The Road to Libreville
Updated: Sep 21
Patience, Police, and Porc-épics
One of my many adventures as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Gabon.
[2003] The road between Lambaréné and Libreville, the capital, is about a 3.5 hour trip. That is, if you make it in a straight shot.
There are lots of possible factors which can prolong the trip by up to 4 or 5 hours, sometimes turning what could be an easy trip into quite an adventure.
First, there are the controles — police (gendarmes) or civilian entrepreneurs with orange cones or barrels blocking the road. These are sometimes police or military, sometimes the minions of village chiefs, often wearing ridiculously over-sized uniforms that make them look like characters in a mediocre high school play.
These men, who start drinking beer or palm wine first thing in the morning, sit in little wooden shacks or simply at a table under a tree and pull over every car with a shrill whistle. Sometimes they have guns, which also look, to me, like they’ve come from the high school prop closet. But maybe they work…?
The gendarmes check identity papers and extort money out of the drivers by always finding something wrong with the papers or the vehicle. The drivers generally have to pay 1000-2000 CFA ($2-$3) at each stop, although I have been in one or two cars where the driver refused to heed the whistle. The gendarmes have no vehicles, and thus no way to pursue the renegade drivers.
Another delay in getting from place to place in Gabon can be caused by any number of technical failures, above all, flat tires.
Some people have experienced as many as three flats in one trip to Libreville. With only one spare, the driver and passengers were obliged, on the second flat, to wait while the punctured tire was taken to the next village by a passing car and brought back, repaired.
The drivers are real pros at changing flats. It’s happened to me now twice and we’re always back on the road within 10-15 minutes. Sometimes we overheat and have to stop every 20 minutes to add water, once the gas pedal stuck and the car was accelerating all by itself.
Another time, the entire glob of nuts and bolts under the car fell apart and scattered all over the road behind us. That time, I thought surely we’d be stuck overnight on the road between villages or have to hitch rides in other vehicles. But the driver managed to jerry-rig the parts plus a nut or bolt he found in the car, and we were only delayed by about 45 minutes.
These cars are the small, Japanese sedan variety, Toyotas mostly, and as described above, most are in a general state of disrepair. Into these “economy-sized” vehicles, one attempts to squeeze as many paying passengers as possible. So, this means, between 3 and 6 passengers in the back, and two in the front bucket seat. I’m told that in Cameroon, they even fit a passenger in the driver’s seat with the driver.
In this situation, it’s best if you are a physically large individual. If not, you end up feeling like a throw pillow shoved between the physically large individuals and the uncomfortable parts of the automobile. I often ended up in the position of sitting on top of the emergency brake, squeezed between the driver and, more often than not, an enormous woman.
I once had two children on my lap and had to fight with the driver to reduce my fare for the inconvenience. It goes without saying that there are no laws regarding these customs, at least none are enforced. But the gendarmes sometimes use extra passengers as a reason to get more money from the driver.
Let me add here that this is the MOST comfortable mode of transport the country offers. If one takes the road from Lambaréné to the south, most likely you end up standing up in the back of a pick-up truck, exposed to the elements (dust or rain) for 5-12 hours to your destination.
Sometimes the roads are impassible due to rain, and the trip can take days. If you manage to get a seat in the cab, you pay more (it’s worth it) but you have other things to contend with. Or, you’re squeezed into a mini-van with 20-30 people, animals and all their possessions.
My friend Matt, coming up from Tchibanga, was trapped with his sandaled feet under the poop end of a tied-up goat that had been shoved under the seat in front of him. He spent the evening at my house thoroughly washing his feet.
The single most frustrating, but also most amusing delay factor is the shopping that occurs en route by all 6-20 people in the car. The giant regimes of bananas and plantains, cut from the trees in the villages are much less expensive along the road than they are in Libreville or Lambaréné, where one has to pay the additional transport costs.
Bananas are not the only available fare along the roadside. All kinds of root vegetables and fruits — taro, manioc, mangoes, pineapples, grapefruit, atangas, palm nuts, etc., and of course, BUSH MEAT! — can be bought moins cher (less expensively) along the way.
While whizzing through the countryside altogether too fast for any semblance of safety, one can see all kinds of equatorial animals dead and strung-up for sale on long poles at the roadside.
Pythons, all kinds of monkeys, a wild cat with a long striped tail, small gazelles and antilope, endangered species like pangolins, even fish, shrimp, and rays in river towns, bush rats and, of course, porc-épics can all be seen displayed in this way. Most passengers have brought a cooler, into which they’ll throw the snake or gazelle or dripping fish.
People in Gabon love to eat porc-épics (pronounced porky-peek) and on almost every trip, one is delayed by forced stops to buy one. And there always seems to be room for one more regime of bananas in the car. The drivers are experts at shuffling baggage and passengers to accommodate each and every purchase. Another friend told me of a time that one of the passengers ended up on top of the bags, curled up under the hatch-back window holding the door down the whole way!
On one particular trip, we stopped as usual because one of the women wanted to buy a porc-épic. A porc-épic is a medium-dog-sized animal with a rat-like face, covered in 4-5 inch spines. It was explained to me that in the cooking process these are removed with a machete.
So the porc-épic was hanging by a rope around a hind leg, front “arms” reaching toward the ground, tongue out, eyes bulged, blood dripping from the mouth. The woman paid and the driver threw the bloody animal into the back on top of my bag.
“WHOA,” I said. “Where’s your cooler? Don’t you at least have a sack to put that thing in?” I had already had an unfortunate experience with a bag of fish that had leaked all over my backpack on a previous trip.
One might wonder why these types of details don’t seem to phase most Gabonese people — blood, fish juice on their own or other people’s luggage — but one will just have to continue wondering.
Of course there was no sack for the porc-épic. Why would there be? Everyone in the car was giving me one of those astonished looks that one sometimes gets in life, like I was the crazy one for asking! “Maybe the whole world’s sane and I’m the crazy one,” I thought.
Anyway, I felt I had to insist that the porc-épic could NOT be put on top of my bag. All that blood dripping and sticking and smelling. It was over 100 degrees that day. Dead animal juices seeping down into my clothes. NO!! I had to make a scene and try to explain in my broken French: “NO PORC-EPIC ON TOP OF MY BAG.”
The driver stopped arranging bags and let out an exasperated sigh. The other passengers were amused by la blanche making a scene (the Gabonese thoroughly enjoy gathering around to watch the white girl get upset). The driver swung the porc-épic back out of the trunk by the string still attached to its hind leg. He took my bag out and dropped it on the road. He swung the porc-épic into the trunk and swung my bag in on top of it. He paused and looked at me with a glint in his eye, as if to say, “There. Are you happy?”
The porc-épic was no longer ON TOP OF my bag. My bag was now ON TOP OF the porc-épic.
I felt like I had just been swindled or out-riddled. My audience held their breath for my reaction. But at that point (although I realized that the tables had never really turned — I was the sane one all along), I accepted the arrangement. What could I do that wouldn’t delay us further?
At least gravity was on my side, and I had another good story to tell.
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