Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Kokolopori is a little more than sixty miles north of the equator. The weather wasn't too hot, the
days peaking in the high eighties, the nights in the low seventies or high sixties, cool enough to
sleep. The dry season lasted until April, and I hadn't seen a single mosquito, not in the village or
the forest, not even after sunset.
Evenings, the staff of Vie Sauvage and BCI gathered with Sally and Michael in the hut, where
they sat around the table to discuss work. But this night was quieter than usual, and Michael and
I went out to the
paillote
to talk. I put my headlamp on low and set it on the floor, the light warm
against the yellow dirt, the darkness beyond the thatch eaves as solid as a wall.
Michael had been telling me about Engindanginda, the sacred forest, an area in Kokolopori
where the locals traditionally do not go. According to them, there was a battle many generations
ago, and the spirits of the dead remain. But as with other taboos, this one was breaking down,
hunters skirting the area's edges, going a little closer to the lake glimpsed at its center, though no
one, according to the stories, had gone all the way in. In 2005, Albert and Michael discussed doing
a quick survey there to see what species inhabited the area while it was still relatively untouched.
“When Albert and I decided to go in with some trackers,” he told me, “the chiefs, notables, and
spiritual leaders from the villages came to do a ceremony for us. They dug a hole in the ground and
went up to it one by one. They started yelling and making threatening motions, then took a swig of
lotoko
and sprayed it from their mouths into the hole. Some of them had headdresses and spears,
and they shook the spear at the hole, then passed the bottle to the next person. At the end, the spir-
itual leader said some words. Then the men came over and gave us a pat. They touched us and said
it was over, that we would be protected from the demons.
“I thought they did this for everyone, but Albert told me it was special. He said no one had ever
gone all the way into the sacred forest and returned alive, and that since I was the first
mundele
entering it and they considered me family, they wanted to make sure I was safe.”
Throughout Équateur, there are areas known as sacred forests, places where hunters aren't al-
lowed. Later, when I wrote to Albert about the name of the one in Kokolopori, he would tell me that
the real meaning of the name Engindanginda had been lost over the generations, but that it may stem
from
yoko y'engunda
, meaning “lake of those beetles in charge of burying feces.” In the legend,
however, the beetles play an important role in the war between Kokolopori and nearby Nsema, pos-
sibly consuming the flesh of the dead whose blood formed the lake in the sacred forest. In the name
Engindanginda, the repetition conveys magnitude, as in very large beetles. But there were two oth-
er explanations that he offered:
linginda
means a special war dress, with
bongindanginda
meaning
a very big war dress; and
lingunda
means deep, with
bongundangunda
meaning a very deep lake.
He wrote: “Therefore, Engindanginda would be that mysterious deep lake stemming from the war
between the Kokolopori and Nsema people, where Coleoptera buried corpses or bodies, and blood
turned into a lake.”