Discovering Bwiti: The First Written Record of a Ceremony, 1865

A Village Idol on the Edge of the Forest

On the evening of June 29, 1865, a French-born explorer named Paul Belloni Du Chaillu walked into an Ashango village somewhere in the Gabonese interior to watch what he called a mbuiti ceremony. He had no idea he was writing down the first direct eyewitness description of a Bwiti ritual that has survived to us. He thought he was watching a village feast. He left after two and a half hours, bored and unable to find any meaning in what he saw. That account, buried in a 650-page travel book published in London in 1867, is the oldest firsthand record of the religious tradition that today uses the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga to induce visionary states across Gabon and neighboring countries.

This is not folklore passed down through oral tradition and reconstructed later by anthropologists. It is a dated, named, located document, written by a man who was actually standing inside the temple hut that night. The Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini spent thirty years, from 1991 to 2022, tracking down and cross-checking documents like this one as part of a five-part study published in the Antrocom Online Journal of Anthropology between 2024 and 2025. What he found complicates the tidy origin stories repeated on most websites about Bwiti, including, until now, this one.

Who Was Paul Du Chaillu, and Why His Testimony Is Tricky

Du Chaillu made two expeditions into the Gabonese hinterland, in 1856-1859 and 1863-1865. He is remembered today mainly for being the first Westerner to describe live gorillas to a European audience and for mapping territory no outsider had charted before. He was also, by his own biographer's admission and by Samorini's analysis, a showman who could not resist improving a story. His most notorious invention was a series of lurid passages describing Fang cannibalism, scenes historians now regard as largely fabricated for shock value. Those pages became, in Samorini's words, the "original sin" that launched decades of missionary and colonial fantasy about cannibal tribes in Gabon, a myth so persistent that some Fang communities eventually came to believe it about themselves.

That history matters here because it means every factual claim Du Chaillu made has to be checked rather than taken on faith. And when Samorini checked, he found something nobody else had apparently noticed: Du Chaillu's 1863 French edition of his first book does not match his 1861 English original. Chapters were dropped. Others were rearranged. And in several places, specific terms were quietly swapped or deleted. Du Chaillu admitted as much himself, writing in 1862 that in the French edition he planned to "avoid the confusions that escaped me in the rush of the first editorial, confusions that gave rise to a controversy that I was not looking for."

A Word That Keeps Changing Its Spelling

The term at the center of the confusion is mbuiti, the word Du Chaillu used for carved wooden statues, for spirit-houses, and, on one occasion, for himself (natives who had never seen a white man reportedly called him a mbuiti, meaning "spirit"). In his 1861 book, Du Chaillu describes obtaining an idol from a Commi (Nkomi) chief named Damagondai near Lake Anengué, writing: "In Damagondai's town I was so fortunate as to become possessed of one of their idols or mbuitis." In the 1863 French edition of the same book, that same statue is renamed mbuiri, and the word mbuiti disappears from the passage entirely.

This is not a trivial detail. For more than a century, French-speaking scholars studying the history of Bwiti, including researchers as prominent as François Gaulme and Julien Bonhomme, built their analysis on the French editions. Because of the 1863 substitution, they concluded that Du Chaillu never referenced Bwiti among the Nkomi at all. Samorini went back to the 1861 English original and found the opposite: it contains, as far as the written record shows, the very first mention of the term in Western literature, a full two years before the term was edited out of the French version that generations of researchers actually read.

Du Chaillu was not being deliberately deceptive here so much as inconsistent. Later in his second book, describing his 1863-1865 journey, he used mbuiti to refer to idols among the Eviva and the Mitsogho, then had those same references stripped from the 1875 French edition of that book too. The phrase "the large house of the idol or mbuiti" in the English original became simply "among other houses" in French. "Mbuiti songs" became "sacred songs." Samorini reads this as the explorer's own uncertainty about what he had actually heard and seen, rather than any coherent editorial policy. The practical lesson for anyone researching Bwiti today: if a source relies only on the French-language record of early contact, it is working from a text that has already been filtered, rearranged, and in places silently rewritten by the person who recorded it.

1865: The First Description of an Actual Ceremony

The most valuable passage in the entire 1861-1938 documentary record Samorini surveyed is Du Chaillu's account from an Ashango village, dated precisely to June 29, 1865. Unlike the scattered single-sentence mentions of idols and spirit-houses elsewhere in his books, this is a sustained, detailed, first-person description of people actually performing a ritual, with named participants, a described space, and specific instruments. Here is the passage, translated as close to Du Chaillu's original English as the 1867 edition allows:

"This evening I went to see the village idol, or mbuiti (the patron saint as it may be called), and to witness a great ceremony in the mbuiti-house... This idol was kept at the end of a long, narrow, and low hut, forty or fifty feet long and ten feet broad, and was painted in red, white, and black colours. When I entered the hut, it was full of Ashango people, ranged in order on each side, with lighted torches stuck in the ground before them. Amongst them were conspicuous two mbuiti men, or, as they might be called, priests, dressed in cloth of vegetable fibre, with their skins painted grotesquely in various colours, one side of the face red, the other white, and in the middle of the breast a broad yellow stripe... There was an orchestra of instrumental performers near the idol, consisting of three drummers with two drumsticks each, one harper, and a performer on the sounding stick... The two mbuiti men, in the meantime, were dancing in a fantastical manner in the middle of the temple, putting their bodies into all sort of strange contortions. Every time the mbuiti men opened their mouths to speak, a dead silence ensued."

Du Chaillu left after two and a half hours, "wearied out with the noise, and being unable to see any meaning or any change in the performances." He had no framework for understanding what he had just witnessed, and he said so plainly. That honesty is, ironically, part of what makes the passage credible as a document, even if worthless as interpretation. Samorini identifies several details that point unmistakably to a genuine Bwiti rite rather than a generic village dance: the exclusively male attendance, the two-colored face paint split down the middle, and the specific combination of instruments, particularly the harp (ngombi) and a stick-and-resonator percussion instrument called the obaka, both of which remain core instruments in Bwiti liturgy today. The hut itself, a long narrow structure housing a carved column, matches the layout of the mbandja temples still used by Bwitist communities in Gabon.

What Came Before It, and What Came After

The 1865 Ashango ceremony did not appear out of nowhere in the documentary record. Du Chaillu had already logged scattered mentions of mbuiti idols among at least four different ethnic groups during his two expeditions: the Nkomi and Bakélé in his first book, and the Eviva, Mitsogho, and Masangu in his second. Taken individually, none of these references proves the presence of Bwiti as a structured cult; Du Chaillu used the terms mbuiti, mbuiri, and alumbi loosely and sometimes contradictorily, at one point describing the same category of spirit as having no physical representation and elsewhere describing a carved statue representing that same spirit. Samorini treats most of these single mentions as suggestive rather than conclusive. The June 1865 Ashango account is the exception: it is detailed enough, and consistent enough with later, better-documented Bwiti practice, to be treated as a genuine, datable sighting.

Four years later, in a children's book called Lost in the Jungle (1869), Du Chaillu described another supposed mbuiti scene involving a healing ritual for two wounded men, this time with women present, which Samorini flags as almost certainly invented, since mixed-gender participation rules out traditional Bwiti by definition. A year after that, in an 1870 book, Du Chaillu claimed to have seen mbuiti idols among the Apingi, a claim he had not made in either of his first two books covering the same expeditions. Samorini's conclusion is blunt: this was very likely Du Chaillu's imagination filling a gap, and the Apingi should probably be removed from the list of ethnic groups where he actually witnessed anything.

The pattern that emerges across roughly a decade of Du Chaillu's writing is one explorer gradually, unevenly, and sometimes dishonestly piecing together fragments of a religious system he never had access to and never tried seriously to understand. The one moment where the fog clears is the Ashango temple on the night of June 29, 1865, almost by accident, because Du Chaillu happened to sit through two and a half hours of a ceremony he found tedious and wrote it down anyway.

Iboga Enters Europe the Same Year Bwiti Is First Named

While Du Chaillu was recording the first mentions of mbuiti, he never once mentioned the plant iboga itself; Samorini suspects his native informants deliberately kept that part secret from him. The written trail for iboga as a substance starts in 1862, a year after Du Chaillu's first book appeared, through an entirely different channel: colonial trade documentation. The Revue Maritime et Coloniale listed iboga root among "Medicinal Materials" sent from French Equatorial Africa to the 1862 London International Exhibition, noting that "the Gabonese combat sleep successfully by chewing these roots." The same year, a Strasbourg newspaper, Le Courier du Bas-Rhin, reported on August 22 that a Mr. Wenger had donated a Gabonese ceremonial dance costume to the local natural history museum, along with a wood sample, described as something Gabonese women chewed while dancing "with frenzy." That sample, alongside the one shown in London, appears to be iboga's first physical arrival in Europe.

The plant would not receive a formal scientific name for another twenty-five years. A French naval doctor named Marie-Théophile Griffon du Bellay, who explored the Ogooué river in 1862 and collected roughly 450 plant species in Gabon, described iboga in 1865 as an aphrodisiac and stimulant used by paddlers "during long excursions in dugout canoes, to combat sleep and revive their ardor," and gave it the botanically meaningless placeholder name "taberna ventricosa." The French botanist Henri Ernst Baillon finally classified it correctly as Tabernanthe iboga in 1887-1889, crediting Griffon du Bellay for bringing it to scientific attention. For roughly a quarter of a century, in other words, Western science knew iboga existed, had physical samples of it sitting in Paris and London, and still could not agree on what to call it.

Why This Matters for Anyone Reading About Bwiti Today

Most popular accounts of Bwiti and the history of iboga compress this entire tangled record into a single clean sentence: "Bwiti has been practiced for centuries in Gabon." That is probably true, but it is not what the documentary evidence actually shows. What the evidence shows is a messy, contradiction-riddled paper trail that begins in 1861, involves a self-mythologizing explorer whose own publishers edited his terminology differently in different languages, and produces exactly one description, from a single night in 1865, that modern scholars can point to with real confidence as a record of an actual rite rather than a secondhand rumor or a fabrication.

That is not a weakness in the tradition. Bwiti's relative invisibility in nineteenth-century Western writing is consistent with what every Bwitist community insists on today: this is a mystery cult, built on secrecy maintained specifically against outsiders, where revealing initiatory content to the uninitiated has historically carried severe consequences. Du Chaillu did not get a clear picture of Bwiti because he was not supposed to get one. What he left behind anyway, however confused and self-contradictory, is the closest thing available to a direct window into Gabonese ritual practice from a period before missionary hostility and colonial administration began actively working to erase it, a campaign that would turn violent within another seventy years.