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It was usual for newborn children to be presented to the sun at the time of a rite known as "YAA", a rite during the course of which a young virgin girl holds the baby prostrate while over him is poured water collected from a hollow tree, mixed with the water in which the baby has been washed since birth.
This mixture is poured onto the edge of the roof of the family home. The father pronounces out loud the name he has given to his child as the drops of water fall onto the newborn baby´s back. The festive gathered assembly chants repeatedly the virtues of the divine, those of the sun. Another name, "Bayemlikok", refers to a crushing, all-powerful mass, against which man is impotent. Bayemlikok is an unfathomable character, elusive in the face of man´s limited and fragmented wisdom. Smallness and wisdom are two of man´s aspects acting as a starting point from which evoking God becomes possible. For a long time considered as peoples endowed with a prelogical mentality, African civilisations are nevertheless rich in knowledge, one which is universal, as attested by the scholarly studies carried out by researchers. The ignorance and obscurantism which characterised the motivations for colonial conquest have had a negative impact on our ancestral values.
Western expansion in Africa led to the progressive abandonment of African forms of worship and ways of thinking in favour of the modern school, characterised by a predominance of Cartesian thought. This ideology of "primitive peoples" was relayed from one era to the next for a long time: the school master who taught generations in times past that our ancestors were the "Gauls", that it was important to bring civilisation to the negro and to teach him God! Christianity to the front, the colonialist right behind. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that African civilisation is essentially oral, not written.

The function of speech
in the social organisation
of the Bassa people.
Membership comes through a long, severe process of initiation for which the knowledge of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, the laws which govern them, the mastery of speech, and therefore its sublimation, lead in turn to the sublimation of the applicant.
The acquisition, conservation and transmission of the knowledge and power of speech are still very much alive nowadays, the prerogative of descendants who have been initiated and marked out for succession. The Mbombog is noteworthy for his moral characteristics and intrinsic intellectual value, his status as a notable within society, his personal charisma, his deep knowledge of the laws which govern the two faces of the universe: the visible and the invisible.

The spirituality of the Bassa people, therefore, is contained in their physical symbols, their tales and legends. As a result, the Mbombog is, as Amadou Hampaté Ba has said, a "living library". The universal truths are stored up faithfully in his memory, as an aid in the processes of the conservation of memory. That is true for all the peoples of the forest.

The tree of the Mbog sinks its roots all the way into the invisible world, via the brotherhoods which comprise its framework. The fundamental problem in our cultures is to be able to reassert their values in a world won over by other trends of thought which dehumanise man, attack Nature and empty the soul of the peoples of the forest. The Mbog has, however, kept intact his knowledge of the visible and the invisible, but in a society where deforestation has become overwhelming, we risk losing for ever the secrets contained in the African forest. Alas, future generations will have no more points of reference. What worth has a people which does not know its own history, which is taught things which will never be of practical use to it? We must embrace globalisation taking into account the differences.