The Babongo and Iboga

If you have read anything about iboga in English, you have probably met a version of this sentence: the Pygmies discovered the plant and gave it to their neighbours. It is repeated in documentaries, in ceremony marketing and in almost every popular account.

The sentence is not invented. It corresponds to something real. What it does is convert a living, unequal and changing social relationship into a founding anecdote, and the anthropology of the Chaillu mountains is considerably more interesting than the anecdote.

What kind of claim the origin story is

The Babongo hold the origin position inside Bwiti’s own account of itself. That is a statement made within a ritual by its initiates, and it is held across several of the peoples who practise it.

It is not a historical finding, and the researchers who report it do not present it as one. Nothing in the literature this page draws on establishes when iboga was first used, by whom, or how the practice moved. What is established is that the ritual says the Babongo were there first.

That distinction is the whole page. A myth of origin is evidence about a ritual’s structure and about how a society understands itself. It is not evidence about the past, and treating it as archaeology does the tradition no favours.

The relation the ritual reverses

Here is the finding that the popular telling loses entirely.

Research published in Anthropos in 2012 on ritual relations between the Babongo and their neighbours states the position directly: whereas the Babongo occupy socially subordinate positions in relation to neighbouring populations, the Bwiti initiation ritual inverses that relational form by placing them at its mythical origin-point.

So the ritual does not reflect the social order. It turns it upside down for the duration of the ceremony. The people who are subordinate outside are foundational inside.

Anyone who has read anything about ritual will recognise the shape of that, and it is a much stronger claim about Bwiti than “the Pygmies discovered it”. It says the ceremony is doing work on a relationship, not merely remembering one.

Performing a figure written by someone else

The 2012 study makes a further observation, and it is the sharpest thing in the literature we could reach.

The Babongo who perform at rituals are described as embodying the “Pygmy” as that figure is construed by their neighbours. The role played in the ceremony is not simply “being Babongo”. It is enacting a character that the surrounding society has authored.

That is a familiar dynamic wherever a dominant group makes ritual use of a marginalised one, and it should complicate any account of Bwiti that treats the Babongo presence as straightforwardly an honour.

What changed, and who it belongs to now

The same study does not leave it there, and this is the part that matters most.

Bwiti underwent profound changes across the twentieth century, and those changes allowed for the emancipation of the Babongo. In becoming full ritual actors in their own right, they came to enact Bwiti’s origin myth for their own sake rather than only within someone else’s ceremony. The authors describe subaltern actors emerging as central participants on the ritual scene.

A study of music-making in the Bwete ritual, published in Hunter Gatherer Research in 2017, reaches a compatible conclusion by another route. It describes the relationship between the Babongo of the Chaillu mountains and their Mitsogo and Massango neighbours as ambivalent: one that subordinates the Babongo while still including them within the social sphere of those neighbours. It attributes part of that ambivalence to the Babongo belonging to two normative systems at once.

Two normative systems, held simultaneously, is a better description of what is going on than any sentence containing the word “discovered”.

Where this leaves the plant

Almost nothing on this page is about iboga specifically, and that is not an omission.

The Babongo appear in this subject through Bwiti, and Bwiti is where the origin claim lives. The literature we could reach concerns ritual, music and social relations. It does not contain a separate Babongo pharmacology, a distinct preparation, or a body of botanical knowledge described apart from the ceremony.

Where a page could be written about a people’s practice, this site writes one. Where the record contains a name and a role in someone else’s account, it says that instead. Iboga and the peoples of Gabon sets out which peoples the record connects to the plant and how thin some of those connections are.

What we are not saying

We are not saying the origin account is false. We have no basis for that and it would be an odd thing for an outside site to assert.

We are not saying the Babongo were not first. Nobody knows, the literature does not claim to, and the question may not have the kind of answer the asking assumes.

And we are not correcting Gabonese people about their own tradition. What this page corrects is a Western retelling that takes a claim made inside a ritual, strips it of the ritual, and uses it as provenance for a product.

What the West gets wrong about Bwiti collects the rest of those.