Smithsonian.

com
Equatorial Africa's rain forests have sustained Pygmies for millennia. Now other peoples are
competing for the forests' resources, displacing the Pygmies. (Paul Raffaele)
The Pygmies' Plight
A correspondent who chronicled their lives in central African rain
forests returns a decade later and is shocked by what he finds
By Paul Raffaele
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
December 2008
Some 50 Pygmies of the Baka clan lead me single file through a steaming rain forest in Cameroon.
Scrambling across tree trunks over streams, we hack through heavy undergrowth with machetes and cut
away vinelike lianas hanging like curtains in our path. After two hours, we reach a small clearing beneath
a hardwood tree canopy that almost blots out the sky.
For thousands of years Pygmies have lived in harmony with equatorial Africa's magnificent jungles. They
inhabit a narrow band of tropical rain forest about four degrees above and four degrees below the
Equator, stretching from Cameroon's Atlantic coast eastward to Lake Victoria in Uganda. With about
250,000 of them remaining, Pygmies are the largest group of hunter-gatherers left on earth. But they are
under serious threat.
Over the past decade, I've visited Pygmy clans in several Congo Basin countries, witnessing the
destruction of their traditional lifestyle by the Bantu, as taller Africans are widely known. On this trip, this
past February, my companion is Manfred Mesumbe, a Cameroonian anthropologist and expert on Pygmy
culture. "The Bantu governments have forced them to stop living in the rain forests, their culture's
bedrock," he tells me. "Within a generation many of their unique traditional ways will be gone forever."
The Baka clan members begin putting up beehive-shaped huts in the clearing, where we will spend the
next few days. They chop saplings from among the trees and thrust the ends into the ground, bending
them to form the frame of each hut. Then they weave bundles of green leaves into latticework to create a
rainproof skin. None of the men stands higher than my shoulder (I'm 5-foot-7), and the women are
The Pygmies' Plight | People & Places | Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/the-pygmies-plight-93...
1 od 3 20.7.2014. 3:16
smaller. As the Baka bring firewood to the camp, Mesumbe and I put up our small tent. Suddenly the
Pygmies stir.
Three scowling Bantus brandishing machetes stride into the clearing. I fear that they're bandits, common
in this lawless place. I'm carrying my money in a bag strung around my neck, and news of strangers travels
fast among the Bantu here. Mesumbe points to one of them, a stocky man with an angry look, and in a
low voice tells me he is Joseph Bikono, chief of the Bantu village near where the government has forced
the Pygmies to live by the roadside.
Bikono glares at me and then at the Pygmies. "Who gave you permission to leave your village?" he
demands in French, which Mesumbe translates. "You Pygmies belong to me, you know that, and you must
always do what I say, not what you want. I own you. Don't ever forget it."
Most of the Pygmies bow their heads, but one young man steps forward. It's Jeantie Mutulu, one of the
few Baka Pygmies who have gone to high school. Mutulu tells Bikono that the Baka have always obeyed
him and have always left the forest for the village when he told them to do so. "But not now," Mutulu
announces. "Not ever again. From now on, we'll do what we want."
About half the Pygmies begin shouting at Bikono, but the other half remain silent. Bikono glowers at me.
"You, le blanc," he yells, meaning "the white." "Get out of the forest now."
The earliest known reference to a Pygmya "dancing dwarf of the god from the land of spirits"is found
in a letter written around 2276 B.C. by Pharaoh Pepi II to the leader of an Egyptian trade expedition up
the Nile. In the Iliad, Homer invoked mythical warfare between Pygmies and a flock of cranes to describe
the intensity of a charge by the Trojan army. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus
wrote of a Persian explorer who saw "dwarfish people, who used clothing made from the palm tree" at a
spot along the West African coast.
More than two millennia passed before the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu published the first
modern account of Pygmies. "[T]heir eyes had an untameable wildness about them that struck me as very
remarkable," he wrote in 1867. In In Darkest Africa, published in 1890, the explorer Henry Stanley wrote
of meeting a Pygmy couple ("In him was a mimicked dignity, as of Adam; in her the womanliness of a
miniature Eve"). In 1904, several Pygmies were brought to live in the anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis
World's Fair. Two years later, a Congo Pygmy named Ota Benga was housed temporarily at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York Cityand then exhibited, briefly and controversially, at the
Bronx Zoo.
Page 1 of 6
The Pygmies' Plight | People & Places | Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/the-pygmies-plight-93...
2 od 3 20.7.2014. 3:16
The Pygmies' Plight | People & Places | Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/the-pygmies-plight-93...
3 od 3 20.7.2014. 3:16