The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,87

of the forest?”

“It will change us completely, because we are all tied to the forest. We need the logs to develop the economy of Gabon, but we need a policy of reforestation to be followed very strictly. You have to remember even then that a primeval forest is very different from a planted forest. Even if you leave the young saplings to grow around the trees you have felled, it still affects the flora and fauna and the animals. The animals disappear.”

The loggers crack the forest open, build the tracks, and leave it ready for the poachers, who turn up now with AK-47s and Kalashnikovs which, on animals in the opened-up forest, have the equivalent of the killing power of fly-spray on flies and insects in a small room.

Mme Ondo had an African heart; but within that, and even with her mixed ancestry, she considered herself culturally of the Fang tribe. The Fangs (pronounced in the French way, without the final “g”) are one of the big tribes of Gabon. The French-American traveller Du Chaillu (1831-1903) went among them in the 1850s and (though suspect in other ways) left detailed drawings of the Fangs, their hairstyles, their filed teeth, their musical instruments and their iron tools. He said the Fangs were cannibals. This (rather than their extraordinary skills as metal-workers) gave them a special notoriety in the nineteenth century, always on the look-out for the more sensational side of Africa.

Mme Ondo said, “Fangs were never cannibals. But we don’t know what is done in the mystical ceremonies. They may eat or not eat people. We don’t know. It was the colonial way to denigrate the Fangs because they saw the Fangs as fierce and warlike. The Fangs were coming from the north-east of Africa. They were told that their land was by the sea. The legends said that they were to go to a place where the sun set in the sea. In order to do that, they had to pass through many tribes and territories, and they had to be warriors and fierce to reach here, where the sun sank in the sea.”

It was on this great migration that the Fangs met the pigmies.

“The Fangs despised the pigmy, but they were taught about the forest by the very pigmy they despised. The pigmy is master of the forest and knows all the remedies needed for the many diseases that are found in it. Also, the pigmy is master of traditional healing.” It was interesting how this emphasis on disease and healing came up again and again: suggesting that the forest, spiritual healer though it might be, good for the soul, was always felt in folk imagination to be at the same time a place of illness, a place in constant need of medical or magical attention.

Mme Ondo said, “Even though the Fangs hated the pigmies for their size and smallness, they needed him to run and fetch in the forest. To survive in the forest they needed the pigmy. The forest is a very big struggle. The Fangs’ struggle with the forest, their penetration of it, is sung in their oral history. They have a legend called Odzaboga. It tells of the Fangs and the forest. The legend says that when they came here they saw a big tree, the fromager or cheese tree.”

I had heard the name for the first time in the Ivory Coast, and had understood that the truly beautiful tree, grey-trunked, lofty, with a few well-balanced branches, noticeable even in the high forest, was used by the French to make boxes for certain kinds of French cheese. I imagine the wood of the fromager was neutral in aroma and taste.

In the Fang legend the migrating Fangs spent years digging into the trunk of the fromager that barred their way to the great forest. They tunnelled and tunnelled.

Mme Ondo said, “The tree they dug into is called adzap, and it is in the oral history. There it is the symbol of the immortal country and is sacred. The entire universe sees this tree. It is on top of a mountain and has wide lateral branches. Well, the Fangs succeeded in digging through the trunk, but then the tree collapsed and took them into a ravine, where a giant snake appeared and took them to the other side of the forest. That is where the legend ends.”

Mme Ondo had been initiated into Fang rites. Silence was the first law of initiation, she said; and she wished to