4 Science, Fantasy, and Desecration Gorilla Demons in Colonial Gabon Florence Bernault In European folk cultures, demons, spirits, and monsters have long signaled passages across worlds and states of being. They also reveal chasms and contradictions in these worlds: demons often surge at the crossroad of pagan ideas of evil and Christian dichotomies between Heaven and Hell (Thomas 1971). Fairies and ogres testify to the afterlife of the Titans and Cyclops of ancient Europe (Warner 1998). In the 19th century, the Western craze of calling the spirit of deceased relatives through mediums brought together ghosts, Christian dogmas, and hopes in scientifc progress (Mon- roe 2008). In the 1890s, the young discipline of psychoanalysis proposed a new meaning for these beliefs: for Freud, demons and spirits worked as hallucinatory manifestations of the unconscious. In 1919, he repurposed the term “uncanny” (unheimlich) to explain the mix of strange and familiar feeling that people experienced about forms and experiences that straddle the realm of the intimate (heimlich) and the terrifying (Freud 2003). 1 This chapter poses questions about spirits and the uncanny in the colonial context in Africa. It uses the unheimlich as a heuristic entry in European and African interrelating ideas between the familiar and the uncanny, the spectral and the carnal, the normal and the abnormal. Imperial reason was enormously prejudiced against local beliefs in spirits and ancestors, relentlessly trying to annihilate “fetishism” and vernacular techniques to relate with the supernatural realm (Gordon 2012). Yet colonialists were not devoid of beliefs in the mystical, the demonic, and the sacred. As I have explored in my work, some of these imaginaries created congruent, if hid- den, conversations with Africans about the spectral, the supernatural, and the uncanny (Bernault 2019). One particular character can help to illuminate these confrontations and entanglements: the great ape ( Gorilla gorilla) that thrived in the rain- forest of Cameroon and Gabon and, from the 1840s onward, astonished Euro-American visitors to Equatorial Africa. They described the gorilla as a terrifying monster, a demon of primitive ages, and a castrating Titan. But foreigners also related to the gorilla as an animal to hunt, a pet and companion, a commodity and a specimen. To some extent, this com- posite genre resonated with the rich representations circulating in local DOI: 10.4324/9780429273582-4