison in addition to the
eboga
, and they passed this knowledge on to the other tribes. Strange, to think of it. They were the true masters and now an American has a patent and is making millions from it.”

Every day, the professor said, there was an initiation in Gabon, and people went to the “tradition houses” to eat
eboga
and enter the other world. There, in the other world, people saw what was wrong with themselves. In their trance-like state they met their ancestors and told of their problems. The ancestors would tell them how to break the charms that have befallen them, and they would return “free.” Many foreigners, especially from the former Yugoslav territory of Slovenia, came to “traditional houses” to be initiated.

The professor said, “They, or we, are very superstitious as a race.”

And though the professor went to the ceremony with his friends, mainly in order to be with them, and though he had regard for the ceremony, he wanted to be free of it. He said, “I prefer being in the domain of chemistry.” He was an elderly man with a round, humorous face.

S
OONER THAN
I expected, I was taken to an initiation, or that part of it which was not secret. It was in Libreville, in that district which was known as PK 12, Kilometre 12—the kilometres being measured, I imagine, from some point on the Libreville coast.

I went with Nicole, a captain in the army. She had been appointed my bodyguard. In an extraordinary act of generosity the Defence Minister, who was also the president’s son, had made me his guest in Gabon; and during all my time in the country I had this important protection. Nicole was well educated, had travelled, and was well connected.

After the Ivory Coast, Libreville, with its ocean drive and new official buildings, presented a smiling face; it was easy to believe that there had been an oil boom. But the road to PK 12, an outer area, undid that early impression. The lights were dim; in one place the narrow road was flooded, because of a burst water main; and traffic was difficult, especially at crossroads. Someone who was to meet us somewhere couldn’t come, and though Nicole had reconnoitred the route in daylight, in the darkness houses and shops with their feeble, almost
ghostly, fluorescent tubes looked alike, and we overshot the initiation house by a good kilometre. Habib, the driver (also in the army, and with a gun), began very slowly to take the big car back. We came upon two “cruisers” full of white people. They went through a big gate in a high compound wall. They were clearly like us, people going to the initiation; and we followed them.

The compound wall concealed an initiation “village.” It was the creation of a big, handsome Frenchman who had a Gabonese wife. The drumming was ceaseless; it was mingled with some kind of rough chanting and very deep shrieks, quite impressive. The Frenchman appeared to be asking Nicole too many questions. I thought he was checking on us; but later, at the end of the evening, when she was paying him money, I thought he had been letting Nicole know at the outset that there was to be a hefty payment for our party. Nicole knew the ways of Gabon in these near-spiritual matters and had come supplied with cash, which was more than I had done.

The “village” and the “initiation dance” were both productions for tourists or townspeople, to give them a taste of the
eboga
experience. So it wasn’t the real thing. This was disappointing; but a moment’s thought showed that it was wrong to be disappointed. What else could be expected in the capital? To see the real thing, assuming it existed, and was accessible to strangers, you would have to go far in the interior; and there you would be an intruder, which would have been disagreeable. And the drumming here—ceaseless—was real; the painted dancers were real: glimpses of them all the time in the thatched huts in the lower part of the yard: red, white and black the arresting colours of paint on bodies already beaded with perspiration.

Later, when he showed us into the initiation hut, before the dance, the Frenchman referred to his drummers and dancers as
artistes;
and that probably said it all. For all their passion and energy, they were performers. They did it every Saturday. It was a livelihood for everyone concerned. All the troupe, the Frenchman said, were members of his wife’s family.

A little way in from the entrance a steep hillside led down to the
sounds of the drums and the chanting. Steps had been cut into the hillside, and at the bottom there was to a clearing of flattened earth, lit by kerosene lanterns and rolled-up palm leaves. This was where the dancing would take place. Around this area was a half-ring of tables and stools, for visitors. It was hot, with the lanterns and the burning palm leaves, and there was much moisture in the air; but there were no mosquitoes.

The drumming went on and on, together with the chanting and the shrieks that made for a kind of wild rhythm.

A woman, apparently a servant of the house, asked whether we would like to drink something. I asked for a cola drink. It came in an opened bottle. Habib, the driver, swift as a hawk, objected to that. The woman said, “I have done nothing.”

When the Frenchman invited us to go to the initiation hut to see the artistes invoke their ancestors and the spirits, Nicole refused to go. She was a Christian and wanted no part of this spirit talk. The drumming and chanting might have been done only for tourists, but it agitated her. Working her lips, but not speaking loudly, she was saying “Hail Mary” again and again, speaking her Christian charm against whatever charms were in play here, and unwittingly paying tribute to the power of African spirits.

The initiation hut was a low structure of mud and dry palm leaves. Palm leaves burned on the earthen floor, and the initiates, splendid in costume and paint, sat in a semicircle around the fire. They were of various ages, from six to thirty. It was hot enough outside; the palm-leaf fire made the heat overpowering. The great heat, the drumming, the shouts and shrieks, the low roof, the feeling of an encroaching darkness, with an inability to see very clearly, made the scene hypnotic.