Pygmy Life
Knowing the pygmies has been an extraordinary experience for me; they are the most peace- loving people I have ever met. Polite, very dignified, and even humorous, they hate and avoid violence. When they disagree, they argue and may hit each other - even husbands and wives - but they rarely use weapons. Murder is extremely rare. If two people disagree, they avoid each other, stop speaking for a while, and build their huts so the entrances do not meet. If the dispute is more serious, one of them will leave the village to join another group.
A fixed rule in pygmy ethics (possible only in large, sparsely populated areas!) is that people who quarrel badly must separate. Their companions, tired of hearing voices raised in anger, endeavor to silence them. If the arguers persist, they are sent outside the village. Pygmies hate those who "make a noise" or "disturb the peace," to use their own words.
Men and women are equal in pygmy society, and everyone discusses matters of interest around the fire. The most serious punishment that can be inflicted is expulsion from the village, which amounts to a virtual death sentence. Life in the forest is fine in a group, but it is nearly impossible to survive alone. Sometimes, of course, another group will accept the exile.
One remarkable feature is the parents' exceptional love for their children. And although parents raise their own children, all the adults treat the children as if they were their own. A child who is orphaned is immediately adopted without distinction by a family of aunts or uncles. Colin Turnbull, the first anthropologist to live at length with these people, and an excellent writer, notes that the children call all adults of their parents' generation "mother" or "father," all those of the generation before "grandmother" or "grandfather," and all those of their own generation "sister" or "brother." The old and infirm are protected carefully, as long as they do not jeopardize the group's lives. I remember one pygmy being called to a farming settlement to kill a mad gorilla - the locals often rely on the skill and bravery of the pygmies. Having mortally wounded the gorilla, the man was bitten very severely in the lumbar area and paralyzed from the waist down, but he was kept in the tribe. (In the forest, inability to walk means certain death.) The pygmies take care of the injured, and I have seen blind and extremely sick people kept within the group and cared for by their relatives.
I am often asked how long pygmies live. Their life expectancy at birth is about seventeen years, which sounds terrible compared with that of U.S. males (70) or females (76). Many deaths take place at very early ages, because of infectious diseases. It is rare to find individuals above 60 years of age, but the ages of individual pygmies is usually based on estimates because they have no interest in it. In spite of high mortality, they maintain (barely) their numbers. Other Africans are better off; even if health services are usually very poor, many of them have some, however limited, access to modern medicine; pygmies essentially have none.
The pygmies no longer have a language of their own. They speak the language of the peoples with whom they have come into contact over time, perhaps even centuries previously. Because they have also moved long distances, their language may be borrowed from peoples living far away. Turnbull says they appear to attach no importance to the future or the past; what counts is the present. As they say, "If it is not here and now, then what do where and when matter?"
Their god is the forest, of which they feel themselves an integral part. It is both father and mother, the being that permits them to live and that must be respected. Depending on the region, after death pygmies are either burned or laid in their hut, which is knocked down around them after a funeral rite. Their bodies are then left to dissolve into the earth while their companions move on.
Marriage is not a very complex rite. If need be, pygmies divorce. The current habit of "buying" their wives probably was adopted from local cultivators. They pay not with money - they do not have money - but by working for the future parents-in-law, perhaps doing their hunting for a year or two. Before he can marry, a man must prove he can hunt game and therefore support a family. When he takes a wife, he must also give something in exchange, to replace the contribution the woman made to her family.