1Having acted as a French colonial administrator for about a decade, roughly from 1909 to 1923, and having roamed through the Ubangi territory along a South-North axis, from Bangui to the then Fort-Archambaud (or Sahr) in Chad, René Maran shows a deep familiarity with the nascent French Equatorial African colony and especially the Bandas and their mores. The Bandas are a large ethnic group, which is spread over the then Belgian Congo (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo), Cameroon under French mandate, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the borders of which were drawn in 1919 and then endorsed by the London protocols of 1924.
2The eponymous Batouala in René Maran’s Batouala (1921) belongs to the Banda group, whose pre-colonial social cohesion is sealed by the Ga’nza initiation rituals of male circumcision and female excision, which are presented as coeval among the Bandas. Significantly for our purpose, the Ga’nza rituals are given ample narrative space and the marked Banda body is linked to the history of Ubangi-Shari in subtle ways. This proves Michel Foucault correct when he described the body in his History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1980) as “the inscribed surface of events” and the job of the genealogist as that of exposing “a body totally imprinted by history” (Foucault, 148). In the Banda example that Maran provides, history is literally etched onto the body, and Maran is the metagenealogist of the Banda Ga’nza, albeit a warped one since he is also an Afro-Caribbean colonial administrator in the employ of the French.
- 1 “Ga’nza” is also spelled “Nga’nza”.
- 2 The couple was friends with D.H. Lawrence, whose Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer was edited by (...)
- 3 Cuttak: Prafulla Ch. Das, 1954.
3The English translation of the first edition of Batouala (1921) was published and copyrighted by Thomas Seltzer in New York City in 1922. The translator was Thomas Seltzer’s wife, Adele Szold Seltzer (1876–1940), a professional translator of African material and juvenile fiction2. There were two printings in the month of August 1922. Nine other editions, including a second American edition in 1933, were published between 1922 and 2015. Some translations were also from the French into Hebrew and into Oriya or Odia, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Odisha State in Eastern India3, which shows that the Goncourt-winning novel fared far and wide.
- 4 The Hemingway review is to be found in the Toronto Star Weekly of 25 March 1922.
4While Ernest Hemingway praised Batouala in 19224, French critics launched scathing attacks on the novel as well as its Preface, which they read as a bitter denunciation of French colonialism. While, in retrospect, the Preface is a far cry from being a rallying call to Blacks to unite against their colonial oppressors, Donald E. Herdeck argued, in the 1972 Introduction to Batouala: A True Black Novel, that it paved the way for “the intellectual groundwork for the anti-colonial revolt which was to sweep the post-World War II world” (Herdeck, 5).
- 5 Jomo Kenyatta’s European forerunner, Berlin anthropologist Felix Bryk, focused in Neger Eros (1910) (...)
- 6 While Kenyatta explains in some detail how the woman specialist, known as moruithia, dexterously cu (...)
5Upon its first publication in 1921, French critics reviled Batouala as being “poorly composed” and “obscene” on account of the vivid description which Maran provided of the rituals (qtd Herdeck, 1). The 1922 Seltzer translation thus suppressed the passages around the Ga’nza rituals of male circumcision and female excision. There are other instances of excising passages related to African ritualistic genital alterations, the most famous one being the School Edition of Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya ([1938] 1961)5, in which Kenyatta chose to dwell on his own Kikuyu group’s rite, or irua, to designate the operation for both boys and girls. Although Kenyatta achieved balance in the description of irua for both boys and girls to the point of having used girls among “relatives and close friends” (Kenyatta, 147) as informants, the educational version of the text, edited by J. Kariuki in 1971, excises female irua altogether. References to female irua are erased from Chapter 6 on the “Initiations of Boys and Girls,” along with Kenyatta’s references to “menstruation,” “masturbation” (136), and “sexual intercourse” (136 and 143). In bowdlerizing Kenyatta’s anthropological text, Kariuki has also deleted the diatribe against European missionaries posing “as authorities on African customs” (154), into which Kenyatta launches at the end of his sixth chapter6.
- 7 For more detail on Anthony Comstock, who, during his career, ordered the destruction of 15 tons of (...)
- 8 It was also reprinted within the famous African Writers Series (London: Heinemann, 1987).
- 9 It also provides additions like “a new chapter … which describes the lifestyle and views of Batoual (...)
6Kariuki’s reasons for excising irua and its corollaries of pain, blood, and sexuality from Facing Mount Kenya, are presented, somewhat paradoxically, as “educational” in post-independence Kenya and are therefore of another order than the reasons for the Seltzer deletions of the initiation rituals for boys and girls in Maran’s text. Herdeck surmised that the publisher, Thomas Seltzer, was possibly “afraid of the censors in the Comstock blue-stocking days of the 1920s,” and therefore “deleted much of the vivid description of the Ga’nza, the feast of circumcision” (Herdeck, 5). It is true that the charge of obscenity for “indecent” or “immoral” publications going back to the Comstock Act of 1873 in the United States (and the recommendations from Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice) as well as the American women’s Temperance movement may have guided Thomas Seltzer’s judgment in suppressing passages that could have been deemed lascivious7. Herdeck’s speculations are part of his Introduction to Batouala, a True Black Novel (1972), which was translated by Barbara Beck and Alexandre Mboukou8, and which I will be using here along with the 2020 Magnard French edition. Batouala, a True Black Novel is based on René Maran’s 1938 édition définitive, on which Maran worked for over a decade and a half after publishing the first edition in 1921. It restores that which had been expurgated from the 1922 Seltzer translation9. The Beck and Mboukou translation is, however, not always accurate such as the translation of Batouala’s ritualistically filed teeth as “worn-down teeth” (Maran 1972, 27), which shows that this authoritative translation of the “dents limées” (Maran 2020, 39) was not consistently attuned to the rites practiced in the pre-missionary days.
- 10 See also Georges Toqué, Les massacres du Congo. La terre qui ment, la terre qui tue (Paris : Librai (...)
7In Batouala, Maran zeroes in on the Kemo circumscription, whose headquarters was Fort-Sibut or Gribidji (Krébédjé), and, more precisely, one of its four subdivisions, Grimari (also called Bamba or Kandjia), among the Bandas (Preface 1972, 12). Maran’s own post was located between the land of the Bandas and that of their Eastern neighbors, the Manjas. He alludes to the embryonic French colonial administration through a sword-swallowing French District Officer “moro-Kamba” who had “pacified the Bandas” (Maran 1972, 31). Admittedly, Maran only arrived in Grimari in 1912, three years after the onset of colonization, the military operations for control over the region having only ended in 1921, when Batouala was first released. As Boris Lesueur has intuited, Maran proleptically shows that the relations between the French colonizers and their colonized subjects are already set in, when in fact they were in the process of being forged (Lesueur, 98). From writings of the period about the French Congo between 1905 and 1907, as well as André Gide’s later travel diary Voyage au Congo (1927), we gather that the colonial measures were more brutally introduced than Maran would allow10.
8From René Maran’s first Preface but also from the text itself, it transpires that the Banda ethnic group was plagued with disease, famine, and intertribal warfare in the nineteenth century. As of 1890, “the Senoussian raids” (Preface 1972, 12), that is, the slave raids led by Mohamed-es-Senussi, the Sultan of Dar al-Kuti, an Islamic state in the center and north-west of present-day Central Africa, considerably weakened the Bandas, along with their neighbors, the Manjas, whom the Bandas had invaded in the past. Although the Bandas faced decimation through such slave raids in the late nineteenth century and French colonization in the early twentieth century, they endured. Some scholars have traced the etymology of “Banda” to “slave” or “bondsman” and have also ventured Farsi as a possible source (Makris 2000, 194). But the etymology Maran preferred is derived from “nets” (Fr: “filets,” Maran 2020, 22) after the nets they used to capture game during the Harmattan, which highlights their vindictive spirit.
9Fragments of historical facts around the colonization of the Ubangi-Shari, established on 29 December 1903 and made part of French Equatorial Africa as of 1910 and then officially a French colony as of 1916, are adumbrated through the news carried from neighboring districts to Batouala’s village on the day of the approaching Ga’nza festivities. Significantly, as a mokoundji or chief in the Kemo prefecture (Fort de Possel), Batouola is responsible for the organization of the initiation rituals. It is therefore through his summoning of this major event that Batouala is informed of the departure of the French Governor for Kaga Bandoro (Fort Crampel); of the deaths of white men in Bangui, an outpost-turned-capital in 1906; of the outbreak of the First World War between the French and the Germans – the frandjés and the zalémans (Maran 2020, 88)–; of the presence of tirailleurs sénégalais; and of the lowering sales in the scandalous trade in rubber. The heated conversation that ensues upon hearing such news, during which Batouala speaks to his peers of their colonial submission, the draining institution of portage and the heavy per capita income taxation, is then drowned by the approaching Ga’nza or initiation ceremony, as if French colonization and World War I could not put an end to timeless traditions and ancestral rituals.
10The Ga’nza celebrations indeed take place in the absence of the white commandant who left Grimari eight days before. It is implied that the festivities would not have been approved of by the French colonial administration and this is confirmed later in the text when the Ga’nza festivities are abruptly interrupted by the Governor’s impromptu return to Grimari. The rituals have surreptitiously taken place, without the French administration being aware of them. Only the dance of love and what follows, which Maran describes in colonial fashion as a scene of debauchery, seem to have caught the attention of the not so perceptive Governor. The latter believes what the local serjeant Silatigui Konaté presents as a fortuitous episode of drunkenness, for which the Governor nevertheless intends to levy a substantial fine.
- 11 See Hicks (1996) and Zabus, Between Rites and Rights, pp. 105–106.
11The Bandas’ location in the Kemo prefecture in the then Ubangui-Shari, some 190 km north of Bangui, that is, just below the Sudanic belt may explain why ritual circumcision and excision were and are still practiced, as opposed to infibulation. Infibulation or “suturing” entails the complete removal of the clitoris, the labia minora, and the labia majora and the stitching together of the two sides (the cut edges) of the vulva so as to cover the urethra and vaginal opening, leaving a very small aperture to permit the flow of urine and menstrual discharge. The early civilizations of the Middle Nile, that is, ancient Nubia, Kush, and Meroe, that thrived in the Eastern Sudanic belt from the second millennium b.c.e. were empires that practiced infibulation among female slaves or jawari to guarantee their virginity and thus their market value11. This form of sexual control spread in the kingdoms and empires studding the Sudanic belt beyond Meroe, to Darfur, Kanem, Bornu, Songhai, ancient Mali, and ancient Ghana.
- 12 The first kind of excision, also called sunnah to refer to the obligatory excision of women, is mis (...)
12The practice of infibulation marked the Meroite civilization’s engagement in what Gerry Mackie (2000) has called “imperial female slavery” (266). Even though infibulation is pre-Islamic, a certain version of Islam may later have played a role in helping comfort the practice in what was to be the Republic of Sudan, as opposed to South Sudan, which gained independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011 and is largely Christian. The slave raids that occurred in the nineteenth century among the Bandas seem not to have impacted the symmetry of rites between male circumcision and female excision, also called “female circumcision” in the scholarly literature up to roughly 2000 (e.g Shell-Duncan and Herlund). Whereas Banda male circumcision here involves the severing of the prepuce of the glans, Banda female excision is a partial clitoridectomy, often understood as the removal of the prepuce or hood of the clitoris, which is itself a milder version of the fuller excision practice, which involves the removal of the said prepuce and the clitoris and is often accompanied by partial or full labiadectomy12.
- 13 See, for instance, the use of mokonzi in Moen 2005, passim.
- 14 Fr: “On y procède en public à la circoncision des jeunes garçons initiés au culte secret des “Somal (...)
13Batouala has himself been “initiated” in two ways: he has undergone the ritual of male circumcision and he has been trained as a “medicine man” (Marna 1972, 23; Fr: féticheur), that is, in colonial terminology, a priest or traditional healer in animist belief-systems as well as a mokoundji or chief of many villages. The twin positions of “chief-priest/healer” seem to be covered by most Central African and Guinean linguistic variants in Adamwa-Ubangi, a subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family: Mokonzi, Mokoundji, Makounzi, Makundji [mokonzi]13. It is in this dual capacity that Batouala officiates as the organizer of the Ga’nza initiations, which are being prepared at the very outset of the novel, thereby giving it an ethnological edge. The secret rites, that is, the Semali (Fr: Somalés), are introduced to the readers in a quasi-ethnographic aside as if to inform them: “This is when the circumcision of the young boys initiated in the secret cult of the ‘Somalés’ and the excision of the girls is held in public” (Maran 1972, 22)14.
- 15 Fr: “anciennes coutumes” (Maran 2002, 35).
- 16 Fr: “Contre l’usage, tout raisonnement est inutile” (Maran 2020, 36).
14The immediate narratological environment also indicates that these timeless rituals are on a par with ancestral or “old customs”15 (Maran 1972, 23) such as scratching oneself and yawning to chase away sleep upon waking up in the morning. For good measure, Maran adds Batouala’s sonorous grunts and burping sounds which he inherited from his parents. Faithful to his parents and his ancestors, Batouala is presented as the gatekeeper of “obsolete customs” (Maran 1972, 23), which he, in his strict adherence to tradition, does not question. The same applies to his active polygyny: he has nine wives and reserves his early morning’s daily male sexual prerogatives for his favorite, Yassigui’ndja, who is however weary of his overtures and prefers those of the village’s younger seductor, Bissibi’ngui. The narrator concludes: “If anything were in opposition to custom, all reasoning was useless” (Maran 1972, 23)16.
- 17 In Subsaharan Africa drum languages rely “on the emission of sound signals which are neither words (...)
- 18 “nous montrerons après (la danse et le chant) aux femmes ce que nous savons faire d’elles” (Maran, (...)
15In the unfolding of the same auspicious day which opens the novel, Batouala beats three “li’nghas,” the famous slit talking drums17, to issue a pressing invitation, which joyfully cascades to the neighboring chiefs to join, in nine days’ time, the ritual dances or “yangba” by the Bamba river on the occasion of the Ga’nza feast of the initiated. The narrator evokes for the benefit of the Western implicit reader the many dances that make up the “yangba”: the elephant step; the dance of the assegai, the dance of the warriors, and the dance of love which is the Bandas’ specialty. The Ga’nza festival only occurs “once every twelve moons” (Maran 1972, 34). The drums talk back, praising Batouala as the greatest of all chiefs. The promise of a cornucopia of food, drink and rejoicing is intoxicating and the din of male sexual prowess echoes from mountaintop to mountaintop: “Afterwards we’ll show the women that we know how to use them” (Maran 1972, 34)18.
16Crowds gather from neighboring districts and as soon as their chiefs from “Kama, Pangakoura, Pouyamba, Yakidji” (Maran 1972, 65) reach Batouala’s village, women, armed with mortars and pestles, start cooking while men gulp down beer or kéné made of corn and millet while Yassigui’ndja wittily improvises on the song of the Kouloungoulou or dung beetle. Amidst a tumultuous roar, columns of boys and girls, whose bodies have been whitened by ash and cassava powder, advance with shaven heads and a haggard gaze, dance their way into the village while uttering the guttural, nasal or hissing words from the hermetic Semali language of the initiated. The warriors then pick up their weapons while the women, drunk with the kéné beer and the overpowering sound of the li’ngha drums, stomp their feet while screaming “Gan’za” in incantatory style. The mokoundji-yangba acting as masters of ceremony, equipped with long bird-feathers stuck in the rope of their matted hair and whose wrists, ankles and knees are tinkling with tiny bells, delight the crowd with their funny grins. Frenetic women dancers, their hair wet with castor oil, their earlobes, nose, and lips pierced with glass beads, their ankles and wrists adorned with copper bracelets, circle the novices while keeping their trance-like rhythms to the beat of the li’ngas, the kou’ ndés and the balafons. Then it is the men’s turn: with only a loin cloth around their bodies anointed with fat and red bark and their tattoos exuding sweat, they somersault and rival in prowess. This is a scene which Maran describes with particular gusto.
- 19 Fr: “Il fallait essayer d’étouffer les cris possibles" (Maran 2020, 109).
17The rituals are then introduced as being symmetrical. An old man and an old woman, both covered with amulets and brandishing a knife are facing the young male and the young female novices, respectively, after both groups spent a prolonged period of isolation, abstinence and fasting in the woods. Both the circumciser and the exciser announce that the candidates’ ordeals are now over and that they will, respectively, soon become men and women. The musical instruments reach a crescendo, sonorous enough “to stifle any possible cries” (Maran 1972, 84) that might emanate from the pubescent boys and girls19.
- 20 Fr: “Si un rien de souffrance suffisait à l’abattre, c’est qu’indigne d’être un homme, il devrait m (...)
- 21 “(ils) agissaient machinalement, à la manière des moissonneurs qui, armés de n’gapous, s’avancent p (...)
18Both circumciser and exciser spit on their knives and sharpen them on a flat pebble. Maran does not tell his readers exactly where the knife falls on the young man’s body, but we are told that the blood spurting from the wound, which is seen running down the novitiate’s legs, also splashes his neighboring peers of the same age-group. If the novice faints or shows signs of pain, he has to die after being ritualistically knocked out: “If a bit of suffering were enough to fell him, it showed that he was unworthy to become a man and, by custom, should die of a booting” (p. 84).20 The ritual is performed in public and serially, the old circumciser expertly and mechanically proceeding to cut the young male’s prepuce “acting as mechanically as the harvesters who walk through the plantations at harvest time armed with n’gapous” (Maran 1972, 85)21.
- 22 Fr: “ce qu’il fallait saisir, à la manière d’une liane à caoutchouc” (Maran 2020, 110).
- 23 Fr: “(elle) jetait derrière elle, à la volée, ces morceaux de chair chaude et sanglante, qui parfoi (...)
19Likewise, the bedizened exciser approaches the swirling female dancers, who have become pale and shake uncontrollably. She “roughly” (Maran 1972, 85) rather than expertly – Maran tells us – spreads the young female novice’s thighs, seizes the clitoris – the organ is not named and is put under erasure through the euphemism: “what had to be seized, stretching it as if it were a rubber vine” (Maran 1972, 85)22. We are then told that the exciser sliced if off “without even turning her head, threw the pieces of still warm and bloody flesh far into the crowd behind her” (Maran 1972, 85). The 1972 English translation does not however mention that the exciser throws the severed clitorises behind her so carelessly that they would sometimes hit someone in the face23 —or end up as a dog’s prized prey.
20The rituals for both boys and girls are followed by a cacophony of chants, and the dance of love, which is performed only on that night. Yassigui’ndja, Batouala’s favorite wife, along with a nubile woman, stand both naked, depilated and with their nose and ears adorned with glass beads, their bodies covered with a reddish glaze. Around her waist Yassigui’nja wears an enormous, painted, wooden phallus, which bounces as she sways and seeks to attract her companion in her manly embrace. The reference to the wooden effigy of the male organ has been restored in the Black Orpheus 1972 unexpurgated edition whereas the Seltzer translation is content with mentioning that “Yassigui’ndja wore an emblem, that indicated the role she was to play in the dance” (Maran 1922, 104).
- 24 Fr: “tel un gibier forcé” (Maran 2020, 112).
21Compared to a helpless prey cornered by hunters – “like flushed-out game who had suddenly given up” (Maran 1972, 86)24–, the nubile dancer succumbs and when both partners reach a paroxysm of gasping convulsions, they tumble down, satiated. This is followed by an orgiastic pairing off of one-time partners, including that of Yassigui’nja and the handsome Bissibi’ngui, which is going to incur Batouala’s wrath and precipitate the mokoundji’s end. More to our purpose, this scene to which Maran devotes considerable narrative space highlights the male/female distribution of sex roles after the ga’nza rite of passage.
- 25 “Fearful Symmetries” is the title of a volume (Zabus, 2008).
22The symmetry of the rites is confirmed by the fact that there is only one word –“ga’nza” – to designate the Banda rite of both male circumcision and female excision. The symmetry between both practices is on a par with male-female dualism and sex segregation, which is a human construction reinforced by the cult of culture25. Sex membership in some Sub-Saharan African cultures can be so overvalued that it presents clitoral or any other form of excision as a necessity to ensure that womanhood in no way resembles manhood. Therefore, the residual masculinity of the clitoris has to be suppressed through excision just as the vestigial femininity in the prepuce of the glans has to be nicked off so as to ensure a full-fledged belonging to adult manhood. The Bandas, like many other Sub-Saharan ethnic groups, consider Ga’nza as a coeval term the way, to take only one example, irua designated the Kikuyu rite of both male circumcision and female excision in pubescent boys and girls in Kenya. The first President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, in the already mentioned treatise, Facing Mount Kenya (1938), of which the renowned ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote the Introduction while he was mentoring Kenyatta in London, immortalized the rite of irua as a source of cultural and ethnic identity and a form of resistance against missionary societies in East Africa.
23In Facing Mount Kenya the rite is of crucial importance since irua is bound up with the moral code of what Kenyatta called “the tribe.” The physical operation per se is accompanied by ceremonies like mambura, that is, “ritual or divine services” that include dances and songs and contribute to “the unification of the whole tribal organization” (Kenyatta [1938] 1961, 134), much in the same way in which Maran, though an exogenous observer, emphasizes the sealing of an ancestral practice against the grain of colonization. Kenyatta conjectured that the “secret aim” of the Christian camp must have been “to disintegrate their social order and thereby hasten their Europeanisation” (Kenyatta [1938] 1961, 73). Likewise, Kenyatta’s brother, James Muigai, later writing in the traditionalist Kikuyu Central Association’s (KCA) newspaper Muigi Thania, meaning “The Unifier” but called in religious circles “The Redeemer,” warned that “Christians seem intent on destroying Gikuyu history” (qtd Sicherman 1990, 64). In Batouala, there is no reference to the importation of a European belief-system and at the time, in the 1910s, missionaries had not yet won converts to any branch of Christianity, as is the case with Kenyatta’s Kenya.
24There is no evidence that Kenyatta and Maran knew each other, but in both Batouala and Facing Mount Kenya, beerthe initiates have been imparted with sexual knowledge, have learned to speak an esoteric language, and have pledged an oath, by which the initiates vow to behave as full-fledged members of the adult community and, more significantly, of “the tribe as a whole” (Kenyatta [1938] 1961, 141). In both texts, the initiates form a procession heading back to the homestead, hovering on the verge of adulthood. Léopold Sédar Senghor in his famous “Elégie des circoncis” (1964) uses the Latinistic phrase “une nuit d’enfance extrême” to refer to the end of childhood and the twilight world of the dawn when the blood spurts into the river: “Sang! Les flots sont couleur d’aurore” (Senghor, 97).
25Likewise, both Kikuyu girls and boys then “go to the river,” as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was to put it some three decades later in The River Between (1965), where they bathe and drop the ceremonial mathakwa leaves “as a sign of drowning their childhood behaviour” (Kenyatta [1938] 1961, 144). In Batouala, blood spurts on the ground. Blood during the ceremony, as in many mutilative beliefs and cleansing rituals, has the power to heal and to bind individuals together in sacredness and self-knowledge.
26The symmetry of the rites, as it is relayed in Maran’s account, is confirmed by Antonin– Marius Vergiat in his early study, Les rites secrets des primitifs de l’Oubangui (1936) in which male circumcision and female excision are likewise presented as co-eval. As an anthropologist and a photographer for the French Navy, A-M. Vergiat had lived among the Bandas for three years and had observed their customs as early ethnographers did and was on intimate terms with a féticheur who allowed him to take pictures, much at the priest-healer’s expense since he died in mysterious circumstances after revealing his occult knowledge to the European anthropologists. Maran is no anthropologist; short of observing secret rituals, he must have come across early ethnographical accounts of both rituals at the turn of the twentieth century, which paved the way for Vergiat’s anthropological inquiry. In Vergiat’s contrastive account, which constantly shuttles between the Manjas and the Nd[r]is Bandas’ elaborate rituals, he speculates on the origins of the Ga’nza rite which was, in one etiological scenario, imposed by the women who allegedly refused to have sexual relations with uncircumcised males, arguing that they derived more voluptuous pleasure from circumcised ones (Vergiat, 78). Other reasons put forward are hygienic or a rehearsal of the matron’s severing of the umbilical cord at birth (Vergiat, 79).
27Maran may also have witnessed or heard of some aspects of the Ga’nza festivities, especially the most spectacular and audible ones, but it is unlikely that, as a French colonial administrator, even an Afro-Caribbean one hailing from Martinique, he had access to the deep complexity of such ancestral rites, some of which were carried out in secret and generally took place at a geographically distant location from the village, away from the inhabitants’ prying eyes.
28Maran’s account matches Vergiat’s rendition of the rituals but misses out on the role of the beer and the use of the dance as well as the trance-like state that dancers reach, which are part of ancestor-worship rituals. Maran mentions millet-based beer or kéné as partaking of the general convivial atmosphere. In what Maran sees as general inebriation (severe enough to cause the death of Batouala’s father) and the ensuing orgy, there is more than meets the eye. Kéné beer is used in libation-pouring rituals to enter in dialogue with the ancestors, as is the case in most ancestor-worship systems. Beer libation-pouring is part of an arsenal of precautions that aim to appease the ancestral spirits and enter in communion with the godhead, N’Gakoura. Likewise, in Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, on the night prior to the initiation, the members of the irua group sing and dance and prepare the koraria morungu, a “beer” that is intended “to keep the gods awake” (Kenyatta [1938] 1961, 140). The initiates thereby commune with the ancestral god Morungu, who is invoked to protect them and impart to them their forefathers’ wisdom. The adorned girls’ great ceremonial matuumo dance is held throughout the day before the operation in the household or at a site in close proximity to it. The ground is then sprinkled by the elders with njori ya ooke, or “honey beer”, to facilitate harmonious relations between the living and the ancestors.
- 26 See Zabus and Das (2020) on “possession” in Zulu gender-differentiated spiritual cults in Johannesb (...)
29Instead of the orgy Maran describes, the dance and trance are part of “possession” spiritual cults, which antedate the advent of imported monotheistic belief systems. Possession by “dead” ancestors from the spirit-world is common to most African ancestor worship systems but not exclusively26. Ancestors remind the living of their presence among them through various processions, festivals, and councils. The dancer’s body thus acts as a conduit for the ancestors, who render it passive through possession, thereby locating agency outside of the subject. The Banda novitiates, whose bodies have been covered in white clay as a symbol of renewal and who wear a new attire and headdress for the occasion, customarily perform ritualistic dances for three days (Vergiat, 96–98). These dances are part of their initiation, along with the lessons on ethics, on lovemaking to ensure the best coupling position to make their future wives pregnant, as well as the discarding of their vestigial “female” identity through whip cracking, all of which Maran has put under erasure or slightly distorted.
30Likewise, the dance of love, which is performed by Baoutala’s favorite wife, Yassigui’ndja, looks like a misplaced rendition of what the Banda circumcised males are subjected to, that is, the exposure to Ndju, a huge, thick strawman equipped with a large wooden phallus, whom the elders can move from a safe distance with a rubber vine. After the first circumcised males’ initial surprise, they are coaxed by the elders into approaching Nju, weighing its heavy phallus, and then imitating its swaying movement. This is followed by singing and dancing and other rites which crown the initiation period (Vergiat, 101). These post-circumcision rites of passage mark the symbolic “death” of the neophyte, who used to “stink like the sex of woman” (Vergiat, 94, my transl.) and his rebirth into male adulthood.
- 27 Fr: “Ah ! que nous ferons bien l’amour/Car notre sexe sera sec et propre” (Vergiat, 113).
31The newly excised female Ga’nzas are also asked to perform ritualistic dancing steps, while mimicking lovemaking movements prior to orgasm (Vergiat 110). Among the Manjas, the Bandas’ neighbors, the role of transmission from exciser to excised is highlighted through singing around the Wi-zu-goré or clitoris, the removal of which is to ensure that their vagina will be “dry and clean”27. The girls’ matron further likens their excised vulvas to “sealed mouths”, which entail loss of speech. Throughout these songs, where forms of aphasia prevail, the question of pleasure is not shunned, since excision, somewhat paradoxically from our standpoint, is said to ensure voluptuous lovemaking. After elaborate rituals around the healing of the wound, the girls will leave their mothers’ hut – “la case de ma mère” (Vergiat, 107) – and will therefore be ready to embrace a full-fledged female adulthood.
32Vergiat condemns previous accounts of Ga’nza rituals which are described “with a repulsive brutality”; “we ignore if the authors truly witnessed these operations, but we very much doubt it” (Vergiat, 88, my transl.). Maran’s 1921 account may be one of these texts. Although Vergiat may be accused of using colonial terminology to describe the ritualistic lives of the Bandas at the turn of the twentieth century, his fieldwork is not that of an armchair anthropologist. Vergiat and his team lived among the Bandas, in an intimate way that Maran could not have experienced, especially from his chaise longue, where, stretched out on moonlit evenings on his porch, he “listened to the conversations of those poor people” Preface 1972, 8).
- 28 See https://www.who.int/hiv/pub/malecircumcision/infopack_en_2.pdf?ua=1. Accessed on 29 March 2021.
- 29 See Zabus, “Beyond Circumspection: African, Jewish, and Muslim Autobiographies Around Circumcision” (...)
- 30 See https://data.unicef.org; FGMC_CAF.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2021. See also https://www.28toomany.o (...)
- 31 See https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/5a17f2254.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2021.
33Maran’s fictive account and Vergiat’s anthropological accounts of rituals around genital alterations, however, seem to pertain to cultural relativism as opposed to the universalizing pull to perceive such African rites or their de-ritualized equivalents in the early twenty-first century as mutilations. Overall, there is a decrease of male circumcision in Western countries due to “changes in the perception of health benefits and cultural beliefs associated with the practice” while it remains almost universal in most of West Africa and Central Africa, where there is an 80% prevalence28. What is now called Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Female Genital Cutting (FGC) continues to be more documented than male circumcision, which is seldom called MGM or Male Genital Mutilation.29 In the Central African Republic, 24% of women from 15 to 49 years of age have undergone a form of genital alteration, despite the national decree banning FGM/C which was passed in 1966 and amended in 1996. The reasons that are usually evoked for the continuation of the practice are “the traditions and cultural norms to ensure that girls are socially accepted and marriageable and uphold their status and honor and that of their family”30. The highest prevalence of FGM/C is found in Central African households where the head is of Banda ethnicity (53.4% of women aged 15–49)31.
34Despite the asymmetry in the efforts to eliminate genital cutting practices, some of which were considered coeval, organizations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, or WHO have all used the idea of “human rights” to help discontinue such practices. Of course, both Maran and Vergiat were impervious to the recent Western use of the idea of “human rights,” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) having been proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948, that is, ten years after Maran’s definitive edition of Batouala and Vergiat’s Rites secrets des primitifs de l’Oubangui.
35In the Preface which Maran revised on 23 November 1937, he portrays himself as an impersonal observer who described “what [he] had seen” (Preface 1972, 7) in Ubangui-Shari and he denounces the “continuous evil the great colonial life is based [on]” as well as its “vile excesses” (Preface 1972, 10), especially European alcoholism. Claiming to be objective –“it states facts” – he provided “a series of etchings” (Preface 1972, 7) of Banda life, but the history that was etched onto the Banda male and female body through the Ga’nza rituals partly eluded him. Maran-qua-metagenealogist in a Foucauldian sense partly failed, even though, on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the first edition of Batouala, he can be commended for recording the way in which things started falling apart. It remains that he could not have anticipated, especially since Batouala “didn’t go deeply into anything outside of [custom]” (Maran 1972, 23), that things could not have fallen apart among those for which they had not been together in the first place.