The Masque of Africa (27 page)

The places where smelting was done still showed as bare patches on the hillside. There were many of them in one place. You could—and it seemed a privilege, a link to the remote past—still pick up shiny flakes of ancient, burnt-out charcoal, and bits of half-smelted ore.

The roads of Lope were country roads, rough and red, much cut up by rain and raging water. They required patience and a strong back, even in a four-wheel drive.

Some small trees beside the road had been half broken by elephants, and we were told that the elephants of the equatorial forest were a metre shorter than the African elephants of more open spaces. Lope was a national park and elephants here were to some extent protected. But elsewhere in Gabon elephants were under threat; the very size that made them fearful creatures before the age of the gun now made them hopelessly vulnerable. Local people liked to eat elephant meat, and there was again a Chinese market for ivory. The loggers opened up the forest; the poachers moved in. Some of the logging companies were themselves Chinese, able now, far from home, fully to express the Chinese hatred for the earth.

Local people liked what they called, in their manly way, “bush meat.” With modern guns they were now able to kill for trade as well, sending carcases to Libreville. In a government magazine I read that a million animals—clearly a random figure—were killed in Gabon every year. Since people in places like Lope hunted all the time, the real figure would be much higher. Africans, like the French and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, ate everything, not only elephants and dogs and cats, but everything else with life. Everything with life was, you might say, fair game. The eating of bush meat had become a cultural matter; it was not to be questioned. The forest, with its apparently endless supply of bush meat, was like a free supermarket, open to everyone.

In this dependence on bush meat, the easy bounty of the forest,
might perhaps be found a reason for the failure of the people here to develop a serious agriculture, which might have created another kind of civilisation, another kind of man, better able to take the outside world on, better able to move in all directions. But that was only one side of the story. Guy Rossatanga-Rignault had said that the sleeping sickness and malaria and the great heat had made the keeping of cattle an impossibility in Gabon. Perhaps, then, as he had said in his inimitable way, the land was not made for men; it was only for animals.

The problem remained: why had the villages disappeared? Had the people eaten out the forest? Had they been compelled to go deeper and deeper into the forest? Had it become harder to drag the carcases back to the villages? Had the villages then begun to starve? The current theory, according to Kate White, was they had been laid low by the Ebola virus, brought to them by the fruit bats, themselves an African delicacy.

I
N
L
OPE
I got to know Mobiet, a white American of thirty-seven. He had been educated at a private university (his parents had paid), and he had come with the Peace Corps to Gabon eleven years before. He had been on some kind of spiritual quest, and had stayed. He had been dissatisfied with the United States and his restless life there. In Gabon he had done the
eboga
initiation; it had met some need. He had married a Gabonese woman and they had three children. For some years, after the Peace Corps, he had done paid research; but now, with three children to look after, and the years ticking by, he had begun for the first time to think more seriously about money and a proper job.

For the time being he was a free-lance. To be a free-lance in a place like Gabon, and especially in an out-of-the-way place like Lope, must have been a hard row to hoe. He sold African carvings, but I don’t imagine there would have been much of a market here; and I suppose it was as a free-lance that he had been attached to our party.

He had come to Gabon with the Peace Corps as an agricultural expert. That was an exaggeration, to put it charitably, and in the beginning it worried him; all he had done in the United States was to work for a while in a plant nursery. In the end it occurred to him to tell local people that he had come to learn about their agriculture.

He liked to tell about his first day in the village. Some people took him to the house where he was to live. A man fell in behind them, and when they entered the house the man behind them began to shout, “Get out! Get out!” It was unnerving, but the man behind them—the owner of the house, as was soon apparent—was not shouting at Mobiet. He was shouting at people who were in the house, and these people—no doubt unsatisfactory tenants—picked up their scattered things and left. The next morning the house-owner came back to take Mobiet to the local guardhouse. He wanted Mobiet to tell the people there why he was in the village. The guardhouse was where the local men hung out. The head of the guardhouse and the village watch was a kind of chief, and Mobiet had the time to notice that he was weaving a mat.

Mobiet looked about him. To his right was a sharp, towering granite rock, and a little distance away was the deep forest. The air was fresh. It was more beautiful than Mobiet had imagined; at the same time, because it was so unlike anything he had known, he was fearful. Some of the houses were of mud, and some were of concrete with a thatched roof. He thought with alarm: “Am I going to stay here for
two
years?”

That was when he decided to abandon the Peace Corps line and to tell people he had come to learn about the kind of agriculture they did.

He learned the hard way. It was a Fang village. He cut and slashed with the men, learned to hunt and set traps and do what they were doing. It was punishing; he had never before done such hard physical work. The women worked on the planting allotments, which were generally smallish, about a hundred metres square.

There was a woman in the village who had befriended the previous Peace Corps volunteer. Now she befriended Mobiet. She lived just
across the road from Mobiet. She was thirty, just a few years older than Mobiet, and had eight children. He valued her friendship and the many things she taught him about village life. She taught him, for instance, about the standing of various people in the village, which he had not always appreciated. She got him used to the absence of privacy (the children coming into a house all the time, to stare at him and to touch his things). She also taught him about everyday things, like ants, that can take over a house, and about simple skin lesions that can become infected. It was a platonic friendship; he thought of her as a mother and a guide; he failed to see that the woman’s husband was becoming jealous, and the husband’s brothers and other people in the village were looking at the friendship as a kind of insult to the family.

When he found out he became enraged. He thought he should tell the Peace Corps that they had sent him to a bad village and they should send him somewhere else. The best way for him to do that would have been to go to Libreville. Libreville wasn’t far away in terms of miles, but the forestry companies didn’t maintain their roads: it took eight hours on truly dreadful logging tracks to get to Libreville. So Mobiet postponed and postponed the journey.

Then something terrible happened in his bad village.

He was in his house one lunchtime. He had prepared his lunch, such as it was: rice, peas, tomato paste and sardines. He wasn’t a cook; he cooked only because he had to. A toddler from the family across the road came into his house, a little girl of two and a half. It was the custom in the village to share food. So he gave the little girl some of his rice. She ate it and went back to her house. Next morning he heard screaming and wailing from the little girl’s house. He went to look. Some village boys outside the house told him that the little girl he had given rice to the previous day had been poisoned. Her aunt had poisoned her. Mobiet knew the aunt. She was a strong and intelligent woman, and was mad. Half the family were making a coffin; the rest of the family were tying up the aunt. Mobiet thought it was something for the police. The family said no; they would deal with the matter in their own way. Mobiet heard later that the aunt was dead.

It was about this time that Mobiet’s woman friend decided to leave her husband and go to Libreville. She asked Mobiet for money for the trip, and he, in all innocence, gave it to her. Mobiet would visit her from time to time, and it was during one of these visits that Mobiet met the woman he would marry. She was his mother’s neighbour. What he liked about this woman was her calm. Two years after meeting her he married her.

Closer to her now, he understood that his wife was not well. He found out that she had been “spiritually persecuted” by her family. And it was through this search for his wife’s mental health that Mobiet became started on his own spiritual quest. Looking for a cure for his wife, they went to traditional healers. They did not help. She was pregnant at the time, and wanted urgently to be well. It was urgent for him too. He had left the Peace Corps and was looking for jobs.

Help, though, was at hand for them both, in the form of a young new healer. Mobiet’s wife decided, at the urging of this new healer, to go to the forest to be with the pigmies and to be with her new healer. This was a time of great anxiety for Mobiet. He would ask himself, “What is wrong with this woman I love? Will she come back?” He meant: come back from the pigmies, come back to health. And some time later his wife came back from the pigmies, completely cured. As a result of this he went deeper and deeper into the spiritual side of things. He had always had a spiritual inclination, even in the United States, and even before he went to university; he never took the “power structures” around him for granted; he sought to understand them.

Mobiet became initiated, the local
eboga
initiation, when his son was two.

He said, “I was comfortable with my wife and I wanted to know my spiritual essence. I wanted to know how to direct my energy. When I decided I wanted to be initiated I went to the same traditional healer who had healed my wife. I thought of him as my spiritual father. It was a test for both of us, a test for me, and a test for my spiritual father. He was afraid to initiate. It was his first time too. Honestly
speaking, I was always interested in
eboga
. I knew that I would do the voyage. I wanted to do that journey when I was ready for it. You go on a long journey, and you have to be prepared for it, because you risk going to a place where the spirits are dead. You see your ancestors and you can be pulled in different directions. I had seen the country initiations, but they don’t tell you all. After initiation you don’t fear death. I fear it only because I have not prepared my family to live without me. I am not afraid of losing my essence. I pray I live a long time and see my children grow, but you need to go beyond yourself.”

I asked Mobiet to describe his spiritual father: not only his spiritual qualities, but also his appearance.

“He is a strong man. He is a soldier, very lean and muscular and very well defined. I know that if things went to hell, and we are in real trouble, I want to be with him, because he is so resourceful. He has only been educated to the fifth or sixth class in primary school, and is a sculptor. I was the first person he initiated. He was still a young healer then, learning his craft, and now he has learnt a lot more. He inherited it from his father. There are other ways to become a healer, but that involves the black arts.”

Initiation had worked for him.

“It makes me listen to my inner voice. It confirms the existence of God and it makes me move in tune with my dreams. And you meditate.”

M
OBIET HAD
arranged a special afternoon excursion for us. I suppose it was the kind of thing he did as a free-lance in Lope. And it was special: he was going to take us to see the ancestral bones of a tribe. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could see every day. It involved a journey by road to the new village of the tribe—after the death of a chief a village shifted: usually to the other bank of the river—and after that road journey, a trip by river, by dug-out (with perhaps an outboard motor),
in the company of the tribal chief, to the site of the old village where the sacred old bones were kept.

The road journey took longer than I expected (Mobiet hadn’t been all that precise); and the very length of that journey led me to believe that we were going to a landing stage on the river. It wasn’t like that. We came to a village. Mobiet looked up his friends. That took a little time, and then we picked our way past a couple of wood huts, not to the landing stage, as I had hoped, but to a stretch of tallish grass bounded, discouragingly, by bush. I had trouble with the tall grass; it wrapped itself around my shoes. After a while my nervy, frail legs began to give out; and they gave out completely when I saw some barrels, taller than the tall grass, barring the way in the distance.

A pretty little sign said
Débarcadère 500 metres
. I suppose it was meant to be friendly, but it broke my spirit. I felt we had already walked that distance. I had given it all my zest. I thought about what I might have to walk at the other end, before I could see the bones; and I doubted whether I would have it in me to walk a thousand metres on the way back. The trouble was that I had done a fair amount of walking (for me) in the morning, in the great forest, following in the sodden tracks of an elephant. It had exhausted me; but Mobiet thought, as he said, it was a demonstration of what I could do.

He had invested much in this trip to see the bones. He thought now that I could be wheeled in a wheel barrow to the river bank. A barrow miraculously appeared, but it was an African job, heavily rusted, and not sturdy, sagging below my weight when, leaning back far too much, I tried unsuccessfully to sit in it.

It was the village chief himself, small and wiry, who put an end to the wheel barrow absurdity. He appeared, walking easily in the tall grass, coming up from the river, holding a clutch of iron tools, hammer, mattock, saw, which were amazingly like those Du Chaillu drew for his book. He clearly had put in a lot of effort into getting the bones ready for our visit, and he was more disappointed than Mobiet. I had missed seeing the sirens in the river, he said. They were white women, and they were well worth seeing; they protected the river and they
didn’t like intruders; he had gone to some trouble to placate them for our sake.