The Masque of Africa (28 page)

So I had let everybody down. It had taken some of the savour for the village out of the rest of the programme—the dinner, and the initiation dance afterwards—which Mobiet had prepared.

But I had not let Nicole, my bodyguard, down. She was a Christian, but she had the old Gabonese anxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirens at the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had been praying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river trip wouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers had been answered, giving her, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of prayer.

I began to walk back to the road. I went around the wood huts at the front of the yard, asked the surprised women at their washing-up stands to forgive me, and crossed the road.

U
NLESS YOU
knew him, and if you were looking for something regal or chief-like in the man, you would have missed the chief. He talked easily, he had good manners, but there was nothing chief-like about him. The simple wood houses of his family—two or three separate houses: I assumed they were the houses of his family—were like those of the women on the other side of the road.

There he was now, working in his yard with others of his family, shirt falling away from his strong but bony chest, to put the place straight for dinner. There were chairs—white plastic of a familiar design, capable of being stacked—for the visitors in his chief’s hall, a low rough building with a roof of old corrugated iron and traditional bark walls. He had the white chairs put in a line and invited us to sit. He was sorry not to have had the dignity of showing us the sirens in the river and the bones of the elder; he complained, but only a little; and thereafter his manners and formality did not fail.

He was a traditional healer in Lope. He was also a retired police officer. So to be a chief was not, as I had half imagined, to hold down a
hereditary honour. A chief here was more a kind of civil servant, someone appointed by the government. His father had been a maker of dug-outs. He had also been a healer in the traditional way, and an initiator. The religious side of his father’s attainments (a healer had to have healing in his ancestry), could be said to be the chief’s true inheritance.

I wondered whether he was finding it hard nowadays to keep up the old traditions.

He said, “The first difficulty is the park itself.” The Lope national park. “The park took away all our sacred places in the forest. When the park was created they said that the village would have a protected zone. That zone for the village was not respected. The second difficulty is the increase of evangelical churches.” Nicole belonged to an evangelical church, but she kept quiet. “They keep calling us devil-worshippers and pagans, and their propaganda has worked. In reality our religion respects God more than these churches.”

There had been Protestant and Catholic churches here; but these evangelical churches—the local people called them the rock-and-roll churches—appeared in the 1990s. About the influence of the evangelical churches he said two different things. He said at first they were a threat to the traditional religion; and then he said that the young people of the village were in his church. He had initiated them himself. I thought it sounded as though he was exaggerating the evangelical threat. But he said he wasn’t. The influence of the rock-and-roll churches was growing.

He said, “I was baptised and confirmed, but I decided that the traditional religion was strong in me, and I wanted to come back to it. In our initiation the fundamental belief is that there is only one God.”

He was sixty-four or sixty-five. He was born on the day in 1944 when a Frenchman came to the village to do a census; so it was easy for him to remember when he was born. The people of his tribe had always lived where they lived, on the riverside. They moved to the other bank only when a great chief died.

“We wanted to take you where our great ancestral king is, and
where the siren is, a white woman. But you were not able to get to the riverbank.”

“Have you seen her?”

“The siren? Many times. You don’t need to be initiated to see her. You go to the riverbank and make a prayer to her, and offer her a sacrifice, and ask her for fish. If she is happy with you she will grant your wish, and sometimes she will appear.”

“Has she always been in the river?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you become chief?”

“I was a civil servant and more qualified. I became a chief in 1987. But they may remove me, or I may quit. It is a government appointment. I am responsible for two villages, and I am a master initiator.”

“How did you become an initiator?”

“I was born into it. My grandfather was a master initiator. When I was born he put the red paste from the
padouk
wood on me, and said I would follow him. I went to school and had a life, but the traditional religion was always in me.”

“Are you preparing someone to take your place?”

“Not as yet. I am still strong and powerful and not ready to go. When you appoint someone the religion leaves you. You are ready to go and it leaves you. It is semi-mystical. You cross the river. The person you appoint cannot escape his fate, no matter where he goes or what he does.”

“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.”

T
HE 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.

M
OBIET 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.”

O
N THE
way back to Libreville we stopped at Lambaréné, the place connected with Dr. Schweitzer. 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.