CHAPTER 5
Children of the Old Forest
GUY ROSSATANGA-RIGNAULT, a lawyer and an academic, a former dean of the university of Gabon, said, “The new religions, Islam and Christianity, are just on the top. Inside us is the forest.”
In another country it would have sounded too poetic and mystical, too imprecise, someone trying to cover up for a backward country. But Rossatanga wasn’t like that; and in Gabon his words had meaning. Gabon, as big as Britain in area, with a population of less than two million, was an equatorial land of river and forest. It was hot; it steamed; it was malarial. From the air, as you came down to the airport, the shiny river-estuary and sea seemed about to overwhelm everything else. The forest near the capital was secondary, with plantings of oil palm that spoke of awful labour and heat. A little way inland the true forest began, primal and tall and tight. The tufted land, green with tints of the palest yellow, became hilly. The cloud shadows didn’t fall flat here, as on the sea; they fell unevenly; and these jagged up-and-down shadows helped you to imagine the contours of the land below the forest canopy.
The French were unwilling colonists. They staked out their territory in the 1840s. Just thirty years later, after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, they felt they didn’t have the resources, and wanted to call the whole expensive business off. They actually sent a ship to take their people away. The missionaries, though, refused to leave, and the colony survived. River traffic developed. The great French-Italian explorer Brazza, starting from the river Oguwé, shifting to a tributary, and then continuing on land, was within four days of sighting the mighty Congo River.
With the establishment of the colony there began the logging, the cutting down of the primal forest. It has never stopped, and yet after more than a century it doesn’t really show. Perhaps it will soon. Thirty-year permits have been granted to the Chinese, the Malaysians, and the Japanese. They are more ruthless and better equipped than the people who went before, and at the end of their licences there will almost certainly be patches of desert in what was once forest. An international expert says that in a very short while thirty per cent of the forest of Gabon—the focus for centuries of Gabonese love and religious awe—will go. The good news, from the same expert, is that there may be some kind of international action (some form of subsidy, perhaps) that will make it worthwhile for the Gabonese to leave their forests standing. In the meantime, even with the areas of loss, the forests of Gabon are still one of the great sights of the world.
ROSSATANGA-RIGNAULT, an attractive man in his forties, was of mixed ancestry, as his double name suggested. His father was French, his mother African. He was educated in Gabon and in Paris. But, like many people of mixed ancestry here, he appeared to be embracing the African side of his inheritance. He didn’t speak a great deal about his father; and he had married an African woman from the Ivory Coast. When he first came to see me he was at the end of his university day (he was a very busy man) and he was in his university clothes, a grey double-breasted suit. He was more relaxed the next time. He came with his two children and was informally dressed in a long West African gown decorated at the neck. This kind of gown was not Gabonese wear, and I imagined he was wearing it in tribute to his Ivory Coast wife. I thought the grey suit became him better.
When he was going to school Gabon was rich enough (from oil) to be a welfare state. His parents, as he said, had to pay only for the school bag. Everything else was free. There was even pocket money for the children when they got to the secondary stage. Every Wednesday the children lined up for a quinine tablet and milk to help the quinine down. Even the university education in Paris was free. And when Rossatanga married in Paris, the Gabon government paid for his wife’s fare to Gabon, even though she was from the Ivory Coast.
He was a lawyer by profession and thought of himself as a political scientist. At the university of Gabon he also taught political anthropology. It was through these latter studies, no doubt, that he came to his poetic understanding of the place of the forest in the Gabonese mind.
It wasn’t always like that. His mother was a civil servant and he was born in a hospital in the town. When he was three he was taken to the forest. It was a great opportunity to learn the ways of the forest, but he was too young to see it like that. The forest was frightening; it is frightening even now, although in the family house they have a generator. In the forest night falls very quickly. It is dark by seven; by eight you go to sleep; and you wake up at five. The darkness is dense. To understand the vision of the people of Gabon, you have to understand the forest.
“When darkness comes to the forest there is no sound. But at night there are different sounds or noises that come from animals hunting. The night plus the noises make up our mentality, because people are linked to everything in the forest. Thunder isn’t just thunder, as it is for you. It is the voice of God: try to understand that. In our village the most terrifying creature is the owl. We are frightened of the owl because it is a manifestation of evil. If you are out walking and you see an owl it is a very bad omen. And this country of ours is a specific place. Our village is in the mouth of the river, and even if we take a car we will get nowhere, because of the water and the condition of the roads. It is a primeval area. The forest will always break out, always win. There is a place called Loango Lodge. You should see it. It is heaven, an Eden. On the land you will see elephants. From the same place you will see whales and dolphins in the sea. When you see that place you will understand why I say that this land was not meant for humans. It is for the animals. It is very hard to survive in the forest. You cannot farm here. You might not have noticed it, but we have no cattle. Put these things together and you will understand why this country, which is half the size of France, has such a small population. Malaria, sleeping sickness, and the hot climate.”
The French, fine engineers though they were, never built roads here. There was too much rain, too much water; it washed everything away. The French concentrated on air travel. The first railway was built in 1981 by independent Gabon; it was very expensive, and it was done against the advice of the World Bank.
I asked Rossatanga, “What is it like physically in the forest?”
He said with extraordinary passion, “It is like a wall. At fifty feet you cannot see, as it is so dense and thick. Your vision is limited by the forest and everyone of us in the forest is small. I’ll say it again: this land was not made for humans. You have to fight to survive. You don’t know what will get you even in the river. It could be a croc, a water snake, or something living there. God knows what else is there.”
“How does this affect your belief?”
“We feel that everything has life, even trees. There is a mystical tree, a red tree. When we go to the forest we talk to it and tell it our problems. We also ask its permission to cut its branch or bark, and we tell the tree why we are taking its bark, why we are cutting it. You must tell the tree. All tribes have totems here, and that totem is taboo for them. They can never kill or harm their totem. They can never hunt it. It can be a crocodile, parrot, monkey, anything.”
Because the conditions of life are so hard, everyone in Gabon believes in the forest and in the principle of “energy” that the forest exemplifies. This is the principle that keeps people going. To lose energy is to fade away. To revive is to get new energy from some source.
Rossatanga said, “Every living thing is energy. Everyone of us is like a battery. In our version of the world even the animals are batteries. That is why we believe there is no such thing as a natural death. If someone dies in the family we know that someone has taken his energy. To do that you have to kill the victim, be it man or animal. You kill and take their energy. We also go to the witchdoctor to take someone’s energy. This is why it sometimes happens that people feel they have to do a ritual sacrifice. We are a matrilineal society. We take our mother’s name, and our mother’s elder brother is the big man in the family. He is so powerful that if a nephew dies people in the family
suspect the uncle. They think that he wanted his nephew’s energy.”
Rossatanga’s first experience of the supernatural—linked to the overwhelmingness of the forest—occurred when he was five. It was in his grandmother’s village, a traditional village, as he says. He had gone there for his circumcision rite. That was “imperative,” a rite of passage to manhood. Whatever formal—Christian—religion the family professed, there were these old African ways that had to be honoured and perhaps were more pressing than the formal outer faith.
One day during this visit to his grandmother’s village he went with his mother to a “plantation”—something much smaller than the English word: a family allotment, a vegetable patch. His mother was not familiar with the way, and when they were going back to the house they became lost. They came to a clearing. It was a cemetery, but they didn’t know. There they saw something very strange: four monkeys sitting with red bands tied to their foreheads. Red is a powerful colour in Gabon. (Only three colours are known: red, black and white.) Eventually they found their way back to the house. His mother told the villagers what she had seen. The villagers said that what they had seen were not monkeys, but ghosts.
Rossatanga said, “I wanted to get away from the village.”
But the supernatural began now to force itself on him. A long time afterwards he went to his mother’s village with an American friend, the son of a foreign friend of his parents. This friend was prospecting for oil in Gabon. When they got to the village a man told them not to throw litter or in any way pollute the stream that ran by the village. A spirit or jinn lived there and didn’t like the stream to be polluted. The American said it was black magic and nonsense and to prove his point he spat in the stream.
Rossatanga said, “Ten minutes later there was no water there, and there was a hue and cry. The village was up in arms, we had to do a lot through the local traditional man to placate the jinn or spirit. We spent a lot of money, and after many ceremonies or rituals the water came back just as quickly as it had vanished.”
So in spite of his ancestry and his Paris education, his analytical mind, and in spite of his fierce rationality in other fields, Rossatanga had become a believer in the magic of the forest and, like other believers, had many stories to prove his point.
He said, “There is another jinn of this sort in Lambaréné.” Famous as the site of the Schweitzer hospital. “It lived in the river. You needed a ferry to cross that river and the government decided to build a bridge. The old people in the area warned the engineers about the jinn and told them they should ask the jinn’s permission first. The engineers, who were Dutch, just laughed and carried on. Every day a worker died. People became very frightened, and even the engineers thought they should stop the work. They said they would bring an exorcist along with the local witchdoctor to placate the jinn. They went and brought a traditional doctor and he performed many rituals, and they were finally allowed to build the bridge. I believe these forest spirits are linked to the psyche of our people even if they live in the city. This is one reason why the American evangelical churches have been so successful here. They also invoke the Lord’s spirit to remove the devil. This is like what we do when we go to the witchdoctor to remove the devil. The principle is the same. The common ground is the spirit.”
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.”
2
IT 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.