AN ANTI-FETISH MOVEMENT COMES TO NORTH-EASTERN GABON

In north-eastern Gabon during the years prior to independence, religious and political imaginations converged in ways that continued to shape understandings of social and political history half a century later. In 1955, a ritual specialist named Emane Boncoeur (or Emane Nyangone) arrived in the town of Makokou from Souanké in Moyen-Congo to lead an anti-fetish movement.Footnote ¹ Emane came armed with two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and her husband or brother Mimbare (also called Jean or Jean-Baptiste).Footnote ² Emane toured the countryside, especially the Fang-speaking villages to the west of the Ivindo River (see Figure 1). He performed ceremonies, identified sorcerers and compelled villagers to turn over their power objects: protections, medicines, ancestor relics, harmful ‘fetishes’. Those who resisted were struck or seized by Emane's spirits in nocturnal visits, and subsequently fell ill, went insane, or died. Emane stopped at the district boundary 80 kilometres west of Makokou; others carried the movement to points beyond. This movement has shaped historical memory profoundly; it also illustrates how Fang speakers from the region mediate between visible and invisible powers, and how they understand their marginalization from regional and national politics. At the same time, the direct intervention of white ‘spirits’, while building on previous anti-sorcery movements such as ngi (or ngil),Footnote ³ also marked a significant but paradoxical innovation that harnessed white power to weaken Africans.Footnote ⁴ Since the 1950s, Mademoiselle and Mimbare have been incorporated into a range of initiation and healing practices, including Mimbiri, Mimbalé, and Bwanga. During ceremonies initiates consume the powerful forest psychotropic, iboga, to voyage to the spirit world where they encounter the spirits. East of the Ivindo and in northern Gabon, Mimbalé and Ndéndé practitioners listen to Mimbare and Mademoiselle during consultations or ceremonies through wands they have received mystically during their initiations.

Figure 1 Northern Gabon in the 1950s: major rivers, roads and administrative centres

Mademoiselle and Mimbare appear primarily to those who have cultivated ‘occult vision’: ritual experts, initiates, those with ‘open heads’, and also those they punish. A ‘Euro-African’ spirit, usually described as French, white and comely, with flowing hair and a long gown, Mademoiselle embodies mysterious European power put to use by some Africans against others. Some practitioners associate her with the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, or Mami Wata, while Mimbare is linked to John the Baptist, sent to purify the land. In some accounts, however, Mademoiselle is the spirit of Emane's sister, sacrificed to give him his extraordinary powers. These differing representations of Mademoiselle suggest that equatorial Africans experience, narrate and speculate about the invisible world in a variety of contradictory ways that also inform, as explored here, divergent political imaginings.

Colonial records cite stories that Emane received the spirits from a Frenchman in Cameroon in order to combat evil and sorcery (Tonda Reference Tonda2002: 65). Others have gained access through direct revelation or initiation and apprenticeship, usually preceded by a call to heal via spirit visions and physical or mental illness. Mimbare and Mademoiselle are thought to have communicated directly with Emane – appearing to him at night, speaking to him during fetish-finding tours, and by some accounts writing revelatory information in the book he carried, the latter symbolizing the power of European bureaucratic knowledge, which his movement ritually reinforced.

Decades later, Fang speakers from north-eastern Gabon recalled Emane's movement with vivid ambivalence. Women, in particular, are convinced that by ridding the country of powerful sorcerers Emane left a lasting positive legacy. Yet – as argued here – many, including devotees, believe that he and his spirits permanently weakened the country by robbing people of their power objects at precisely the moment they needed all their force to compete for power in the nascent Gabonese state. Emane's tour coincided with the growing national political rivalry between député Jean-Hilaire Aubame and the man who would become Gabon's first President (1961–7), Léon M'Ba. Emane's arrival also played into regional ethnic and political rivalries. In the 1952 Territorial Assembly elections, the Fang candidate, Marc Essia-Nsomore, had lost to Paul Zembote, a Kwélé speaker originally from Mvadhi on the Upper Ivindo River. Three years later, following Essia-Nsomore's death, territorial councillor Zembote invited Emane to come to Gabon to combat sorcery and fetishes, a passage remembered as particularly devastating in the Fang villages that had supported Zembote's rival. Emane's visit was also authorized and closely monitored by colonial officials in Makokou and Libreville, whose chief concern was maintaining order and control (Cinnamon Reference Cinnamon2002). Thus both Gabonese politicians and colonial administrators were intimately involved in the tour of Emane and his spirits. While the goal here is to understand how Gabonese viewed this anti-sorcery movement ‘from below’, the movement itself originated and was sanctioned from above.

The present article brings together discussion of late colonialism and changes in northern Gabonese spirituality to highlight struggles in rural communities over access to a central government that included both elected Gabonese officials and colonial administrators. It proposes an alternative reading of ‘grassroots’ political understandings that departs from studies focused on political parties, unions and international politics. Both villagers and regional political elites have shared very similar understandings of the invisible dimensions of power. As invisible forces, Mademoiselle and Mimbare ushered in a new political era, characterized by competition, loss and marginalization. Narratives about Mademoiselle and Mimbare thus provide important insights into a Gabonese political imaginationFootnote ⁵ and make close connections between the 1952 Territorial Assembly elections, the coming of Emane and Mademoiselle in 1955, and the marginalization of Ogooué-Ivindo Fang speakers from national political power. Villagers express their disillusionment through moralizing stories that attribute their disempowerment, neglect and resistance to occult human agency (Ngolet Reference Ngolet2000; Mba Ndzeng Reference Ndzeng L2006).

SPIRIT MOVEMENTS, OCCULT POLITICS, LATE COLONIALISM

In its movement across the landscape, the Mademoiselle movement paralleled other late-colonial anti-sorcery movements. The Atinga anti-witchcraft movement, for example, arrived in south-western Nigeria in 1950–1 as part of a ‘strategy of political and economic empowerment by a rising commercial elite’ during a period of increased cocoa production and economic growth (Apter Reference Apter and Comaroff1993: 113). In Moyen-Congo in 1953, Lassy Simon Zéphirin founded an anti-sorcery/anti-fetish movement to cleanse his region of ‘its diabolical practices’ (Hersak Reference Hersak2001: 621; Soret Reference Soret1959: 98).

In its complex interactions with state politics and turn to healing, Mademoiselle also resembled other equatorial African spirit movements. In post-colonial Congo-Brazzaville in 1973, the Mvulusi therapeutic movement arose under Ma Meno Véronique, who began her career by entering into trance and accusing her clan chief of ‘eating people’. Later, she established a healing practice in Pointe Noire that drew on Vili and Judaeo-Christian mythological and metaphysical frameworks, including spirits and holy water (Hagenbucher-Sacripanti Reference Hagenbucher-Sacripanti1992: 66–70). After her death in 1977, her followers navigated complex political relations, first with the single-party Marxist state, and, later, with Congo's turbulent multi-party system (Hagenbucher-Sacripanti Reference Hagenbucher-Sacripanti2002). One politically active adherent ‘insisted on the inseparability of the political and the religious’ (2002: 526).

I situate this article at the intersection of two bodies of scholarship in Africanist anthropology and history. The first has to do with the close relation between political power and the invisible, politicians and spirits, politics and the occult (see, for example, Geschiere Reference Geschiere1997; Niehaus Reference Niehaus2001; Schatzberg Reference Schatzberg2001; Ellis and Ter Haar Reference Ellis and Haar2004; Ashforth Reference Ashforth2005). Much of this literature emphasizes the resurgence of occult power in post-colonial Africa in response to global modernity and the occult violence of millennial capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999; Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2000). As Florence Bernault (Reference Bernault2009b: 774) has put it, ‘modern witchcraft has become the dominant paradigm in the studies of African religious beliefs’. Recently, Terence Ranger (Reference Ranger2007: 274–5) has argued that many of these studies over-generalize the occult. Instead, he argues, ‘occult phenomena need, like all others, to be situated in their own particularity’ (ibid.: 277). In the particular case presented here, that of north-eastern Gabon in the years immediately preceding independence, Mademoiselle and Mimbare loomed at the heart of political processes.

The second body of scholarship assembles the burgeoning number of detailed historical studies of late colonialism, nationalism and decolonization across Africa. Together these studies have sought to move beyond emphasis on political parties, African elite males, mass political mobilization from above, and wars of independence. Revisionist studies have elucidated the roles played by women political activists in the production of nationalism in Tanganyika (Geiger Reference Geiger1996; Reference Geiger1997), the intersections of popular music and nationalism in late-colonial Luanda, Angola (Moorman Reference Moorman2008) and the decisive influence of ‘grassroots ethnic, class, regional, and gender alliances’ as well as ‘low-level civil servants and trade unionists’ in Guinea's move to independence (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2009: 23; Reference Schmidt2005). Most of these studies, however, with the exception of the growing number of accounts of independent and Pentecostal African churches (for example, Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; Kirsch Reference Kirsch2008), downplay spiritual and invisible domains of power.

Exceptions include late-colonial Dar es Salaam, where rumours circulated of blood-sucking European vampires (mumiani) and their African assistants who extracted the blood of victims they had abducted ‘to make medicines that would further increase their powers’ (Brennan Reference Brennan2006: 392–3). Such rumours expressed relations between urban citizens, nationalism and economic inequality, and led to a 1959 riot in Dar es Salaam. While TANU nationalists deplored the ‘superstition’ and violence, they opportunistically borrowed metaphors of ‘blood sucking’ to denounce colonial exploitation and inequality (Brennan Reference Brennan2006; Reference Brennan2008). In the Cameroon Grassfields during and after the violent transition to independence, village politics, nationalism, failed revolution, spirituality and ‘the influence of the invisible world on political processes’ intersected. According to one resistance fighter, the ‘failure to uphold a spiritual alliance’ between a multi-dimensional non-Christian God and man – an alliance mediated by ancestors and spirits – caused ‘the violence of the independence war in the Grassfields region’ (Terreta Reference Terretta2005: 75–7, 98). Finally, in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Mozambique, sorcery and the invisible have been worked and reworked continually to inform governmentality and political power (West Reference West2005).

Of course, not all people in Gabon make explicit connections between Mademoiselle and politics. In the Ogooué-Ivindo, Kwélé speakers, who vie for power with Fang and Kota, admit that the removal of their power objects in 1955 left them in a weakened, albeit purified state, but tend to depoliticize the episode. As one Kwélé man put it, ‘There had been many deaths in our canton due to sorcery and medicines.’ People asked territorial councillor Zembote to call Emane Boncoeur ‘to remove the medicines’.Footnote ⁶ In the northern Woleu-N'Tem region, where Mademoiselle also arrived to remove fetishes, she was not directly involved in state politics (Fernandez Reference Fernandez1982: 215–40).Footnote ⁷ Even before independence, the spirits were incorporated into healing practices and initiation religions such as Bwiti and Mimbiri, where, again, they were connected less directly to state power.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, both villagers and urban-based intellectuals originally from north-eastern Gabon are eminently capable of retracing their version of regional and national political history without evoking invisible power. They speak of big-man political competition, winners and losers, and regional marginalization. Late colonialism initiated new forms of accumulation by Gabonese politicians while holding out the false promise of independence (and the paradox of disempowerment) to rural villagers.

Key stated goals of Emane's 1955 mission to Gabon were to combat sorcerers (pl. bəyəm in Fang) and to remove harmful məbyaŋ: power objects, medicines, fetishes. The problematic term ‘fetish’ and its derivations are the product of a complex history in equatorial Africa that dates back at least to the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese mercantile encounter with West and Central Africans (Pietz Reference Pietz1985, Reference Pietz1987, Reference Pietz1988; Tobia-Chadeisson Reference Tobia-Chadeisson2002). As elsewhere in equatorial Africa (MacGaffey Reference MacGaffey2000; Bernault Reference Bernault2009a, 2009b), the term fétiche has slipped into Gabonese French and refers to bivalent power objects that may protect and heal or provoke blockage, misfortune, illness and death. Of course, post-colonial ‘fetish governments’ – authoritarian systems that imagine power as a sacred but violent object invested in the autocrat and his agents (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001: 111) – would not have materialized ex nihilo. In Gabon, the magical political battles of the 1950s built on earlier conceptualizations of power – ‘regimes of fetish’ (Bernault Reference Bernault2009a). These changed under the weight of the colonial situation while foreshadowing the fetishization of political power in the post-colony.

Variously represented as unseen forces, spirits (mìnsísím in Fang), medicines (məbyaŋ), or miracles, Mademoiselle and Mimbare embody a fundamental ambiguity, widely noted in Equatorial Africa, between protective and harmful forces, between healers and sorcerers, between protective and harmful medicines.Footnote ⁹ In late-colonial Gabon, a similar ambiguity existed when it came to medicines, spirits, ritual experts, sorcerers and politicians; all could operate for good or ill. This ambiguity lies at the centre of conceptualizations of power and political culture, including state politics. Mademoiselle and Mimbare, as new invisible forces in the region, ushered in a new political era.

I now turn to a number of narratives (recorded between 1988 and 2005), beginning with an interview with the late territorial councillor Paul Zembote that underscores the relation between Emane's 1955 anti-fetish tour and the late-colonial political imagination. A second narrative suggests how Emane and his spirits continue to permeate popular consciousness; it evokes not only the violent confrontations between the spirits and those who resisted them, with the imperative of submission, but also the spirits' involvement in healing practices. I then turn to several interviews: with a former député; a village chief and a party official; a retired registered nurse who accompanied Emane's delegation; and a village elder. All of these situate the coming of Emane squarely within the framework of local and regional political rivalries. It is here that the convergence of spiritual and political imaginations is most evident. A final section moves beyond Emane and Mademoiselle as political origin myth to trace connections between regional politics in the 1950s and an emerging national political imagination. Here, village elder Jean Nzeng explains what he calls ‘the paths of politics’ as well as his understanding of multiple political beginnings that have culminated in local marginalization and frustration. Together these narratives suggest the partial contours of a masculine political imagination, shared by both villagers and regional political elites, that includes but is not reducible to the invisible.

MADEMOISELLE AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN OGOOUÉ-IVINDO: ‘I, TOO, WAS AFRAID. …’

The first narrative, based on a 1990 interview with former territorial councillor Paul Zembote, suggests the close connections between ‘fetishes’, spirits, politicians, the colonial administration and Emane Boncoeur's arrival. Zembote was Bεkwil (also Kwélé, Bakwélé) born in c. 1915 at Mvadhi, a village and colonial post on the Ivindo River. Zembote attended primary school in Mvadhi until the post (and school) closed in 1929. He then went to Makokou where he became an interpreter/scribe, and later an assistant nurse, before entering politics. Fang elders spoke of Zembote with considerable resentment, intimating that he had summoned Emane and his spirits in 1955 to weaken them. When we met, I (tactfully) asked him about Emane Boncoeur. While calling attention to his role as territorial councillor and, therefore, as a broker between the colonial administration and the people, Zembote, whose response I summarize here from field notes, de-emphasized the political:

As Zembote explained it, he was merely carrying out his duties as a conscientious public servant, protecting his distraught constituents – and himself – from the menace of fetishes. Zembote mentioned other anti-sorcery associations (Mungala, Benjie, Njobi) but dismissed these as ineffective or evil. This recalls the ambiguous potentialities of anti-sorcery movements, including Mademoiselle. Moreover, Zembote points to a close relationship between sorcery, anti-sorcery and Christianity (Tonda Reference Tonda2002; Reference Tonda2005). His last comment invokes God the Father and Holy Water, but his preceding discussion suggests that these were not enough to neutralize sorcery, ‘bad spirits’ and fetishes. As an African Christian, Zembote thus called on an African ritual expert (Emane) who used two Euro-African spirits (Mademoiselle and Mimbare) in African ways to promote an imported religion at the expense of African ritual practices.

Emane's anti-sorcery was particularly effective because he had obtained his force from a white man in Southern Cameroon. Tonda (Reference Tonda2002: 65), citing a 1956 colonial report on the Mademoiselle anti-fetish movement, identifies this European as a Public Works agent named Benoît. After having asked Emane for hair and nail clippings and 5,000 francs, Benoît gave him a booklet and a phial of perfume by which he beckoned Mademoiselle to help him to combat harmful fetishers. This suggests the long-distance pathways along which anti-sorcery movements and other practices travelled. A white man had brought Mademoiselle from Europe to Djoum, a Bulu-speaking town in Southern Cameroon. Emane had received her there, and carried her back to Souanké, an Njεm- and Bεkwil-speaking town in the Moyen-Congo. From there he conveyed her to Mvadhi, Zembote's village on the Gabon–Moyen-Congo border, and then on to Makokou, a Fang-, Kota-, and Bεkwil-speaking town, and the Fang-speaking villages west of the Ivindo River.

Finally, Ndéndé, a Kota or Chiwa speaker from near Ovan, took the movement to the regional capital, Booué, and to Okandé villages south of the Ogooué River.Footnote ¹⁵ It is to Ndéndé that Zembote probably referred when he said that Emane had sent people to Woleu-Ntem to remove Fang reliquary objects. At the same time, Zembote's statement that Léon M'Ba (then Zembote's colleague in the Territorial Assembly and, as of November 1956, mayor of Libreville) was unhappy may refer to widespread speculation that M'Ba's power came from the ancestors and other invisible sources. M'Ba might have seen Ndéndé's movement as a threat. Of course, Ndéndé's work in the vicinity of Oyem is well documented and remains etched in the popular imagination (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1966; Fernandez Reference Fernandez1982; interviews in Oyem and Minvoul 2005). North of Oyem, villagers thwarted Ndéndé's arrival (Weinstein Reference Weinstein1966: 54).Footnote ¹⁶ Here we have a transnational anti-sorcery movement that inspired widely varying local and regional or even ethnic reactions and interpretations.

According to Zembote, Emane in his war on fetishes used or sent out Mademoiselle and Mimbare on night-time search-and-destroy missions, reminiscent of vampires who also go out at night in vampirisme (ŋgbəl). Emane succeeded primarily because he had access to more powerful invisible forces. Zembote, for his part, tells us that he, too, was afraid of fetishes. He directed Emane to Kwélé villages on the left bank of the Ivindo and then across the river to the villages of his Fang-speaking rivals. Perhaps Zembote perceived Emane as a means of protecting himself from village-based ‘levelling mechanisms’, thereby enabling him to accumulate power in the emerging realm of national politics (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1982; Reference Geschiere1997). The political realm offered unprecedented opportunities for some while also creating new social inequalities. Zembote downplayed power politics, but Emane's spirits not only protected Zembote's constituents – they also attacked them, forcing them to submit.

‘HE BROKE THE STONE WALL WITH HIS FORCE’Footnote ¹⁷

Decades after the passage of Emane through the Fang-speaking villages of Ogooué-Ivindo, both Emane and his spirits remained rooted in popular consciousness. Efaghe-Akare Basile, not born until 1963, eight years after Emane's visit, spoke of Emane and his spirits with easy familiarity. He also knew which healers continued to use Mimbare and Mademoiselle in their work. Mimbare was a spirit who befriended those who ‘had nothing’ and attacked sorcerers and people with evu. Efaghe knew very well that Emane Nyangone had brought Mimbare from Souanké. ‘When Emane Nyangone came to Makokou,’ he noted, ‘the people built a stone wall. He broke it with his force. People died.’ This of course hints at mystical battles between Emane and the sorcerers whose medicines he sought to remove.Footnote ¹⁸ Efaghe underlined Emane's force and illustrated how Mimbare and Mademoiselle have become part of Gabon's post-colonial spiritual landscape, linked to healing. It was also Efaghe who, early in my fieldwork, first called my attention to the importance of Mademoiselle in the local imagination. Efaghe described how Emane carried out his work:

Without making overt political connections, Efaghe underlined the colonial imperative of submission to superior force. People were compelled to relinquish their medicines – whether harmful or beneficial – or face drastic consequences. After Emane's visit had moved on to the next village, the villagers remained behind, protected only by the terrible force that had subdued them in the first place. Later, healers gained access to the spirits and used them not only to remove fetishes but to consult patients and diagnose illnesses.

THE RISE AND FALL OF MARC ESSIA-NSOMORE

In the regional political imagination, Marc Essia-Nsomore embodied the hopes and disappointments of Fang speakers. He is remembered as a great intellectual and man of book learning capable of delivering his Ogooué-Ivindo brethren to the political promised land. In the end, Essia lost the 1952 election, died of malaria two years later, and could not deliver. Without directly accusing Zembote of complicity in Essia's death, ex-député and government minister Nze Thomas-Dydyme suggested close conceptual and even causal links between Zembote's 1952 election victory, Essia's death, Emane's arrival, subsequent disempowerment of Ogooué-Ivindo Fang, and the quashing of their legitimate political aspirations. Nze also provided a sketch of Essia's truncated political biography. It is a tale of lost potential and serves as an allegory of the region's perceived political marginalization in post-colonial Gabon.Footnote ²⁰

Essia began his education around 1930 at a school run by the military administration in Makokou. After its transfer to civilian administration in 1936, Essia continued at the new Protestant Mission school at Alarmintang, on the outskirts of Makokou.Footnote ²¹ He finished primary schooling at Angomo on the lower Ogooué in 1941, and earned an additional certificate in 1943. He then taught at the Mfoule Protestant Mission school in Oyem (1943–5) before being reassigned to Ovan, 100 kilometres west of Makokou, where he opened cours moyen – the last two years of the primary-school cycle.Footnote ²²

Electoral politics came to Ogooué-Ivindo in the immediate post-Second World War years. In 1947, Essia was still too young to present his candidacy for the Territorial Assembly elections. A former abbé, Augustin Essone Ekoume from the Moyen-Ogooué region, represented the Ogooué-Ivindo from 1947 to 1952. The fact that this territorial councillor came from outside the region suggests the relative isolation of Ogooué-Ivindo and the late arrival of electoral politics. When Essia ran in 1952 he lost to Zembote. According to Nze, the Protestants had not wanted Essia to leave teaching and intervened with colonial administrators, who in turn saw him as less malleable than Zembote.Footnote ²³ Essia was furious and tried to leave the Mission before being reassigned to Oyem, where he died in 1954. His death spelled a double loss for the Fang of Ogooué-Ivindo. First, their candidate lost the elections which would have assured them more direct representation in state affairs; then they lost their candidate.Footnote ²⁴

In the popular imagination, the winning candidate, Paul Zembote, was somehow linked to Essia's death. Only occult forces could have killed a man such as Essia, and Zembote feared vengeance. According to Nze, Zembote had said that the Fang were trop sorciers. He sent for Emane at Souanké to come and remove all of the medicines in Makokou. ‘Essia had been beaten.’ As Nze put it:

Nze here evokes occult agency, that is, ‘representations that heavily emphasize human actions but that, at the same time, hide the actors and their acts from view’ (Geschiere Reference Geschiere1997: 22). In the realm of politics, secrecy and power, the apparent and the concealed are always related (Eaton Reference Eaton2006). Moreover, human intentions always lurk behind cases of political misfortune. Zembote's complicity in the mysterious death of his political rival remained concealed, or only vaguely suspected, until he brought Emane to Ogooué-Ivindo to protect himself.

‘AND THEY CALL HER MADEMOISELLE …’

Fang villagers in the region linked Emane's anti-fetish tour even more directly to Essia-Nsomore's death. In response to a question about Emane, a village chief, accompanied by the Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PDG) village committee president, immediately made the political connection.Footnote ²⁵ The chief also placed the former chef de canton, Menie-M'Oyone Fabien, at the centre of the affair. Menie, born in c. 1909, served in the French military from 1929 to 1944, rising to the rank of master sergeant. Upon his return home, Menie took a leading role in the clan reunification movement, the rewriting of ‘clan’ history, the Mimbiri religion, and local politics. He was a trusted auxiliary of the colonial administration and, after independence, of presidents Léon Mba and Omar Bongo. Menie served as canton chief from 1952 until his death in 1982 (Ntoule-Akame Reference Ntoule-Akamen.d.; Cinnamon Reference Cinnamon1998).Footnote ²⁶ As these village elders saw it, Menie and Emane shaped late-colonial local and regional politics, set against the backdrop of emerging nationalist politics:

For the chief, Emane's visit stemmed directly from the loss of their two leading intellectuals. Had not these mysterious deaths undermined regional political life at a crucial moment of opportunity? The chief also suggested that the influential canton chief, Menie-M'Oyone, had played a role in the affair. Other sources note Menie's close ties to Zembote.Footnote ²⁸ Had they somehow colluded in Essia's death?

Apparently the chief voiced more widely held, but sensitive, speculations about Menie's involvement.Footnote ²⁹ The late Bifele Alphonse, from Mayiga, also noted that Menie was close to Zembote. Menie and Essia were ambitious men and rivals from the same village, so they did not get along. And as Peter Geschiere (Reference Geschiere1997) notes, Cameroonian political elites were thought to use occult means to settle their political scores. Had Menie sold out a local rival to side with an ‘outsider’ from across the river? Or, as an astute and opportunistic political entrepreneur, had he simply sought to profit from the passage of Emane Boncoeur? Menie's own extraordinary success in local politics and wealth accumulation may have convinced people, especially his enemies, that he too had access to invisible force. ‘But,’ Bifele concluded, ‘these are affairs that people suppose. On this earth, no one knows exactly what happened.’Footnote ³⁰

Emane-Ebome Raymond (not related to Emane Boncoeur) was cantonal secretary in the mid-1950s and had accompanied Emane's delegation all the way to Mintoum, where Emane (the healer) stopped. He also mentioned the ‘Zembote-Essia affair’ and observed, ‘Zembote and Menie were supposed to be together. Menie feared medicines. Emane Boncoeur said that he had come to remove medicines, [but] he wanted to take away the fétiches from the others without removing theirs’ – that is, Menie's and Zembote's.Footnote ³¹ Here, Emane (the healer) emerges as an accomplice in regional politicians' designs to accumulate invisible forces while nullifying those of their constituents and rivals. Emane-Ebome expressed two widely held sentiments: first, ritual experts frequently operate as double agents who use invisible force to strengthen some and weaken others. Second, political elites deliberately set out to enhance their hold on power by weakening that of the population – economically, politically, and in the realm of the invisible. In this sense, Emane's passage set the tone for subsequent interaction between villagers and those who would inherit state power, the latter comprising a trans-ethnic alliance of elites against the people. Emane-Ebome, who later became a registered nurse, also observed that a deadly flu epidemic spread through the region after the departure of Emane. This was interpreted as the wrath of Mademoiselle and Mimbare – or as an expression of new powerlessness after the removal of medicines and protections.

Not everyone, of course, interpreted the arrival of Emane as a political event, especially on the opposite side of the Ivindo. Joseph Bapasse, Kwélé from Abord, for example, downplayed the political and ethnic dimension of Emane's expedition: ‘For us Emane-Boncoeur did not come because of the Fang. We didn't want him to visit all the cantons. The government wanted him to go to all the cantons. They obliged [the canton chiefs] Menie and Njolé to sign. … They speak about politics now. It wasn't politics. The Bakwélé didn't do politics.’Footnote ³² Contrasting interpretations aside, diverse actors involved nonetheless shared a common political imaginary in which sorcery/anti-sorcery was linked, one way or another, to state power. While Bapasse denied the political dimension of Emane's journey, he did acknowledge active government interest.

It was risky, of course, to accuse Menie of having colluded in Essia's death; such accusations could dredge up submerged conflicts on the Fang side of the Ivindo. In the above-cited interview, as soon as the village chief mentioned Menie's name, the committee president interrupted him, re-focusing suspicion on the politically safer outsider, Zembote. The chief quickly concurred. At that point, discussion took on an ethnic dimension (Zembote the Kwélé vs the Fang).Footnote ³³ To protect himself and escape retribution, Zembote now had to neutralize or ‘remove’ the entire Fang group (ayoŋ). He called Emane from Souanké so that Emane could ‘slaughter’ the Fang sorcerers to prevent them from retaliating, while weakening the ayoŋ:

The source of Emane's power was, of course, Mimbare and Mademoiselle. The chief suggested that Mademoiselle was especially powerful, because she was white [ntaŋa], which evoked both Europeans and the ancestors.Footnote ³⁴ As in the other versions, although Mademoiselle attacked sorcerers, she, too, was a killer:

THE PATHS OF POLITICS (MƏNZƏN MƏ YA POLITIQUE)

A central argument here is that the passage of Emane and his spirits must be considered in relation to the emergence of a regional and national political imagination in north-eastern Gabon. This imagination is informed in part by ethnicity. In Ogooué-Ivindo since the 1950s, ambitious Kota-, Bεkwil-, Fang-, and Shakè-speaking politicians from the region have vied for regional and national political office and power. At the same time, the political alliance between Menie (a Fang) and Zembote (a Kwélé), and the fact that both Emane and his spirits traversed ethnic and even national boundaries suggest that the politics of ethnicity was never clear-cut.

In this section I trace connections between regional politics and the birth of national politics in the 1950s. In the minds of many Ogooué-Ivindo Fang speakers, the loss of Essia-Nsomore, followed by the Emane's officially sanctioned anti-fetish campaign, foreshadowed Jean-Hilaire Aubame's later defeat by Léon M'Ba. One village that Emane visited in 1955 was a recent regroupement west of Makokou on the road to Ovan. When Zembote had won the Territorial Assembly election in 1952, this regroupement village did not yet exist; its future inhabitants still lived in a number of smaller villages on the old Ndzong Angouma road north of the main road. They did not vote and had been only vaguely aware of the elections. Their 1953 move out of the forest at the behest of the colonial administration brought them closer to government authority, surveillance and politics. For many, the move, while leading to greater opportunities for schooling and health care, also brought a growing sense of dependency, marginalization and frustration that has characterized the villagers' dealings with the Gabonese state for the past half-century. Stories of Emane's journey narrate both the beginnings of politics and the roots of political marginalization.

In a 1991 interview, Nzeng Jean, an elder from this regroupement, spoke of multiple political beginnings, betrayed hopes, and his village's highly ambiguous interactions with the Gabonese state. Nzeng meditated on Zembote, Essia and Emane; his people's move to the road; their loyalty to Jean-Hilaire Aubame; and their strained relationship with Gabon's first president, Léon M'Ba. Nzeng revealed himself as an astute observer of Gabonese national politics. He had listened intently and critically over the years to politicians and authorities. Acutely aware of the power dynamics in Gabon's political landscape, he measured promises and propaganda against lived experience, unfulfilled expectation, official neglect and state oppression.

Nzeng traced the ‘origin of politics’ to the late-colonial liberalization of the 1950s.Footnote ³⁶ He identified multiple political beginnings, including the Zembote–Essia-Nsomore affair, which had unfolded before his people had relocated to the main road:

Nzeng also referred to Essia-Nsomore's death and Zembote's role in bringing Emane. ‘We were surprised to learn that Essia-Nsomore died,’ he said. ‘We only came to know it when Zembote went to get Emane. Then I saw the Fang burning with shame.’ According to Nzeng, it was only when Emane Nyangone arrived that they concluded that Zembote had killed Essia-Nsomore. Otherwise, why would he have called Emane?

But it was not only through Zembote's dubious triumph that the regroupement's future residents learned of politics. While still at Ndzong Angouma, they had also begun to hear the name of Aubame-Eyeghe, or Jean-Hilaire Aubame. Nzeng explained, ‘We started to know [politics], because they came to tell us, “Accept Aubame … accept Aubame-Eyeghe.” So we said, “He's the person that we'll accept.”’ Aubame remained a leading political figure in post-war Gabon and the chief political rival of Gabon's first President, Léon M'Ba. He was also an architect of the village regroupement policy that sought to combine atomized villages of the Gabonese countryside in order to facilitate the construction of schools, dispensaries and other modern innovations.Footnote ³⁷ As noted above, Nzeng's regroupement itself was a product of Aubame's policy and administrative convenience. By 1951, Aubame and his party had won virtually unanimous support among Ogooué-Ivindo Fang speakers.Footnote ³⁸ Like Essia-Nsomore, Aubame remains firmly rooted in popular political consciousness, in part as a symbol of frustrated hopes.

Politics had thus begun while they were still at Ndzong Angouma, but began again (or truly began) with the move to the main road. Nzeng says: ‘When we came from Ndzong Angouma to arrive here at the main road [ŋkpax], it was then that the affair [dzám] of politics broke out.’ These were, as Nzeng puts it, ‘affairs of here’. Yet another beginning of politics came when Léon M'Ba took over ‘commandement’ from the whites at the end of the 1950s:

Once they had settled on the main road, the people of the regroupement began to receive occasional visits from political leaders on tour from Libreville. Their new leaders spoke of coming independence, telling them that they were separating from the whites in order to take command of the country. Looking back on this period, Nzeng made a number of contradictory observations. He expressed pleasure at partial separation from the French, hope in Gabon's new leaders, and the inevitable disillusionment that followed unfulfilled promises. His words reflected his own understandings of the intersection of the local, the national and the transnational:

Somehow, the French député, Jean-Hilaire Aubame, had convinced the villagers of this ‘poor’,’ ‘isolated’, demographically ‘mediocre’ region (Balandier Reference Balandier1982 [1955]: 95) that his politics would, as Nzeng put it, ‘help all of us’. Villagers may have seen the proposed benefits of his regroupement programme – including schools, dispensaries, and economic opportunities – as paths toward modernity.Footnote ³⁹ Aubame's message and bearing evidently appealed to villagers' openness to new opportunities and strategies for social success. As Nzeng's remarks suggest, Aubame, like Essia-Nsomore, continues to occupy an important place in the popular political imagination.

When it came to the rivalry between Léon Mba and Aubame, Nzeng said, ‘Above all, the people of the village liked Aubame-Eyeghe. … [We] refused the habits of Léon M'Ba.’ In Nzeng's eyes, Aubame-Eyeghe, rather than Léon M'Ba, had liberated the country. ‘This is why we liked Aubame-Eyeghe … every person turned to the party [ŋgam] of Aubame-Eyeghe [the USDG].’

Nzeng's interpretation underlines widespread ambivalence over Gabon's special ties to France. He portrayed Aubame as the means by which the Gabonese would maintain access to the French technical expertise needed for the production of necessary ‘modern’ commodities. In fact, both Aubame and M'Ba had very close relations with the French government. Although M'Ba flirted with communism in the late 1940s, he soon learned that the path to power in Gabon required the support of French administrators and businessmen. By the late 1950s administrative backing had shifted decisively from Aubame to Léon M'Ba (Bernault Reference Bernault1996). In Ogooué-Ivindo, the administration actively campaigned to convert chiefs, politicians, and, with less success, the general population. Aubame may have displayed too much economic nationalism and commitment to participatory democracy. Once M'Ba rose to power in 1957, he, with the help of the administration, attempted to weaken and co-opt his opposition (including Aubame) – subordinating them after 1961 to a strong presidential regime, which persists to the present.

As at least some Fang-speaking villagers saw it, the multiple beginnings of politics in the 1950s – the rivalry between Nzembote and Essia-Nsomore, the passage of Emane Nyangone and Mademoiselle, and the eventual triumph of Léon M'Ba over Jean-Hilaire Aubame – set the tone for the paths of politics in the post-colonial period. Fang speakers themselves remained loyal to the opposition candidates they thought would best serve their interests. Later, they gave strong support to the Paul Mba-Abessole, who served as a Roman Catholic priest in Makokou from 1969 to 1973 until he was forced to flee (with villagers' complicity) for challenging President Bongo's single-party regime. Most Ogooué-Ivindo Fang speakers remained loyal to Mba-Abessole, who emerged as the leading opposition figure in the multi-party Gabon of the 1990s, before he eventually rallied to the presidential majority and accepted a post as a government minister.Footnote ⁴⁰