The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  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.

  SOONER 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.

  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.

  3

  THE 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.”