• 1 I have conducted various experiments in sites where so-called mystical madmen are treated, meaning (...)

1This article examines the fear aroused by the subject of my research, “mystical madness in Gabon,” and more specifically, the way in which I have used reflexivity to overcome it, in order to be able to study it (Duvoux 2014). According to popular imagination, a “mystical madperson” is someone who has been “eaten” or “sacrificed,” and whose spirit has been tamed and made servile in order to serve the occult aim of enriching the person controlling them (Babongui-Mba 2023). As such, by describing the intimate or personal experiences that I have had with mad people,1 and those which I made myself go through as a researcher, I am well aware that I have always been afraid of mad people. Even if, in a certain way, I have been socialised to deal with their presence, through various narratives and experiences, the fear I feel in relation to them remains very real. Still to this day, with my recent fieldwork, this feeling has been emphasised as I have collected data, especially after having witnessed certain manifestations of madness and the repressive techniques that are often used to deal with them.

• 2 In Bantu languages, the term nganga spontaneously refers to a healing soothsayer, a therapist or wh (...)
• 3 The healer allowed me to mention her common name for the reason that she has “nothing to hide.” Thu (...)
• 4 Fang Bwiti, also referred to as Mbiri, is a syncretic religion combining Catholicism and the Bwiti (...)

2In this article, I reflect on my own social background and my position as an academic trained in France, as a Gabonese woman, as a person with a Fang background, when I have interacted with players from the same culture as myself and even from my own family. I started carrying out this research in 2012 for my Master’s degree till 2015, and then continued with it from 2017 to 2020 for my doctorate. During a six-month period, in 2017, I carried out my fieldword among the nganga2 and specifically at the temple of the healer Maman Betoe,3 an expert in Fang Bwiti4—an experience which allowed me to think about the way in which the reflexive process feeds into research (Bertucci 2007). In this article, I describe and analyse my fieldwork relations, and therefore my relation to others and the impressions sparked by my field study. To continue this reflexive and heuristic analysis, I will show how I negotiated my presence in the field, by choosing to work on a subject that seemed terrifying to me and on a subject connected to my own society.

• 5 The spirit is viewed as an incorporeal principle which connects a set of both conscious and unconsc (...)
• 6 “présences vides” (Beneduce 2013). The discourse of mystical madness is part of what Beneduce (2013 (...)

4The question of the processes of production of knowledge connected to madness has led me to realise that in Gabon, madness is discussed in terms that inexorably lead back to the occult. These are often descriptions that portray “madmen” as “ghost workers,” meaning beings who have no spirit.5 These are persons who are said to have been “eaten,” meaning “sacrificed,” victims of witchcraft, either from a third person, or due to their own actions having backfired on them. According to these representations, these “empty presences”6 are mainly the property of persons who exploit them alive in order to enrich themselves spontaneously and to an unlimited degree, meaning immediately (Akana 2011–2012) and without any actual productive effort (Comaroff and Comaroff 2010). The versions that perform and characterise this view, in other words its emic sense, emphasise that certain practices of enrichment operate precisely through the mediation of the spirits of “mystical madmen” (Babongui-Mba 2023). For me, the theme of unlimited enrichment was reminiscent of the etic sense of capitalism, as developed by Max Weber, following Sombart, from 1905 (Weber 1991). And this emic sense, which had an accusatory logic, was aimed precisely at rationalising these occult economic practices. My doctoral work thus explored this subject, and I decided to use the term “mystical madmen” to refer to these persons who were revealing, as if in a mirror image, the structural transformations affecting the statutory order driven by neoliberalism in Gabon.

• 7 As the Comaroffs (2010?), who practise an imaginative sociology inspired by Charles Wright Mills, r (...)
• 8 Death can be biological or symbolic.

5In order to do this, I deployed an “imaginative sociology”7 of the discursive uses of madness in Gabon, in order to understand, based on discourse and social practices, the historical and structural transformations that had led to the local situation that I analyse in my study. This work has allowed me to reveal a certain number of social relations which the concept of “mystical madness” allows us to understand, between various contradictions and subjectivities that are all part of the same social context. Although I did see the hints of an analogy between these “mystical madmen” and the figure of the zombie, analysed as a “phantom worker” in other countries, such as Cameroon (Ardener 1970), Mozambique (Harries 1994) or South Africa (Comaroff 2016), I still had to stress how different these figures are. The issue is always to produce or create persons who are supposed to live on after their death8 in order to work, for the benefit of others, on plantations or sites where wealth is produced. However, while with zombies it is the body that is put to work, with the madman in contrast, according to the common view, it is the spirit that is put to work. These persons are emptied of their conscience and their will through magical processes, in order to become people without heads, subject to the orders issued by their owners.

• 9 Imagination understood as an instituting power in the terms of Cornelius Castoriadis (1975).

6Based on this presentation, I would say that my fear brought into play at least two worlds: that of madness in general, and that of witchcraft. First of all, it related to images of strange and dangerous persons, who might “attack” passers-by without warning. I myself was chased after and terrified by “madmen” on several occasions while in high school. I did not always understand the fate of these people who wandered through the streets, naked and dirty, who fed on refuse and acted in ways that were horrifying (e.g. brandishing knives or stones) and indecent (defecation, masturbation, copulation etc.) Since childhood, I had in fact been taught how to keep “madmen” at bay: cross to the other side of the road if one of them was walking towards me, and, even more, to definitely strike back if they ever struck me, at the great risk of ending up like them. In addition, I was afraid of the image that witchcraft had in the so-called worlds of witchcraft or fetishes, of presumed anthropophagy, of bad spells and various incantations, which these so-called traditional places of healing awoke in our imagination.9 These here are at least a series of preconceptions and, even more, social senses, supported by a Judeo-Christian and persecutory view of witchcraft, which I had internalised. It was thus as I was attempting to understand these processes—both of the effectuation and healing of madness—that I decided to carry out research in various places that treat “mystical madness,” including the therapeutic village of the Endedang-ening Temple, an initiatory temple of Fang Bwiti located at Pk12 (kilometric point 12), in the urban area of Libreville, the capital of Gabon.

• 10 Literally, the expression endedang ening means “light of life” or “clarity of life,” a meaning whic (...)

7On Saturday 15 July 2017 around 9 am, I was going to the therapeutic village of the Endedang ening10 Temple with some companions—in particular my father, my uncle and my sociologist friend Elza—with a view to interviewing the healer Maman Betoe.

• 11 Nima: a priest who officiates in Fang Bwiti.
• 12 This concept of “spiritual safety,” just like the proliferation and use of the term “mystical” in c (...)
• 13 The term “mystical attacks” evokes the violence of witchcraft and has as much a negative as a posit (...)

8Since my friend was also out in the field to carry out research, I had offered to introduce her to Maman Betoe, so that she too could set up an interview. I wanted to enable her to take advantage of my uncle’s network, given that, when we had been looking for people to survey in the world of Fang Bwiti, we could not find any. Having remembered that my uncle practised this religion, I therefore told him about my difficulties and he decided to introduce me to this Nima.11 As for my father, who is not familiar with these circles, he had decided to join us for “spiritual safety” reasons.12 He said that he did not want to run the risk of letting me go there without protection, and in fact he gave me prayers to recite in silence throughout on the way there. He had also asked me to carry along some worry beads, to put some salt into my left pocket and some lemon into my bag, in order to weaken or defeat certain “mystical attacks.”13

• 14 “mes ancêtres voulaient communiquer avec moi.”

10Still within this persecutory view, my uncle asked me about my choice to work on “madmen,” and before I could give him an answer, he launched into a labyrinth of theories, reminding me that one did not choose a subject such as “mystical madness” by accident. He insisted on the fact that this choice must have something to do with our ancestors. I did not want to appear disrespectful or pretentious by responding to him, since I knew he would insist on the matter, and as a result I did not say anything. As far as I was concerned, I knew that I had chosen to work on this research subject for other reasons, and not because “my ancestors wanted to communicate with me,”14 as my uncle was suggesting. I knew very well that I had chosen to explore this because of my own personal relationship to “madmen.” I should mention as well that I saw this subject as having great epistemological potential, and even more so within the framework of a discipline such as the sociology of health, which had not yet sufficiently explored this subject in Gabon (Koumba and Mogoa 2016; Mboussou, Mbadinga and Koumou Dope 2009).

• 15 “Opening one’s eyes,” which refers here to the fact of being initiated into traditional therapeutic (...)

13For my uncle, this was an opportunity to restate the importance of being initiated into our culture’s traditional rituals. He has always very much insisted on the idea that any person should know their origins, and thus should go and meet their ancestors in order to have a good knowledge of their family history. My uncle and I had already had this kind of conversation about initiation in the past, well before I became a researcher. He remained convinced that my decision to work on madness was motivated by what he called “the ancestral call.” I did not understand his insistence on making me fit within this recurrent model of family reproduction, for the sole reason that I had taken an interest in a subject that is part of a certain worldview. For my uncle, carrying out research as I was planning to do, meaning that limiting myself to asking other people questions and writing down their answers, would not be beneficial to me. It seemed to him that it would be better to go and discover this problem of madness by ingesting some “iboga” (Fernandez 1982), a sacred substance which would necessarily “open my eyes”15 and bring me “true answers.”

• 16 Through my paternal clan, this healer was my grandmother, meaning that the clan correspondence [rel (...)

16When I went to visit the healer that morning, my companions and myself were received by an elderly woman, a former patient, who invited us to wait in the sitting room. After fifteen minutes, Maman Betoe came in and greeted us in Fang with a confident voice. She struck me as warm and reassuring. She was a woman of average height, aged 63 years at the time of the study. She wore her hair styled into two plaits, had light skin, was quite robust, and was coming towards us in a loose, orange dress with a flowery pattern, her feet bare, and seemed to be moving with some difficulty. After she had greeted us, my uncle introduced us all, and broadly explained why we had come to see her. They quickly established that our clans were connected, and from this point on, she showed me that I was in fact “at home.”16 A few minutes later, the healer decided that we would continue our conversation in the Abègne, the guardhouse, which was cooler.

• 18 “On m’a d’abord montré que j’étais folle. Bien folle.”

20In everything she said, I recognised something in common, familiar even, with my uncle’s words, suggesting that working on madness was a response to an “ancestral call.” Indeed, the healer received a call, which justified her devoting herself to treating mad people, and despite her fears and preconceptions, she complied in order to ensure that she was in the position desired by the tutelary spirits of Fang Bwiti. As she put it herself: “I was first shown that I was mad. Quite mad,”18 and at first this idea was not enough to convince her. It took her falling into madness herself for her to realise that her commitment was essential for the sake of her own mental health. Her trajectory is typical of that of a nganga: she first fell ill, then she was initiated and then ultimately became a Nima. Through her personal experience, and through those of the different cases she told me about, she confirmed that madness was a mystical illness which involved personal and social factors. And it was as a consequence of this consideration that she deployed her therapeutic system. This system had to be considered beyond the chains, the blows, the negligence, or even the deficiency that I was observing, and be seen instead as an attempt at restoration through the treatment that was being administered. This is how the term “Akoma” or “arrange,” she explained, is to be understood in practice: euh kome ening i.e. “arranging life.” A process which, according to her, must inexorably involve the fact of meeting the light, “Endedang,” i.e. one’s interior self, in order to recover one’s health. Thus, baths, the ingestion of “medicines” or even aggressive responses organised in relation to the patients when they are agitated or recalcitrant, are an integral part of the process of restoration of the patients’ health.

• 19 This is an example of terms inherited from the colonial period and which alludes to forms of cultur (...)
• 20 The term élope (singular) or bilope (plural) comes from a dichotomy between the populations of the (...)
• 21 These representations operate on a social level and sometimes concern a person’s tone of voice, the (...)
• 22 “Le stéréotype dans sa forme figée, apparaît comme la révélation même de l’arbitraire pour celui qu (...)
• 23 “Le pouvoir ironique est une manière de se jouer des préjugés dans un moment réciproque entre l’obs (...)

22Indeed, I am Gabonese, the child of a Fang father and a Punu mother. I am a woman and I have, as we say in Gabon, “done school,” meaning I have completed a long course of study, something which is not a negligible fact for myself or for my family. Quite on the contrary, this increases a certain ambivalence I feel towards my subject. I am sometimes considered by my own family as a “French woman,” due to my having studied in France, or as a “white person” because I have “learnt a lot,” and I get the impression that I am sometimes kept at a distance. I therefore have a feeling of being at once close and distant (Therrien 2008), a little as if the borders were being intertwined. The same applies to my family connections, to this mix that made of me a “white coffee”19 child, since I come from two Gabonese cultures. Being called “white coffee” by my parents, Fang or Punu, placed me in a liminal or threshold position. It is an in-between state, which defined me, on my mother’s Punu side, as the little Fang known as Mupamu and, on my father’s Fang side, as the Bilope girl.20 This situation affected me as I grew up, and I ended up accepting it as my own identity. I can say that these stereotypes21 that were pinned on me, whether taken from my two Gabonese cultures, my academic or social backgrounds, did not just do me a disservice; even if, most of the time, my interlocutors would differentiate themselves from me through their postures and body language, which either put me on a pedestal (the French girl, the student, the intellectual), or reminded me that my threshold position constituted a major difference between myself and them. Thus, despite the fact that I was Gabonese, I was mainly a stranger in my own home (Ouattara 2004; Kepny 2012). This kind of “floating posture” which I occupied allowed me to renegotiate my relationships as a researcher to my benefit, by playing on my different profiles. Henry-Pierre Jeudy puts it well: “The stereotype, in its fixed form, appears as the very revelation of the arbitrary for the person who uses it, through ethnic jokes, racial insults, ways of avoiding touching ‘others’”22 (Jeudy 1993, 1252). He adds: “Ironic power is a way of defying prejudices in a reciprocal moment between the observer and the observed”23 (ibid., 1259). This last sentence is well confirmed here, all the more so given that for me, these contradictory postures sometimes complete each other, such as when my father and uncle introduced me to Maman Betoe, by emphasising my Fang side, my Nguai clan and its correspondences of lineage, which made me the healer’s granddaughter. Far from my disliking it at this point, this proximity was to serve my interests, and for once I felt at ease in this position. Nevertheless, my birth conditions and my situation as a student who had come from France combined to create a kind of legitimacy, and this fact allowed me somehow to identify with this circle which, nevertheless, I had to keep at a good distance in order not to fall into a kind of essentialisation of the reality I was trying to analyse.

• 24 “l’objet de la recherche reste la connaissance empirique du social, sans illusion sur la transparen (...)

25I am well aware that lying to my interlocutors is ethically reprehensible, but some situations in the field require some evasion (Bonhomme 2017) and/or sidestepping strategies that do not entirely cover their perpetrators in glory. What I take away from this experience is that there is no ideal posture in the field, and that the environment we are researching is what shapes our posture in practice. This proximity has advantages and disadvantages (Biyela 2021). A researcher researching on her home ground is confronted with fantastical and extraordinary situations that must be handled through negotiations and cooperation, or even bypassing sparked by the asperities of the field. These appear as the conditions of research (Olivier de Sardan 2000, 436). In other words, we must “play the game” (jouer le jeu) while also keeping in mind that “the object of research remains the empirical knowledge of the social, without any illusion as to the transparency of subjects or our ability to establish new relationships”24 (ibid., 442). In concrete terms, we must adapt to the field by using even its disruptions. We should absolutely not give in to the illusion of an “objectivist detachment” (Althabe and Hernandez 2004, 8) between the researcher and her field of study. This is how this reflexive feedback allows me to understand that, in the fieldwork relation, far more is at play than what we hoped at once from an ethical, methodological, sociocultural and even imaginary point of view. Which goes to show that the situation of carrying out research can subject us to a certain amount of social control (Manetta and Samson 2021), can make us vulnerable (Jarry et al. 2006), sometimes empathetic, or yet again terrify us.

• 25 “Comment tu vas enquêter sur quelque chose qui t’effraye ?”

26“How are you going to research something that terrifies you?”25 my friend Elza asked me, the day I told her of my intention to write a thesis on mystical madness and therefore to go to the nganga to do my research. In this line of questioning, which seemed to me like a warning and which also invited me to implicitly surpass myself, I was mainly going to concentrate on the necessity of putting this fear to good use, and to produce objective research results. In order to push my enquiry beyond the frameworks of mystical madness, I first needed to realise that mad people did not all display the same characteristics. By dint of seeing or living close to such people, above all when they were members of my family or came from my circle of friends, I had come to terms with the necessity of seeing these patients as fully-fledged individuals. I had to accept to recognise these individuals as my fellow human beings, and above all make projections that allowed me to accept their status of patients and to change my way of approaching the situation. By viewing them as something other than ghosts or trash, as they were described in popular discourse, I viewed them with a different gaze. Let us say simply that by rehumanising them (Babongui-Mba 2023), I was led to ask myself about the reasons for the social, family and state neglect that leads to their wandering. I am not saying that my fear completely disappeared; what I am trying to formulate more specifically is that the desire to investigate and understand the meaning of this occult discourse on madness was much stronger than my fear of madmen. Which allowed me, now and again, to set it to one side in order to move my research forward. I realise, with the benefit of hindsight, that my empathy was stronger than my fear, in the sense that I often had the courage to confront my fears in order to defend other people. Beyond my desire to carry out an original and heuristic research project, the need to complete my collection of data was motivated by the idea that this research would serve to improve the conditions of mental patients.

• 26 “rendre étranger ce qui m’est familier par distanciation, et […] rendre familier ce qui m’est étran (...)

27Keen to find the methodological rigour and distance that a researcher must have, I actively tried to counter the prejudices that might prevent me from decently carrying out my investigation, while confronting the multiple challenges posed by my proximity to the object of my field study. Thus, on the one hand, I must say that the location of my research and the familiarity I found there succeeded in reversing the trend, that is to say: allowed me to relax at times. On the other hand, this proximity did not only have advantages, such as when the massive presence of certain of the healer’s relatives would disturb my interview, or when my father and brother endlessly reminded the healer of shared anecdotes about their extended families. We thus found ourselves in something like an improvised focus group, and I then needed to conduct several interviews just with the healer, in more appropriate conditions. To sidestep these familiarities, I indeed needed as Pierre Bourdieu’s works remind us (1972, 269), when he discusses participant observation, to distance myself in order to “make strange what is familiar to me through detachment, and […] make familiar what is strange through appropriation.”26