The Masque Of Africa Part 8

In any event the ritual could hardly survive its founder. It was built around his need. And it was as though with his death much of Houphouet's grandeur had disappeared into thin air. The airport still carried his name; so did the big orange-coloured stadium on the edge of the lagoon in Abidjan, and the stadium was also hung with a very big photograph of the man. But something like bad magic was about to befall that stadium. Some weeks after I left the Ivory Coast there was a calamity during the football match against Malawi. A wall fell (too many people perhaps); the police for some reason fired tear gas at the panicking crowd; and in the melee sixty-nine people died. It would not be easy for Houphouet's name to recover. Already, even before that tragedy, people were ready to speak less reverentially about the king and were ready at the same time to dismiss as Togolese the rituals that had once been used to perpetuate the rule of the crocodile master. (Houphouet's wife came from Togo.)

2.

IN 1982, when the crocodiles and the meat-eating turtles were the draw in Yamoussoukro, the cathedral existed only in outline, with the dome (intended to be higher than the dome of St. Peter's) only a few curving lines in metal. There was nothing more to see. Now the cathedral was what visitors were taken to Yamoussoukro to see. It was, indeed, a creation, beautiful and unexpected and staggering. It echoed St. Peter's in its dome and its tall outside columns. In some accounts it had cost 300 million dollars; in some it had cost 400 million; and there were vain local people who said, boastfully, but without truth, that it had bankrupted the country.

The steps to the plinth were of white marble from Italy, and the floor was a Roman design in coloured marble. Below the famous dome the strong tropical glare was softened by very tall French stained-gla.s.s windows in blue and purple that ran from the floor to the dome. At the far end was a copy of Bernini's baldaquin in St. Peter's (which had itself been partly made from bronze impiously stripped from the ancient Roman Pantheon, a full fifteen hundred years after Hadrian's reconstruction of the burnt-out original). A notice asked pilgrims and visitors to be silent: we were in a house of G.o.d.

It was quite desolate outside. The columns of the porch framed extensive flat gardens: shrubs trimmed low to fill a European-style design. Various comparisons came to mind. It could have been a pastiche somewhere in the United States. For its costliness-and thoroughness-it could have been Houphouet's Taj Mahal.

The architect had left out a device whereby cleaners or their brooms could have got up to the coffered ceiling between the high columns of the porch. Cleaners couldn't get up, but tropical spiders could: they had begun to create noticeable brown webs up there. Elsewhere, between one column of the porch and the outer skin of the dome a fair-sized piece of stucco had fallen off, revealing the metal armature. Much complicated scaffolding would be needed before that could be put right; perhaps it never would be. It was possible that this was how it would be nibbled away, this piece of vainglory of the forest king. A woman guide said that on Sundays up to nine hundred people came for the services. This might have been so; but until the government moved the capital the hundred and fifty miles from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro (as was projected) there could be no rooted community in the forest town. Even then there would be much to do. Hidden from the cathedral and its gardens were moraines of uncollected garbage that lay in all the streets of the town: Africa reclaiming its own.

3.

AS MUCH as on his magic Houphouet's rule had depended on the support of the French. In 1982 there was a French army base amid the coconut trees near the airport; and in many places in the Ivory Coast there were French people helping to keep Houphouet's show on the road. The French were welcomed as investors and they were glad to come since they could repatriate ninety per cent of their profits. They ran the restaurants and they ran them well, giving the Ivory Coast its reputation for fine French food. There was an official word for these French guests who helped to create the illusion that this African state, unlike its neighbours, was on the move. The word was as on his magic Houphouet's rule had depended on the support of the French. In 1982 there was a French army base amid the coconut trees near the airport; and in many places in the Ivory Coast there were French people helping to keep Houphouet's show on the road. The French were welcomed as investors and they were glad to come since they could repatriate ninety per cent of their profits. They ran the restaurants and they ran them well, giving the Ivory Coast its reputation for fine French food. There was an official word for these French guests who helped to create the illusion that this African state, unlike its neighbours, was on the move. The word was co-operants; co-operants; it can best be translated as "helpers." it can best be translated as "helpers."

Even if one knew nothing about the political situation one could be worried about this French presence. It seemed that a crisis was being prepared, and after Houphouet's death the crisis came: a very involved business, as crises in small places tend to be, not easy for an outsider to disentangle. There was a many-sided civil war: people of the country against black immigrants from the neighbouring poorer countries, a tribal war with the French on one side, with the French then retaliating against hostile Africans, and finally Africans against the French, so that yet another aspect of Houphouet's legacy vanished. The day came in 2004 when gangs of black men roamed the streets of Abidjan looking for white people to kill.

There was, as it happened, a survivor of that day staying in the hotel. She was not white; she was of mixed descent, with an African mother and a French father; and she had a black husband. She had gone on that bad day in 2004 to fetch her children from school. A black crowd surrounded her car and pulled her out. Some instinct of self-preservation made her say she was Moroccan, and not half French. She looked Moroccan; perhaps she had been told that before, and now she said it to the crowd, and it saved her. Morocco, perhaps because of its good airline, popular with Africans, has a fair reputation in this part of Africa.

When she told the story she tapped a finger of her right hand on her pale left hand. She said, "They were looking for white skin."

She had lived all her life in the Ivory Coast. So the experience had undermined her in many ways. It had given her such severe "palpitations" that her black husband, a diplomat, had taken her out of the country for some years. She was now back in the Ivory Coast, but the country still made her uneasy. She still feared the sight of a crowd of black men.

But black crowds couldn't now be avoided. One Sunday there was to be an African football championship match in Abidjan, in the great orange stadium, named for Houphouet, which lay between the hotel and the lagoon. The Ivory Coast was going to play Zambia. Entrance was free. The match was going to start at four in the afternoon, but from five on Sunday morning people had begun to gather. The stadium had various entrances, far and near. Soon the crowd at each entrance made an unmoving ma.s.s; perhaps they didn't move because the stadium wasn't open. They looked picturesque, something for a painter of crowds, an African Ca.n.a.letto: a stippling of black faces, jeans, and tee shirts orange, white or red.

At some time in mid-morning a few people appeared on some of the uncovered seats of the stadium, to the left, which I could see from my hotel window. Those people were going to wait for six hours for the match. The seats would have been hot enough already, and the great heat of the day was to come. I expected the waiting crowd now to move slowly into the stadium, but it didn't happen like that. It wasn't possible from my hotel room to understand all the movements of the crowd. From time to time, as the start of the match drew near, the riot police charged sections of the crowd; it was like a game. The charged crowd ran away in various directions. The stippling effect broke up, and what had looked picturesque became frightening. And then, quite quickly, the crowd reformed.

The "Moroccan" lady had seen the crowds. Later she said, "I hate hate football." football."

The Ivory Coast lost to Zambia that Sunday. The local people couldn't be generous to the winners, after the hours of waiting, the heat, and the occasional trouble with the police. It was easy to understand their frustration. Football released great pa.s.sions here. Houphouet's stadium was orange-coloured. Orange was the colour of the national side. Six weeks later, when Ivory Coast was playing Malawi, and winning, a wall in the stadium fell down and sixty-nine people died.

4.

ABIDJAN HAD grown so much I had trouble thinking back to the town I had known in 1982. I had stayed then in the Forum Hotel. No one seemed to know about it now. I remembered an open field across the road where fat baobab trees grew. I remembered the lagoon, like the sea, outside one of the hotel's public rooms; in the heat of the afternoon the algae-covered water rocked and it was then like an undulating green carpet. I remembered a general feeling of openness. There was nothing like that now; all those memories seemed to have been swallowed up by time itself. Two days before I left, a taxi-driver, showing me the sights, took me to the Golf Hotel. It was set, stylishly, a little way from the busy road and the lagoon was at its back. It would have been the old Forum, re-made in the image of over-peopled Africa, with a new kind of staff and a new kind of clientele. grown so much I had trouble thinking back to the town I had known in 1982. I had stayed then in the Forum Hotel. No one seemed to know about it now. I remembered an open field across the road where fat baobab trees grew. I remembered the lagoon, like the sea, outside one of the hotel's public rooms; in the heat of the afternoon the algae-covered water rocked and it was then like an undulating green carpet. I remembered a general feeling of openness. There was nothing like that now; all those memories seemed to have been swallowed up by time itself. Two days before I left, a taxi-driver, showing me the sights, took me to the Golf Hotel. It was set, stylishly, a little way from the busy road and the lagoon was at its back. It would have been the old Forum, re-made in the image of over-peopled Africa, with a new kind of staff and a new kind of clientele.

Houphouet, promoting his town of Yamoussoukro, had built an autoroute to it from Abidjan. A hundred and fifty miles, mainly bush: at the time it had seemed part of the vainglory and general wastefulness of Yamoussoukro. But the autoroute was now in use, beaten up in parts, a short stretch replaced by a red dirt road (tree branches on the asphalt announcing the diversion), and it was now the main thoroughfare for heavy trucks from the north and the countries to the north, bringing supplies to Abidjan.

Between Abidjan and Yamoussoukro the land is ravaged. For a hundred and fifty miles the tropical woodland or forest has been cut down and replaced by patches of petty planting: banana, knotty ca.s.sava (introduced to Africa by the Portuguese): the subsistence food of people who are not yet a peasantry. They make scratchings in the bush; these scratchings may develop into a village of gra.s.s and mud and mats (for the roof), and that village might turn into something more durable, of concrete and tin.

The pressure on the land is great; the migrants never stop coming down from the poor and arid north. From the days of Houphouet and the French there is a myth of the blessedness of the lush Ivory Coast where no one need starve. Needs are small; there isn't the time or s.p.a.ce to think of grandeur. But, in spite of the myth, it is possible that in that ravaged, once forested land they will one day be hungry. For people to aim at grandeur they must have a picture of grandeur in their minds. Houphouet didn't provide this. His rhetorical buildings were part of the private magic that served him alone.

The land has suffered much. The Ivory Coast-land of ivory beside Ghana's land of gold-is now without the elephants that by their death provided the ivory of their tusks. There are two cruel elephant monuments in Abidjan-one of a female elephant with her calf (elephants are food in this part of Africa), and a tall awkward obelisk composed (wickedly) of elephant tusks alone. Many small hands got rid of the mighty elephants, and many little scratchings have surely destroyed the great forest.

In another direction-east of Abidjan, to Bingerville-the idea of landscape has been undone or certainly hidden by line upon line of inelegant small houses. I remembered the road to Bingerville as a road through country, almost wilderness. Now it belongs to the developers; and the wretchedness of Abidjan encroaches.

Bingerville is named for Binger, a French governor of the Ivory Coast. And there is so little of history and architecture here in this former French colony that Binger's house, said to be a great house, is promoted as one of the sights. It is far from being a great house. There are a score of grander public and private buildings in a small place like Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic; and Binger's house is now, more appropriately, an orphanage: Africa drowning in the fecundity of its people.

In Ghana, just next door, with the same kind of people and climate and vegetation, the British (as they did elsewhere in the empire) created a botanical garden, which still more or less stands, with a few local intrusions. Next to Binger's house there is said to be a botanical garden. On the outer wall, freshly distempered, an enormous sign, newly done over in fancifully shaded letters at least two feet high, says that there is a garden. All that is missing is the garden.

After two short lines of ancient and very fat bamboo clumps, dead and grey in the centre, then yellow, then streaky green-clearly from the original garden, and they still cast a pleasant shade, bamboo's great virtue in the tropics-after this there is nothing, only bush and a few mildewed concrete buildings. But the guides still want to show you the gardens and the plants.

When they give up they tell you that destruction came to the botanical gardens of Bingerville during the troubles, the many little wars that undid the country when Houphouet left it. So the developer's landscape that disfigures what might have been beautiful hills between Abidjan and Bingerville, and these tragic gardens might also be said to be part of the legacy of Houphouet, who allowed the French to keep the country going, while practising magic for himself, wasting the substance of his country, building religiously, like a Pharoah-Sh.e.l.ley's Ozymandias again.

The land is full of cruelty which is hard for the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle are sent for slaughter here in big ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery, that b.u.mp along the patched and at times defective autoroute to Abidjan, to the extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black earth these n.o.ble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding comfort of a sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together with the beautiful goats and sheep a.s.sembled for killing. The ground around the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like this meet the eyes of simple people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.

5.

IT WAS part of the wisdom of the country that nature here was bountiful and unfailing; it was what brought the immigrants. Part of the bounty of nature were the bats. For half an hour or so every day in the late afternoon the bats came, flying low, just outside the windows of taller buildings. They speckled the sky. One million bats would have made a memorable show, but prodigal nature provided four or five millions, at least. The bats flew in a circle over the city. They had no fixed destination. They roosted on trees, hanging upside down within the pale-pink protection of their wings, which they folded around themselves with an almost human gesture. The trees from which they hung were damaged at the top, half stripped. part of the wisdom of the country that nature here was bountiful and unfailing; it was what brought the immigrants. Part of the bounty of nature were the bats. For half an hour or so every day in the late afternoon the bats came, flying low, just outside the windows of taller buildings. They speckled the sky. One million bats would have made a memorable show, but prodigal nature provided four or five millions, at least. The bats flew in a circle over the city. They had no fixed destination. They roosted on trees, hanging upside down within the pale-pink protection of their wings, which they folded around themselves with an almost human gesture. The trees from which they hung were damaged at the top, half stripped.

Africans eat everything that nature provides (except when a particular animal is the totem of a tribe or clan). The local people liked eating these bats. The main trouble was in getting them down. Some people used slingshots, and then there was the trouble of cooking the creatures. The bats were tough (all that flying) and had to be cooked for hours before they became acceptable.

It might have been thought that with all that flying some hundreds of bats would have dropped dead every evening and fallen from the sky to a grateful people. But no one had seen such a thing, a bat dead on the ground. And I was told by someone (perhaps not an expert) that when bats had to die they did not show themselves, but hid away, being in this like cats, who could leave their houses and go away to die.

This, however, was a luxury few of the cats of the Ivory Coast could enjoy. No cats wandered the streets here. Cats were eaten; they were part of the bounty of nature, and they could be reared to be killed. "Like chickens," the youngish man said, and the comparison amused him.

It was only on the last morning of my stay, on my way to the airport, that I found out what was the best way in the Ivory Coast of killing a cat or kitten. You put them in a sack of some sort, and then you dropped the sack in a pot of boiling water.

The thought of this everyday kitchen cruelty made everything else in the Ivory Coast seem unimportant.

Then, a few days later, when I was in Gabon, I learned more about the bats of Abidjan. They were fruit bats; they were also known as flying foxes. And they were not as innocent as they sounded. They, or their fleas, were carriers of the contagious Ebola virus. The victims bled helplessly till they died. No one knew for sure how the virus jumped from bat to man; but a good guess was that the virus was transmitted by the eating of the bat. So the darkening of the Abidjan sky at dusk was not only part of the visual drama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.

CHAPTER 5.

Children of the Old Forest.

GUY R ROSSATANGA-RIGNAULT, a lawyer and an academic, a former dean of the university of Gabon, said, "The new religions, Islam and Christianity, are just on the top. Inside us is the forest."

In another country it would have sounded too poetic and mystical, too imprecise, someone trying to cover up for a backward country. But Rossatanga wasn't like that; and in Gabon his words had meaning. Gabon, as big as Britain in area, with a population of less than two million, was an equatorial land of river and forest. It was hot; it steamed; it was malarial. From the air, as you came down to the airport, the shiny river-estuary and sea seemed about to overwhelm everything else. The forest near the capital was secondary, with plantings of oil palm that spoke of awful labour and heat. A little way inland the true forest began, primal and tall and tight. The tufted land, green with tints of the palest yellow, became hilly. The cloud shadows didn't fall flat here, as on the sea; they fell unevenly; and these jagged up-and-down shadows helped you to imagine the contours of the land below the forest canopy.

The French were unwilling colonists. They staked out their territory in the 1840s. Just thirty years later, after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, they felt they didn't have the resources, and wanted to call the whole expensive business off. They actually sent a ship to take their people away. The missionaries, though, refused to leave, and the colony survived. River traffic developed. The great French-Italian explorer Brazza, starting from the river Oguwe, shifting to a tributary, and then continuing on land, was within four days of sighting the mighty Congo River.

With the establishment of the colony there began the logging, the cutting down of the primal forest. It has never stopped, and yet after more than a century it doesn't really show. Perhaps it will soon. Thirty-year permits have been granted to the Chinese, the Malaysians, and the j.a.panese. They are more ruthless and better equipped than the people who went before, and at the end of their licences there will almost certainly be patches of desert in what was once forest. An international expert says that in a very short while thirty per cent of the forest of Gabon-the focus for centuries of Gabonese love and religious awe-will go. The good news, from the same expert, is that there may be some kind of international action (some form of subsidy, perhaps) that will make it worthwhile for the Gabonese to leave their forests standing. In the meantime, even with the areas of loss, the forests of Gabon are still one of the great sights of the world.

ROSSATANGA-RIGNAULT, an attractive man in his forties, was of mixed ancestry, as his double name suggested. His father was French, his mother African. He was educated in Gabon and in Paris. But, like many people of mixed ancestry here, he appeared to be embracing the African side of his inheritance. He didn't speak a great deal about his father; and he had married an African woman from the Ivory Coast. When he first came to see me he was at the end of his university day (he was a very busy man) and he was in his university clothes, a grey double-breasted suit. He was more relaxed the next time. He came with his two children and was informally dressed in a long West African gown decorated at the neck. This kind of gown was not Gabonese wear, and I imagined he was wearing it in tribute to his Ivory Coast wife. I thought the grey suit became him better.

When he was going to school Gabon was rich enough (from oil) to be a welfare state. His parents, as he said, had to pay only for the school bag. Everything else was free. There was even pocket money for the children when they got to the secondary stage. Every Wednesday the children lined up for a quinine tablet and milk to help the quinine down. Even the university education in Paris was free. And when Rossatanga married in Paris, the Gabon government paid for his wife's fare to Gabon, even though she was from the Ivory Coast.

He was a lawyer by profession and thought of himself as a political scientist. At the university of Gabon he also taught political anthropology. It was through these latter studies, no doubt, that he came to his poetic understanding of the place of the forest in the Gabonese mind.

It wasn't always like that. His mother was a civil servant and he was born in a hospital in the town. When he was three he was taken to the forest. It was a great opportunity to learn the ways of the forest, but he was too young to see it like that. The forest was frightening; it is frightening even now, although in the family house they have a generator. In the forest night falls very quickly. It is dark by seven; by eight you go to sleep; and you wake up at five. The darkness is dense. To understand the vision of the people of Gabon, you have to understand the forest.

"When darkness comes to the forest there is no sound. But at night there are different sounds or noises that come from animals hunting. The night plus the noises make up our mentality, because people are linked to everything in the forest. Thunder isn't just thunder, as it is for you. It is the voice of G.o.d: try to understand that. In our village the most terrifying creature is the owl. We are frightened of the owl because it is a manifestation of evil. If you are out walking and you see an owl it is a very bad omen. And this country of ours is a specific place. Our village is in the mouth of the river, and even if we take a car we will get nowhere, because of the water and the condition of the roads. It is a primeval area. The forest will always break out, always win. There is a place called Loango Lodge. You should see it. It is heaven, an Eden. On the land you will see elephants. From the same place you will see whales and dolphins in the sea. When you see that place you will understand why I say that this land was not meant for humans. It is for the animals. It is very hard to survive in the forest. You cannot farm here. You might not have noticed it, but we have no cattle. Put these things together and you will understand why this country, which is half the size of France, has such a small population. Malaria, sleeping sickness, and the hot climate."

The French, fine engineers though they were, never built roads here. There was too much rain, too much water; it washed everything away. The French concentrated on air travel. The first railway was built in 1981 by independent Gabon; it was very expensive, and it was done against the advice of the World Bank.

I asked Rossatanga, "What is it like physically in the forest?"

He said with extraordinary pa.s.sion, "It is like a wall wall. At fifty feet you cannot see, as it is so dense and thick. Your vision is limited by the forest and everyone of us in the forest is small small. I'll say it again: this land was not made for humans. You have to fight to survive. You don't know what will get you even in the river. It could be a croc, a water snake, or something living there. G.o.d knows what else is there."

"How does this affect your belief?"

"We feel that everything has life, even trees. There is a mystical tree, a red tree. When we go to the forest we talk to it and tell it our problems. We also ask its permission to cut its branch or bark, and we tell the tree why we are taking its bark, why we are cutting it. You must must tell the tree. All tribes have totems here, and that totem is taboo for them. They can never kill or harm their totem. They can never hunt it. It can be a crocodile, parrot, monkey, anything." tell the tree. All tribes have totems here, and that totem is taboo for them. They can never kill or harm their totem. They can never hunt it. It can be a crocodile, parrot, monkey, anything."

Because the conditions of life are so hard, everyone in Gabon believes in the forest and in the principle of "energy" that the forest exemplifies. This is the principle that keeps people going. To lose energy is to fade away. To revive is to get new energy from some source.

Rossatanga said, "Every living thing is energy. Everyone of us is like a battery. In our version of the world even the animals are batteries. That is why we believe there is no such thing as a natural death. If someone dies in the family we know that someone has taken his energy. To do that you have to kill the victim, be it man or animal. You kill and take their energy. We also go to the witchdoctor to take someone's energy. This is why it sometimes happens that people feel they have to do a ritual sacrifice. We are a matrilineal society. We take our mother's name, and our mother's elder brother is the big man in the family. He is so powerful that if a nephew dies people in the family suspect the uncle. They think that he wanted his nephew's energy."

Rossatanga's first experience of the supernatural-linked to the overwhelmingness of the forest-occurred when he was five. It was in his grandmother's village, a traditional village, as he says. He had gone there for his circ.u.mcision rite. That was "imperative," a rite of pa.s.sage to manhood. Whatever formal-Christian-religion the family professed, there were these old African ways that had to be honoured and perhaps were more pressing than the formal outer faith.

One day during this visit to his grandmother's village he went with his mother to a "plantation"-something much smaller than the English word: a family allotment, a vegetable patch. His mother was not familiar with the way, and when they were going back to the house they became lost. They came to a clearing. It was a cemetery, but they didn't know. There they saw something very strange: four monkeys sitting with red bands tied to their foreheads. Red is a powerful colour in Gabon. (Only three colours are known: red, black and white.) Eventually they found their way back to the house. His mother told the villagers what she had seen. The villagers said that what they had seen were not monkeys, but ghosts.

Rossatanga said, "I wanted to get away from the village."

But the supernatural began now to force itself on him. A long time afterwards he went to his mother's village with an American friend, the son of a foreign friend of his parents. This friend was prospecting for oil in Gabon. When they got to the village a man told them not to throw litter or in any way pollute the stream that ran by the village. A spirit or jinn lived there and didn't like the stream to be polluted. The American said it was black magic and nonsense and to prove his point he spat in the stream.

Rossatanga said, "Ten minutes later there was no water there, and there was a hue and cry. The village was up in arms, we had to do a lot through the local traditional man to placate the jinn or spirit. We spent a lot of money, and after many ceremonies or rituals the water came back just as quickly as it had vanished."

So in spite of his ancestry and his Paris education, his a.n.a.lytical mind, and in spite of his fierce rationality in other fields, Rossatanga had become a believer in the magic of the forest and, like other believers, had many stories to prove his point.

He said, "There is another jinn of this sort in Lambarene." Famous as the site of the Schweitzer hospital. "It lived in the river. You needed a ferry to cross that river and the government decided to build a bridge. The old people in the area warned the engineers about the jinn and told them they should ask the jinn's permission first. The engineers, who were Dutch, just laughed and carried on. Every day a worker died. People became very frightened, and even the engineers thought they should stop the work. They said they would bring an exorcist along with the local witchdoctor to placate the jinn. They went and brought a traditional doctor and he performed many rituals, and they were finally allowed to build the bridge. I believe these forest spirits are linked to the psyche of our people even if they live in the city. This is one reason why the American evangelical churches have been so successful here. They also invoke the Lord's spirit to remove the devil. This is like what we do when we go to the witchdoctor to remove the devil. The principle is the same. The common ground is the spirit."

I asked him if he could define the religion of the forest more closely.

He said, in a precise academic way, "We cannot call it a religion. It is a set of beliefs. We don't pray to G.o.d because in our understanding G.o.d is not accessible to humans. It [he meant the idea of G.o.d] has many other problems and has no time for humans."

In forest belief the organic world, the world that mattered, was like a pyramid. "The first level are the minerals and ore, the second level are the trees and flora, and the third level are the animals. The fourth level are the human beings."

If it had stopped there it would have sounded like a version of the Elizabethan chain of being. But he went on, and it soon became clear that this concept was a local one.

He said, "In the human beings you have divisions. Children are spiritually stronger than the middle-aged, who are useless and blind. The elderly, like the children, are spiritually strong because they are about to go to the new place. Children are strong because they have just come from the new place. They are pure and still have the sight. They can sense evil as they have an open mind. Sometimes they cry because they see too much, and then you have to take them to a strong traditional master. He places a stone on their forehead to stop the sight, but you have to be very careful, because too much of the stone can turn the child into an idiot. As for the old, they are special because they have power and they are close to the ancestors. Only the ancestors can intercede with G.o.d. You have to keep the bones and skull of your ancestor and feed it rum and talk to it when you are in trouble."

This was what Rossatanga himself did. So in this matter at least he was not talking with the distance of the anthropologist.

He said, "Before leaving the village I go and put alcohol and food on my mother's grave and my grandfather's grave."

I liked him for saying that. Were there other ways of worshipping the ancestor?

He said, "Every family has an elder who can talk to the ancestor. There is one man in every family chosen for the job. This elder keeps the bones and skull. The way to worship is through initiation. Initiation is a fundamental rite and practice."

I had heard much about initiation. Everybody in Gabon talks about it, or so it seems. It requires a master, an all-night ceremony with dancing and drumming, and eating the bitter root of a hallucinogenic plant, the eboga eboga. The rite is secret, and even at the end of my time in Gabon, I didn't feel I had begun to understand the idea or importance of initiation.

I wanted to know whether in this ritual of honouring the ancestor there was also contained the idea of virtue, the good life.

Rossatanga said, "No. The ancestors are there only to provide answers for your problems and give you what you want." And about initiation he said, "You have no say in the village or its matters until you are initiated. To be recognised as a man you have to be circ.u.mcised in the village. And that itself is a ritual. You take the child's foreskin and bury it in the ground. Then you plant a banana tree or sucker. This is the boy's banana, and you watch it grow. When it gives its first fruit there is a big ceremony, since the banana is a s.e.xual symbol of the boy's manhood. The boy will eat the first banana, and the rest of the fruit is rubbed all over his body. No woman must be nearby or see this ceremony."

I asked him, "Are you saying that if you follow the various rituals you need not be afraid of the forest?"

"You remain afraid. Initiation and ritual only give you a path through the forest. You are not protected against others, women especially. Women are very important in this society. They are the real power. A woman may not exercise power, but she gives it to her son. We are a matrilineal society, and women give life. This country was not made for men. Women's bodies are stronger, and so they are witches. There are many ritual sacrifices where the eyes are removed and tongues torn out of living victims. Every day there is a ritual sacrifice. White skin is very prized here, and for that reason I cannot let my light-skinned children out in the evening."

"What is the importance of the tongue?"

He said, "They remove the tongue to get energy."

"What do you think about that?"

"There is no name. It is too shocking."

It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of "energy" in such a positive way I thought he might have been more accepting.

He said, "Power is everything. It is always sought out. There is a lot of rural migration and so you have many forest people living in the cities. During elections you have to be very careful because of ritual sacrifice. You have to go every day to pick your children up from school. I was twenty-five when I did my Ph.D., and they think because I am a lawyer and successful and work late into the night I am a wizard and in a secret society. At night normal people sleep! They will think that you are a wizard too. And so far as the president is concerned, he is the king of kings of the wizards."

"When the forest gets thinner, with the logging, will these forest ideas fade or change?"

"Maybe. But I'm not sure. People who have not gone to a village for twenty years still have the same mindset. It is still a forest mind. It is a challenge, and I'm not sure that we will win. You will see people here in Libreville splashing about in the sea. But, generally, Gabonese people will not go to the sea because it is not our domain."

"Does this fatalism depress you?"

"It doesn't. I know a lot of educated people who go to the witchdoctor and spend a lot of money. This society works with this belief. All our music, painting, sculpture, everything is linked with the forest."