The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,81

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.”

2

IT WAS from Professor Gassiti that I first heard of the Gabonese miracle plant, the eboga. It was not especially rare, and it looked ordinary enough, with the spindly stem and the leaves of a kind of pepper plant. The root, suitably, was bitter. When the patient or aspirant, after due psychological preparation, ate this root it emptied his stomach and gave hallucinations. And (since we can hallucinate only about what we expect) local people could be sent on a dream journey to meet their ancestors in the other world. It also this other world (since it took you behind the scenes, so to speak) that showed the other side of reality and revealed clearly, as in daylight, whoever might have sought to damage you with charms or witchcraft. Once you had this knowledge you could protect yourself.

The professor taught at the university and was a pharmacist in his own right, with a famous modern pharmacy in Libreville. He was also known as an expert on local medicine and traditional ways of healing. He compared this medicine to the Indian ayurveda. It was based on metals, animals, and above all on plants. It had a spiritual side; it literally dealt with the spirits. The plants were aromatic herbs from the forest collected by traditional healers.

He learned about traditional healing from his paternal grandfather and his ancestors who were healers. His grandmother’s name meant “the tree is medicine.” The whole family was inspired by this lady, but his main influence was his grandfather’s cousin. She was a very famous healer. She healed many patients all over Gabon.

“I went to France for my studies. There I met a Gabonese man who told all the students there that they should acquire skills and go back to Gabon. He told me to become a pharmacist. Actually my elder brother was to have done it, but he did engineering instead. So I did pharmacy and plant specialisation. It was the time when everybody was talking about the eboga plant. It is a plant that is found in central Africa. In Gabon it is used to cure many things. It is now used as ‘methadone’ in the West. It is a substitute for heroin and morphine and is now used to help addicts to break their habit. It has fifteen substances in the roots. Since time immemorial eboga has been used in initiation rituals, and these initiation rituals are unique to Gabon. It can be called the Gabon patrimony. The first tribe to know of the eboga were the pigmies.”