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The Spark That Lit the Thunder

In the secret places inaccessible to laymen, the Black Magi,

heirs of Balthazar, teach there the mysteries of existence

and non-existence.

Prince Birinda de Boudieguy,

The Secret Bible of Africa According to the Bwiti

Gabon’s sweltering heat began to envelop me from the moment I disembarked onto the jet bridge and into the musky air of the jungle. Cool beads of sweat were already collecting under the shoulder strap of my carry-on as I descended the first stairwell inside the terminal. This equatorial weather evoked memories of my recent summers living in Mexico, but the moisture here hung heavier and hotter. After growing up in Canada, this kind of climate was still exotic.

I struggled through customs with my poor French and made my way through the airport. After picking up my luggage, I was greeted with a hug from Hughes Poitevin—better known by his nickname Tatayo—a French-born Gabonese citizen, long-since integrated into local culture as deeply as a white man possibly could be. On my path to learning about the root bark of the iboga shrub, which contains one of the world’s most powerful naturally occurring psychedelics, he kept coming up as the obvious next person to know. Over the years, several of my friends had visited him for initiation into Bwiti, the main Gabonese tradition that administers iboga in ceremonies of healing and rites of passage. Between the stories that they shared and Tatayo’s numerous appearances in National Geographic and on the BBC documentaries about Gabon, he already felt like a familiar face.

“Hi! Ho! A fresh Canadian Pygmy,” he shouted with his usual style of irreverent humor. He was slender and wrinkled with age but beamed with youthful energy and a disarming smile. He originally came to Gabon for a two-week vacation back in 1971 at the age of twenty-one and fell so deeply in love with the open-hearted and artistic spirit of the people that he skipped his return flight and made it his home. He still wore subtle remnants of his hippie roots, like the beads hanging from his neck and wrapped around his wrists. I couldn’t help but note his vest layer over a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt and his red wool beanie, all of which looked like overkill to me with the perspiration already dampening the back of my shirt. After loading my luggage into the trunk of his 1985 Land Cruiser, we made our way to Ebando, the home of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) that Tatayo founded decades earlier. The word Ebando is a Tsogho term that means “the beginning,” and the retreat center embodied its name as a starting point for countless international travelers interested in exploring Gabon and the Bwiti tradition.

The truck rumbled through the streets of Libreville, the coastal capital, with the windows rolled down and Fela Kuti blasting from a Bluetooth speaker on the dashboard. The deep sky and dark green of the palms and flora accented the aging signage on cinder block shops and faded Western clothes, a muted background for the brightly colored and intricate prints of traditional African dresses. Along the way Tatayo talked about the cultural changes he’d witnessed in the country, and why he found the colorful synthetic hair extensions that many of the local women used distasteful. It sounded a bit problematic because they were almost ubiquitous on the city streets, and I didn’t share his opinion, which he reluctantly appreciated.

Gabon is a small country with just over two million people, about a third of whom live in Libreville. The pace of urbanization and cultural change has been staggering, with many leaving hunter-gatherer lifestyles in the villages to enter the pursuit of careers and modern households in less than a generation. I asked Tatayo how many Bwiti temples made their home amid these kinds of urban neighborhoods, compared with the rest of the country.

“It’s hard to know this,” he thought for a moment. “Maybe one hundred? But they are mostly new. Some of them come for a time, and then they go. It’s more in the countryside where you find Bwiti that continues for many generations. You will see. We will go and visit the countryside too.”

One of the roads wound along the shoreline away from the city center, passing tall palace-like government buildings and some newer developments. Before long we arrived at Ebando’s small fenced-in plot next to the ocean, just on the outskirts of the city. We pulled into the yard of the naturally sheltered compound and parked in front of the entrance to a hangar-like structure with a metal roof. Several other weathered buildings surrounded an open grassy square. Outside the hangar, in a dry patch at the center of the grass, a campfire burned in broad daylight, surrounded by logs where several young people sat. One of them worked on a pile of palm leaves, carefully stripping lengths of fiber from the stems and collecting them in a pile next to a metal bucket.

On the opposite side of the clearing, along the south wall of the compound, rested a trailer raised up on metal supports. It had a covered platform strewn with unique wooden artifacts and masks and a narrow path that led through the trinkets to the small room where Tatayo lived.

We toured part of the hangar, which contained a kitchen and eating area decorated with similar artifacts and artwork and a lounge area with several couches and shelves spilling over with books left behind by visitors from all over the world. Out through the back door and down a shaded path behind the building, Tatayo handed me the key to the first in a series of small wooden guest cabins. The room had an empty shelf, a table, the necessary luxury of a floor fan, and a single bed draped with mosquito netting. I unpacked my bags and made the space my own. After the long flight, I welcomed a moment of rest. I couldn’t sleep yet, but with the faint sound of the ocean in the background, I spent some time reflecting on the winding journey that brought me here.

A LONG ROAD TO GABON

Five years before visiting Ebando, I immigrated to Mexico to work at a clinic that administered ibogaine, a psychedelic compound derived from the iboga shrub and used in centers around the world to help people detox from opioids and other drugs. For people who genuinely want to stop using illicit substances it can dramatically ease this notoriously challenging transition, removing most of the harrowing withdrawals from opioids and minimizing cravings afterward. Partly due to this association with heroin users in the throes of withdrawal, ibogaine remains the dark horse of the psychedelic world, a reputation further complicated by a number of deaths among people who have taken it, mostly attributed to preexisting cardiac complications or interactions with other drugs.

Despite the inherent risks, I found ibogaine therapy amazing to witness. For the most part, people feel a kind of inner gravity that brings them to lie down and to close their eyes. To an observer who didn’t know any better, it could appear that a patient under the effects of ibogaine was simply asleep or at least resting very quietly. But during the process people often find their attention drawn to an inner tapestry of dreamlike visualizations. This parade from the inner depths can be highly personal or highly impersonal, sometimes banal, sometimes exquisite. Many find the effects to be quite challenging, physically, mentally, or emotionally, but most remain in a prone position and gravitate to a state of neutrality, witnessing visual reveries and processing through a kind of self-psychoanalysis.

Depending on the dosage, the acute ibogaine trance can continue for upward of ten to fifteen hours, often followed by what ibogaine providers affectionately refer to as a “gray day.” Recovering from this, ibogaine’s aftereffects gradually taper off over the course of days, weeks, and sometimes months, leaving a sense of quiet, clarity, and ease. For those coming off drugs, the enduring benefits completely transform detox. The visions sometimes inspire valuable insights, but even when people don’t see anything clearly, the treatment provides physiological relief from withdrawal and cravings. This release is otherwise unheard of in early addiction recovery, where many continue to struggle with post-acute withdrawal and depression that can last a year or more.

My own interest in ibogaine came about somewhat differently. I had never used heroin or most of the things that people came to the clinics to detox from, but I did pass through a deep and dangerous depression. When I was sixteen and going through a difficult period in high school, a doctor handed me a nine-item questionnaire printed on cardstock with a Zoloft logo in the header. Unsurprisingly, my answers landed me a prescription for Zoloft, a standard selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) designed to increase the amount of serotonin in my system.

Two years and two different SSRI medications later, as the doctors fiddled with my prescription, I realized the professionals didn’t know what they were doing and quit cold turkey. The long valley of the withdrawal left me in a state of depersonalization, or derealization, during which I had difficulty grasping whether I or the world around me was real. Psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD helped me to emerge from that broken state and come alive again, but remnants of confusion and mental obsession continued to impact my life as I moved forward.