The Pharaoh's Message
Pygmies have a cheerful temperament: they are chatterboxes by nature and - rightly enough - feel they lead a good life. They often stay in the settlement doing nothing. They also are keen dancers and singers; and their music has an extremely rich range and unusual timbre. Each pygmy repeatedly produces a note or a certain tune at a regular time interval. They hey have an incredible sense of rhythm. A French musicologist once taped a solo piece of music in which the same note was repeated at an irregular interval, and then he taped the same piece performed by another and then a third man. Superimposing the three recordings, he found he had a choir in perfect union. Pygmies use simple musical instruments such as drums, flutes, and a kind of one- string violin. Some areas boast excellent groups of musicians.
Their overwhelming passion, though, is for dance: even before they can walk, six- or seven- month-old babies will dance to music if held up by their hands. Mothers with small children dance with them on their hips or shoulders. There is always a drummer willing to tap out a beat and someone to show off with fast and difficult steps. In a letter, a pharaoh of forty-three hundred years ago exhorts a general in search of the source of the Nile to bring him a pygmy from Punt (perhaps Ethiopia or the Upper Nile), calling him "God's dancer" or "he who will entertain the pharaoh."
All these years later, the enthusiastic tone does not surprise those who know the pygmies. They normally play their music in a wide circle around the fire and will go on singing and dancing in their lively, agile style all night long.
There is a pygmy dancer by the name of Aka in an Egyptian fresco. Even today, one pygmy tribe uses the name Aka to define itself. This name, which has survived many thousands of years, quite simply means "human."