he had said in his inimitable way, the land was not made for men; it was only for animals.
The problem remained: why had the villages disappeared? Had the people eaten out the forest? Had they been compelled to go deeper and deeper into the forest? Had it become harder to drag the carcases back to the villages? Had the villages then begun to starve? The current theory, according to Kate White, was they had been laid low by the Ebola virus, brought to them by the fruit bats, themselves an African delicacy.
6
IN LOPE I got to know Mobiet, a white American of thirty-seven. He had been educated at a private university (his parents had paid), and he had come with the Peace Corps to Gabon eleven years before. He had been on some kind of spiritual quest, and had stayed. He had been dissatisfied with the United States and his restless life there. In Gabon he had done the eboga initiation; it had met some need. He had married a Gabonese woman and they had three children. For some years, after the Peace Corps, he had done paid research; but now, with three children to look after, and the years ticking by, he had begun for the first time to think more seriously about money and a proper job.
For the time being he was a free-lance. To be a free-lance in a place like Gabon, and especially in an out-of-the-way place like Lope, must have been a hard row to hoe. He sold African carvings, but I don’t imagine there would have been much of a market here; and I suppose it was as a free-lance that he had been attached to our party.
He had come to Gabon with the Peace Corps as an agricultural expert. That was an exaggeration, to put it charitably, and in the beginning it worried him; all he had done in the United States was to work for a while in a plant nursery. In the end it occurred to him to tell local people that he had come to learn about their agriculture.
He liked to tell about his first day in the village. Some people took him to the house where he was to live. A man fell in behind them, and when they entered the house the man behind them began to shout, “Get out! Get out!” It was unnerving, but the man behind them—the owner of the house, as was soon apparent—was not shouting at Mobiet. He was shouting at people who were in the house, and these people—no doubt unsatisfactory tenants—picked up their scattered things and left. The next morning the house-owner came back to take Mobiet to the local guardhouse. He wanted Mobiet to tell the people there why he was in the village. The guardhouse was where the local men hung out. The head of the guardhouse and the village watch was a kind of chief, and Mobiet had the time to notice that he was weaving a mat.
Mobiet looked about him. To his right was a sharp, towering granite rock, and a little distance away was the deep forest. The air was fresh. It was more beautiful than Mobiet had imagined; at the same time, because it was so unlike anything he had known, he was fearful. Some of the houses were of mud, and some were of concrete with a thatched roof. He thought with alarm: “Am I going to stay here for two years?”
That was when he decided to abandon the Peace Corps line and to tell people he had come to learn about the kind of agriculture they did.
He learned the hard way. It was a Fang village. He cut and slashed with the men, learned to hunt and set traps and do what they were doing. It was punishing; he had never before done such hard physical work. The women worked on the planting allotments, which were generally smallish, about a hundred metres square.
There was a woman in the village who had befriended the previous Peace Corps volunteer. Now she befriended Mobiet. She lived just across the road from Mobiet. She was thirty, just a few years older than Mobiet, and had eight children. He valued her friendship and the many things she taught him about village life. She taught him, for instance, about the standing of various people in the village, which he had not always appreciated. She got him used to the absence of privacy (the children coming into a house all