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ABSTRACTThrough narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.

When American Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries arrived in the Gabon Estuary in the 1840s, they entered a world marked by vibrant commerce; violence and inequality; widespread slavery and slave-trading; British, French,