Gabon, 1984

Ndjolé Memoir is my attempt to remember fully my experience doing anthropological fieldwork 38 years ago in Ndjolé, Gabon. This is a small town of 5,000 people located on the Ogooué River in this west-central African country predominated by rainforest, heat, humidity, and manioc. The French colonials had controlled Gabon since the 1840s. Independence had come in 1960. French was the official national language.

For me, a memoir is a truthful, factual account (i.e., it is not imaginative fiction) of some finite period (like my 15 months in Gabon) in the writer’s past. It is not autobiography, which presumes to cover a lifetime. A memoir aims to be interesting and compelling. It should be minimally encumbered with citations or references. (I use the occasional endnote located at the back of the book.) A memoir is not a scholarly or “academic” treatise. Memory alone will never permit a memoir to be written. Memory is far too unreliable and fallible for that. Writing my memoir has required robust contemporaneous evidence (e.g., a diary, a journal, maps, drawings, interview notes, correspondence, photos, all of which I use) permitting my past to be recreated in detail and with some objectivity—which is not to say that we can ever totally recapture the past. We will always imagine, and thus “construct,” our past, but it must be construction that is buttressed by much factual information. Most of my interview notes lay dormant for years, at least until the mid-1980s when I wrote my PhD dissertation.