“Is this the pigmy religion?”
“The pigmy is master of this particular religion. I trained with them. I speak their language and so it was easy for me.”
“Where did you train?”
“In a village called Okouka, forty kilometres from here. My grandfather had gone south on an old walking road and he had captured two pigmies. He owned them. The pigmies have power, and we keep them just like you keep a pet. You can do anything you like with your pet, but there is something in the pet that you don’t have. We kept them and we pitied them. We gave them food, and soon they knew that we were not bad for them, and so many more came and we worked together. They gave us their knowledge. But the pigmies who kept their tradition have died. There is only one left today in this area. Young pigmies are not interested in their inheritance. They have been won over by modern ways and now are drunks. In the old days no pigmy drank like this. Now they all want alcohol and modern things.”
I asked the nostalgic old chief about the forest. Was he worried about its future?
“I am afraid for it. This village is not my ancestral village any more. It has become the world’s property. You have as much right here as I have, although it is my forest. Deforestation brings its own problems. The mwabi tree has gone. It was very important in traditional medicine, together with python fat.”
“Do you think deforestation will go on and on? Can you imagine a time when there is no forest around you here?”
“It depends on the state. As far as the forest going, I don’t think it can happen here. We are a cradle of peace, unlike Ivory Coast. If the forest goes, there will be global consequences.”
8
THE SUN was going down. For the dinner (and, later, the initiation dance) the chairs were moved out of the chief’s hall and placed in a row on the uneven ground in the open, the row continuing the line of the bark wall, so that we on the chairs looked across the chief’s small yard, the scene of the dancing to come, to where a detectable extra growth of bush and young trees, low and broken, marked the limit of the chief’s ground. We could just about see the side wall of the neighbouring hut. On our side of the boundary there ran, from the front of the yard to the back, and down the side of the chief’s hall, an unmarked way. People were going down this way all the time, in ones and twos, gathering in the half-obscured greenery at the end—the green room, it might be said, the country version of the Libreville Frenchman’s palm-thatched hut—for the chief’s dance.
Women from the houses in the chief’s yard began laying out the dinner. They brought a table, covered it with a white oilcloth, shiny and patterned, and began laying out food, dish after laden dish in very good ware: plantains, sweet potatoes, fish and other things. It was a metropolitan entertainment; perhaps Mobiet had suggested the style.
The food—the smell, the knocking of the dishes—brought out the house dog. He was of the local mixed breed, brown and white, small but in good shape, deep-chested. Perhaps he was a hunting dog, with a fixed place in the family scheme. He was perfectly secure in his yard; he lay down at the back of the white chairs, confident that he was going to get what he was going to get.
The same couldn’t be said of the second dog who appeared. He might have been of the same family as the house dog. He had the height, but was altogether more shrunken and ribby. Good treatment would have filled him out, but for some reason he was not cherished. He was of paler colour, as though he had missed some necessary nourishment since birth. His nervousness showed in his eyes, and the trembling of his tail.
The house dog growled when the newcomer came, but not too aggressively. Perhaps that was one of the things he did for the house: warning other dogs off. A woman who had helped with putting out the dinner dishes noticed the intruder and made as if to throw something at him. Without waiting he ran to the back of the chief’s hall. And then in no time he was back, in an ache of worry about the food. It was the way he spent his life.
I asked Kate White whether it would be bad manners to give him some of the food from my plate. She said it would be all right, and I gave the dog some of my food. The house dog noted this and was strangely accepting; he didn’t growl. It seemed that as a house dog he did what was expected of him.
The assembly point or “green room” at the back of the chief’s yard became busy. The evening’s dancers, many of them absolute children, had been rounded up—the chief was clearly a man of authority—and were being marked and dabbed with paint. Some older men, too, came. They were drummers, very serious, and their drums were unusually slender and long, like small cannon. They lit a fire in the open space in front of us, and heated the goatskins of their drums until they were satisfied with the tone.
One of them broke off from this important business to ask Nicole, “I like you. What about it?” When she reported this she said it was the Bantu way; in these matters they could be direct.
The chief said to me, “You see how the young people come. They aren’t all in Libreville. You see how we maintain our traditions.”
It became dark enough for the palm-branch torches, very romantic. A spark from one of the torches fell on the back of my hand and the burn-mark stayed for days.
The boys stood in a line in the mouth of the chief’s village hall, the girls and one or two women in a line outside. Two by two, then, they left where they were and did their turn; that was the limit of the invention; it was not much better when the wiry old chief himself did a turn. I had the feeling that he had shouted and done his turn to pep things up and to encourage the others. But it didn’t work. Something was missing; perhaps we, the audience, were foreign and wrong; perhaps we didn’t inspire the drummers or the dancers.
MOBIET WAS disappointed. He said, “They could have shown you a lot more. Those chaps playing the drums know a lot about the initiation ritual.”
He suggested that I had discouraged them by not going down to the river and not seeing the bones of the tribal elder. They couldn’t give of their best after I had let them down.
He was nevertheless punctilious about thanking people in the village for what they had done. The afternoon had been his show; he felt the failure keenly.
In the car, going back, we talked some more about initiation. He said his wife had done the special woman’s initiation, but there were things in it they couldn’t talk about.
What things? Sorcery?
He said, “I believe that there are people who use their negative energy to harm people. Negative emotions do harm. Sometimes they use material objects to make sure that the harm is done. It begins with meditation, and people will call it black arts, but I would not call it that because that is racist.”
“Have you talked about this to other people? Your parents?”
“Part of the spiritual path is enlightening others, but not in an evangelical way. As for my parents, I did try, but it did not work. I do films and I show them in the USA. My parents are in the audience and they have not asked me any questions. So I will wait until the time is ripe.”
“Do you think you will lose your spiritual life in the USA?”
“No. That is inside me. What I will miss is the forest, and the leaves, and the ritual sides of the ceremony. They are very important. I have to go back for a better future for my children, but I want them to have a taste of their mother’s country. Gabon has been part of my destiny, but I don’t know the whole story yet.”
“What do you feel about the forest now?”
“I always knew that plants were living beings, but now I know that they are conscious beings. They have spirits, and there is so much diversity in them. They have special and many chemical properties that can be used if we talk to them. I know that if you analyse all the plants of Gabon you cannot activate the healing process unless you know the language of the plants. To know that language you have to know the religion that comes with initiation.”
9
ON THE way back to Libreville we stopped at Lambaréné, the place connected with Dr. Schweitze
r. We had gone from Libreville to Lope by train and we were coming back by helicopter, courtesy of the army and the minister of defence.
Until I had got to Gabon I had not associated the country with Dr. Schweitzer. When I thought about him I had thought of a vague tropical African space. Now it was here, next to the helicopter landing ground, and my first thought was of the overwhelmingness of water and heat, the nearness to nothing that was close to one, and how hard it would be to spend the best part of one’s middle life here. Lambaréné was a narrow island, some fifteen miles long, in the Oguwé River. After the disturbance of the helicopter blade, sending dust noisily into the nearby bush, there was, as it seemed to me, something like the equivalent disturbance of the official welcome. Everyone welcoming the guest of the minister of defence seemed touched by the urgency of the helicopter; everyone—the representatives of different layers of local government, the officials of the Schweitzer hospital—seemed anxious to say what he had to say right off. It made for some breathless moments. I had been hoping for a period of quiet in which I might expose myself to the genius of the place (using that word in its classical sense), letting the place speak for itself, and arriving through that at some private idea of the man we had come to honour.
It wasn’t like that. The place felt cleansed of the presence of Dr. Schweitzer, in spite of the long low-eaved hospital building, with the two rooms at one end that had been the doctor’s. There was a lacklustre piano (the second of the two pianos that the doctor had had sent out to Lambaréné, we were told), with opened sheet music unnecessarily in place (for the actuality, no doubt) forty-four years after the doctor’s death, the exposed music sheet brown from the harsh light of the broad Oguwé. There was a bookcase with some of the doctor’s books: not books he had owned and read, but Asian translations (for which no true home had been found) of some of the doctor’s own books, part of the unimportant detritus of a writer’s life. In the next room was the doctor’s narrow bed with a mosquito curtain. On a table were technical-looking relics, including a microscope. There were photographs, not easy to look at. It was possible that the real relics were elsewhere, and we were looking only at things that could be spared.
When I was a boy in Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic, I used to think that the light and heat had burned away the history of the place. You couldn’t feel that bush or sea had a history. To have a sense of history you needed buildings, architecture; and history came to the place—you seemed to see the change occurring—in Marine Square in the centre of the old Spanish town, and the few ambitious buildings of the British period. Here at Lambaréné there was no architecture, only nondescript tropical buildings, in ochre-coloured distemper, of no distinctive style, that seemed to have eaten up the past.
While we looked, the young woman who was the official guide recited the dates of Dr. Schweitzer’s life: it was part of the continuing hubbub of our welcome.
In spite of that microscope on the table it was well known that Dr. Schweitzer was more of a missionary than a doctor. The medical degree he had taken was the abridged one missionaries took; so that in Africa he was a little like the barefoot doctors the Chinese created for China much later in the century. When he and Lambaréné became famous more qualified doctors came out, attracted by the idea of service which he appeared to exemplify.
Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty years before, and missionary activity, both American and French, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, had been going on for almost all that time.
The English traveller Mary Kingsley came to Gabon in 1893 and 1895. Her famous book, Travels in West Africa, was published by the house of Macmillan in 1897. (This was the year in which Somerset Maugham published his first novel: it gives a kind of context).
Mary Kingsley describes a busy river life in Gabon, with traders and missionaries. Dr. Schweitzer, when he came to Gabon twenty years later, in 1915, would not have had to live the life of Robinson Crusoe. Mission life by this time would already have been formalised. African children would have been trained in housework; the missionary whose energy was low needed only conduct a service in his church, which might be next door to his house.
Mary Kingsley writes especially about Dr. Nassau, a very early missionary from the American Presbyterian mission. He had been working among Africans for forty years when Mary Kingsley met him. She is full of praise for him; and he is clearly an unusual man, of high intellect, full of energy, and wise about the ways and beliefs of Africans. The subject of African religion interests Mary Kingsley, too. She consults Dr. Nassau at length about what she calls “fetish,” which is her portmanteau word for African belief, and she gives the subject five chapters in her book, a hundred pages.
Set beside Mary Kingsley and Dr. Nassau, Dr. Schweitzer doesn’t shine. Among Africans his reputation, which has lasted down to our own time, is that of a man who was “harsh” to Africans and was not interested in their culture. This perhaps is the true mystery of the man: not his ability in 1915 to turn his back on the civilisation of the time (though the 1914 war might have been a factor), but the—almost heroic—idea of his own righteousness that enabled him to live apart in Africa for all that time: the ideal of the missionary taken to its limit, the man less interested in serving men than in beguiling them.
Early on her travels Mary Kingsley saw the ruins of the first mission house Dr. Nassau built on the upper Oguwé. It was on one side of a ravine, and in front of it, “as an illustration of the transitory nature of European life in West Africa,” was the grave of Mrs. Nassau. The four or five lines about this—the ruined mission house above the grave—make a telling point about dedication and loss and the swift growth of bush.
Quite different is the cluster of granite crosses beside the Lambaréné hospital building. The crosses are close together. They seem not to leave room for anyone else. These are the Schweitzer family graves. They speak more of possession and triumph than tragedy. Nearby is a caged, depressed-looking pelican, padding about on trampled mud. Dr. Schweitzer had a pet pelican; and this unhappy pelican, flying nowhere, diving nowhere, is kept in his memory.
It became time to get back on the helicopter and leave. Some schoolchildren had been mustered in the afternoon sun for this farewell, and there were photographers. The boy closest to me, living deep in his imagination, blind to everything else, began to shadow-box for the photographers, and they, not seeing him, clicked away.
CHAPTER 6
Private Monuments, Private Wastelands
IT WAS the South African winter. In the high land around Johannesburg the air was dry and the grass was brown; outside the airport the jacaranda trees (as they had been identified to me) had turned yellow. Nothing of tropical Africa here, it seemed; the colours were like the winter-bitten colours of places far to the north, Iran, perhaps, or Castile. The straight lines of the industrial buildings on the way to the great city belonged to a culture of science and money, the style of another continent, another civilisation. The African workers at the roadside, at first exotic in this setting, gradually began to fit (though the extraordinary light gave a deeper tint and an extra shine to their blackness).
Two days later, in central Johannesburg, I saw what had befallen a section of the post-apartheid town. The white people, nervous of what the end of apartheid was going to bring, had left, just like that, and Africans had moved in, not local people, but footloose people from the countries round about, Mozambique, Somalia, the Congo and Zimbabwe. The government of free South Africa, in a fit of African-ness, had thrown open its borders to these people, and they were living in their own way in this corner of the too big and too solid and unyielding city: reducing great buildings and great highways to slum, or at any rate to a kind of half-life, in a way that would have been hard to imagine while the buildings served their original purpose. At road level solid glass panes had been kicked in, and all the way up an office block (or perhaps an apartment block) there were lines of poor wash
ing.
It is a saying of the extraordinary South African writer Rian Malan (born 1954), seeking always without rhetoric or falsity, and in an almost religious way, for an illumination to the racial pain of his country, that in Africa the white people built themselves a moonbase for their civilisation; when that crumbles there is nothing for black or white.
Forty years before, in Rwanda, on the shore of Lake Kivu, I had seen a much simpler Belgian holiday settlement surrendered to forest and people of the forest. The forest people, welcoming ready-made roof and walls and solid floors, ready-made shelter, had moved in, but had then grown unhappy: they didn’t like the rectangular spaces of the Belgian houses, and they had sought gradually to shrink these spaces to the more familiar circular spaces of their huts. Some years later, in the Congo itself, I had seen whole residential areas of the town once called Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, swallowed up by forest, with here and there a bleached signboard from its earlier life showing (though the plan of the streets had already become indecipherable).
This area of Johannesburg, speaking of science, style and architecture (speaking as much of learning and dedication as the mysterious textbook Joseph Conrad found in a hut on the bank of the Congo), had the effect on me of the bush of Kisangani. It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.
There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink. The least offensive of these magical goods were the wreaths of herbs which could be used to fumigate a room or house to make life uncomfortable for a bad spirit. Higher up in the scale of seriousness were roots with earth clinging to them; perhaps they were used for purges: the purge is a recurring theme of African magic.