Will The Pygmies Survive
In the rain forest of Central African Republic live the Pygmies-one of the world’s least understood and most endangered people. For thousands of years the pygmies were masters of Equatorial Africa. Today there may be only 100,000 of these semi nomadic hunters-gatherers left. Much of their forest realm has been turned into Savannah and they are often scorned by their neighbours.Pygmies live in waist high beehive huts made from bent branches covered with leaves and daubed in mud. A pygmy child is not very short; they have the height of a normal child. Some deficiency in their diet stunts their growth. One in five babies dies before their first birthday, mostly from respiratory infections, diarrhoea or malaria.
The word pygmy comes from the Greek for “dwarfish” but the people here differ from true dwarfs. Their children are nearly the normal size until their early teens, when they do not experience the growth spurt typical of most other humans. Their small stature could be an adaptation in the forest. All forest people tend to be smaller, though not as small as the African pygmies. The man is normally about 5 feet in height and women about half a foot shorter.
Pygmies love hunting. They spread traps and nets to kill their prey. They kill small antelopes called “duiker”. They sing when they are happy. Children learn to sing as soon as they learn to talk. Pygmies from Gabon across to the Congo sing in much the same way.
Pygmy life is communal and food from a hunt is always shared. Family ties in a pygmy clan are very strong and rules of clan cooperation are rarely flouted.
Game in the rainforest is plentiful, but the pygmy’s love of a vegetable called manioc (for cassava) puts them at considerable risk. This edible tuber was brought to Africa from Brazil 400 years ago and the forest dwelling pygmies developed a taste for this food.
They bartered meat, wild honey and mushrooms with the neighbouring Bantu farmers. At first the shy pygmies left their catch just inside the forest, resisting a face to face meeting with the Bantu, spooking the taller tribe into believing that the rarely seen Pygmies were primitive subhuman’s , a kind of forest animal.
Pygmies found it hard to resist the manioc, cooking pots, metal spears, arrowheads and machetes, and this lured many tribes into abandoning the rainforest for months at a time, working in the Bantu fields in exchange of these treasures. Over the centuries, Bantu landowners came to regard pygmy families as their hereditary serfs.
The prejudice remains strong even today. Bantus call them”bambinga” meaning not human. The pygmies call the Bantus “ eBobo” meaning gorilla. The Pygmies in Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and Gabon are treated harshly. They don’t even get the same wages and many are ill treated by their employers. Government often don’t recognise the Pygmy’s ownership of forest land, which they have occupied for hundreds of years.
Although they refuse to abandon their forest life, many Pygmies accept schooling for their children.
In the meantime the leap across the chasm from the Stone Age to the Book Age is not an easy one. The Pygmy children like to eat chalk, more than writing with it they prefer to devour chalks. Only a few are able to go up to the high school. But they are humiliated and bullied by Bantu children.
A successful leap by pygmies into modern life can be seen at the Catholic mission at Monassao. There, more than one thousand Pygmies are free of Bantu interference and have largely abandoned the rainforest, growing crops including manioc and peanuts. The tradeoffs is Christianity, a price some pygmies at Monasao resist paying.
The Pygmies worship a supreme being, but also revere forest spirits, good and evil.
