Beyond the forest floor, somewhere between land and sky, there are unseen realms where words lose meaning. Beating long cylindrical drums, a group of male musicians huddled in a circle, pummelled by unrelenting equatorial sun. Smoke billowed from mupetu torches, burning resin from the sacred Okoumé tree, as entranced dancers daubed their skin with white ash. For hours, the Mikumu village had been preparing to summon the Marumba spirit, an animistic figure with the power to terrify and protect. Invoking fear, respect, and fascination, masquerade dances hold deep significance for the community. “We call him when somebody dies or when there’s a celebration,” I was told by Guillermo Casasnovas, the fixer who had arranged our visit. “Although sometimes he appears and we don’t know why.”
Furious chanting followed by a sharp inhalation of breath announced Marumba’s arrival. Swaddled in thick ruffles of raffia topped with a crown of feathers and a wooden mask in red, white, and black, the garish character crawled into view across a corrugated iron roof. Running at me, I would later learn, was the spirit’s perverse form of benediction. Dancers brandishing palm leaves backflipped and cartwheeled, pushing the mobile haystack into various corners until he gave one final frenzied shimmy and disappeared in a cloud of ash and smoke.
The ritual I’d witnessed belongs to Bwiti, a spiritual discipline rooted in Gabon’s dense, impenetrable forests. A commune on the edge of capital city of Libreville, Mikumu offers an education center, traditional healing clinic, and social services for young people. At its core is a determination to preserve a precious connection between culture and the natural world.
