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{ 83 } \ Mvett Performance Retention, Reinvention, and Exaggeration in Remembering the Past —Mbala D. Nk anga We experience our present world in a context which is causally connected with past events and objects, and hence with reference to events and objects which we are not experiencing when we are experiencing the present. And we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present. Hence the difficulty of extracting our past from our present: not simply because present factors tend to influence—some might want to say distort—our recollections of the past, but also because past factors tend to influence, or distort, our­ experience of the present. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember When the rooster crowed “cock-­ a-­ doodle-­ do” for the first time, I was not born yet. Fang saying The concept of mvett1 represents a cultural institution among the Pahouin (Fang) people,of Gabon,Cameroon,Equatorial Guinea,and Congo-­ Brazzaville in central-­ west Africa. The presence of this institution in all major social and cultural circumstances in Fang society testifies to its prevalence. It is a well-­ established tradition of musical and storytelling performance based on an epic story and performed with the musical accompaniment of an African cordophone withthesamename.UnlikemanysimilarAfricantraditions, mvett has long been overlooked by scholars and observers of Central Africa. Pierre Alexandre, { 84 } Mbala D. Nk anga one of these observers, states that “a strange fact about this highly original literary genre is that it was ‘discovered’ so late. It is hardly alluded to in Tessmann ’s monumental monograph on the ‘Pangwe’ and not at all in Largeau and Trilles.”2 However, since the publication of Herbert Pepper’s,3 Eno Belinga’s,4 and Tsira Ndong Ndoutoume’s5 transcription and translation of various episodes of the mvett, many young scholars have taken to it in the form of academic theses. Others, such as Grégoire Biyogo and his group of researchers at the Cheikh Anta Diop Institute at the Omar Bongo University in Libreville, are attempting to develop a scholarship of the mvett based on Cheikh Anta Diop’s historiographical concepts. This essay presents the characteristics of the mvett performance tradition. It also discusses why mvett performance plays such an important role in social and cultural events among Fang people. Perhaps more importantly, it explores the process of memory activation and the solidification of Fang identity through performing and attending a session of the mvett. Listening to the Gabonese National Radio every day around 5 p.m., one can hear public announcements and advertisements of upcoming events. The most popular events in Libreville and other cities are traditional ceremonies concern­ ing deaths, marriages, and other kinds of celebrations. Most announcements, especially by Fang people, involve mvett. At first they did not seem so remarkable , but after a while the emphasis on the word mvett caught my attention. Why is there so much concern for mvett? What is the meaning of the word or concept? Why is it so publicized, but without any explanation by the organizers ? These were the prime questions in my mind when I first heard the word. The emphasis placed on it intrigued me. I thought that if Fang people scheduled mvett regularly during all major family events, then it should be a very important part of Fang life. My first encounter with mvett, in July 1991, was an eye-­ opener. It was a very complex artistic activity that was a presentation of genealogical records. An individual led each event, simultaneously playing an ancestral instrument similar to the Western kithara, recounting an epic, and dancing. This musician-­ storyteller, called mbômômvett in Fang, referred family members to their ancestral origins and the ways the family evolved through generations. He underscored the violent life they led to (1) survive the oddities of nature they learned to control and (2) compete for supremacy among themselves. In this context, the mbômômvett resembles the West African griot, who uses the kora to support his incantation of epic stories about distinguished ancestors . Here the focus is the relationship between the organizer of the performance , who invites the griot to perform, and the epic...

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