The Masque of Africa (25 page)

The initiates shouted (I believe),
“Bukowa! Bukowa!”
The Frenchman tried to instruct us in a response. But we needed a lot more time to learn, and we did the next best thing: we gave money. As so often on these occasions, it was enough.

The dancing, done sometimes with burning palm-leaf brands, was
breathtaking. Energy seemed to come to the dancers from some external source, and we could imagine that it came from the
eboga
root. Habib, the driver, who took his bodyguard duty seriously, told me afterwards that there were times, during the dancing, and the waving about of brands, when he had become worried for me.

After the dancing there was to be dinner for those who wanted it. On a lower level (the hill was full of levels) we could see where tables had been laid with white tablecloths. There was, of course, a charge. And after the dinner there was to be, for a further fee, something connected with initiation. That sounded quite serious and I didn’t think I should stay for it. One can be an observer only up to a point. Beyond that point one was an intruder (and there was the further worry about Nicole’s Christian agitation).

We went back up the steep steps to the top of the hill. There the Frenchman met us and showed an
eboga
plant. Nicole paid him; it seemed to me in the darkness that she was paying him a fair sum.

The general who was Nicole’s superior telephoned her as we were going back to the hotel. The traffic was easier than it had been earlier in the evening; but the weak fluorescent light still teased the sight. General Ibaba wanted to know about the evening. Nicole gave him a summary, but the general wanted to know about it in minute detail. We were in good hands.

Near the end of my time in Gabon, when we were far inland, in a village in the Lope national park, I witnessed another piece of African dancing. This was outside a chief’s hall, which was a shed with traditional bark walls and an old corrugated-iron roof. Only the bark wall spoke of old forest ways. The shed was cleaned up in our presence, and a short stiff broom was applied to the uneven ground outside. The dancing came after a dinner carefully prepared and laid out on a table in the open air.

The drums were there but not as thrilling; the body paint was there on the dancers, but more perfunctory, a dab of white and a dab of red standing for something more complete; the originals of all the movements were there, but in a lesser, undeveloped way. There were a number
of children among the dancers, but not many young people; there was little in this piece of bush in Lope to keep young people; the ambitious or the bored wanted to go to Libreville. Yet even with its thin chorus line (so to speak) this village performance was as genuine as could be. But I preferred the Frenchman’s metropolitan creation in Libreville, and not only because its human material was richer, its dancers more accomplished. It used the same local materials, but it added style and finish, and I did not think it lacking in spirituality or feeling.

T
HE PIGMIES
, the small people, were the first inhabitants of the forest, and they became its masters. They knew its multifarious plants, their healing or poisonous qualities. They were the first to learn of the hallucinogenic
eboga
. (“Hallucinogenic for you,” one professional Gabonese lady said unexpectedly. “But for Africans it’s their reality.” Opening up a whole vista of the relativity of perceptions, too much of a quicksand for the short-term traveller to go into.) Africa is a land of migrations, and it was the pigmies who showed the later Bantu migrants the “path” of the forest, the philosophy of the forest.

Claudine felt passionately for the pigmies. She now lived in the forest close to them.

She said, “I thought it was awful that they were considered subhuman and low-value and had been herded into reserves. That was why I wanted to know more about them. We have no regard for them, but we go to them in secret for healing. For initiation, barrenness, for sickness the hospital cannot cure. Sometimes people step on a charm hidden in the ground and they become ill. The hospital cannot find out what’s wrong with them, even with all their modern amenities. So the sick person will go to the pigmy. The pigmy will tell them who put the charm and where and how. A person can become paralysed by stepping on a charm. He loses feeling in his lower limbs. I have made
many photos of people who were injured by these mystical weapons, and I have seen how they were healed.”

Her feeling for the pigmies and the “path” made Claudine use extraordinary and sometimes very moving language.

She said, “The closer we come to the pigmies the more we understand that the world has a soul and has a life. It has energy. Pigmies are like our memories of the past. They hold the knowledge of that world.”

The events of the second half of the nineteenth century ripped the continent open. But the pigmies remained close to the forest. They preserved their knowledge of the forest; in that knowledge lay their civilisation. Other tribes lost much of that knowledge.

“In spite of the relentless pressure of the outer world the pigmies retain their civilisation. They still have to kill an elephant to become ‘a man.’ A group of young initiates wear masks made of palm branches and they go hunting. It is a rite of passage.”

And then there were the charms—never far away in any consideration of the shifting reality that surrounds men.

Claudine said, “In the mystical world”—“mystical” was the word used for anything beyond rationality—“you can make a charm from someone’s leftover food to hurt that person. And that person will have to go fast to the pigmy for help. The pigmy will look into water or a mirror and he will see whether the victim will live or die. Or whether indeed the victim has already ‘crossed the river,’ as they say: has already died. There are two kinds of healer here. The small healer will deal only with malaria and influenza. Pigmies are very good with malaria. For bigger problems, like charms, you have to go to a master healer. He has been a disciple of a great man for many years. He has learned all the ‘tactics’ of the spiritual world. When it comes to fighting the spirits you have to know the rules, or you can die, because the spirits are very strong.”

How was the pigmy healer or master rewarded?

Claudine said, “They know about money now. But those who really know their work, the genuine healers, the real masters, will not
want money because they feel it corrupts their gifts. They look upon their gift as something that has come to them from the ancestor. So you give the healer or the master whatever you want—cloth, alcohol, food or tobacco. He will not ask for it. You do not give money. He does not want it. I knew a person who went really mad. They took him to a pigmy master who treated him for three months, and he was healed. The man wanted to reward the master with anything and everything—car, house, a plot of land. He said he would do anything for the master. But the master wanted nothing. All he said to the man was, ‘Take my young daughter home with you. Adopt her and educate her in modern ways.’ The man did as the master asked. He brought the girl to Libreville and educated her and treated her like a close confidante. She is now a civil servant and is still very close to her people. You see, the master knew that the world had changed, and the pigmies would need their own people to be a bridge to the new world.”

Pigmy villages were small, from twenty to fifty people in all. At one time the pigmies lived in branch or leaf igloos, made afresh every evening. But now they follow Bantu ways and live in more permanent Bantu-style mud huts.

Claudine said, “I don’t think their culture has changed as a result. The outer form has changed, but the content is still the same.”

There were two important tribes in the south of Gabon. They had introduced the pigmy to the all-important initiation ceremony, and the pigmy in his turn had passed on his knowledge of plants, including the
eboga
, to them. Initiation (for men alone) was a necessary stage in divination, which was done here with water or with a mirror; and in this field the pigmy was the master. So you could say that the two cultures, Bantu and pigmy, had come together.

More important than divination was the gift of communication with your ancestors. This, too, could come only after initiation, and it was of great importance. It was only from your ancestor that you could find out about your position in society, your duties and your responsibility. For this you needed the skull and bones of your ancestor, and they had to be truly of your ancestor; you couldn’t use the
skull and bones of a ritual sacrifice. The skull and bones for this ritual had to come from an elder who, as he was dying, gave you permission to keep his bones as a relic.

In every family there was only one person, and he was an elder, who had the privilege of talking with the ancestors. It was this elder and his wife who kept the skull and bones; the wife’s duty was to keep the skull and bones clean.

Claudine said, “This
buitee
or ritual is only for men. Some tribes have included women now, but people are very unhappy about it.” She began to talk in a practical way about
eboga
-eating. “It is very bitter. The mouth becomes numb. The body becomes numb, and every sensation is enhanced. In the real
buitee
the ancestor comes at three in the morning.” It occurred to me that at PK 12 I had heard something like this, but had thought of it only as a way of getting us to stay longer. Claudine said, “The ancestor comes at three in the morning and speaks in an ancient tongue no one can understand. Only the third level of initiates can understand him. At that level the initiate can talk to the relics, and can also initiate other people. Women can be healed by
buitee
, but they cannot be initiated. Another thing: to be a healer you have to have an ancestor somewhere in your past who was a healer.”

Even with Claudine’s knowledge of pigmy ways, and her love for them, it was hard to arrive at a human understanding of the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.

I asked her, “Are pigmies happy people?”

“They are happy and they are gentle, but they are a very wary race. They become tactile after a long time. They don’t trust easily.”

“Do they still hunt?”

“They hunt at night now, and they have guns. Before they used to make traps.”

“Do you really like living in the forest?”

“Yes. Because my ancestors were savages.” She laughed, at the double irony of her words, which acknowledged what was said about Africans by people outside, and, within that, what was said about pigmies
by the Bantu. She said, “Life is simple in the forest. You have no urban stress. You bathe in the river. You eat from communal kitchens, and you go to sleep at seven. The forest is peaceful and tranquil and I can think about ‘myself.’ I am not afraid of the forest. I never think of the dangers there, because you radiate energy. Animals can smell negative waves of fear and then they attack. It is here, in the forest, that I understood that the forest talks to us. It asks us questions, and it feeds us. It is the beginning and the end, and that is why pigmies, who understand this, are the masters.”

I wanted to know about death: how do pigmies deal with it?

“Pigmies believe in nature. They believe they come from the earth, and that is why they do not want to pollute it with the dead. They do not bury the dead. When a master dies they wrap him in a mat and put him under a big tree. They leave him there to rot, and no one will go to that place. They will not hunt or forage there. When decomposition is complete they put the bones in a grave, and they will quarantine that area. They cannot understand Christianity.”

“What do they find especially hard about it?”

“They fail to see why Jesus should have all the power. For them power has to be distributed among many chiefs.”

“How long do they live?”

“The average span is fifty years. Life is short because civilisation has introduced many diseases that were not known to them. Alcoholism, HIV.”

“How dark is the forest?”

“During the day light filters through the canopy and it is full of shadows. At night it is pitch dark. I think of it as a ‘locked’ darkness. It is important, too, to remember that the canopy absorbs pollution. This is why we must preserve the forest.”

F
ROM THE
air the depredation of the loggers hardly shows. The forest seems whole and tight and eternal. At ground level it’s another story. There are the logging roads; the rains wash the loosened earth into the rivers, and the fish suffer. For anyone who feels a mystical bond with the old forest there is pain. Mme Ondo, a high civil servant, and a very elegant lady, felt that pain acutely. She was of mixed ancestry, but her heart was all African.

She said, “We were told that we would plant a tree for every tree we cut, but it is not so. It sickens my heart that we don’t follow that principle. When I see a truck full of logs, I don’t see trees or wood. I see murdered people. They are not logs for me, but dead people. The trees are creatures just like us. Trees live longer than human beings, and they give us everything, even oxygen. We need to learn a lot from trees.”

Mme Ondo was elegant, but that elegance was not a simple matter of inheritance. It came from deep within her. Her mother was a peasant, and so was her mother’s mother.

“I used to help on the small farms they worked on, and I used to go with my mother to the forest. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle. Once, when I was eight, they took me to the forest and left me alone in an encampment while they went fishing in the big river. I was alone in the night, and I was afraid because I kept thinking of the stories of the anaconda snake that comes at night looking for children. In the morning I was very glad to eat the fish they had caught, but at night it was a different story.”

Later she became attuned to the beauty of the forest.

“The positive side is that it is very cool. There is a great calm. The birds sing, and there is great beauty in the trees. And if you see the small path twisting and turning like a snake in the forest you think of the image of the absolute. The search for the truth comes from the forest.
I adore the forest, and even if I spend years abroad I have to come back and rush to the forest. I need the thick forest to feel alive.”