5.
I HAD HEARD HAD HEARD so much about the splendour of the forest that, before I went to the Lope national park, I allowed myself to play with Hansel-and-Gretel ideas of what I might find. I imagined myself sleeping in the narrowest of clearings between mighty trees, among whose b.u.t.tressed roots small, friendly people moved in and out of their small mud huts: pigmies. I imagined a wonderfully clean forest floor, spotted with soft sunlight falling through a high forest canopy. so much about the splendour of the forest that, before I went to the Lope national park, I allowed myself to play with Hansel-and-Gretel ideas of what I might find. I imagined myself sleeping in the narrowest of clearings between mighty trees, among whose b.u.t.tressed roots small, friendly people moved in and out of their small mud huts: pigmies. I imagined a wonderfully clean forest floor, spotted with soft sunlight falling through a high forest canopy.
Of course it wasn"t like that. For a hundred and sixty years, ever since the beginning of the colony, Lope (not a Spanish or Portuguese name, but African, the name of a brisk little local river) had been a station on the great river Oguwe. Since the 1980s there has been a railway service from Libreville; and Lope, with about a thousand people, was now in part a railway town, with the houses, near the railway station, of railway workers.
I had been told that the railway had been built with great difficulty over the watery land. The aluminium coaches looked a little tarnished, the effect no doubt of tropical sun and rain. But the train as a whole looked solid enough, the gravel embankment high and true; the French locomotive was smooth and powerful, the wheels remarkably quiet; and after thirteen years of punishing use the air-conditioning still worked beautifully.
The forest came slowly, broken in the beginning by little clearings and peasant dwellings, sometimes by small settlements. Absolute forest didn"t seem to come at all; but perhaps a little distance from the track there had always been absolute forest; and it had to be remembered that the track had been laid on what would have been original, untouched forest. In this and in other apparently small ways the forest was being nibbled away. Where the logging companies were at work the forest had been battered in a big way. At certain places you could see the heavy, long trucks bringing the straight, ancient logs (Mme Ondo"s dead bodies) to the railway. I had been told that the railway had been built to meet the need of the logging companies rather than the need of travellers. That might have been so; but certain events have unexpected consequences; and it was now agreed by everyone that the railway had tied the country together. But equally there could be no doubt that where the railway had come, people and town would come as well, and the forest would begin to melt away.
The land began to be broken: gullies, ravines, chasms, all forested, all requiring to be bridged, all adding to the cost of this great engineering venture in the middle of the equatorial forest. And then we were running beside the Oguwe itself and its many side waters, so to speak: it was wonderful to be brought so close to the mighty river, and the glimpses big and small of its ancillary power: the spectacular view continuing dizzyingly for mile after mile, far too much to see, to take in, to understand.
The train set us down at Lope. We were able, a while later, to see the high aluminium coaches leaving. For Mme Ondo a twisting path in the forest was an image of the absolute. For me, bred on old Westerns, the sight of the st.u.r.dy departing train spoke of a horrible kind of solitude.
The Oguwe ran through Lope. It was a kind of Nile here, with islets and rocks and isolated trees. It was in a wide valley and was muddier than the Nile in Uganda. It roared over unseen rocks. Beyond that roar, on the other side, rose gentle hills, strangely light green (I had been looking forward to forest), strangely like savannah or parkland, with contrasting acc.u.mulations of dark and deep forest in clefts in the hills and on the riverbank. About these acc.u.mulations were what looked like many smaller green splashes of vegetation: they looked superficial, easy to sc.r.a.pe off, but it was the great forest, ever seeking to re-colonise the land and extend its domain. The oldest forest, a few thousand years old, was beside the riverbank; that of course was where the water was, and from the other bank (where I was) it looked logical enough.
The pale-green colour of the savannah appeared to underlie everything, like the priming on a canvas. It made the landscape look tamer than it was, a place where tourists might come in buses and where teas might be served.
There was a further surprise: in this land, sc.r.a.ped clean and green in so many places, the separate clumps of forest marked the site of old, even ancient, villages. For this reason UNESCO had designated Lope as a heritage site. Between seven hundred and fourteen hundred years ago the villages were abandoned, for an unknown reason, and never reclaimed. So in spite of its apparent tameness the land held a mystery.
My guide was Kate White. She had spent many years in Lope as a researcher, in conditions of remoteness where I don"t think I would have lasted for a month.
It was necessary to people the landscape with Africans-such as one could still see-to begin to understand its drama: the land discovered and settled many centuries ago; the villages built, the trees planted; in some places the remains of kilns surviving where the vanished people had smelted iron ore into iron, using charcoal and local bellows in a difficult method the mid-nineteenth-century traveller Du Chaillu was still to see; and then, after centuries of success, centuries of mastering the land, because of some unknown calamity everything abandoned, only the village trees left growing, with no further record of the presence of men until our own time.
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 s.p.a.ces. 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.
6.
IN L LOPE 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 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 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. 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 two years?" 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 eboga initiation, when his son was two. 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 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 h.e.l.l, 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d and it makes me move in tune with my dreams. And you meditate."
7.
MOBIET 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. 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 gra.s.s bounded, discouragingly, by bush. I had trouble with the tall gra.s.s; 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 gra.s.s, barring the way in the distance.
A pretty little sign said Debarcadere 500 metres Debarcadere 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 gra.s.s, 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.
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.
UNLESS 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 a.s.sumed they were the houses of his family-were like those of the women on the other side of the road. 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d."
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 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." 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 You have as much right here as I have, although it is have as much right here as I have, although it is my my forest. Deforestation brings its own problems. The forest. Deforestation brings its own problems. The mwabi mwabi tree has gone. It was very important in traditional medicine, together with python fat." 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. 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 a.s.sembly 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 s.p.a.ce 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." 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.