mattock, saw, which were amazingly like those Du Chaillu drew for his book. He clearly had put in a lot of effort into getting the bones ready for our visit, and he was more disappointed than Mobiet. I had missed seeing the sirens in the river, he said. They were white women, and they were well worth seeing; they protected the river and they didn’t like intruders; he had gone to some trouble to placate them for our sake.
So I had let everybody down. It had taken some of the savour for the village out of the rest of the programme—the dinner, and the initiation dance afterwards—which Mobiet had prepared.
But I had not let Nicole, my bodyguard, down. She was a Christian, but she had the old Gabonese anxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirens at the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had been praying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river trip wouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers had been answered, giving her, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of prayer.
I began to walk back to the road. I went around the wood huts at the front of the yard, asked the surprised women at their washing-up stands to forgive me, and crossed the road.
UNLESS YOU knew him, and if you were looking for something regal or chief-like in the man, you would have missed the chief. He talked easily, he had good manners, but there was nothing chief-like about him. The simple wood houses of his family—two or three separate houses: I assumed they were the houses of his family—were like those of the women on the other side of the road.
There he was now, working in his yard with others of his family, shirt falling away from his strong but bony chest, to put the place straight for dinner. There were chairs—white plastic of a familiar design, capable of being stacked—for the visitors in his chief’s hall, a low rough building with a roof of old corrugated iron and traditional bark walls. He had the white chairs put in a line and invited us to sit. He was sorry not to have had the dignity of showing us the sirens in the river and the bones of the elder; he complained, but only a little; and thereafter his manners and formality did not fail.
He was a traditional healer in Lope. He was also a retired police officer. So to be a chief was not, as I had half imagined, to hold down a hereditary honour. A chief here was more a kind of civil servant, someone appointed by the government. His father had been a maker of dug-outs. He had also been a healer in the traditional way, and an initiator. The religious side of his father’s attainments (a healer had to have healing in his ancestry), could be said to be the chief’s true inheritance.
I wondered whether he was finding it hard nowadays to keep up the old traditions.
He said, “The first difficulty is the park itself.” The Lope national park. “The park took away all our sacred places in the forest. When the park was created they said that the village would have a protected zone. That zone for the village was not respected. The second difficulty is the increase of evangelical churches.” Nicole belonged to an evangelical church, but she kept quiet. “They keep calling us devil-worshippers and pagans, and their propaganda has worked. In reality our religion respects God more than these churches.”
There had been Protestant and Catholic churches here; but these evangelical churches—the local people called them the rock-and-roll churches—appeared in the 1990s. About the influence of the evangelical churches he said two different things. He said at first they were a threat to the traditional religion; and then he said that the young people of the village were in his church. He had initiated them himself. I thought it sounded as though he was exaggerating the evangelical threat. But he said he wasn’t. The influence of the rock-and-roll churches was growing.
He said, “I was baptised and confirmed, but I decided that the traditional religion was strong in me, and I wanted to come back to it. In our initiation the fundamental belief is that there is only one God.”
He was sixty-four or sixty-five. He was born on the day in 1944 when a Frenchman came to the village to do a