I had just arrived at the research camp in the Ituri Forest, then Zaire and now the Congo, after a rather long and harrowing journey that took me from Boston to New York to London to Lagos to Kinshasa to Kisingani to Isiro, all by plane, then over 250 kilometers of increasingly less road-like road, to the world’s most “remote” research site to be found among human settlements anywhere on the planet. Jack’s research involved looking at what happened to Efe Pygmy “camps” after they were abandoned. The Efe hunter-gatherers were known to move camp an average of once every two weeks or so. An archaeologist would want to know what happens to a camp once it is abandoned because many of the ancient sites we excavate are exactly that, abandoned settlements. Jack had been tracking Efe movement and camp abandonment patterns for one year, and the expectation was that I would continue his data collection for another year, as he and his wife returned to Montana to write up their results.

“Oh, excuse, me have you moved yet? No? OK, see you tomorrow.”

When we arrived at the camp, which was located very near the Lese villages … the Lese are the farming people who with an overlapping culture and economy with the Efe … there were a lot of people there. This was a camp with several adult couples and a number of kids of all ages from baby up to nearly teenage. Since this was Jack and Helen’s last visit, they brought gifts to give to the people who had helped them out for the previous year. Project regulations and ethics required that any gifts be irrelevant to diet or economics, not usable as tools of poaching, not likely to change people’s status, and be likely to be used up or worn out quickly. So, everybody got plastic green sunglasses, the really cheap kind you buy by the dozen at a party store to use as favors.

It was a party, a good time, lots of conversation, some weeping over the fact that the much beloved Jack and Helen would be moving back to the States, lots of fun with the green sunglasses, lots of data collected. Then, we left, and the next day we returned to map in the locations of the small dome shaped leaf-covered huts and other structures, fire hearths, stick chairs, drying racks, midden piles, trampled central-use areas, and so on and so forth. This is what the abandoned camp of a people known in the literature, and generally to outsiders, as “nomads” looked like. There was lots of stuff there, but all of it was made from materials available on the spot, transformed from wild growing plants to architecture and kitchen furniture, but eventually thrown out or left behind. Everything else was carried by the Efe, in one trip, to the next camp they would build from natural materials. Or almost everything.

And the forest had it’s seasonal cycle as well. During the dry season, which lasted several weeks around November and December, certain animals were easier to hunt because the streams they hid in, or that would impair hunter’s movement through the forest, were very low. Staring in late June and running into August, the famous African Killer Honey Bees (the wild version of our own domesticated honey bee) produced copious honey in nests about 100 feet up in the forest canopy. The Efe men were very dedicated to harvesting this honey.

If you think about that information for a bit you’ll notice possible conflict. For example, the Efe are drawn to the deep forest for Honey Season, but this overlaps with the mid-year harvest and planting. The November harvest and planting overlapped and conflicted with the dry season hunting. You might guess that men and women would have different opinions about where to reside during these periods of conflicts. The women would never stay overnight in a farm village during harvest; they moved each day by foot from the Efe camp to the gardens and back. But as it became more desirable to camp farther and farther into the forest, that commute became longer and longer. We say (usually tongue in cheek) that Western couples fight over certain things, like money or how to raise the kids or what channel to watch on TV. Efe couples argue over where to put the camp in relation to the horticultural villages vs. the deep forest.

I ended up never continuing Jack and Helen’s data collection project. That I would spend a year doing Part II of another graduate student’s thesis was an idea cooked up by our shared advisor, but neither Jack nor I saw the benefit in doing that. He had enough data, I had other things to do. So, instead, I studied the larger scale structure of Efe nomadism, of their movements across the landscape and their use of forest resources.

I discovered that each Efe group possessed (and that is a carefully chosen word) rights to a trail, usually one single trail but sometimes something a bit more complicated, that ran from the villages out into the forest. Along this trail, at intervals of almost exactly 1.5 kilometers, was a potential camp site. Of these camp sites, a handful were used again and again as the Efe moved through their seasonal cycle. Some of the other camps were used only occasionally. This was interesting, because it meant that even though the efe might move over 20 times a year, the part of their movement in the deep forest had them return to the same exact four or five camps again and again for years. They would also repeatedly use the same camps near the villages, but since village farmers often moved their swidden gardens, wiping out grown-over sections of the forest in one area and abandoning a garden elsewhere, the Efe “village camps” … the camps used during planting and harvest seasons … were often destroyed or otherwise became inconvenient.

And now we come to the interesting anthropological lesson that emerges when we look at other cultures, in this case, the Efe and Lese. In books and articles about the Pygmies of the Central African rain forest, the Pygmies (including the Efe as well as other groups with different names) are often called “nomads.” Nomads, we all know, are people who move a lot. The term also invokes, for many, a certain amount of randomness, or at least, uncertainty in where one might be moving next. There is indeed uncertainty, of a sort, among the Efe as to when they are going to move and where to. But this is simply because one does not need to decide when or where until it is time to do so. There is a constant negotiation happening between members of a particular group as to when to move, and which camp to move to. If there is a big enough difference between different families in a camp, they can easily move to two different locations for a while, or one group can stay and others leave. But these differences never lead to the men going one place while the women go elsewhere, even though the biggest conflict is usually between men and women. The point is, their movement is not random, but well considered and systematic, yet in at the scale of days or weeks in advance, not very predictable at any level of detail.

Yet, at the same time, the Efe are the opposite of nomadic. Consider their Lese village farmer neighbors. They live in permanent villages. But, over time, the Lese use up garden space and firewood in the vicinity of their village. Also, a mini-epidemic of disease in a given village will cause people to not want to live there any more. So, over the course of a person’s life, say a person who lives to 70 years old, one might move seven or eight times from one village to another just in service to the agricultural cycle.

But wait, there’s more. Among the villagers, men and women, when they are married, move to one parent’s village or another for a while, then try to start their own village, and that sometimes does not work out, so they move again. So, around the age of marriage, a person may move three or four times in two or three years. A young man might spend two or three years working at a plantation far from their village, or spend some time in the army. A woman and her children might move to near a chief’s village if her husband is caught doing something wrong and forced into indentured service for a few months. Every now and then the government comes along and moves any village that is too far out in the forest closer to the road so it is easier to tax them. Then later, the government disappears (remember, this is a remote area) and everyone moves back. If grandma gets really sick part of the family might move far away to a mission hospital, because the family is required to supply food and labor to support grandma’s stay in what amounts to a hospice. And so on and so forth.

Betweeen all of these factors, Lese farmers might move 20 times in their life.

Let’s view “nomadism” among the Efe hunter gatherers and the Lese villagers from a slightly different perspective. Let’s ask the question: How many different places have you slept a total of 100 nights or more? That eliminates short forays, fishing trips, very short marriages, etc. Or, putting it a slightly different way, let’s look at the list of places one lives ranked by how many nights one has slept there in a lifetime. Nomads, given our usual conception of them, should have a very long list with a small number of nights at each place, while settled people should have a list with a short number of localities each associated with hundreds or thousands of nights, even if there is a tail of several places with a small number of nights each down hear the bottom of the list.

If we look at the “nomadic” hunter gatherers of the Ituri Forest, the Efe, their list will have five or six places that account for 80% or more of their nights, if we adjust for the frequently destroyed camps in or near the gardens. The Lese farmers, on the other hand, will have over a dozen localities with a several hundred nights in each. By that reckoning, the Lese are more nomadic over a lifetime, even if the Efe are constantly moving.

Minnesotans who go away for college and whose families have a cabin (maybe a series of cabins over time) up north and who spend part of their lives moving opportunistically from apartment to apartment in South Minneapolis are pretty nomadic too. I myself moved once before the age of 16, then about every six months for the next 15 years, chasing relationships, jobs, schools, and doing field work.

Finally, let’s look at nomadism in one more way. If you move every several years, occasionally more often such as around the time of marriage, then at any given time the landscape you know is the landscape you live in, and the memories of details of the landscape of your childhood or other times gone by both fades and becomes obsolete. But if you move constantly, but over the same exact landscape all the time like the Efe do, then your knowledge of every bit of the landscape is detailed an intense and constantly updated and renewed. The Efe know every root that ever tripped them and every rocky pile that ever harbored a small forest animal procurable for dinner and every mature fruit tree and every patch of tasty forest yams in the place they live. The other part of my research, looking at Efe diet, came to this conclusion: There is a fair amount of food in the rain forest, but the only way to find any of it is to know in advance where it is located. Otherwise, the costs in time and energy to discover it excede its caloric value.

The Efe are not nomadic. They are, rather, constant inspectors of their rather large home, centered on their traditionally used trail, consisting of a half dozen venues to sleep and live.

More stuff about the Congo

A while back I wrote a Novella, as a fundraising effort for the Secular Student Alliance, set in the eastern Congo. A cleaned up version of it is available here: Sungudogo

You can read the harrowing real life story of a season of field research in the same region, in a series of blog posts, by clicking HERE (then click through to the next blog post, and the next, and the next, until you’ve read them all!).

And, THIS LINK will get you to a selection of other stories set in the region.

Jack’s research was written up here:

Ethnoarchaeology Among the Efe Pygmies, Zaire: Spatial Organization of Campsites, by J. W. Fisher, Jr. and H. C. Strickland. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78:473–484.

Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”
The traveler was a college-educated westerner with a late-Victorian attitude about Africans. The idea that all Africans are at least a little subhuman would have been a starting point for him. Throwing in a tribe here and there with especially cannibalistic or otherwise uncouth tendencies would be typical. Running into a group of individuals that looked to him almost like a separate species would be notable, and he did in fact make note of it, but this would be something he would take in stride.

Reading this made me wonder about two totally different and to some extent opposed lines of thought. On one hand, I thought, “How can people think such things are real…this guy was obviously seeing something he expected to see. Why? How does that work?” On the other hand, I thought, “What if his observations were essentially accurate, aside from the racial judgments he made. What if he really did encounter a bunch of people with bow legs and funny-looking bodies?”
Then, in the next paragraph of this monologue, a possible answer came. Shortly after the above mentioned description, the traveler mentions that one of these strange heathens, with the bow legs and the disproportioned body, traveled with him as a servant for a while. Then, at the end of that leg of the trip, after serving quite well for being such a subhuman and all, the traveler wanted to leave this misshapen wretch with some sort of extra payment for services. A tip. But the wretch had withdrawn to the forest never to be seen again (by the traveller), apparently uninterested in recompense.
Bingo.

Or at least, maybe bingo. I have an experience that may in fact match that of this ca. 1900-vintage traveler. Actually, a few such experiences. But as a post- (way post!) Victorian anthropologist, I have a slightly different take on the situation.

When I lived in the Ituri Forest, I often lived with the Pygmies for stretches of time. There were two modalities of living with them. In one mode, I would throw myself on their mercy and more or less live exactly as they lived, staying in the same kind of hut they lived in and doing whatever they did, or at least watching them do whatever they were doing, and trying to stay out of the way at the same time as observing and learning things about their lifeway. In the other modality, I stayed in a small dome tent (a cloth version of their hut) and was a bit more involved with the logistics of camp life, because during at least some of that time (several weeks over the course of many many months), it was more like they were living with me. I would hire a small number of Pygmy men, and maybe have one villager with us as well, and another anthropologist, and we’d be doing something like digging an archaeological site, measuring trees, counting monkeys, or whatever.

During some of these forays, especially in the first modality when it was only me (no other anthropologist) travelling with them, and I was living in their lifeway, more or less, I was assigned a wife. Sort of. This happened a couple of times, with different groups, and different individuals. In each case the person whom I eventually came to understand was serving the role of Mrs. Gregoiri (one of my Efe names was Gregoiri, which I admit is not too original) was a man with pretty severe polio.

These were men who could not carry out many of the activities in which the men normally engaged with respect to hunting and other forest activities. Even moving from camp to camp might be a challenge to someone whose legs were very shortened and deformed and who had, essentially, a kind of polio-induced dwarfism. For the most part, these men had outstanding manual skills. They could shoot an arrow as well as any (or better) and were outstanding at making things that the other men also made, but that the polio-afflicted men would make with utmost skill. What they lacked was stamina in the field.
Their condition meant that they would be unlikely to marry. It meant that they would be in camp with the women anywhere from now and then to almost always as the men went off to hunt. It meant that their social and economic gender was unique. And it meant that when someone had to be assigned to keep the big pasty white guy who was always tripping on tree roots and poking himself with sticks from harming himself, well, this person was the obvious choice.

I remembered, rather poignantly in fact, on reading the aforementioned traveler’s notice that the strange deformed subhuman left without any special recompense, that this is what happened to me as well. It was a bit of a privilege to hang out with the visitor, as would be the case in most cultures, and the visitor seemed to overlook the person’s affliction, which is something that many visitors may not have done.

The polio that came through the Ituri Forest of Zaire must have come through at roughly the same time because all the men who had it were about the same age…my age, actually. This population of forest dwelling people must have been very susceptible to it. And the Pygmies were notable for either refusing or just being bad at accepting long-term treatment or hospital stays, so even if there was some help available for them in those days, it may have ended up rather ineffective. Many must have died.

I need not mention that I never saw a subhuman deformed race. I did see some men who were being very good to me, keeping me from getting killed by the snakes, the elements, by getting poked to death or falling off a cliff into quicksand, or whatever one may think of as the dangers of the African Jungle. And they didn’t want any special pay for it.
Those marriages were short lived. But they were good marriages.

Originally posted at Quiche Moraine

I knew a guy, an older Efe Pygmy man, with one leg. When I first arrived in the Ituri Forest I was shown by my colleague an abandoned camp that a group of Efe Pygmies has only recently been living in, and told “everyone in this group lived here but the old man and his wife … he’s a bit contentious and there was an argument.” Having read all the literature written in English about Pygmies, I was aware of the fact that these foraging people, who moved frequently — perhaps ten times a year or more — would often change the composition of their residence groups to reflect forming and breaking alliances among people who often, but not always, lived together. After hanging out in the camp long enough for my colleague to collect some data, we went back to the road via a different path and passed the old man, Kobou (pronounced “Ko-bo-oo”), and his wife in a small clearing in a freshly cut garden. “Strange,” I thought, “They live in a square hut. Everyone else lives in a dome-shaped hut. I guess some Efe live in square huts.”

But no. Kobou is the only Efe I ever came across to always build square huts. Maybe somewhere else in the Central African Rain Forest, but not around these parts.

Thin, old, bearded, fierce eyes contagious laugh and one leg. Kobou¹ was the father of one of my main informants. Kobou would come by the research base camp whenever I was there, more or less daily. He’d sit in a chair and chill for a while, then we might chat about one thing or another. Then he’d say “I’ve come to get my plantains” or “I’ve come to get my mohogo” or “I’ve come to get my [fill in the blank with something to eat that we had growing in our fields]”. The base camp did have a rather large garden, and the main purpose of the garden was so that Kobou and a handful of other Efe could come by now and then and claim some of the food.

“You’d better cut your plantains, then,” I’d say.

Kobou had lost his leg to a snake. He had been bitten by a full grown Gabon Viper. The Gabon Viper is one of the scariest of snakes. It’s head is huge, it’s body very stout, and it’s venom is the richest venom known in a snake, both neurotoxic and haemotoxic.

When my friend was bitten by the snake, he was driven by someone from a nearby plantation to a hospital, to have is leg cut off, which was the only way to save his life. In the days I lived there, this drive required many many hours (or a day or two), and would beat the hell out of the truck. But in those days, they were able to drive him there in a few hours. At 120 kpm, it would have been a two or three hour drive.

But the reason that the road was so good is because of the sort of policy satirized in King Leopold’s Soliloquy. In those days, a Belgian Colonial Administrator would drive a vehicle at 100 kilometers per hour down this road with a glass of water on his dashboard. Wherever water spilled form his full glass, he would stop, and his agents would beat and/or maim the nearest villagers. This encouraged the villagers to keep the dirt road in perfect condition by constant attention to any rivulets or potholes, using hand labor and simple tools.

Eventually, the revolution came, in it’s own way, and the Belgians, guilty of a decades-long holocaust, got their due. They were burned to death in the buildings they hid in, they were shot, strangled, and drowned, and a few got away.

At a later time, I stayed in one of King Leopold’s mansions. Well, not really. We kept some of our stuff in the mansion. The mansion had no roof, and was filled with birds and bats, and their guano. It was better to stay in a tent, outside, even though one would risk being trampled by a hippo or hassled by a hyena. This was Ishango, known locally as “The Most Beautiful Place on the Earth.” It is. But they should really tear down those old mansions (Two stood there side by side) and neaten the place up just a little. Leopold had mansions here and there across his Congo, though he never actually visited the place.

I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign — sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire — sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private “swag” — mine, solely mine — claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine — mine solely — and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.

Leopold did not say that. Clemens puts those words in his mouth as a political and social parody. But it is absolutely accurate; had Leopold said those word he would have been speaking the truth.

¹Here and elsewhere, when I write about people in the Congo, I use fake names. There are reasons.

The people who lived in this village were very familiar with the idea of an anthropologist, and were aware that we had a research facility a few days walk to the east. Others, while they had heard of us, either had never met any of the outsiders or didn’t care much either way about us.

When we initially embarked on our long trek to the village, we carried enough food to get there, but not much more. I was assured by my fellow travelers that the streets of the village would be paved with food, as it were, and that we would not have to carry much with us, and if we brought just a little cash and some tobacco and salt, we could easily trade for plenty of spare rice to get ourselves back to the road fatter than we had left. Since it was technically the tail end of one of the two seasons of widespread reduced food availability, I didn’t much like that idea but I didn’t have a choice. It was simply impossible to carry enough food to make the trip there and back. So we gambled with the odds against us.

And, of course, we lost. We arrived at the village with a kilo of rice and little else, and we found that there was not much food there. Even though the rice harvest was just starting, so people weren’t exactly starving, there was nothing close to an abundance. We knew that we could eat while we stayed in the village … there was enough for that … but clearly we’d have to make the trip home without provisions. We’d have to live off the land for the three day walk home … which would probaby be a four day walk since we’d be starving and you go slower when you are starving. (Another story for another time. It was not a good week to be a monkey along our route!)

The village was traditional and I was a guest, so I was treated accordingly, and had to act accordingly. This meant we travelers needed to divide up into appropriate traditional roles and mete ourselves out among the villagers per spec, and thereafter more or less spend our time that way. The Efe men went to hang around with the Efe that were living in the village and they were also able to sit with the village women when they were outside processing food; Our cook went to work and hung with the village women in the mafika … an open air kitchen building with a roof and food stores, cooking gear, etc. … during the heat of the day. And, as the adult male, I was expected to hang around with the other adult males in the baraza … the open air ramada-like roofed-over sitting area in the middle of the village. As men, we would have important things to do in this baraza. Planning things and stuff.

So, I sat there and did my Ethnoarchaeology, hanging out with the other men, observing things and writing it all down, while the women prepared our first meal together, which would include all of the rice we had brought and whatever the village had to offer.

And what did the village have to offer? There were three things besides our rice. Someone had killed an antelope that morning so there was a bit of meat. The meat was cooked in palm oil traded about noon that day with some Budu merchants who had come by to exchange forest products for oil. (The oil was traded for a forest fruit known as “eme” which is not really food but rather medicine.) Then there was sombe. Sombe is wonderful. It is the very young leaves of the casava (manioc, manihot) plant pounded and cooked with palm oil. The process is much more complex than I’ve indicated. It is the main thing to eat that I miss from the region, and until recently was impossible to get outside the forest unless you have connections and live in Belgium.

And the third thing was bugs. To be specific, palm larvae. These are grubs of some critter, and you get them from inside a palm tree, which were eaten frequently this time of year. They are fried up in a bit of palm oil which gives both flavor and color, and some salt is added. They are not very flavorful but they are quite nutritious.

When the food was all prepared, the women came over one or two at a time and gave a plate of food to each man. A woman or women associated with a particular man or men as mother, wife, sister, or daughter had prepared each plate and had brought it to the baraza, so of course, our traveling cook, Maria, brought me my plate.

When she handed me the plate, our cook also gave me a knowing look, because she knew that I was not enamored with the traditional roles of her culture and was somewhat uncomfortable getting served along with the other men in the baraza. I returned the look as I glanced down at the plate, and on the plate was some rice, some antelope, some sombe, and about a dozen palm grubs. But there was a small problem. While all the food types were neatly separated into their own zones on my plate, some of the sombe had moved across the plate and joined the palm grubs. A splotch of green leafy food rested among the larvae of the palms.

Maria was five steps away when I called out.

“Maria!”

She stopped and turned. I pointed at my plate.

“Maria, there is some food in my bugs!”

She was close enough to see exactly what I referred to.

It turns out that some jokes translate and some do not. It is all a matter of available symbolic reference and context. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pointed at a plantain or banana peel laying on the ground (these are a main crop for the region) and said to someone “Hey, don’t slip on that!” Every time I did that I amused myself but the person whom I had warned had no clue that this was funny to me, no image of Woody Allen and a giant banana peel came to their mind. The joke was always a dud.

But this time it clicked. Maria laughed heartily and, pointing at me and barely able to talk, explained the joke to the men in the Baraza. They all laughed as well. Maria told the joke to the women back at the mafika, and I could hear their laughter mixed with phrases like “Those white people… they are so funny sometimes” and that sort of thing. The joke spread across the Ituri Forest and it was also retold among anthropologists. In fact, one famous anthropologist giving the keynote address at a major event celebrating Mary Leakey’s birthday told the joke as part of his remarks. Mary Leakey LOL’ed.

Maria, there’s some food in my bugs!!!! Still cracks me up.

When it comes up that I’ve lived in the Central African Rain Forest, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: “Did you eat bugs?”

Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating insects, and of course, Westerners who think they generally don’t eat insects are fascinated with the idea. However, Westerners eat a lot more insects than they think. You should really consider any processed food you eat that started out as a plant crop to be part insect. If what you are eating is made of any corn product, rice, wheat, etc. or pretty much anything else, consider how the foodstuff got from field to factory to your face. At no point did someone sit down and do what you do with the veggies you buy at the grocery store: take the time to clean them off and if you run into a bug, get rid of it. And, even when you do that to your own produce, you are not seeing some of the invertebrates that are just too small and too well hidden to see.

We had a more extreme than usual buggy food situation arise in the Ituri Forest one year. Our practice was to grow some food, and occasionally purchase food from a local market when one existed, but to mostly stay away from the food the local people grew, because we didn’t want to be draining away their resources. So, we would go to town every several weeks and purchase a number of long-term staples, including 20 kilo sacks of rice, beans, or other dry foods, a few gallons of palm oil, and to splurge, twenty boxes of pasta and dozens of tiny little cans of tomato paste which we would turn into feeble Italian food. The tomato paste cans always exploded on opening, so one had to learn to aim them into the pot first. But I digress.

Once you brought that food back there was no changing plans. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks. We kept the food in a special food storage hut, and our cook, a locally hired woman who worked a few hours a day for us, would take very good care of it. All sorts of things can go wrong from leaks in the roof to vermin to mold or rot.

And one day something went wrong with the beans.

At first we noticed little black spots floating around in the cooked beans. A little later we noticed that among the beans, while cleaning them, there were these little tiny things that would fly away. Then we noticed that some of the beans had little holes bored into them. Eventually, we put two and two together and figured out that we had some sort of infestation. Some small beetle creature had taken up residence in our beans. Their larva would bore a hole into a bean and live there for a while, presumably eating each bean from the inside out. I’m pretty sure both the larvae and adults were doing the boring, but I can’t be sure. The way we handled this was to spread the beans out in the sun, and over time a bunch of the beetles would fly away. Then we’d wash off the beans as per usual and some of the beetles left behind, beetle corpses (of which there was an increasingly large number) and grubs would be washed away. But as each day passed, the number of beetles that would end up in the cooked beans went up and up and up, and the efficacy of getting rid of the beetles was obviated by their ubiquity. So we stopped laying the beans out in the sun. At that point we stopped eating “cooked beans” and started eating “cooked beetles and beans” or, for short “B&B”.

And eventually we discovered that this was not all that uncommon. If you want beans in that habitat, you’re gonna get beetles too. Its just that this particular batch of Beetles and Beans was farther along than usual. Eventually we had to speed up the rate at which we consumed the beans so that there would be some left for us to eat! And, as I recall, the next batch of beans had hardly any beetles in it.

Well, I’m sorry to report that you do something like this every day when you eat stuff made out of pretty much any plant, but probably to a lesser degree. When products are made in factories in the US, some sort of test is applied to the powder or juice or whatever the corn or beans or wheat is turned into, to see how much invertebrate (mainly insect) matter is in there. I assume that batches with “too much” are mixed with batches of “not much” to make batches of corn meal, wheat flour, etc. that have under the regulated maximum amount of insect matter. Right?

In any event, there is nothing wrong with eating most insects, especially those that eat the foods we eat. Chances are they are low in toxins, and they are loaded with amino acids and other protein related molecules! Here as well as the Ituri, people eat insects all the time in this manner.

But of course, that is not what people are really asking me. They want to know if I’ve ever eaten insects as part of the cuisine. On purpose.

Yes, of course I have…

Now, I’ve been all over Africa, and I’ve sat down in Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho, Botswana. I admit having had a hard time finding a place to sit down in Namibia but that’s because I’ve only been in places with no chairs but there were a lot of rocks. I once sat for a long time on a curb in Rwanda. I’ve never been to Egypt but I’m pretty sure they may have invented the chair there. South Africa is, of course, all about sitting down. Lots of places to do it there.

Having said that, the question of where to sit down is an interesting one when certain things are true. For example, if you go into the deep forest to hang out with the Efe Pygmies siting down can get a little dicey. We can talk about that later. But what she really meant, I think, is that there is no place to sit where there will not be a bug or a spider or something either where you want to sit, under where you want to sit, or flying around where you want to sit.

It isn’t really true though. When I first went to the Ituri some people quite thoughtlessly (i.e., they did not put any thought into what they were saying) advised me to bring bug spray, because the place would be thick with mosquitoes and such. So I brought a couple of small cans of bug spray, and after I arrived, I found the big basket hanging from the roof of the supply hut that contained dozens of unused containers of bug spray that various researchers had brought there over the previous five years or so, only to discover as I had that there was no use for such a thing. “Maybe we’ll have a garage sale someday” I thought as I added my bug spray to the rest.

An Efe camp is usually out in the the forest somewhere, and that is a good place to sample the invertebrate life in that habitat. There are no clouds of mosquitoes or flies in the rain forest, or at least not in this rain forest. Why? There are too many bugs! If any insect tried out the strategy of being in a horde some other insect would come up with the strategy of eating the entire horde, and said strategist would simply wait round, in numbers, under wet leaves somewhere, for the next horde to come along. Really, clouds of insects, like the mosquitoes or lake flies or black flies we get in the northern states and provinces of North America exist because there is a winter, from which the landscape emerges, and into which swarming hordes of insects swarm, one after another, until deadly winter returns again. A set of evolutionary stable strategies resulting in this pattern have developed in the colder regions. If you got rid of the winters (though you could not get rid of seasonality) there would be fewer swarms of flying insects in a highly species rich forest environments. Swarming insects are more likely to be found in habitats with a winter, in low species diversity forests, and grasslands (including marshes and swamps), or areas a more distinct dry and wet season. Not so much in tropical rain forests.

But that does not mean there are not a lot of insects. There are plenty, and even just sitting in a camp is a great way to discover new ones. One day as I sat on my Efe-made “chair” (we can discuss those another time as well) a whopping big slow moving thingie came along and started to climb up the chair leg. I managed to guess that it was some kind of cricket … bear in mind, though, that crickets in the African rain forest are as much like our temperate crickets as an elephant is like a hyrax. I asked the nearest Efe what it was.

He looked. Shrugged his shoulders. “No idea.”

I was surprised. Normally the Efe knew the name of anything I pointed to (and yes, I did verify their knowledge using various techniques … they weren’t usually making stuff up, though that could happen now and then). We kept an eye on the slow moving creature as it explored around on my chair and the nearby ground, and everybody who came along got asked.

“What is that thing?”

“Huh. No idea. Strange looking.”

Eventually, an older man picked the thing up with a stick and moved it several hundred feet into the rain forest and let it go. Why do this instead of ignore it or squishing it? Well, the Efe don’t squish an insect or other invertebrate unless they know what it is. With good reason.

The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …

…that has wandered into their camp if they don’t know anything about it a priori is … according to what they told me …

Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For instance, one does not walk to the right of a young male Canarium tree in the afternoon, because he who shall not be named could be sitting in the tree waiting to put a curse on you, and then you’re screwed. Or, one should not handle the fetus of an antelope if you are a fertile female or if any females in your family are planning on getting pregnant soon. For many insects, killing them is bad because that may affect fertility of someone related to the one who kills the insect.

Generally speaking, this culture is very uptight about babies and fertility issues. Some of this is spillover from the village-dwelling horticultural Lese with whom the foraging Efe share a culture. The Lese have a repressed fertility owing to a number of causes. When a fertility rule is broken, a great deal of effort may be expended to fix it. As the reproductive ecologist Peter Ellison once said, “The Lese and Efe are constantly afraid of overdrawing on the bank of fertility.” (I paraphrase.) One of the most dangerous things you can do is to accidentally have twins. That’s like going to an ATM machine to get 100 bucks and the machine gives you 200 bucks. What do you do with the extra money? Will you get caught? When you check your bank account later, will there be 100 or 200 bucks taken out? Will there be a fee? A fine?

An insect that you don’t know about might be an insect linked to something important like fertility, or if not fertility, something else. Better to just leave it alone and let it go on its own way.

Oh, and there is probably a lot of heterogeneity across the cultural landscape in the detailed beliefs. It is not at all unlikely that an Efe visiting a distant settlement will discover that those people have a different set of beliefs about various insects or other things. The ethnography certainly shows different things happening across time and space, rather dynamically. The Efe do not generally look at beliefs of other people with disdain. Rather, they figure that those beliefs might be valid as well, and try to incorporate them in their routine.

So it makes sense that Efe would assume that an insect they’ve never seen before … and in this very species rich rain forest that is not as unlikely as it sounds, though it is certainly not a daily occurrence … has an importance of which they are simply unaware.

Want to read more about insects in the Congo? Click here: “We live in little houses made of beans.”

A modified repost; stay tuned for more on the Ituri Forest and Insects.

Its general theory is based on the premise that bodily functions are regulated by the flow of an energy-like entity called qi. Acupuncture aims to correct imbalances in the flow of qi by stimulation of anatomical locations on or under the skin called acupuncture points, most of which are connected by channels known as meridians. Scientific research has not found any physical or biological correlate of qi, meridians and acupuncture points,[1][2][3][4][5] and some contemporary practitioners needle the body without using a theoretical framework, instead selecting points based on their tenderness to pressure.

Leave it to Wikipedia to find the least intuitive way to spell “chi.”

Changa, I can describe to you more authoritatively because I’ve studied it, a bit and lived in it’s region of use, though I’m sure there are others who know much more about it. This is the practice of making numerous small, often parallel cuts in the skin, and then (usually) rubbing ash into the cuts. The ash is made of a mixture of selected leaves or other plant matter thought to have curative properties which are burned to make the ash. Often the plant ash is mixed with ash from a convenient wood fire, and if there are no available thought-to-be-curative plants, the ash from the fire on its own will do. The ash is not applied hot.

Changa is used by various culture groups in Central Africa, and is identical in method to a form of body decoration sometimes called scarification (it is only a subset of scarification). People who do this seem to use the same term for the medicinal practice and the decorative practice, and it is not clear that the two are fully exclusive of each other. One of the interesting things about Changa is that you can often guess the chronic illnesses a particular person suffers by observing their body scars, their extent, and distribution. For instance, since malaria is common in the region, most people who practice Changa (which means, essentially, most people) will have Changa marks on their forehead.

I’ve never observed acupuncture, but according to one study, applying traditional acupuncture, “incorrect” acupuncture (where you poke someone with a needle but not in the “correct” manner) and poking someone with a sharp wooden stick (a toothpick) all produce similar results: The severity of chronic back pain is reduced, compared to a control which does not involve poking with a sharp object.

I’ve only observed Changa being carried out once, despite the fact that I’ve seen many people with scars indicating it had been done, and I’ve seen many people with immediate post-Changa cuts. Of course, I’ve never seen most medical procedures done in the West either, yet people have them all the time. The one time I saw Changa carried out, it seemed to work exactly as expected. An infant had been in obvious pain, and cried pretty much continuously, for a few days before the infant’s father applied Changa to his distended stomach. Dozens and dozens of cuts were applied, and the ash wiped into the wounds. About half way through the process the infant stopped crying, and over the next 24 hours or so cried very little, his stomach reduced in size, and he seemed to improve overall. His mother, who apparently had mastitis, died within 48 hours after the Changa was applied to the infant, and her sister married the infant’s father (Levirate marriage) and since she was with milk, took over nursing the child.

I could list all the reasons why the Changa seemed to work and we could have a lengthy and exhaustive discussion about it, but instead of that, I’ll let you speculate based on the information provided and tell you the simple version of what I think happened. At the scale of hours or days, the mother of the infant, quite ill with a deadly infection, stopped producing milk which was, in turn, poisoning the child. In the meantime, the mother’s sister increased the amount of milk she was providing the child. The Changa was done to the child during this hand-off, so prior to Changa the child was quite ill, after it, not as ill. The reason why the child stopped crying during the Changa, even though he had been inconsolably crying for a very long time prior and was still quite ill, is more speculative. Chance or coincidence is certainly a possibility, but I think, guess really, that something else happened. I suspect that dozens and dozens of tiny slices in your stomach is rather distracting both to the psyche (even of an infant) and to the various homeostatic mechanisms of the body. The child passed out in pain, got some sleep, and woke up healthier because of a change in milk supply. Maybe.

I would guess, and this is only a guess, that Acupuncture and Changa have two things in common. The first I’m rather sure of, the second is pure conjecture. The first is that each has a set of associated behaviors which are fetishized and considered important, but in truth irrelevant to the effectiveness of the procedure, and are essentially window dressing. As I say, I don’t know much about Acupuncture, but adjusting where a needle will go based on readings of Chi is obviously not part of any system of anything that actually does something. There is no such thing as Chi. There seem to be a number of fetishized elements of Changa as well, the most obvious and easily documented is the use of multiple plants with specific “properties” in the ash mixture. Since these are all leaves of saplings, mainly one kind of fig or another, I’m sure there are not any interesting secondary compounds in the leaves. Since they are burned to ash before they are used, I’m sure the substance being rubbed into the wounds is mainly carbon, but since it is just burned, at least it is fairly sterile.

The second thing they have in common is that they both inflict pain and directly invade the body. I doubt this will have too much effect on an infection, depression, or evil spirits/bad chi, but I do wonder if adding more pain to pain … or different pain to pain, or specific pain to general pain, or whatever … could have an effect on pain other than making it hurt worse.

Oh, but wait, there may be another difference, not between the methods, but between those who use the techniques. I’m speaking here more of the patients than the practitioners, though in the case of Changa there is pretty much total overlap between those groups. This is, again, conjecture and it is based on my own limited observation.

I’ve known a number of people who chose “Alternate” medicine such as homeopathy, naturopathy, or chiropractic services over mainstream medicine, pursuing the former with vigor while at the same time rejecting, even disdaining the latter. Of those people I know, including verified cases of people who know people I know, one had to have major life threatening surgery to survive the alternative treatments (which he could not refuse since he was in a coma), one spent months in pain, others have been variously inconvenienced or not cured, and one is dead.

I’ve known a number of people who chose Changa, but none who chose it over whatever Western Medicine was available. Be assured that the father who Changa’d his son went to me first for medicine for the infant. Turns out I was not much help in that case, but I never met a person in those cultures who was not very happy to have antibiotics or other Western treatments, either instead of or along side of traditional methods, and I never met anyone willing to argue that traditional methods were better than Western ones.

I wonder what American New Agers would think if they knew that; People living in a “state of nature” surrounded by wonderful natural cures and remedies have much more faith in Western Medicine than they do in their own time honored traditional cures. Of course, if you live in a parasite-rich sometimes nutrition starved jungle, you can’t afford the luxury of being an idiot.

So, which is better, Acupuncture or Changa? Tell you what. I’ll give you the Acupuncture and you can keep the Changa.

(The eclipse reference is just past three minutes. Some other time we can argue over whether or not Carlie, singing in this video on Martha’s Vineyard, was referring to the March 1970 eclipse or the July 1972 eclipse, but I’m sure it was the former, because that’s the one everybody got all excited about.)

I was such a geek that I actually missed the eclipse because I was busy collecting data. There was a phone number you could call and a lady’s voice would give you the time and temperature. Perfect. I called the number again and again and wrote down the time and temperature and made a graph. And I got results!

The temperature went down during the eclipse, then it went back up again. That was cool, but being tethered to the phone I missed the part about it getting all dark and a dragon eating the sun and everything. This may be the first time I’ve ever admitted that I did that.

I did get to see a full-on solar eclipse with no clouds some time in the 1980s or 90s in Cambridge, and the most memorable thing about that was the eerie double shadow effect caused by the penumbra’s light passing through the tree crowns. These were the trees on Divinity Avenue between the Peabody Museum and the Divinity School. Having seen that during that eclipse, I’ve noticed it many times since, but caused by other light sources, and I’m always reminded of that day.

But my most memorable eclipse was not a total eclipse of the sun. It wasn’t total, and it wasn’t even the sun. It was a near total eclipse of the moon which is much more ordinary, except that it happened the way this one did, which was fairly extraordinary.

I was in the Ituri Forest, at the Harvard Ituri Project’s basecamp, with cultural anthropologist Richard Grinker. One of us had mentioned that the moon was full, which you could tell by looking at it, and there was this big round thing. But then another one us noticed that it was not full, and made that remark.

“Nope, actually, it’s not quite full. I can see a bit missing.”

Then someone noticed a little while later that it was even less full.

“Hey, wait a minute, the moon is not supposed to change that fast! What’s going on here?”

At first we panicked because we thought that a giant invisible Dragon was eating the moon, but in short order our right brains took over from our left brains (or do I have that backwards?) and we realized that we were observing an eclipse of the moon. And not just any eclipse of the moon. One we had discovered!

After answering Rich’s questions (he was a social anthropologist, so no reason he’d know) about who else could see this (yes, it is visible everywhere where you can see the moon … no, if you are on the other side of the earth, it would not be visible…) we discussed the idea of waking up our neighbors, the Lese villagers who’s homeland we were visiting.

I should mention that it was probably about 9:00 at night, and yes, all of the people in the nearby villages were in bed. It had been dark for three hours already, as the sun pretty much goes up and down at 6:00 am and pm. Or, using the local time system, the sun goes up at hour 12, and then is up for hours 1 thorough 12, then goes down, and it is dark through hour 12. (So noon is 6:00.) Anyway, this is a society in which there is no electric light and no regular access to things like candles or lamp oil. Essentially, there is no artificial light, though it is possible to make a torch if you really need one out of a special tree. And there is the moon and the stars and in the forest, the forest floor glows, of course. But not quite as brightly as the one on the far away planet in the movie Avatar.

As a result of the lack of artificial light, everyone had the same schedule: Up at dawn, then back to the villages at sunset, using the fire and the fading sun as a means to see while finishing off the daily tasks and socializing, and so on. But hanging around the campfire, as it were, for hours on end is not so much a Lese Villager thing to do on a day to day basis. In fact, wandering around outside at night was considered a little unsafe for reasons ranging from very good natural ones (like the fact that the place is crawling with leopards and snakes and such) to interesting supernatural ones. The point is, very few people spend much time out doors at night gazing at the sky, and the local science and folklore does not speak much to things astronomical, although one important part of the origin story does all happen up in the sky.

So, not only were our neighbors all asleep, but there was a distinct possibility that they had never observed a lunar eclipse, or if they had, that it was rare. So we went ahead and woke them up and, using our kerosene lamps to light the path, invited them over to our place. (Our research camp, which looked just like a local village, was less than 100 meters away from their actual, authentic local village.)

After cajoling our friends to join us, we all sat around in a circle in our chairs, which we had dragged from their shelter beneath our baraza (a ‘baraza’ is like a ‘ramada,’ like in the photo above). And our neighbors were wondering why we were sitting around in a circle out in the open in the middle of the night. That’s when we sprang it on them.

“Look at the mooon. Part of it is missing, as though a great dragon has come and eaten part of it.”

JM, one of our informants who lived in that village, looked at us and with a bit of snark said “Look, you guys, the moon is not always ‘full’ … sometimes it is less than full, sometimes you can’t really even see it. It goes in cycles, and it is from these cycles that our word for ‘month’ derives, which you will notice is the same as our word for ‘moon’ and if I am not mistaken you once told me that this is true in your langauge as well. And there is no such thing as dragons.”

(We were probably actually using a term like “giant geko that lives in the sky and eats celestial objects” but I don’t remember exactly.)

He was right of course, and he said all this with a look in his eye that told me he knew we were up to something. And at that point we explained that this was not a normal disappearance of part of the moon as per it’s monthly cycle. He and the others did not believe us, so we had tea. And having tea took long enough that it could become obvious that something was afoot in the sky.

“Look at the moon again. Much more of it is gone!”

They looked. They went through the catalog of expressions people use there when they are shocked and amazed.

“Kwa… Uto… Wapi … Inapunguza kabisa ….”

“Zhimoni,” JM used my local name, “a dragon really is eating the moon!” (He was joking of course.)

I explained what a was happening, using the kerosene lantern first to light the ground where I drew a schematic of the moon, earth, and sun, and then as a source of light to demonstrate the effect. By the time I was done Muzungu-splaining the eclipse they were bored but appreciative. They thanked us for this knew knowledge and went back to their village to bed. By this time much tea had been drunk, the moon had mostly returned from the gaping maw of the sky-dragon, and the path to their village was well enough lit by lunar light.

The next day, the elder of that village and the elder of several other villages came by and our village’s elder requested that I re-explain the lunar eclipse to the other elders. I did so. By this time several younger folk had gathered around as well, and that is when one of them said something in English that utterly shocked me. No one ever speaks English there, and if they do, it is an imitation of an English word much like you, dear reader, might say “Hakuna Matata” because you heard it in a song from The Lion King, not because you know what it means or can speak that language.

The phrase was “Total Eclipse” … pronounced more like “Total Eclipsay” as it happened.

“What?” I said.

“The song. There was a song these white people had on their radio many years ago when I lived in the city. Everybody was listening to it all the time. Someone explained to me then that the whole sun could be blanked out by the shadow of the earth, just as you explained for the moon.”

He was talking about the Carlie Simon Song.

It isn’t just planets traveling in their orbits that go in circles.

For more stories from the Congo, see Congo Memoirs and Lost Congo Memoirs. (Remember to read the Congo Memoirs from beginning to end. They start with The Zodiac.

It was in the Congo, at Senga, a location I’ve written about before. Our camp was on one side of a wash right where it entered the Semliki River, and the excavation was on the other side of the wash, but since the digging all occurred during the dry(ish) season, that was never an issue. But when the excavation was over, and almost everyone went home, those of us left behind to do our own non-excavation research projects experienced a number of good rains.

One day I had parked the Zodiac on the other side of the dry wash, where it was tied up to a sturdy tree AND pulled fully out of the water. It rained, and I went down to look at the wash to see if it was running, and it was. I realized that the river was rising, so water was lapping at the boat, and the water running into the river from the wash was between me and the vessel. So, I considered crossing the wash to drag the boat farther inland.

Not being a total moron, I first tested the was with a stick to see how deep the water is. If the water was flowing over the surface as I had seen it only that morning, the water could be no more than 12 inches deep. When I stuck the stick into the rushing torrent, I discovered two things: 1) Yes, the water was only about a foot deep and 2) the strength of the water was sufficient to pull the stick out of my hands and drag it at a very high velocity into the river, where it would flow down stream over the rapids, then down the water fall, then into the crocodile infested lake.

I walked the long way around. It took an hour and a half to make it to the boat, and I had to cross through the territories of a pride of lions and a bunch of hyenas, but that was a LOT safer than crossing the one foot deep flood.

And I’m reminded of all of this by this post, which you should visit and read: “I Can Feel The Boulders Rolling”

Do you have a flood story?

It is rather annoying to have locust descend on your crops. Some years it is not too bad, some years it is bad enough to noticeably affect the food supply. But every year there is the potential for revenge, even if it is mostly symbolic.

I first learned of the locust when sitting around the fire one dryish dry-season night with some Efe Pygmies and Lese Villagers. As we sat there, amid the usual night cacophony of insect (and other) noises, the occasional moth-like creature flying into the flames, and all that, a newcomer arrived on the scene: The katydids. Something largish and green would fly around a bit in the fire-light, and suddenly veer into the flames and spend a few seconds writhing around before being consumed and falling into the coals.

On about the third or fourth fiery demise, someone reached over to a katydid that was at the edge of the hearth, picked it up, held it for a second and popped it in his mouth. Was that a joke? A quirk, of this particular person? Did he think it was a potato chip or something? Or was it a cultural practice? And if so, was it common and widespread enough to be part of the cuisine? Of course, I watched for a while and then inquired, and learned the whole locust story minus a few details, which I picked up later by examining the appropriate literature.

And yes, the folks in this region eat them and take special enjoyment in doing so as a matter of revenge. They are probably my favorites insect; They have a nutty taste and are just oily enough to seem sauteed. Very nice.

Termites are also self-oiled and the winged alates are captured locally during the full moon, especially in the dry season, when termites do a night-time mating ritual that involves everybody flying towards the moon at once. (The moon is used as a reference point to get everyone to the same buggy orgy at about the same time.) To catch the termites, you make a light (of fire, traditionally, or with Greg’s Flashlight if he has batteries and lets you) behind a basket. The termites fly from the nest towards the light and get caught into the basket.

One day we got word, spread in advance by some government herald, that the “King of the Pygmies” would be passing down our “road” (read “slippery footpath”) to visit his people. The ensuing sociological events are worthy of another, and probably sombre, essay. Let’s just say that when those considered by some to be sub-human suddenly have a “king” and all the other folks have is a “chief” that there will be anxiety and even violence can erupt. In this case mainly torture of Pygmies. But as I say, that is another story.

Hearing that the “King of the Pygmies” was arriving soon engendered significant cynicism especially among the Pygmies who have no interest in Kings. But to be polite, I inquired as to what he might like to have as a gift, in the event that he actually showed up. And, since it was termite season, and for some reason I in fact had some batteries that were charged up, “termites” was the obvious answer.

It was timed rather well: The termites were captured and put in a fine hand-woven basket the very night before the king arrived.

It turns out twenty-some years ago an infant King Mobi was taken by missionaries to Italy, where he was raised by Catholic Nuns on a diet of, well, Italian food. As you know, Efe and other Pygmies are of short stature, but what you may not know (and most people do in fact get this wrong) is that their stature is not equivalent to the short stature of the fabled “They were shorter back then” Western ancestors famous for gaining stature with changes in diet and so on. More to the point, if you feed a Pygmy from infancy copious pasta and brochette, he does not grow tall, but he will grow corpulent, and King Mobi was. That may seem like an insignificant observation, but since all Efe are skinny and buff, being hunter-gatherers and all, it was odd, in fact impressive, to everyone.

We gave the King the termites just about the time I realized he would likely not really want to eat them. As it turns out, he didn’t even want to look at them. He did want me to take many pictures of him and he wanted to know what I had to drink. And he was not speaking of water. Living, as we were, beyond the beer line, I couldn’t help him much with that.

I have to admit, though, I’m sorta with The King on this. I love me those katydids, and palm grubs are good, but termites are not my favorite bug. Unless, of course, they are mixed with peanut butter, which is another local product. Anything goes well with peanut butter!

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!