The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,85

genuine healers, the real masters, will not want money because they feel it corrupts their gifts. They look upon their gift as something that has come to them from the ancestor. So you give the healer or the master whatever you want—cloth, alcohol, food or tobacco. He will not ask for it. You do not give money. He does not want it. I knew a person who went really mad. They took him to a pigmy master who treated him for three months, and he was healed. The man wanted to reward the master with anything and everything—car, house, a plot of land. He said he would do anything for the master. But the master wanted nothing. All he said to the man was, ‘Take my young daughter home with you. Adopt her and educate her in modern ways.’ The man did as the master asked. He brought the girl to Libreville and educated her and treated her like a close confidante. She is now a civil servant and is still very close to her people. You see, the master knew that the world had changed, and the pigmies would need their own people to be a bridge to the new world.”

Pigmy villages were small, from twenty to fifty people in all. At one time the pigmies lived in branch or leaf igloos, made afresh every evening. But now they follow Bantu ways and live in more permanent Bantu-style mud huts.

Claudine said, “I don’t think their culture has changed as a result. The outer form has changed, but the content is still the same.”

There were two important tribes in the south of Gabon. They had introduced the pigmy to the all-important initiation ceremony, and the pigmy in his turn had passed on his knowledge of plants, including the eboga, to them. Initiation (for men alone) was a necessary stage in divination, which was done here with water or with a mirror; and in this field the pigmy was the master. So you could say that the two cultures, Bantu and pigmy, had come together.

More important than divination was the gift of communication with your ancestors. This, too, could come only after initiation, and it was of great importance. It was only from your ancestor that you could find out about your position in society, your duties and your responsibility. For this you needed the skull and bones of your ancestor, and they had to be truly of your ancestor; you couldn’t use the skull and bones of a ritual sacrifice. The skull and bones for this ritual had to come from an elder who, as he was dying, gave you permission to keep his bones as a relic.

In every family there was only one person, and he was an elder, who had the privilege of talking with the ancestors. It was this elder and his wife who kept the skull and bones; the wife’s duty was to keep the skull and bones clean.

Claudine said, “This buitee or ritual is only for men. Some tribes have included women now, but people are very unhappy about it.” She began to talk in a practical way about eboga-eating. “It is very bitter. The mouth becomes numb. The body becomes numb, and every sensation is enhanced. In the real buitee the ancestor comes at three in the morning.” It occurred to me that at PK 12 I had heard something like this, but had thought of it only as a way of getting us to stay longer. Claudine said, “The ancestor comes at three in the morning and speaks in an ancient tongue no one can understand. Only the third level of initiates can understand him. At that level the initiate can talk to the relics, and can also initiate other people. Women can be healed by buitee, but they cannot be initiated. Another thing: to be a healer you have to have an ancestor somewhere in your past who was a healer.”

Even with Claudine’s knowledge of pigmy ways, and her love for them, it was hard to arrive at a human understanding of the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.

I asked her, “Are pigmies happy people?”

“They are happy and they are gentle, but they are a very wary race. They become tactile after a long time. They don’t trust easily.”

“Do they still hunt?”

“They hunt at night now, and they have guns. Before they used to make traps.”

“Do you really like living in the forest?”

“Yes. Because my ancestors were savages.” She

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