The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,77

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 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 Oguwé, 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 Japanese. 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