The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,79

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 circumcision rite. That was “imperative,” a rite of passage 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 analytical 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 Lambaréné.” 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