And yes, I have eaten the elephant shrew, and no, it does not taste like chicken. In fact, almost nothing I’ve ever eaten that was not a chicken has tasted like chicken. Elephant shrews don’t taste like elephants either.

The common mouse-like shrew is in the shrew family Soricidae (Order Soricomorpha), which includes over 300 species distributed among 23 genera. They are worldwide wherever you find small furry things other than Australia (they are not shrew-roos, after all) and not in South America. Some of these shrews, in the genera Sorex and Blarina use echolocation, like bats.

Six wandering shrews (Sorex vagrans) were trained to echolocate the position of a platform and drop to it. They preferentially directed their ultrasonic emissions at the platform. With their ears plugged, they were unable to locate it above chance levels even though they increased their emission rate. Shrews with hollow tubes in their ears performed as effectively as controls. Echolocating shrews, trained on an elevated Y-maze, detected a 15×15-cm flat metal barrier to a distance of 65 cm. The minimum detectable barrier at 20 cm was 3·5×3·5 cm. They detected a target with a 4×4-cm hole to 30 cm. Their dependence on echolocation was inversely related to familiarity with an area. Audition was important for the location of suitable cover in strange areas. The adaptive significance of echolocation to the wandering shrew is discussed.¹

Tree shrews have the odd characteristic of possessing human-like ears. They also have a tooth comb (the front teeth make up a comb used for grooming), which is found as well in many prosimian primates. The tooth comb and a few other traits caused early researchers to suggest that the tree shrew is a living version of the original primate. We now know that tree shrews share a common ancestor with primates and the flying lemurs to form an unresolved group of related mammals, but there is no particular reason to include or exclude the tree shrew as a model for the first primate. The key primate features that make primates primates (and I greatly oversimplify) are not really found in tree shrews. The tree shrew tooth comb, for instance, is made up of different teeth than the tooth comb of primates. To my knowledge, no one has explain why they have human-looking ears. Coincidence, most certainly.

Regarding the elephant shrew: The version with which I’m most familiar is the giant elephant shrew (Rhynchocyon cirnei). (Kingdon probably has the best pictures and descriptions generally available.) This creature has fawn-like markings on it even as an adult, as do many rain forest mammals. And it is called giant because it is HUGE. For a shrew. Small enough to fit in your shoe, but large enough to make a meal. Well, a side dish, anyway. The most interesting thing I observed with the elephant shrew is not so much the shrew but how the Efe Pygmies handled it. The Efe have a characteristic way that they butcher the antelopes and monkeys that make up most of the meat in their diet. But the giant elephant shrew is smaller than any piece into which an antelope is cut using this method. For many small animals like little song birds or small fish, the Efe just cook the animal on an open fire until it becomes crunch then eat it like you might eat funnel cake at the fair. But when the caught elephant shrew, always by chance as one happen to wander by in the leaf litter on the forest floor, they butchered it exactly as they butcher an Okapi or a Duiker. (That process of butchery is the subject of another blog post, which I’ve not written yet but someday will. It’s quite interesting.)

There is one final thing I’d like to mention about shrews that I find interesting. There are a lot of underground rodents, and some non-underground rodents, that eat roots as their fallback food. This has been the subject of a fair amount of research by my colleagues and me. These rodents have specific characteristics of their jaw and teeth. It occurred to us one day that maybe these characteristics had to do with living underground, and not with eating roots. But the underground dwelling shrews (and other non-rodent mammals, like moles) don’t have those characteristics at all, showing that big teeth and strong jaws are not caused by eating dirty insects or living in holes. I know, I know, that may not be that interesting to you, but … well … I guess you had to be there.

¹BUCHLER, E. (1976). The use of echolocation by the wandering shrew (Sorex vagrans) Animal Behaviour, 24 (4), 858-873 DOI: 10.1016/S0003-3472(76)80016-4

But really, each of these observation is a hypothesis. When you ask the people sitting there what is going on, ask about the spoon or the pot or the pipe, you may get nothing, a blank look, a surprise answer, or a story that contradicts what you were thinking. The pot is empty because everyone just ate, the new spoon will replace the one you thought was perfectly good because the old spoon was borrowed from a village and needs to be returned before someone notices. The plantain-stem pipe was just fashioned on a hunch.

A hunch?

Yes, a hunch. It is possible, Mr. Anthropologist, that you have not come empty handed!

Cooperative Extension Agent:

Of course, it never really gets unbearably hot here. Again, I can make the comparison: A heat wave where I grew up is when the temperature hits 100 or more during the hottest hour of the afternoon and the nights do not cool off much. Here, where I live now, a heat wave is where it hits 90 or more every day but it will still go to 70 or sometimes below during the coolest part of the night. People in Chicago and New York will complain about their heat wave to about the same degree as people in central and northern Minnesota will complain about their heat wave, but there is a difference. People in Chicago and New York die during their heat waves. Not all of them, but some of them.

Heat Wave:

Of course, people in northern Minnesota die by falling through the ice more often than people in New York or Chicago do.

Typical Day On the Ice:

My feet can be wet, and even muddy and sandy inside my shoes and I don’t care. Glynn Isaac could not stand wet feet. He grew up in arid country (South Africa and Kenya) while I grew up spending time in a temperate moist forest (the Adirondacks). Had this not been true, I would have never done my PhD on what I did it on. Glynn wanted to work in the Ituri Forest but what he ended up doing is sending his only student who did not care about wet feet. You would be surprised as to how many archaeologists ended up specializing in one area or another because of something utterly tangential to archaeology. Jack Harris studied the Karari Industry because he could back up a truck with a trailer on it. Lew Binford got into archaeology at all because he had time off while a soldier in Korea and ended up bumping into interesting tombs. J. Desmond Clark took an interest in Africa (and, essentially, founded and shaped African Archaeology) for similar reasons; He was assigned to positions with trenches, dug across interesting stratigraphy, while with the British Army in North Africa.

Archaeology:

I once new a graduate student in anthropology who went into graduate school to study a particular system. She was very excited about this system because it had to do with genes, and genes were (here words…) “The Truth” as opposed to, I guess, bones and stuff. That system didn’t work out. She tried another one. Didn’t work out. She tried a different one. Didn’t work out. Finally she discovered an interest in monkeys. Monkeys have genes, interesting ones, and that worked out. Funny how “The Truth” can be such a problem.

Interesting Monkey:

I can’t remember the first time I was ever in a house with air conditioning, but it might have been when I was 13 and my parents moved to a place with an air conditioner. It was not on all the time and it kept the downstairs absurdly cold if the upstairs was cooled at all, so it had little effect on me (living in an uninsulated room over the garage extension and all). My wife, my daughter, my son, lots of people in my wife’s family, others that I know these days all grew up in houses with air conditioning. When my daughter was growing up she did not like wearing coats or sweaters. Her mother always wanted her to do so, because she, the mother, was always cold. Same old story, you’ve heard it before. “I’m cold, put on a sweater!” I conspired with Julia often so she did not have to wear the uncomfortably warm clothing. So, even though she grew up with air conditioning, she grew accustom to cold. So one end of her range of comfort is more open ended than the other. She is skinny and lanky but the heat bothers her. An Inuit trapped in the body of a Maasai warrior.

Air Conditioning:

Speaking of Inuit, a friend of mine is an Aleutian (they historically live on the same end of the planet) and while he grew up in a run of the mill middle class home on a reservation, the home was in Alaska and he spent a fair amount of time on boats in the Bering Sea and on land doing archaeology and stuff on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Then he went to live with reindeer herders in Siberia (the Eveny or Evenki, not the Sámi). I thought it was funny when the first thing he said to me when he returned after his first season of working with them as an anthropologist was this: “I can’t believe how COLD it is there!” And he got to sleep with the best reindeer!

This is him:

Without going into details, it is more or less true that your body adapts early in life, but for the rest of your life, to the range of temperatures to which it is exposed when you are little, after infancy but through toddler years. The way your skin gets configured, with blood vessels and sweat glands and so on, and some things having to do with neurons, adapts to control heating and cooling, and as an evolutionary aside, comfort for a certain range. Lots of things adapt as we grow, but these things are sorely understudied. The assumption that you are a product of your genes right down to the details is too pervasive. For instance, how well you see detail in various conditions adapts. If you grow up in Arizona you will have a different way of seeing than if you grow up in the Pacific North West. Well, not if you grow up in Phoenix vs. Seattle, but if you grow up in the wilderness in those two areas. Colin Turnbull has a story about this in relation to Pygmies which I will not relate because I think Colin put the Bull in Turnbull and I don’t trust most of his stories. But I have an Efe Pygmy story that might relate and is true: If you give some Efe Pygmy men a mammal identification guide so they can pick out a picture of some animal they just saw, so you can relate the observation to Western Linneonormative Classification Schema, they hold the book upside down as often as right side up. That is what we might expect from people who don’t read at all, they hold the book randomly. But then, they’ll start rotating the book around so they see the picture of the monkey “right side up” and “up side down” and everything in between. Then they’ll make their ID. I never see Westerners do that, but it makes sense. A western book held by a western person shows a picture of an animal sitting or standing there, and you hold the book up in normal book position and you imagine you are up in the tree staring at a monkey standing on a branch ten feet away. But in real life, you almost always see monkeys that are above you or nearly above you. In a rain forest, the arboreal mammals that are not above you are too far away to see well, and behind too much vegetation. They are shadows crossing distant gaps. Efe not only see correctly in a forest, but they know how to adapt the book to use it to represent that way of seeing.

And they see better. As I mentioned above, I spent a lot of time in a forest growing up, so I may be better than some Arizonan guy at seeing detail in a forest. But not like the Efe. One time I was talking to my friend (in the Ituri) about a particular species of snake.

“I’d like to see one of those,” I said. We were sitting right in our research camp. He chucked. “What?” I said.

“Come over here,” he stood and walked away beckoning me to follow. I followed.

“There,” he said, pointing.

I looked. I saw nothing but branches and leaves. “What am I looking at?”

“Your snake.”

“Really? Where?” raising my hand to point at the bushes that lined the path down to the water from our base camp. He grabbed my hand to stop it from going near the bush.

“Right in front of you. You almost touched it.”

Now, this is a snake he had seen from about 100 feet away, a snake that I was now in reaching distance of, apparently, but could not see. The snake in question, by the way, was a “boomslang” a.k.a. “green tree snake” … the are small, green, and blend in very nicely with the green trees. Nasty venom. Apparently, this one was perfectly camouflaged.

“I still don’t see it.”

“OK, stand back,” he said as he raised his bow, arming it with a monkey arrow. Efe men always carry their bow and a few arrows with them.

He drew the bow, took a breath to stop himself from giggling (at me), and fired.

And the arrow went through the snake in at least three places, so the now squirming reptile could not extricate itself from the branches it was effectively pinned to. I could finally see it. At first I felt bad that the snake had to die to teach me a lesson, but then it occurred to me that my friend was surely going to kill this snake on his way back to his camp anyway. He had seen it, after all. And, a snake an Efe sees is a dead snake. They do this to keep the chances of being bitten by poisonous snakes down, and since his uncle had lost a leg to a viper in his youth, one could understand this especially in his case.

Boomslang:

But the point is, to him, seeing an 18 inch long green snake in a green bush over 100 feet away was like me seeing my bus coming down the avenue. On a hot day, which I would not think of as too hot because I grew up without air conditioning.

One’s comfort zone, one’s path in life, one’s personal history. A lot of people call it free will, but it’s not.

Sorry for going all Philosophy on you:

A shaman takes the pipe, and as part of a ritual that probably went on for hours (there are ethnographic analogues) used it to suck objects out of ill or wounded ‘patients.’ Sometimes the patient was cut first. It is possible that sometimes the object was something really embedded in the patient, and perhaps removing it was a good thing. In other cases, the objects removed were small stones, bits of chicken bone, other household objects, and perhaps the occasional carved sacred thingie presumably put there by some other, evil, shaman.

Except in those rare instances where a shaman may actually have removed an object, the presumption is that the shaman used sleight of hand to make it appear that some object or another was pulled from the subject’s body.

So, one day I was walking along the path in my study area in the Ituri Forest, in what is now known as the Congo, and a man I barely knew approached me. He was someone whom I believed to be half “Pygmy” (Efe) and half “Villager” (maybe Lese or some other group). We had a common language or two, so we chatted a while, but he was clearly disturbed by something. Finally, he told me that he had come down from the north to find me in order to get some medicine. This was fairly typical. We anthropologists were the only people for hundreds of kilometers in all directions that had any western meds, so we were often prevailed upon to treat this or that disease. We had some training to do it, and we maintained as much of a supply of medicine as we could, and were happy to do what we could do even if it seemed sometimes like we were spending all of our time running an impromptu clinic rather than doing our research.

Anyway, the man had a leaf in his hand, a leaf of the type used to wrap up and carry around pretty much anything one might want to transport. These leaves served as wallets, baggies, waste disposal devices, cups, and so on. He unwrapped the leaf and as he did so, it became obvious that it was quite bloody, and in it were a couple of stones, a chicken bone, and a piece of string.

“The shaman removed this from my arm” he said, showing me where he had a bleeding abscess. “It worked, he cured me of the abscess. But now I’ve come to you, so you can give me your medicine and cure me of the shaman.”

It took me a while to understand. He was not using the term “shaman” but rather, the local word that I had come to understand as “Witch” according to the local lexographies compiled mainly by missionaries. But as the conversation progressed, I understood that the person who had used a tube (made of the aforementioned leaves) to suck these objects from this man’s arm was what we would call a shaman. Furthermore, the shaman was a Pygmy, and heretofore we had not encountered Pygmy shamans in this area. Later on I was to discover that one of my best Pygmy friends, and one of two or three key informants, had been a shaman all along. But whatever. At the time, it was a moment, for me, of discovery, and of great interest. I never got to meet this man’s shaman, but I did provide him with antibiotics to cure the man of the shaman’s efforts which, in turn, may or may not have helped with the abscess.

And this all came back to me yesterday as I lie on an operating table not drugged but numbed, and my shaman, I mean, doctor, moved his gloved tweezers-holding hand towards me to show me what he had just “sucked” out of my leg. It was a couple of inches of string, covered in blood and some cyst-like tissue. Through the procedure just accomplished in which this object was removed from my body, I WAS CURED!!!

I was thinking that I had to go down the street to find a Pygmy to cure me of the doctor’s activities. But just at I was thinking that, he told me he’d write a script for antibiotics, just in case.

The string was a small portion of what must have been a few feet of string used to tie my tendon back to my patella and quadriceps muscles in my right leg. Somehow this bit of string, which was no longer doing anything important, had elicited an immune response, which caused the growth of a cyst on the proximal/ventral surface of my kneecap. In other words, I had a painful bump sticking out of my knee. If it got rubbed (by wearing pants and walking around) it would become quite sensitive. At other times, it would just hurt for no apparent reason, and it would hurt a LOT, as in “Ice pick in the knee” pain. At all times, it made it impossible to comfortably kneel on that knee.

So I went in yesterday to have it removed. I was brought by a nurse to a “procedure room” where I laid down on a special bed/chair thing. Special juices were used to wash my knee, and I was draped in bright blue paper sheets. The surgeon came in and with the nurse’s help donned a funny hat and a backwards robe and some rubber gloves. The process of dressing up the surgeon was highly ritualized, with modestly stylized movements and highly selective touching and various choreographed moves. The cutting itself was all business, but the excitement of finding the source of the illness and removal of it from the body was palpable. We did not really know for certain what had caused the growth of this nodule, but we had guessed, it turns out, correctly.

There is another element to this which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, in a sick and morbid sort of way. Many years ago, when I was very little, there was an evil girl who lived down the street … Mary Beth something or another. I won’t go into great detail about her at this point but at present you need to know this: During the summer weeks that we were living at home (we spent most weeks in the forest somewhere) on a very regular basis, every couple of days, Mary Beth would at some point chase me down the street and push me to the ground, laughing, and then just walk away. The thing is, no matter where she started chasing me, she always pushed me to the ground in the same exact spot. The spot was my parent’s driveway. And, I think she was trying to insult me. You see, we had one of the only driveways on the street (as I think back, I can’t recall any other ones) but, unlike other driveways in the larger neighborhood, it was not paved. It was a messy gravel driveway with a few patches of tar where the car’s wheels always stopped, but that was it. The kids around the block had paved driveways, but we had this slummy gravel driveway. Anyway, since it was gravel, that meant that when Mary Beth pushed me into the ground, I would get bits and pieces of gravel in my knees. There were occasions when I had to spend some time pulling bits of sharp gravel from my knee-skin before dressing the wound. At first this was alarming to my mother and other members of my family, but after a while, after it happened dozens of times, no one seemed to care any more and Greg pulling the gravel out of his knees became just one of those things that happened a few times a week, like my brother polishing his buttons (he went to military school) and my father sorting through multiple listings (he sold real estate) and my mother making a dress (yes, we made our own dresses).

So, I had in the back of my mind the idea that maybe the thing in my knee … the core of the nodule of pain and discomfort … was actually not a direct result of the surgery done to repair the tendon, but rather, a piece of driveway-gravel that had migrated (as an indirect result of the surgery, presumably) to the front of the kneecap from a more innocuous hiding place.

“But it would have dissolved by now” you say. Well, maybe. There are three things the driveway gravel could have been made out of: Slate, graywacke, or rhyolite. I’ve listed those three in order of hardness (increasing) and potential reactivity (decreasing) to an acidic environment. Believe it or not, I’ve occasionally wondered since then what kind of stone that gravel was made from. And, although I think graywacke or some sort of slate is the most likely (given the geology of the region), a rhyolite stone would likely survive for longer than metal shrapnel.

Eventually, the driveway was paved. The city came by to pave our ancient brick-paved street and put in concrete sidewalks to replace the deteriorating, undulating slate walks. They had no plans to pave any driveways, but when my father started buying the workers six-packs for their lunch breaks, they inexplicably discovered a work order apropos the laying of macadam on the Driveway of Doom … thus, ending that era of my life because, clearly, driving the gravel into my knees was Mary Beth’s only objective.

I wonder what she’s doing these days? Probably neither shaman nor surgeon.

Read More …

But then an even rarer thing happened.

As we sat, being rare and chatting about the weather, we heard a the sound of a distant truck approaching. Our visitors (there were always visitors) — Lese (farmers) and Efe (Pygmies) — heard it first. They also figured out first that this was not the car of the Masoeur, the “Sisters” of the catholic mission to the south. (The sisters had driven by a week or two earlier, and thus, might be on their way back from town by this time.) And it was not our truck. Our Land Rover was sitting there in it’s little house quietly growing grass out of it’s front grill. Nobody else drove up and down the “road” so this was a real mystery.

As the vehicle got closer, even I could hear that it was unfamiliar to us. Also, it was not hard to surmise that the driver was unfamiliar with the terrain. Several times the sound of the engine would die away as the driver idled, presumably looking with little relish at the “road” immediately ahead, considering how best to bypass the crevasses and holes without falling into a stream or getting hopelessly stuck.

One of us, Grinker or me, said “Maybe they’ll turn around.”¹ This drew dirty looks from our neighbors. They wanted visitors. We wanted to relish being in the most remote spot on this continent. This was always a minor conflict.

From the time we first heard the vehicle to the time it pulled up to our research camp a half hour passed. This was enough time for a dozen additional friends and neighbors to arrive in anticipation of a visit, perhaps from someone interesting or important. They wanted to be there to see who it was. Our neighbors conjectured that most likely the visitors would be more researchers, coming to join Grinker and me. That could mean more employment for the people in the local villages as a new roof would surely be needed for the hut the new arrivals would stay in. Maybe two huts. If they were a couple that would be one hut. If they were a couple and a third person, that would be two huts. If they were three separate people that would be three huts, and there werent’ three huts! Perhaps a whole new hut would have to be built, and that would be work for more than the usual roofers! And perhaps the new arrivals would need an informant to help with research, or language tutors.

A virtual economic stimulus package could be driving down the road right now!!

I thought it unlikely that new researchers would be arriving because we had not received any word of potential visitors, but given that there was no direct contact with the outside world and no reliable system of mail, that did not mean much. Indeed, when my doctoral adviser had died the previous year during the summer, I did not learn of his death until mid October. So really, this could be anybody.

When the vehicle did make its way down the road close enough to our camp to either pull into our hidden driveway, or accidentally drive past without noticing us (very likely given that we were disguised as a traditional local village and set back from the road), a handful of our neighbors were well positioned on the road to direct what we now saw to be a very new fairly large American built four wheel drive vehicle into the Ngodingodi Research Camp.

Rich and I had already decided, conversing privately in English, to discourage whoever it was from staying unless they needed something serious. It was the policy of the research project to not become a tourist attraction. It was not hospitable, but it was normal, to send people away.

So, up drove the vehicle. The diver was a man in his 40s who was somewhat large, somewhat imposing, dressed in the usual safari suit, and American. He was accompanied, if memory serves, by a wife and teenage boy child who made such little impression on me that I only barely remember them. They were quiet and obsequious to the man. This was very clearly his show. They were also accompanied by one or two Africans, young men, acting as servants.

“Well, hallo everyone, with God’s grace, we made it! Are you the anthropologists?”

Oh crap, he’s here to actually visit us, not just passing through. Someone must have told him about us.

“Ah, yes, we are … this is our research camp,” Rich said, as the Great White Visitor sauntered around his car opening doors and his family and servants got out of the vehicle and started wandering around. “How did you know about us?”

“Oh, a man named Andre mentioned your research camp when I was in town up north. I came to see the Pygmies!”

“OK, hold on a second,” Rich jumped in.

“We don’t use that word … the ‘P’ word … some people find it offensive,” I said. “And you can’t ‘see’ them. They is not a … tourist… attraction.”

As I spoke he came to the back of the vehicle and opened it, without much listening to what I was saying. “Who’d like some lunch! We’ve got ham and cheese sandwiches, some tomato and bacon for BLT’s, cokes, and look, plenty of ice in the cooler!”

Bacon? … Ice?

We are in the most remote part of Africa and we have bacon? … and Ice?

“So, who’s hungry?”

So, Rich turned to me and in some language that was not English quietly said …. “well, he can stay for a while I suppose.”

“Until the ice melts” I said. “And we finish off the bacon.”

“I’m not into bacon much,” replied rich, struggling, as I had, to come up with an understandable word for bacon in a language spoken on in a region with no pigs,² “but did you see that stash of candy bars? And he’s got hot chocolate.”

Our private conversation was interrupted by the Great White Visitor, who was not paying much attention to anyone else anyway. “I’m a missionary. From Oklahoma.”

So, OK, we could let the guy stay for a while. But we had to talk about this “seeing the pygmies” bit. He was obviously unaware that three or four of the local people standing around watching him and his party were Efe (Pygmies). He needed to be educated.

Rich and I were not merely justifying what we were doing for the sake of bacon and ice. We simply made the decision to spend a little time with this guy and his retinue and talk about the Efe, maybe introduce them to some Efe, and help him learn to have a better attitude than to treat the Efe like some kind of tourist destination. Also, he identified himself as a Missionary from Oklahoma, not as a missionary from some particular group. What this meant is the following. He was not an in-country missionary. He would be funded by some church in Oklahoma to come out to “Africa” or someplace and convert some people over to Christianity. He would take pictures of this and give slide shows in the churches in and near his community showing how he had done this converting and how their money was not wasted, then he would go after more funds to come back and do more converting.

This is how all the missions were funded, but over a longer term and with a larger organization handling the flow of money, the flow of personnel, the flow of supplies and equipment. Great White Missionary was a rogue … working on his own, paying for his vacations to various foreign lands by giving a dog and pony show between trips showing how he had converted x number of these people and y number of those people who otherwise were pagans living in direct community with Satan.

So we thought we would spend a little time with him so he’d get a certain impression of what was going on out here, mainly to avoid having him go back, raise the funds to missionize our project area, and return with reinforcements.

And it would take a while to eat all this bacon anyway. Hey, anyone would have done the same thing in our situation…

Oh, and there was a lot of bacon. There was bacon that was cooked already and only needed to be reheated in the toaster oven that magically operated in the back of his Great White Truck. And there were kilos and kilos of frozen bacon that he wanted us to take from him to be distributed among the Efe.

So, Great White Missionary and his retinue sat with us at our research camp and we served tea with his BLT’s, ham and cheese sandwiches, and candy bars. He had many questions and many things to tell us. His way of communicating was like this: Random crap would rattle around his head and every now and then some item would happen to be near that hole in the front we call a mouth and fall out.

“The Pygmies are pagans, they believe that spirits live in rocks.”

“Actually, most of the Efe, we don’t call them Pygmies, are monotheists.”

“These Pygmies have already been converted? I’d like to watch them hunt. Can you arrange for me to hunt with them? Is is true that many of the children are born with tails?”

“Actually, the Efe, we don’t call them Pygmies, are monotheists because that is their religion. They are not Christians…. And that tail thing is not true…”

“Everything is based on a kernel of truth. You better check for the tails. Offer them some of this bacon and I’ll bet they’ll go hunting with me. Can we see where they live? Do you have a rifle?”

… this sort of thing went on for a while, and as it did, Rich and I formulated a plan and slowly put it into effect. In the background, we kept up a conversation with one of our Efe informants who’s camp was actually only a few hundred meters away just off the road …

“So, do the Pygmies have a concept of hell and Satan? Satan’s greatest trick is not being known to those who worship him. I’m afraid they may worship Satan.”

“Ah, well, no, these Efe (We don’t call them Pygmies) are actually Christians!” (changing our story a little).

“Really? Hmm.. In Zimbabwe, I taught a thousand people in one village to accept the word of Jesus our savior. With a single sermon.”

“Yes. The Efe have been Christians for generations, thanks to the mission up north of here. You passed it on your way down. There used to be white missionaries there, and in those days, everyone became a Christian!”

“Really?” … a sense of disappointment creeping into his voice. “In Zambia, I started a food program. To receive the food, you had to be a young boy. By giving the food only to the young boys, the food would get distributed evenly across all the households.”

“Right. Everybody. For miles in every direction. The whole region. Already Christian.”

“Oh. Well, can we go and visit a Pygmy Village. In that village in Zambia, I had a rule. If you behaved, you got a specially made token … a coin I had minted in Oklahoma, like a subway token, at a trophy shop. They had crosses on them. Every time you were good you got one or two tokens. Then, twice a week the young boys would line up and turn their tokens over to me and they would get a bag of food.”

“Ah… right, OK. We could visit an Efe camp. We don’t call them Pygmies. They are the Efe. They don’t live in villages.”

“The Africans are all like children, even when they are adults. But if you set up a structure for them, they’ll follow it. You wouldn’t believe the size of the Boa Constrictor I saw in Malawi. It was twenty feet long. A certain amount of discipline is important, and that is what I taught the boys in Zambia. Great, let’s go to the Pygmy Village”

“They live in a camp. There’s an Efe Camp nearby. This gentleman here is from that camp, he’ll show us.”

… So, we spent the next hour in the bush, cutting our way through vines and undergrowth, traipsing through swamps and streams, climbing over steep and muddy banks, and cutting through more undergrowth. You see, the Efe place their camps, most of the time, on an easily accessible trail connecting the camp to the road or a nearby village. This particular camp was a five minute walk, across the street and through a meadow and then into secondary forest growth for about 50 meters. But we took the long way. The very long, rugged way. We felt it essential that Great White Boy Lover not know the route to anything in our project area….

Now, covered with mud and the ubiquitous rotted plant matter that rains continuously on passers by in the rain forest, soaked with dew and sweat, we arrived in the “Pygmy Village.”

“Have a seat” I said, handing Great White and each of his two companions (the servants were left behind in our research camp) three sticks. As they held the sticks, one of the Efe cut three pieces of vine off of a nearby tree, and in seconds, fashioned each into a sturdy ring about 8 inches in diameter. By that time I had picked my own vine-ring off the roof of a nearby hut, and had placed my own three sticks within the ring, and made a chair on which to sit.

The Forest Folding Chair is a hoot. Three sticks through a ring, at an angle. The first stick holds up the second, the second the third, the third the first. There is nothing soft to sit on (though you can add cloth or a pile of leaves) but they keep you up out of the mud and above the ants. However, getting the seat to not fall down, and sitting in it without causing it to crash, is an art that takes some time to learn.

After considerable fooling around and a great deal of help from the Efe men, who suppressed their laugh while the women and children ROTF at the clumsiness of the Great White Retinue, all were seated. Great White Missionary proceeded to ask me questions to ask the Efe, and mostly I simply relayed the questions and answers back and forth. They were about hunting, about snakes, about food, and about god. The god questions ….. I just made up the answers so that the missionary would be assured that everyone here was already a Christian.

As we spoke, one of the Efe men unwrapped a small bundle of marijuana and broke it to little pieces, putting aside the few seeds that were in the buds, and cut the leaves and flowers into tiny pieces using his arrow, allowing the bits to fall on a flat sheet of metal that had been sitting by the fire. Meanwhile, a different man took a leave of tobacco and placed it right near the fire where it would dry very thoroughly and quickly. Just as the tobacco was starting to emit a bit of smoke, he pulled it away from the fire, powdered it by crushing it in his fist, and added it to the marijuana to make a rather potent mix. The mix was held near the fire a bit longer to dry it further.

A third Efe man took a large plantain plant leaf from the roof of a nearby hut where it had been stored earlier. No one had noticed that this man actually had cut the plantain leaf, about eight feet long, from a plant right next to where we were sitting at the Ngodingodi research camp, and walked off with it at the same time the rest of us headed out for the Efe camp. This man walked directly to the camp rather than taking the long way, and was in the Efe camp, having a nap, at the time of our arrival.

Anyway, he stripped the fleshy leafy part of the leaf away, leaving only the stem that runs down the middle. He then took two strips of palm ‘wood’ that had been fastened together to make a 10 foot long stick, and skilfully ran this through the middle of the plantain leaf’s stem the long way, making it into a giant hollowed-out pipe stem. He then cut a platform into the thick end, and produced a small clay pipe bowl and set it onto the platform, pushing it into the stem, so that the hole of the clay pipe lined up with the hole he had made down the middle.

And thus, he produced an eight foot long pot pipe.

The men then loaded the pipe up with the pot/tobacco mixture. One man sat at one end of the pipe and another and at the other end, eight feet apart. The man at the clay-pie end dropped a small piece of burning wood from the fire onto the mixture while the other man took one huge toke, started gasping and coughing, pounded his open palm on the juncture of his upper arm and chest making a loud popping sound, and shouted “Hojeeee!!!! Mardo!!!!” and passed the pipe to a nearby woman, who did the same thing except the part about yelling “Hojee” (inside joke.)

Thusly, the pipe was refilled and passed around, one filling getting two or three tokes (and one toke per person). Every now and then, someone would cut a bit off the mouth-end of the pipe and discard it. If the pipe needed to be brought to someone sitting farther away than nine or ten feet (the distance that the pipe could be simply passed hand to hand because it was so long) then a child was called over and told to bring the pipe to the next person. In this way, minors were implicated in the practice of smoking pot. Some but not all of the teenagers, who must have looked to Great White’s western eyes (despite his experience with… young boys …) to be a few years younger than they were (as young Efe often do given their size) also smoked.

The young son of Great White had his head bowed and was praying. Mom was wide eyed and … looked like she wanted to join in. Great White himself was turning red and his questions got increasingly incoherent as he obtained a reasonable contact high.

When the pipe eventually came to me, I took a medium size toke but left a lot (but not all) of the smoke in my mouth, and immediately blew it out. I ‘pretended’ to cough, and gave Great White a side long look, saying “I have to do this. Part of the research. But I never inhale…”

For his part, Grinker took a totally fake toke (he never smoked) but pretended to become totally stoned, rolled his eyes back into his head, and fell backwards off his chair onto a midden of dead leaves and cassava shavings.

~~~~

Later on, back at the research camp, Great White and his fellow travelers silently packed up the truck. Only part of the promised bacon wad handed over, and this was given to the Efe who accommodated us. The pot smoking experience had totally blown their minds and they were not going to recover from this. The ‘fact’ that these Efe were Christians was not in accord with what this Oklahoman Evangelical could reconcile with their clearly Satanic behavior. I wondered what stories he would weave to turn this experience into something he could somehow take credit for. He never got to do his hunting (… in fact, I had told him that this was not hunting season. Which is a very, very funny concept …) so maybe he would make something up about hunting.

Great White was an ignoramus. He was a liar. He was a pedophile. He was a swindler. He was not a typical missionary, because most of the missionaries were not rogue like he was, but rather, part of a larger and highly organized effort. But he embodied much of the hypocrisy institutionalized in the larger organizations, personified it, made it real, palpable, and more overtly despicable.

A few months later, I ran into Andre, the merchant in town who suggested this visit to begin with. As usual, we retired to the back of Andre’s store for some Greek coffee. I told him the story of the Great White Visit. Andre was embarrassed.

“I won’t sent you any one like that again,” he promised.

“I know, my friend. I know that.”

¹We usually spoke in a locally understood language even when speaking to each other, as part of our own language training. The idea was to use English only when absolutely necessary. Really, I should be telling you this whole story in Kinguana, but that would chagiza you.

²A derivation of “The pig of the forest that lives in our house among us, it’s flesh” if I recall correctly. It would have been easy to say in KiSwahili but for some reason he was saying it in KiLese.