FEATURE 98 FIG. 7 (top): Mask. Galwa, Gabon. Before 1890. Wood, vegetable fi ber, kaolin, red ocher, charcoal. H: 28 cm. Collected by Virgile Gacon in 1890. Musée de l’Areuse, Boudry, Switzerland. FIG. 8 (above): Mask. Galwa, Gabon. Wood, kaolin, red ocher, charcoal. H: 31 cm. Collected by P. Moller in 1887. Göteborg Museum, inv. GEM 1032. Lower Ogooué. Ivindo is the name of an Ajange clan chief, whom the Catholic missionaries of Ewonjo-Néngé (now Lambaréné) called the “queen.” Oral tradition mentions place names: Abunje, the starting point of their migration, indicates a direction—the place where the sun rises—but it can also designate a large tree in the forest. According to another oral tradition, Abunje is also the original village near Lake Tanganyika where the Galwa were pursued by the “horse-men,” that is, Arabs. This myth of a monster with a human head and an animal body and limbs (simpondo) was recorded during the French colonial period in Gabon after 1920 but was also known to the Fan of Cameroon and to the Nkomi. According to Codjo Rawambia, it is possible that this was an identity construct that served to reinforce Galwa cohesion.14 The Galwa are said to have penetrated deep into the forest and to have found the encampments left by the Mpongwe who preceded them. When they arrived at Okondza (Okonja), a place whose name means “living peacefully and intelligently,” they encountered the Okande and the Tsogho, who introduced them to the bwiti and kono secret societies. These peoples formalized interclanic matrimonial alliances.15 Oral tradition describes the period of the Loango Plain, or Mwa Loango, between the Igela and Mayumba lagoons. The Galwa encountered the Vili cultural center in Libreville from 1980 to 1990, has criticized them for the paucity of their knowledge of the Myene cults and of Galwa society: “They did not always understand what they saw, and tended, like all of their contemporaries, to judge everything by strictly Eurocentric standards.”5 In 1883, J. F. Payeur-Didelot, a companion of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza and an explorer of note in his own right, became interested in the Galwa— their villages, their mores, and the yassi society, as well as in their women, whom he referred to as “these Negro Venuses.” He published an interesting letter in his book Trente mois au continent mystérieux Gabon,6 a complaint addressed to the colonial administration’s “commander” submitted by a Galwa woman threatened with death by her cruel Enenga husband, whom she had left for another man with whom she had had two children.7 In 1897, British explorer Mary Kingsley spent time in Lambaréné and wrote that the Galwa, closely related to the Mpongwe, had “one of the most developed civilizations in Africa.”8 In 1924, Abbot André Raponda-Walker, whose mother was Mpongwe, described the matriarchal laws of the Galwa and likened them to the Eshira rather than to the Mpongwe, who were patrilinear.9 Scholars Hubert Deschamps, Joseph Ambouroue- Avaro,10 and Paul-Vincent Pounah all reject the idea that the Galwa are Eshira, while Annie Merlet, not taking a position, nonetheless affi rms that all of the versions of the oral tradition attest to long and frequent contacts between the Galwa and the Eshira, and contain not only legends referring to wars and subordination, but to cohabitation as well.11 Léopold Codjo Rawambia closes the case, maintaining that the arguments that relate the Galwa to the Eshira are not convincing and that neither their traditions nor their languages support the contention. 12 Lastly, oral tradition historian Paul-Vincent Pounah translated and annotated the unpublished manuscript Galwa, ou, Edongo d’antan (The Galwa, or, the Edongo of Yore) by Galwa pastor Ogoula-M’Beye, which is a veritable gold mine of information on this people.13 MIGRATION MYTHOLOGY At some point in the past, the Galwa and the Orungu left an unknown part of East Africa and migrated from east to west, eventually moving from the Upper Ivindo in eastern central Gabon to the
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