was afraid to initiate. It was his first time too. Honestly speaking, I was always interested in eboga. I knew that I would do the voyage. I wanted to do that journey when I was ready for it. You go on a long journey, and you have to be prepared for it, because you risk going to a place where the spirits are dead. You see your ancestors and you can be pulled in different directions. I had seen the country initiations, but they don’t tell you all. After initiation you don’t fear death. I fear it only because I have not prepared my family to live without me. I am not afraid of losing my essence. I pray I live a long time and see my children grow, but you need to go beyond yourself.”
I asked Mobiet to describe his spiritual father: not only his spiritual qualities, but also his appearance.
“He is a strong man. He is a soldier, very lean and muscular and very well defined. I know that if things went to hell, and we are in real trouble, I want to be with him, because he is so resourceful. He has only been educated to the fifth or sixth class in primary school, and is a sculptor. I was the first person he initiated. He was still a young healer then, learning his craft, and now he has learnt a lot more. He inherited it from his father. There are other ways to become a healer, but that involves the black arts.”
Initiation had worked for him.
“It makes me listen to my inner voice. It confirms the existence of God and it makes me move in tune with my dreams. And you meditate.”
7
MOBIET HAD arranged a special afternoon excursion for us. I suppose it was the kind of thing he did as a free-lance in Lope. And it was special: he was going to take us to see the ancestral bones of a tribe. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could see every day. It involved a journey by road to the new village of the tribe—after the death of a chief a village shifted: usually to the other bank of the river—and after that road journey, a trip by river, by dug-out (with perhaps an outboard motor), in the company of the tribal chief, to the site of the old village where the sacred old bones were kept.
The road journey took longer than I expected (Mobiet hadn’t been all that precise); and the very length of that journey led me to believe that we were going to a landing stage on the river. It wasn’t like that. We came to a village. Mobiet looked up his friends. That took a little time, and then we picked our way past a couple of wood huts, not to the landing stage, as I had hoped, but to a stretch of tallish grass bounded, discouragingly, by bush. I had trouble with the tall grass; it wrapped itself around my shoes. After a while my nervy, frail legs began to give out; and they gave out completely when I saw some barrels, taller than the tall grass, barring the way in the distance.
A pretty little sign said Débarcadère 500 metres. I suppose it was meant to be friendly, but it broke my spirit. I felt we had already walked that distance. I had given it all my zest. I thought about what I might have to walk at the other end, before I could see the bones; and I doubted whether I would have it in me to walk a thousand metres on the way back. The trouble was that I had done a fair amount of walking (for me) in the morning, in the great forest, following in the sodden tracks of an elephant. It had exhausted me; but Mobiet thought, as he said, it was a demonstration of what I could do.
He had invested much in this trip to see the bones. He thought now that I could be wheeled in a wheel barrow to the river bank. A barrow miraculously appeared, but it was an African job, heavily rusted, and not sturdy, sagging below my weight when, leaning back far too much, I tried unsuccessfully to sit in it.
It was the village chief himself, small and wiry, who put an end to the wheel barrow absurdity. He appeared, walking easily in the tall grass, coming up from the river, holding a clutch of iron tools, hammer,