The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,88

say nothing of her initiation. She was willing to talk more about the forest, the medicine and plants that fight illness, and make it possible to deal with the jinn and spirits of the forest. These spirits and jinn can heal the human body. The Fangs have a religion that they practise in grottoes deep in the forest; women have to stay away from these places.

“You dig a hole and put the bones of the elder or master-healer in it. Then you get a special wooden statue. These statues were made long ago by traditional priests. Nowadays they are sought after as antiques and are very expensive. You put the wooden statue on the bones in the hole. The priest will then be able to speak to the buried person, who is an ancestor or elder. There will be a religious service, and the Fangs who gather there will be in a trance-like state. They eat a plant very similar to the eboga. This plant is called alane and is very bitter. The priest asks first for forgiveness for his sins and the sins of the initiates.”

In this account by Mme Ondo, the asking for forgiveness by the priest seemed to me to have been borrowed from Christianity. But I did not raise the point with her; I did not wish to divert her.

Mme Ondo said, “Only the priest can talk to the statue of the elder, because we know only the elder can talk to God. We cannot talk to God; we are impure. The elder will intercede for us and give us what we seek. Then we do the rituals. We sacrifice a sheep without horns.”

If, as I felt, some tinge of Christianity had crept into Fang ritual, it was also true, as Mme Ondo said, that Christianity had done away with many Fang rites and rituals. In Fang legend, the tribe had to look for a land where the sun sank into the sea. They found that land in Gabon. What the legend had no means of saying was that, as soon as the French had staked out their colony in the 1840s, Christian missionaries, American and French, were going to be active, undermining (and in the north suppressing) old Fang life in unforeseen ways.

Mme Ondo said, “Here when an old person dies we say a library has burnt down.”

I had heard that said in the Ivory Coast in 1983. The words had been reverentially attributed to a wise old Ivorian, Ahmadou Hampaté Ba, then said to be very ill in hospital and close to death; the words had clearly passed into folk memory.

But Mme Ondo also thought that certain traditions, certain ways of belief, especially those that had been enshrined in oral tradition, would survive. “Here certain traditions have become institutionalised over generations and cannot be lost. I agree that if a master of a forge dies, and does not pass the iron-smelting knowledge to his apprentice, the knowledge of the forge will die. But traditional rites like initiation and those connected with the oral tradition have preserved their knowledge.”

I asked, “How do the Fang re-charge?”

“The Fang masters do astral journeys. It is a common phenomenon, as it is for the yogis of India. They can double and be in two places at the same time. When they return we feed them raw eggs and offer animal sacrifices for them. Witches and wizards can also do this astral journey, and they can sometimes fail to come back. They are found dead in the morning. Or they turn into owls, bats and flames that you see in the forest in the night. Daylight stops them re-entering their bodies. Only a very strong wizard can do it, but he will become very ill. Then the traditional priest will have to perform many rituals and sacrifices to cure him.”

DOUBLES, ASTRAL journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest: the themes recurred. And yet there were things that surprised me.

Ernest, a museum curator, a Christian, said, “Our life is bound with the forest. Every initiation is related to the forest. The relationship between the people and the forest is seen in the ritual. You went to see it at PK 12. The harp, or what we call the gombi, is crucial. In the strings of the harp are the intestines of our first ancestor, the first men who lived in the forest. It is the main instrument in the initiation