The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,84

laid out on a table in the open air.

The drums were there but not as thrilling; the body paint was there on the dancers, but more perfunctory, a dab of white and a dab of red standing for something more complete; the originals of all the movements were there, but in a lesser, undeveloped way. There were a number of children among the dancers, but not many young people; there was little in this piece of bush in Lope to keep young people; the ambitious or the bored wanted to go to Libreville. Yet even with its thin chorus line (so to speak) this village performance was as genuine as could be. But I preferred the Frenchman’s metropolitan creation in Libreville, and not only because its human material was richer, its dancers more accomplished. It used the same local materials, but it added style and finish, and I did not think it lacking in spirituality or feeling.

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THE PIGMIES, the small people, were the first inhabitants of the forest, and they became its masters. They knew its multifarious plants, their healing or poisonous qualities. They were the first to learn of the hallucinogenic eboga. (“Hallucinogenic for you,” one professional Gabonese lady said unexpectedly. “But for Africans it’s their reality.” Opening up a whole vista of the relativity of perceptions, too much of a quicksand for the short-term traveller to go into.) Africa is a land of migrations, and it was the pigmies who showed the later Bantu migrants the “path” of the forest, the philosophy of the forest.

Claudine felt passionately for the pigmies. She now lived in the forest close to them.

She said, “I thought it was awful that they were considered subhuman and low-value and had been herded into reserves. That was why I wanted to know more about them. We have no regard for them, but we go to them in secret for healing. For initiation, barrenness, for sickness the hospital cannot cure. Sometimes people step on a charm hidden in the ground and they become ill. The hospital cannot find out what’s wrong with them, even with all their modern amenities. So the sick person will go to the pigmy. The pigmy will tell them who put the charm and where and how. A person can become paralysed by stepping on a charm. He loses feeling in his lower limbs. I have made many photos of people who were injured by these mystical weapons, and I have seen how they were healed.”

Her feeling for the pigmies and the “path” made Claudine use extraordinary and sometimes very moving language.

She said, “The closer we come to the pigmies the more we understand that the world has a soul and has a life. It has energy. Pigmies are like our memories of the past. They hold the knowledge of that world.”

The events of the second half of the nineteenth century ripped the continent open. But the pigmies remained close to the forest. They preserved their knowledge of the forest; in that knowledge lay their civilisation. Other tribes lost much of that knowledge.

“In spite of the relentless pressure of the outer world the pigmies retain their civilisation. They still have to kill an elephant to become ‘a man.’ A group of young initiates wear masks made of palm branches and they go hunting. It is a rite of passage.”

And then there were the charms—never far away in any consideration of the shifting reality that surrounds men.

Claudine said, “In the mystical world”—“mystical” was the word used for anything beyond rationality—“you can make a charm from someone’s leftover food to hurt that person. And that person will have to go fast to the pigmy for help. The pigmy will look into water or a mirror and he will see whether the victim will live or die. Or whether indeed the victim has already ‘crossed the river,’ as they say: has already died. There are two kinds of healer here. The small healer will deal only with malaria and influenza. Pigmies are very good with malaria. For bigger problems, like charms, you have to go to a master healer. He has been a disciple of a great man for many years. He has learned all the ‘tactics’ of the spiritual world. When it comes to fighting the spirits you have to know the rules, or you can die, because the spirits are very strong.”

How was the pigmy healer or master rewarded?

Claudine said, “They know about money now. But those who really know their work, the