Iboga: Names, Slang and Etymology

This is a question a lot of people ask, and the honest answer is a negative result. Negatives are worth publishing when they are checkable, and this one is.

The drug agency lists none

Two American federal documents settle it, and they can both be downloaded.

The controlled substances list. Every entry has a column headed “other names”, and that column carries street names where they exist. Compare:

The agency knows how to record slang. For ibogaine it records a botanical description instead.

The slang catalogue. A 2017 intelligence report exists for the sole purpose of listing code words for controlled substances. It has headed entries for amphetamine, cocaine, crack, fentanyl, heroin, ketamine, LSD, marijuana, MDMA, methamphetamine, opium, oxycodone, PCP and synthetic cannabinoids.

It also has entries for the three closest comparators. Mescaline: big chief, blue caps, buttons, cactus, media luna, mescal, moon, topi. Mushrooms: alice, boomers, buttons, caps, hongos, magic, shrooms. Peyote: black button, britton, cactus, green button, half moon, hikori, hikuli, nubs, seni, shaman, tops.

Searching that document for “iboga” returns nothing.

The one alternative name that is real

Endabuse appears in the pharmacological literature. A 1995 receptor-binding paper opens by naming the compound as the indole alkaloid ibogaine, NIH 10567, Endabuse.

That is a development and trade name from a period when the compound was being prepared for pharmaceutical evaluation. It is not slang and nobody uses it conversationally.

The names the plant actually has

These are Central African and French, and they are recorded in the botanical literature by a Gabonese author.

Iboga and eboka are the most widespread, with éboga, eraga, dibughi, dihoa and lihoka among recorded variants. French sources use bois sacré and bois amer, sacred wood and bitter wood.

The recorded English names are bitter grass, sacred wood and leaf of God. All three read as translations of the local names rather than as anything that arose in English.

One caution about how these lists propagate. The vernacular names held by the major biodiversity databases are identical to those in the botanical monograph, which strongly suggests they are all downstream of one source rather than three independent attestations. A name appearing in four databases can still rest on one field botanist’s notebook.

A name that vanished

The plant’s first published description, in 1889, is titled Sur l’obouété du Gabon.

Obouété. It appears in the title of the founding botanical paper and in none of the modern vernacular lists. Somewhere between 1889 and the databases it dropped out.

That is a small thing, and it is a useful reminder of what these lists are: a snapshot of which words reached a European recorder, not a census of what the plant is called.

How to say it

There is no single authority on this and the published renderings differ, so what follows is a plain respelling rather than a phonetic standard.

Iboga is three syllables, with the stress on the second: ih-BOH-guh. Ibogaine is four, and English speakers most often place the stress on the first: EYE-boh-gayn. Both are heard with the first vowel as a short ih rather than a long eye, which follows the Myene and French forms more closely than the common American rendering does.

The reason this is worth a paragraph is not etiquette. It is that the name is usually first encountered spoken, in a podcast or from someone who has been, and then typed from memory. Ibogain, ibogane, ibogaïne and eboga all lead somewhere, and not always to the same substance. A person searching for a half-remembered word is exactly the person most likely to buy a powder whose label does not match its contents.

Which language the word comes from

This is more settled than it usually appears, and the answer is not the one most accounts give.

The standard ethnography of Bwiti states it plainly: eboga or eboka is the Fang name for the plant, and both the species name and the Fang name are taken from the Myene term iboga, of the Galwa and Mpongwe cluster spoken along the coast and the lower Ogooué.

So the word that entered French, and then the scientific name, and then every English-language page about this plant, is Myene. The Fang form is a borrowing from it.

The 1901 chemistry note points the same way independently. Its authors describe the plant as known in the lower Ogooué and the Fernand Vaz, which are Myene country, under the name iboga.

One further distinction worth holding, because the two words come from different languages entirely. Iboga is Myene, from the coast. Bwiti, the practice, is a Tsogo term from the Chaillu mountains in the south, adopted by the Fang at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What none of these sources gives is a meaning for the Myene root itself. No source we could reach glosses what iboga translates as, and we are not going to invent one.

Bwiti and the iboga tradition handles the naming as it belongs to the peoples who use the plant, and those pages are reviewed by an initiating father in Gabon.

The story of how ibogaine was coined in Paris in 1901, by two competing teams who gave it two different names and argued about precedence, is on what ibogaine is.