Very Different Rules of Conduct
All of today's hunter-gatherers have certain customs in common. They live in small groups, have no social or political hierarchy, are normally without leaders, and base their social contacts on reciprocal respect.
Their rules of conduct are usually highly developed. The people at the bottom of the economic ladder are in no way primitive, ethically speaking; they merely see things differently from us. When the Dutch settled at Cape Town, their herds spread into the native hunting territories, causing incidents with the Khoisan. Exactly what occurred is not dear, because there were no anthropologists at the time, but that the natives were irresistibly tempted by the Dutch cattle is not surprising. The Boer farmers started to shoot the Khoisan on sight and literally exterminated them in wide areas. They now live only in Namibia and Botswana, in deserts, in poor, unwanted savannas, or in city ghettos. The Hottentots in the Boer areas have survived better, probably because they already raised cattle and did not hunt other people's cows.
Hunter-gatherers have a different view of possession, because private ownership is rare and not very important. A few rights, such as those regarding hunting territories, are upheld. A pygmy caught hunting on someone else's territory is fined, not in money, since it does not exist, but in kind. The Pygmies have no respect for the cultivators' property, and - if they can get away with it - steal the bananas and cassava grown using pygmy labor in the fields and so frugally shared by the farmers. In reality, the enclosures of today are their ancient hunting grounds, forest areas cleared without permission or recompense. The pygmies know that the farmers exploit them and consider them animals, but they cannot afford to break off the relationship. They take revenge by stealing food whenever they can. Turnbull says the pygmies have two paths into the foresta hidden one they use themselves, and a wider more direct one for the farmers who come looking for them, which the pygmies use as a toilet hiding their excrement under leaves. I was struck by the episode of a pygmy, mortally wounded by a cultivator who caught him stealing bananas. The cultivator was arrested and condemned, but, before dying, the pygmy asked his pardon and forgave him, saying it was his own fault since he should not have stolen the bananas. As far as I am aware, he had not been influenced by Christianity; neither Catholic nor Protestant missionaries have had much access to the pygmies. The big, generally brick missions are in the more important cities, far away from pygmy territory. At the most, mass is held once a week in one of the bigger outlying villages.
There are exceptions. African pygmies are commonly affected by a disease called yaws, caused by a spirochete very similar to that responsible for syphilis. Unlike syphilis, it is not a venereal disease, but it is transmitted through skin contact. Frequently fatal to children, in adults it causes mutilations almost as serious as leprosy. It can be cured with a single injection of penicillin. A small Milanese nun who worked for years at the Nduye mission in Ituri, the main pygmy region in Zaire, used to walk for days through the forest to give penicillin shots in the farthest pygmy camps.