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CHAPTER 1
A Siren, an Empty Shrine, and a Photograph
In the spring of 2002, sociologist Joseph Tonda and I flew to the city of Mouila, the capital of Ngounié Province, to work on spiritual innovations and conflicts. I hoped that investigating a specific locale would help to congeal the evidence I had gathered so far, a medley of cults, rumors, complaints and trials, colonial fantasies, and administrative attacks. I found the region an obvious choice to test my archival and field findings. In the northern and central part of Gabon (the Ogooué Valley and the economic capital of Port-Gentil), the considerable literature on the Bwiti cult and Fang migrations would force me to incessantly confront these movements to the detriment of attending to subtler changes in the spiritual and political economy. The relative marginality of southern Gabon (Ngounié and Nyanga) seemed to hold greater potential.
Historically, the south had long been ignored by politicians in Libreville. Its inhabitants had cultivated a strong sense of political dissidence, supporting, in particular, an important secession movement at the time of independence. Many Gabonese viewed the southern provinces as a cradle for occult, pre-Christian and presyncretic spiritual practices. Although the syncretic version of the Bwiti cult had first developed in the region, historical churches had failed to establish the kind of hegemonic position they hold in the North (map. 1.1).
As is often the case, the field was full of surprises. Instead of stories and ideas about olden spiritual agency, a composite figure confronted us with ferocious modernity, a water genie named Murhumi (pronounced with a guttural "r") who surged under many guises and monikers — Mami Wata, the Virgin Mary — a niece, a wife, a belly-womb, and an ironsmith.
A profoundly historical deity, Murhumi has been central to the lived experiences of the people in Mouila, we soon realized: the slave trade, the commerce in foreign commodities, and the power struggles of the colonial conquest. Today, her rich lore works as a critical conservatory for puissance, a central component of power in modern Gabon. If in English "puissance" is an archaic term for power or prowess, here it encompasses long-standing beliefs in the capacity of people to harm and heal, to "see" spirits and ancestors and use their divine forces, to produce kin and allies, and to master the production of material goods. Puissance can also define the brainpower of "complex" people such as academics or politicians, and it can be economic, based on the resources of affluent persons. Its deep historicity means that, as a complex imaginary of power, puissance arose from long-term changes and reconfigurations: it now includes the technical expertise used by Westerners and French colonialists, what the Gabonese call the "science of the manifest" (la science du visible), while retaining aspects of "the science of the invisible," the older local techniques, to harness power.
At the time of our visit, Murhumi agitated a great many controversies. The main lineage in the city, the Dibur-Simbu, claimed her as ancestor. "[The] family owns the Mami Wata. Her name is Murhumi. She is the genie who belongs to the family, the Dibur-Simbu clan. She is the belly-womb of the family [le ventre de la famille] (the female ancestor of the family)." Many generations ago, they said, Simbu, a beautiful and shrewd female, had founded Mouila; after her death, she had revealed herself to be the river spirit Murhumi. Some, however, expressed doubts about the capacity of the spirit to provide them with material goods and protection. Other inhabitants challenged Murhumi on political grounds, contesting the urban preeminence of the Dibur-Simbu and laughing the spirit off as a "fish" and a scam. During my subsequent trips to Mouila in 2007 and 2012, a shrine dedicated to Murhumi stood empty on a quiet plaza, the statue of the spirit missing (figure 1.1). Perhaps, people explained, the effigy had been stolen or destroyed, or perhaps a former prefect of the region kept it under lock. Meanwhile, municipal documents bore Murhumi's emblem — a black mermaid with a two-pronged fishtail (figure 1.2) — while other signs exhibited her as a white Mami Wata holding a book (figure 1.3).
Such traffic in images betrayed high insecurities in the vernacular imaginary of Murhumi and local puissance. Rare apparitions of the Siren herself struck people with fears of impaired vision, astonishment, and silence. During a foggy night, a young female informant told us, her stepbrother had encountered the Siren on the bridge over the river. Overpowered by the vision, he had recognized only her back, her fish tail, and the long hair around her silhouette. The shock left the young man unable to move for several minutes.
A few days after our arrival in the city in 2002, a member of the municipal council asked us to follow him to the city hall's basement: leaning on the dusty wall of a small room, Murhumi glistened on a heavy board of precious wood, quietly raising her arms in distress (figure 1.4). Our guide explained that the ring around her tail signaled wealth. Her three tresses recalled the style of Punu ceremonial masks. Her raised elbow, however, signaled a "weakness in her kin."
Murhumi's transfigurations and disappearances, this chapter argues, illuminate how Gabonese people imagined and harnessed power. In southern Gabon, agentive capacity rested on a transactional economy that exchanged material goods for immaterial agency and transmuted immaterial forces into tangible riches. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communities carried out such ritual exchanges with nature spirits. During the Atlantic trade, a period of intense economic competition, spirits helped clans and lineages to secure control over territories and commercial markets. The arrival of European firms in the nineteenth century undermined this political economy. In the twentieth century, colonialists entered the field of sacred agency as major experts and operators. By the 1960s, immobilized in a wooden statue and flimsy print media, Murhumi entered what I call a "crisis of symbolic uncertainty," characterized by major dilemmas about the role, the location, and the manifestation of sacred agency. Once managed through secret exchanges and invisibility, puissance depended now on manifest tools and representations. Once based on the capacity of the invisible spirit to produce material riches, puissance now rested increasingly on visible magic, in the forms of cash and human body parts. Once vested in the whims and elusive force of spirits, it was now handled by "white" men and ruthless "slaves," both notions I will clarify later in the chapter.
Exchange and Prosperity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Economically, the south is the second poorest region in Gabon, dependent on extractive activities (lumber and mining) managed by foreign firms that little benefit local people. Almost 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, and only one household in five has access to potable water. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the region had been among the richest and most populous of West Equatorial Africa. To reconstruct this history is vital for assessing the decline of local prosperity and, during the colonial era, the downfall of vernacular systems of production and exchange. But it is also crucial for understanding the early importance of the transactional tactics that people long exercised in the region. Central to this history was the role of nature spirits and the transactions that local people conducted with them to produce social and material riches (the second mostly as iron tools). The narrative will regularly center on the spirit Murhumi and the iPunu-speaking clan and subbranch that claimed her as an ancestor: the Bumweli and the Dibur-Simbu. After these groups arrived in Ngounié Valley in the late seventeenth century, they proved particularly skilled at using the nature spirit to claim sovereignty over farmland and, later, over rich commercial nodes. They later represented the most important part of the African population of Mouila.
When we visited Mouila for the first time in 2002, signs of economic stagnation were everywhere. A ghostly aura emanated from public buildings: erected during the brief interlude of the oil boom, they stood in empty plazas, weathered by dust and humidity. Downtown, a modest market offered food, plastic wares, and secondhand clothes. A few grocery and furniture stores manned by West African and Middle Eastern migrants clustered at a couple of crossroads. At lunchtime, the blazing sun forced the city to standstill. Only nightfall brought it back to life. Softly lighted by petrol lamps and coal fires, the sidewalks bustled with people who paused at the stalls to buy bread or cassava loaves for the evening meal. Young people chatted outdoors with friends, while older men congregated in bars for beer and music. TV screens flickered from living rooms where electricity worked.
The city was awash in cell phones, but until 2012, my third and last visit, it remained impossible to find an internet café and connect to the World Wide Web. Isolation and the plight of transportation provided endless topics of conversation. During two overland trips to Mouila in 2007 and 2012, I learned that an average truck took up to six hours to negotiate the first stretch of dirt roads from Libreville to Lambaréné, the capital of Ogooué Province. After spending the night in Lambaréné, travelers boarded a taxi or a truck to cover the last 330 kilometers to Mouila, a leg that could take up to seven hours. The dense rainforest canopy of Chad Mountain, forty kilometers south of Lambaréné, hid highway bandits. Nervous passengers told me stories of a famous highway gang in the late 1990s, led by a young métis (the French and Gabonese term for people of mixed race) who ruthlessly robbed and killed passers-by. The road itself was dangerous, its crevices often running deeper than the height of the vehicles trying to pass through: "Politicians eat the money of the road, they eat all the subventions. They take the money and they don't suffer for it, they just do what they please with it. The rest of us, we are the "diminished" [les diminués], we are the oppressed [les opprimés]. ... The road is what blocks everything."
The contrast with the prosperity of the region at the end of the eighteenth century is striking. At that time, the "egalitarian uncooperative people" of Ngounié Valley benefited from a constant circulation of persons and riches. Mixed farming provided subsistence food: men cultivated manioc, taro, plantains, and yams on the rich soil of the forest, and secondary crops on the thinner grasslands. In the villages proper, women tended banana orchards and kitchen gardens. Game and forest products came from Babongo forest specialists (later named "pygmies" by explorers and colonialists), who exchanged them for crops and wares. Babongo allies also helped farmers to secure protection from the deities of land and rivers. Among clans and residential units (villages), intricate alliances and movement of people combined with a pronounced taste for competition and equality. In some locales, such attachment to autonomy and rivalry was so accentuated that villagers preferred to build a meetinghouse (mbánjá) for males in each family compound rather than a collective one for the entire village. Virilocality and matrilineal descent fostered alliances and the circulation of individuals: wives moved to the houses of their husbands, but their children belonged to their (the wives') mothers' clan. Initiation societies encouraged cooperation across villages and districts. The most important of these associations were called Mwiri (Ghetsogho: ya-Mwei) for men; and Njembe for women. At the level of districts, individuals with special skills and insights served as therapeutic and judicial experts: they communicated with ancestors and spirits, healed illnesses and misfortunes, and took care of land resources by planting defensive charms to replenish barren grounds. In this fluid context, public authority followed the ebb and flow of big men and prominent families who competed for dependents, influence, and riches.
The farming technique of slash and burn meant that villages had to move regularly to new grounds. The fertility of Ngounié Valley attracted significant migrations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The story of the powerful clan Bumweli, who came from the south and owned the water spirit Murhumi, shows how migrations occurred. The original ancestor of the group, Mweli, was a fumu, or great man, who lived in Niari Valley (Republic of Congo). The migration of the clan had followed an acute crisis of kinship alliance and transgression. Mweli's niece, a young woman named Simbu, eloped one day with a suitor named Ndombi, who had promised to give her some land controlled by his own clan, the Dibamba-Kadi. Searching for the illegitimate couple, Mweli set out northward with his hunter-gatherers. He established a string of villages on the left side of the Ngounié River, and decided to rest for a while in one of them, named Bonda. Meanwhile, he sent his pygmy scouts across the river to explore the right side of the stream and establish a temporary post at Mukuma. There, Mweli finally caught Simbu. The confrontation went well, and Mweli charged the young woman to occupy new land for the sake of the clan. The details of these early foundations are important to know, as they contradict the later claims of the Dibur-Simbu that they were the first to settle in the locale. Simbu first transformed Mukuma into a proper village that she renamed Idumi. Pushing northward, she established colonies in places previously controlled by Apindji- and Ghetsogho-speaking clans. Together with her husband, Ndombi, she gave birth to children who started two new matrilineages for the Bumweli: the Dibur-Simbu (children of Simbu) and the Bandombi (children of Ndombi).
At the time of the Mweli and of Simbu's migration, a clan (kanda) worked as a corporate unit of several matrilineages (mabur, or divumu) linked by a common origin story. Mostly indifferent to territorial charts, clans crossed geographical distance and linguistic communities. In the eighteenth century, however, a new idiom of territorial seniority recognized that "firstcomer" clans, who had first settled in a locale with the help of forest specialists and nature spirits, "owned" the land. The idiom created discrete political divisions between "mother-villages" and "daughter-villages" that had formed later. Owning a locale did not work in a merchant or capitalist sense, rather rights on land remained loose, collective, and decentralized. After a few years, the leaders of the senior clan often allowed junior villages to manage land duties such as dealing with newcomers and managing relations with forest specialists.
The new idiom of territorial authority was anchored in the spiritual realm. Spirits (iPunu: mughisi; pl. baghisi), meanwhile, had to approve of, and collaborate with, villagers. Mughisi were attached to the sky, rivers, and land, although they could also move from place to place. The spirit Tsumbu resided in the Blue Lake, upstream from the Ngounié River. A deep brook nearby was inhabited by a fairy named Mukani Mbabou. Spirits resented human intrusion and would attack swimmers or fishermen who disturbed them. "[Baghisi] inhabit rivers, mountains, caves, or the sky. Nobles and gracious, they hate dirtiness and strong odors." If one encountered a spirit on firm land, one had to run away fast and throw something nauseating to stop the spirit in its tracks. To secure spirit protection over human settlements, villagers performed elaborate cults: "Their cult takes the form of a collective procession carrying cooked dishes. The attendants carefully bathe and wear white clothes. They put elaborate dishes on large tree leaves [and leave them by the spirit's lair] so they can quiet down the irritated [mughisi]."
Once spirits accepted the collaboration with local clans, they helped them to assert genealogical identity and control over territories, and became incorporated in domestic politics. Although historians often draw a sharp distinction between spirits and ancestors (dímo), oral traditions often tell how one was confused with the other. The Dibur-Simbu often say that Murhumi became the new avatar of their ancestral mother Simbu, whose cadaver was transfigured into the water deity after she willfully sacrificed herself for her children. Another Punu tale of origin collected in 1986 illustrates such flexible overlap of spiritual beings. Once upon a time, Ufura Sema, a barren woman who belonged to the Bandombi clan, had tended her plantation and planted pumpkin and gourd seeds. At harvest time, a spirit visited her in a dream. He ordered her to collect the calabashes in her field, except one that grew near a tree stump. The next day, Ufura cut the pumpkins, sparing the fruit designated by the spirit. A few nights later, the genie reappeared and asked Ufura to visit the field. There she heard a loud whistle coming out of the remaining calabash, followed by an explosion. In the pumpkin's debris, Ufura found a newborn, a gift of the genie, whom she adopted as her daughter. The baby grew into a healthy woman who bore many children and ensured many descendants to her mother. In recognition of the miracle, the matrilineage took the name of Dibur-Cuva (children of the calabash).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Colonial Transactions"
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