Le Gabon

Le Gabon — Second Part (translated extract)

[The chapter opens with a long account of Gabonese religion, fetish-huts, féticheurs and féticheuses, and a poison ordeal (icaja/m'boundou, a Strychnos), none of which concerns iboga; that material is omitted here. The extract below picks up where Griffon du Bellay surveys the country's food plants, oils and condiments, in the course of which he records the earliest published description of iboga as a stimulant.]

If the social and intellectual life of black peoples always presents some interesting side, it is rare for their material life to be the same. I have shown how the Gabonese dress and house themselves; contact with Europeans has given them a taste for a certain relative comfort, but it has changed almost nothing in their mode of subsistence. In the midst of a vigorous and powerful nature, they have managed to create only resources insufficient for themselves and utterly nil for outsiders. Near their villages one sees hardly more than a few fine clumps of banana and manioc; within their compounds a few sacred trees, close by the fetish-hut, and a few ilangas, a liliaceous plant credited with the privilege of warding off lightning. The mango tree, introduced by Europeans, is beginning to appear there; the breadfruit tree has met less success, despite the generous efforts of the French Mission. On their holdings they cultivate, on a larger scale, the banana, manioc, yam, some groundnuts, maize and sugar-cane in small quantity, and finally a few aromatics.

These plots change place frequently, at the expense of the neighbouring forests. Such clearing is no mean labour. Whole villages migrate at once for this great undertaking and go to camp in the woods. Shelters are put up, roofed with the leaves of a very common balisier (a Canna-like plant), the ogongou. Some of the women busy themselves with cooking, while the others, carrying their children on their backs, go to help the men fell the trees they have cut down. In the evening the dances get under way to the sound of the tam-tam, for that is the conclusion of everything, of work as of pleasure. The fires blaze through the foliage and throw coppery gleams on these fearless dancers, their skin glistening with sweat, their gestures lascivious. Night and day it is a life, an animation unknown in the village. Everyone has driven off native laziness and works with ardour. But as soon as the clearing is opened and the heavy work finished, their natural bent returns at a gallop and the men go home to rest from their fatigues, leaving to the women alone the task of sowing the ground they have cleared by common effort.

It is, in sum, for the banana and the manioc that this activity develops. Both seem indigenous, though I have never met the banana tree except in places once under cultivation. This tree is, for the country, an immense resource. I was told of nineteen supposedly different species, and I myself had occasion to send several varieties to the Jardin d'Acclimatation at Algiers. Some bear enormous fruit, but none has the fine, delicate taste of the little banana so well known in our colonies under the name fig-banana or Freycinet fig. — Manioc has, over the American kind, the inestimable advantage of not being toxic. It undergoes a quite special preparation: it is reduced to a paste called gouma, after a preliminary maceration that gives it a certain degree of fermentation, and a sour, nauseous taste much appreciated by the natives. This, with dried fish and banana cooked before ripeness, is the basis of their diet.

Condiments are not lacking to this elementary cookery. There is perhaps no country richer in unexploited oil-bearing produce. From the crushed kernel of the Oba, a fine native mango-tree, is made dika, whose taste and colour recall chocolate — a remarkable product first made known by M. Aubry le Comte, today curator of the colonial exhibition. Two trees of the soapwort family [Sapotaceae], the djavé and the noungou, yield, the first a half-solid oil, the other a very firm fat of perfect whiteness. A very tall tree, the m'pôga, produces an excellent oil, though difficult to extract on account of the extreme hardness of the fruit that contains it. A leguminous tree, the owala, gives an enormous pod whose seeds are oily and edible. If to this quite incomplete list one adds the oil-palm, which is not very common, and the groundnut, which the natives care little for because it requires a certain amount of labour, one sees how rich this country is in vegetable fats, and what resources the inhabitants might find there if they were willing to take the trouble — not of cultivating, which is almost superfluous — but merely of multiplying and grouping the useful species.

Let us not close this review without speaking of the high-flavoured condiments the Gabon produces, though they are little used. First comes maketa, a golden ginger of good quality; then yangué-bère, énoné, and several other plants of the cardamom kind, whose hot, aromatic seeds are known in commerce under the names malaguetta, Guinea pepper, grains of paradise, etc., and were once much employed among us in pharmaceutical and culinary preparations. A tree of the custard-apple family, the ogana, produces pods of a somewhat coarse aroma. Nutmeg does not exist, I believe, in the country; yet two nutmeg-trees are found there, the combo and the niohué, whose nut is without scent but very oily. The vanilla vine is common, but not the vanilla. I have indeed very often come across this orchid without ever seeing its fruit. The women, who use its leaf in toilet preparations, do not know its pod or its scent. It is therefore likely that the natural fertilisation and fruiting of this plant are here even rarer than in the American species.

Sensual like Orientals, the Gabonese claims, like them, to possess remedies against physical failings. The most renowned aphrodisiac is the root of the ibôga (taberna-ventricosa, of the apocynaceous family). It is at the very least a general stimulant that might replace coffee; the natives use it on long canoe expeditions, to fight off sleep and revive their vigour. The fruits of several sterculias enjoy similar properties. The most esteemed is the red orendé. Another, the ombéné (Sterculia acuminata of Palisot de Beauvois), is well known under the name kola nut, or gourou. Its harsh, sweet taste strongly impregnates the papillae of the tongue and renders them momentarily insensible to disagreeable flavours. Brackish water then seems fresh and sweet — a precious property that makes this fruit sought after in the Sudan, where it is the object of an important trade. There is not a single traveller in that country, since René Caillé, who has not praised its virtues.

[The text continues with a description of the forests, their flora, and the Boulou and Bakalai peoples; that continuation is omitted here.]

[Translation by the proposing research agent (LLM-assisted); not checked against the French by a human translator.]