Central Africa

Central Africa here means the equatorial forest belt and its margins, across what are now Gabon, Cameroon, the two Congos and Equatorial Guinea. The atlas holds it separately from West Africa and the Caribbean, and the separation is deliberate.

West African religion reaches the wider world largely through the Atlantic slave trade, and the shape it is best known in is the shape it took on the far side of that crossing: Yoruba orisha worship recomposed in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, with a literature and a scholarship built around that transmission. Central African traditions crossed too, and left deep traces in Kongo-derived practice in the Americas, but the forest traditions of Gabon and its neighbours were not transmitted in the same way and are not organised on the same lines. Collapsing the two loses exactly the distinction that a reader most needs.

What the forest region is known for in the study of religion is initiation. Membership in a religious society, rather than adherence to a doctrine, is the unit; the society holds knowledge that is disclosed in stages; and a person's standing is a function of how far into that disclosure they have been taken. Ancestors are present and addressed rather than remembered, and the boundary between the living community and the dead is treated as traversable by trained people under controlled conditions.

Colonial administration and mission activity fell heavily on exactly these societies, because an institution that could not be read from outside looked like a threat.

Bwiti is the religion most associated with this region outside it, practised among the Fang, the Mitsogo and neighbouring peoples of Gabon, where it has legal standing. It is a religion of initiation built around the root bark of the iboga shrub, taken in quantity once at initiation and in small amounts thereafter to sustain long night ceremonies of drumming, harp and song. Its cosmology absorbs Christian material without becoming Christian, and its congregations have their own officers, calendar and architecture.

James Fernandez's ethnography of Fang Bwiti is the standard extended study in English, and its value lies in what it declines to do. It does not present Bwiti as a survival of something older, and it does not reduce the initiation to the pharmacology of the root. It treats the religion as a contemporary response to a specific colonial situation by people making deliberate choices, which is both more respectful and more accurate than the alternatives.

What an ethnography cannot establish is also worth stating plainly. It cannot fix how old the tradition is, because the record does not reach back far enough and the tradition's own account of its origins is a religious account rather than a chronological one. It cannot speak for the initiated on matters they hold as restricted. And a single fieldworker's access, however long, is access to particular congregations at a particular time.

Iboga has since become an object of pharmaceutical and recreational interest elsewhere, which is not the same subject.