by Tom Driscoll
Omar Bongo, president of Gabon for 41-years, died on the 8th of June at a hospital in Barcelona, Spain. The autocrat-for-life who many believe pilfered the country’s treasure, was buried in Franceville, an easy hour’s drive on a paved road that leads to Lewai, the small village where Bongo was born, aptly renamed Bongoville.
Not far past Bongoville, in Leconi, the asphalt ends. Or it did 26-years-ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer there. After Leconi, the highway disintegrated into deep sand tracks meandering like rivers all over le Plateau Bateke looking for passage to the next remote village, and the next, 14-in-all as I recall, scattered along the watershed straddling the border with Congo-Brazzaville.
There were no gas stations up on the Plateau, no grocery stores, no hospitals or clinics. Every village had a little shop though that sold warm beer, canned sardines and soap, provided their supplier had passed through in recent weeks to restock them.
No electricity in those 14-villages. No wells. Little measurable wealth by economic standards. Just mud huts, an occasional tin roof. Every family farmed a small plot of sand. Every family member carried a rusty knife or a machete sharpened on rocks. Some villagers maintained fish ponds, others fished in Plateau rivers and lakes. Men, women and children alike trapped animals, birds, insects for food.
Hunting big game was the job of men and boys of every age from every family. Hunting parties used nets to surround islands of forest dotting the otherwise barren Plateau landscape. With machetes, hunters broke the necks of smaller animals chased into the nets by wily dogs and leathery sorcerers. Once in a great while, an elder marksman would expend a precious shotgun shell to drop a large antelope.
When enough meat was harvested, but not so much it couldn’t be cooked-and-eaten or smoked before spoiling, hunters cleaned the fresh kill, butchered it right there in the sand. One trusted black hand weighed lumps of rump, loin and shoulder, livers, tongues, stomachs and intestines while everyone looked on, nodding, grunting approval as meat piled up on dozens of broad green leaves. Everyone got a package of meat wrapped in a leaf and tied with liana, men too old to hunt, women too pregnant to farm, children too small to carry a knife. Everyone in the village benefited from the hunt.
That’s the way it worked, simple and fair, little competitive market prejudice to warp an essential human service with speculative motives. While Omar Bongo siphoned oil revenues into offshore bank accounts and Parisian real estate, members of Bongo’s tribe living in those remote villages on le Plateau Bateke sustained the welfare of the collective by caring for the individuals.
President Barack Obama appealed to Congress, health care providers, drug manufacturers, insurers and the nation last week to pass a health care reform bill estimated to cost one-trillion-dollars. Majority Leader Harry Reid announced yesterday that the Senate will not take up reform legislation until after the summer recess. Delaying the debate until fall won’t upset 1st District Congressman Tim Walz. According to the Mankato Free-Press, Walz is more concerned about getting health care reform right than getting it done quickly. “I don’t think an issue like this is going to lose momentum (between now and the end of the year),” said Walz.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s largest employer, the Mayo Clinic, continues to lobby for value-based healthcare using a quality care index as an incentive to providers to improve outcomes and lower costs.
Read about subsistence hunting on le Plateau Bateke.
Read another cultural tale, Hmong Deer Hunters in 2005.
Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America.
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