The Masque of Africa

by V. S. Naipaul

  I wanted to know about death: how do pigmies deal with it?

  “Pigmies believe in nature. They believe they come from the earth, and that is why they do not want to pollute it with the dead. They do not bury the dead. When a master dies they wrap him in a mat and put him under a big tree. They leave him there to rot, and no one will go to that place. They will not hunt or forage there. When decomposition is complete they put the bones in a grave, and they will quarantine that area. They cannot understand Christianity.”

  “What do they find especially hard about it?”

  “They fail to see why Jesus should have all the power. For them power has to be distributed among many chiefs.”

  “How long do they live?”

  “The average span is fifty years. Life is short because civilisation has introduced many diseases that were not known to them. Alcoholism, HIV.”

  “How dark is the forest?”

  “During the day light filters through the canopy and it is full of shadows. At night it is pitch dark. I think of it as a ‘locked’ darkness. It is important, too, to remember that the canopy absorbs pollution. This is why we must preserve the forest.”

  4

  FROM THE air the depredation of the loggers hardly shows. The forest seems whole and tight and eternal. At ground level it’s another story. There are the logging roads; the rains wash the loosened earth into the rivers, and the fish suffer. For anyone who feels a mystical bond with the old forest there is pain. Mme Ondo, a high civil servant, and a very elegant lady, felt that pain acutely. She was of mixed ancestry, but her heart was all African.

  She said, “We were told that we would plant a tree for every tree we cut, but it is not so. It sickens my heart that we don’t follow that principle. When I see a truck full of logs, I don’t see trees or wood. I see murdered people. They are not logs for me, but dead people. The trees are creatures just like us. Trees live longer than human beings, and they give us everything, even oxygen. We need to learn a lot from trees.”

  Mme Ondo was elegant, but that elegance was not a simple matter of inheritance. It came from deep within her. Her mother was a peasant, and so was her mother’s mother.

  “I used to help on the small farms they worked on, and I used to go with my mother to the forest. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle. Once, when I was eight, they took me to the forest and left me alone in an encampment while they went fishing in the big river. I was alone in the night, and I was afraid because I kept thinking of the stories of the anaconda snake that comes at night looking for children. In the morning I was very glad to eat the fish they had caught, but at night it was a different story.”

  Later she became attuned to the beauty of the forest.

  “The positive side is that it is very cool. There is a great calm. The birds sing, and there is great beauty in the trees. And if you see the small path twisting and turning like a snake in the forest you think of the image of the absolute. The search for the truth comes from the forest. I adore the forest, and even if I spend years abroad I have to come back and rush to the forest. I need the thick forest to feel alive.”

  “Will the philosophy of the people change with the thinning of the forest?”

  “It will change us completely, because we are all tied to the forest. We need the logs to develop the economy of Gabon, but we need a policy of reforestation to be followed very strictly. You have to remember even then that a primeval forest is very different from a planted forest. Even if you leave the young saplings to grow around the trees you have felled, it still affects the flora and fauna and the animals. The animals disappear.”

  The loggers crack the forest open, build the tracks, and leave it ready for the poachers, who turn up now with AK-47s and Kalashnikovs which, on animals in the opened-up forest, have the equivalent of the killing power of fly-spray on flies and insects in a small room.

  Mme Ondo had an African heart; but within that, and even with her mixed ancestry, she considered herself culturally of the Fang tribe. The Fangs (pronounced in the French way, without the final “g”) are one of the big tribes of Gabon. The French-American traveller Du Chaillu (1831-1903) went among them in the 1850s and (though suspect in other ways) left detailed drawings of the Fangs, their hairstyles, their filed teeth, their musical instruments and their iron tools. He said the Fangs were cannibals. This (rather than their extraordinary skills as metal-workers) gave them a special notoriety in the nineteenth century, always on the look-out for the more sensational side of Africa.

  Mme Ondo said, “Fangs were never cannibals. But we don’t know what is done in the mystical ceremonies. They may eat or not eat people. We don’t know. It was the colonial way to denigrate the Fangs because they saw the Fangs as fierce and warlike. The Fangs were coming from the north-east of Africa. They were told that their land was by the sea. The legends said that they were to go to a place where the sun set in the sea. In order to do that, they had to pass through many tribes and territories, and they had to be warriors and fierce to reach here, where the sun sank in the sea.”

  It was on this great migration that the Fangs met the pigmies.

  “The Fangs despised the pigmy, but they were taught about the forest by the very pigmy they despised. The pigmy is master of the forest and knows all the remedies needed for the many diseases that are found in it. Also, the pigmy is master of traditional healing.” It was interesting how this emphasis on disease and healing came up again and again: suggesting that the forest, spiritual healer though it might be, good for the soul, was always felt in folk imagination to be at the same time a place of illness, a place in constant need of medical or magical attention.

  Mme Ondo said, “Even though the Fangs hated the pigmies for their size and smallness, they needed him to run and fetch in the forest. To survive in the forest they needed the pigmy. The forest is a very big struggle. The Fangs’ struggle with the forest, their penetration of it, is sung in their oral history. They have a legend called Odzaboga. It tells of the Fangs and the forest. The legend says that when they came here they saw a big tree, the fromager or cheese tree.”

  I had heard the name for the first time in the Ivory Coast, and had understood that the truly beautiful tree, grey-trunked, lofty, with a few well-balanced branches, noticeable even in the high forest, was used by the French to make boxes for certain kinds of French cheese. I imagine the wood of the fromager was neutral in aroma and taste.

  In the Fang legend the migrating Fangs spent years digging into the trunk of the fromager that barred their way to the great forest. They tunnelled and tunnelled.

  Mme Ondo said, “The tree they dug into is called adzap, and it is in the oral history. There it is the symbol of the immortal country and is sacred. The entire universe sees this tree. It is on top of a mountain and has wide lateral branches. Well, the Fangs succeeded in digging through the trunk, but then the tree collapsed and took them into a ravine, where a giant snake appeared and took them to the other side of the forest. That is where the legend ends.”

  Mme Ondo had been initiated into Fang rites. Silence was the first law of initiation, she said; and she wished to say nothing of her initiation. She was willing to talk more about the forest, the medicine and plants that fight illness, and make it possible to deal with the jinn and spirits of the forest. These spirits and jinn can heal the human body. The Fangs have a religion that they practise in grottoes deep in the forest; women have to stay away from these places.

  “You dig a hole and put the bones of the elder or master-healer in it. Then you get a special wooden statue. These statues were made long ago by traditional priests. Nowadays they are sought after as antiques and are very expensive. You put the wooden statue on the bones in the hole. The priest will then be able to speak to the buried person, who is an ancestor or elder. There will be a religious service, and the Fangs who gather there will be in a trance-like state. They eat a plant very similar to the eboga. This plant is called alane and is very bitter. The priest asks first for
forgiveness for his sins and the sins of the initiates.”

  In this account by Mme Ondo, the asking for forgiveness by the priest seemed to me to have been borrowed from Christianity. But I did not raise the point with her; I did not wish to divert her.

  Mme Ondo said, “Only the priest can talk to the statue of the elder, because we know only the elder can talk to God. We cannot talk to God; we are impure. The elder will intercede for us and give us what we seek. Then we do the rituals. We sacrifice a sheep without horns.”

  If, as I felt, some tinge of Christianity had crept into Fang ritual, it was also true, as Mme Ondo said, that Christianity had done away with many Fang rites and rituals. In Fang legend, the tribe had to look for a land where the sun sank into the sea. They found that land in Gabon. What the legend had no means of saying was that, as soon as the French had staked out their colony in the 1840s, Christian missionaries, American and French, were going to be active, undermining (and in the north suppressing) old Fang life in unforeseen ways.

  Mme Ondo said, “Here when an old person dies we say a library has burnt down.”

  I had heard that said in the Ivory Coast in 1983. The words had been reverentially attributed to a wise old Ivorian, Ahmadou Hampaté Ba, then said to be very ill in hospital and close to death; the words had clearly passed into folk memory.

  But Mme Ondo also thought that certain traditions, certain ways of belief, especially those that had been enshrined in oral tradition, would survive. “Here certain traditions have become institutionalised over generations and cannot be lost. I agree that if a master of a forge dies, and does not pass the iron-smelting knowledge to his apprentice, the knowledge of the forge will die. But traditional rites like initiation and those connected with the oral tradition have preserved their knowledge.”

  I asked, “How do the Fang re-charge?”

  “The Fang masters do astral journeys. It is a common phenomenon, as it is for the yogis of India. They can double and be in two places at the same time. When they return we feed them raw eggs and offer animal sacrifices for them. Witches and wizards can also do this astral journey, and they can sometimes fail to come back. They are found dead in the morning. Or they turn into owls, bats and flames that you see in the forest in the night. Daylight stops them re-entering their bodies. Only a very strong wizard can do it, but he will become very ill. Then the traditional priest will have to perform many rituals and sacrifices to cure him.”

  DOUBLES, ASTRAL journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest: the themes recurred. And yet there were things that surprised me.

  Ernest, a museum curator, a Christian, said, “Our life is bound with the forest. Every initiation is related to the forest. The relationship between the people and the forest is seen in the ritual. You went to see it at PK 12. The harp, or what we call the gombi, is crucial. In the strings of the harp are the intestines of our first ancestor, the first men who lived in the forest. It is the main instrument in the initiation ceremony, and it was the first religion of the forest.”

  I thought back to the occasion: the night, the heat, the blazing rolled-up palm-leaf brands, the drumming, the painted figures, the shouts. I remembered now, at the very edge of the dancing area, a man at a harp, leaning with infinite tenderness over his instrument, as though anxious in the din to catch every vibration from the strings. He was, I thought, like G. F. Watts’s blindfolded figure of Hope insecurely atop the world. In the roar of the dancing yard I saw him as a minor figure, contributing little. I noticed him and then I didn’t look at him. It was shocking to me now to understand, what nearly everyone there would have understood, what the strings of the harp stood for.

  5

  I 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 buttressed 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 Oguwé. 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 Oguwé 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 sturdy departing train spoke of a horrible kind of solitude.

  The Oguwé 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 accumulations of dark and deep forest in clefts in the hills and on the riverbank. About these accumulations were what looked like many smaller green splashes of vegetation: they looked superficial, easy to scrape 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, scraped 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 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.