For several years, in the 1980s and early 90s, I lived in Zaire (now Congo) for several months out of each year (generally between May and January, roughly), and for much of that time I was in the Ituri with the Lese and Efe. During that time, I spent much of the time in the forest with the Efe (very few of the researches on that long term multidisciplinary project did that — most spent their time with the Lese for various reasons).

To go from our study site to the grocery store (which was not really a grocery store because they did not exist in that part of Zaire, but a city with markets) was about a week’s trip or more. Only a few days of that was driving, the rest fixing the broken truck, doing the shopping, etc. So, one did this infrequently. There was no local market during my time there, though one opened up 10 clicks away for a while, at which one might or might not be able to buy a chicken or a yam, if you showed up early.

I (and this pertains to most of my colleagues as well, only a few of us would be at the site at a time) would buy sacks of rice and beans and other long term food items in the city, and carefully curate them at the base camp, a small village constructed of wattle and daub leaf-roofed huts and outhouses. When I went to the forest just to live with or observe the Efe, I would bring the exact amount of food I would need to survive if all I did was feed myself. This way my presence would not affect the Efe’s food budget. But, this is a sharing culture and it would have been very bad for me to just eat that food. I feely shared my food with my fellow camp members, and they shared their food, and my food was almost exactly the same as their local food (rice was grown there) except I would have beans and they are not local. Otherwise, the same.

This meant that I ate what they ate.

Other times, I would hire Efe and maybe one Lese to go with me to the forest to carry out research. I’d be careful to hire them for limited amounts of time to not disrupt their lives too much, but there was very little difference between them working for me and, say, getting honey during honey season. I would only ask them to work with me for a few hours a day and they would otherwise forage. On these trips, I brought more food, for them, because our geographic location and the work we were doing interfered with their normal food getting activities, so I made up for that. But still, during these times we ate plenty of forest foods.

So, what do the Efe (and their Lese compatriot) eat?

Locally, the plant diet is insufficient nutritionally, and often, children are undernourished. There is a hunger season during which the plants from the forest and gardens are rare or absent at the same time, and this is often the death season. No one dies form starving, really (though that apparently can happen) but they have another dangerous disease, and the lack of food may put an ill individual over the top. During one bad hungers season, a small family attempted mass suicide, and mostly succeeded.

Locally, there is no beef, or as is the case a couple of hundred clicks away in most directions, commercially harvested fish. They have goats but the are ceremonial and seem to be never eaten. The Lese have chickens, a few, and they are eaten now and then. The wild animal foods they eat are incredibly important. Without that, they would be in very bad shape.

The most common animals they eat, as in day to day and mundane, are a form of antelope called the Blue Duiker, and monkeys, usually Mangabeys. During a certain season they eat a fair umber of another animal, like but not exactly a duiker, called a water Cheverotain. But since food supply is so unpredictable, they are always on the lookout, and they eat everything. A song bird or bat that flies too close may be batted down with a machete, a Honey Badger that stumbles up on a group of resting Efe may be chased own, an Elephant Shrew that happens on a camp will be dispatched by an archer and cooked up. The only time I ever saw the Efe not go after an animal that happened to show up is when a small herd of elephants came along, and the Efe made a lot of noise to chase them off, while at the same time making plans to hide in the nearby hide-from-the-elephant trees (yes, they have them.) And snakes. Something odd going on there with snakes (see below).

One of the focal points of my research was to look at how animals reacted to the Efe’s presence, and it is striking. Since the Efe will kill and eat almost anything they encounter, most of the animals are very careful to avoid the Efe, and even the Efe’s habitually used trails.

There is a certain amount of elephant hunting. Pygmies, generally, are the African elephant hunters, and apparently, have been so for a very long time. The importance of elephant is very under-appreciated by most experts. The data show that most of the food the Efe eat is plant food, and animal food makes up a percentage of their diet typical for tropical or subtropical African hunter gatherers. But those data never include elephant. I’ve estimated that the total amount of elephant meat they eat over medium periods of time, left to their own, is about the same as all the other meat combined. This happens because when someone does kill an elephant (a rare event compared to the daily killing of a duiker or other more common mammal), everyone from everywhere shows up and gorges on that meat for a few weeks.

So, even though most researchers would classify elephant as uncommon in their diet and therefor not a major contributor to the diet, they’ve simply got that wrong. It is a big deal.

Beyond that, the range of animals is huge, because the number of species native to the area is huge. Oddly, the Efe I was with (and these were more than one distinct group) didn’t seem to eat snakes, tough I know that others do. These Efe also often have a particular species of snake as their totem animal, and you don’t eat your totem animal. So, maybe that is the reason.

Because Efe live the life they live, one without the privilege of access to unlimited supplies of cattle flesh, swine meat, domestic birds, and commercially caught or raised fish, they have a wide dietary niche. Because they live in a remote part of the African rain forest, this list includes a lot of animals many may have never even heard of, or that most regard as exotic, though they are very common there. They live a life where the plant foods often fail them, and collectively do not provide a sufficiently nutritious diet, so they do not have the privilege of eschewing meat, and in fact, perhaps with the knowledge that meat is the real hunger-killer in their environment, they prefer to spend as much time as they can chewing meat.

And I spent a lot of time sharing their culture and ecology with them, and in so doing, had the privilege of getting much closer to truly experiencing another culture than most ever get. Close enough, in fact, to know that I wasn’t even close, and knowing that is a privilege the dilettante missionary or subscriber to National Geo can not have.

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.

These problems may be overstated. Referring to someone by a physical trait isn’t necessarily considered negative. African Americans are Blacks and Euro-Americans are Whites. But even in these contexts, these references to physical traits can be problematic, perhaps depending on what is meant or who uses the word. “Black is Beautiful” (you might have to be older to remember that phrase). One of my best friends calls herself a “Black Girl.” On the other hand, Donald Trump says he has “a great relationship with the Blacks” and when I’m in South Africa and I hear someone use the term “The Blacks” I become wary, because the next thing the person says may not be very nice. Still, it is not universally the case that a reference to physical features is negative. (I should also mention that in Francophone contexts, “Pygmy” is considered superior to another term often used, “Negrito.”)

The term “Pygmy” as used in biology is unfortunate and also causes confusion. I’ve met people who thought that “Pygmy hippos” were hippos that lived where Pygmies live, but ironically the pygmy hippos live in West Africa only and the Pygmy people live in Central Africa only. I don’t want to go into some of the confusion I’ve encountered between “Pygmy chimps” and Pygmy people. One way to solve this problem, of course, is to change the animal names. These are common names (though the word “Pygmy” is sometimes the root for the Latin binomial which is harder to change) and they can be discarded or altered. In fact, that has happened with the pygmy chimps, which are never called that any more for this reason (and the fact that they are not really smaller than regular chimps). You probably know of them as bonobos.

The real problem is probably the use of the word “pygmy” as a derogatory term, including its use as a slur of someone’s intelligence.

This sort of problem is widespread. There are many cases of people who’s “name” is somehow considered negative. One of the more interesting examples is the term used to refer to the traditionally foraging people of southern Africa, including the Ju/’hoansi and Baswara people, but also many other groups. The two terms of concern are “San” and “Bushmen.” The former is said to be a negative term applied to these folks by their cattle keeping neighbors who looked down on them. It may mean something like “wild.” It is part of the phrase “Khoisan” which relates to the term “Khoi Khoi.” Put simply, San are foragers and Khoi Khoi (or just Khoi) are herders, but otherwise the people referred to by these terms share languages and other aspects of their culture, and are physically similar. Khoisan (Khoi+San) refers to all of these folks together. (These terms are mainly South African and older, used in the 17th century and onwards and not used so much recently.) The term “Bushmen” also means “wild” and that is considered an inappropriate term as well.

During the 1980s, when various anthropologists were working with groups of San/Bushmen in Namibia and Botswana to help them organize politically, they (the San/Bushmen) of that area decided to call themselves “Bushmen.” There were two reasons for this. The primary reason is that the word “Bushmen” was widely known and they wanted to use a term that everyone would recognize as they strove for political and cultural recognition and improved status. The second reason is that by this time it was cool to be a Bushman. Bushmen are Beautiful, if you will. So Bushmen is the correct term in that area of Namibia and Botswana. But, to the south in South Africa, the term “Bushman” never caught on among the politically thoughtful. There, “San” was considered to be a better word. Many of these folks adopted the term “San” in South Africa, while their distant relatives to the north eschewed the term. And that’s the simple version of the story. There are many different cultural groups with different languages living in different parts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa who prefer their more local name such as Barwa or Sho or other terms.

So, in the case of the San/Bushmen (let your eyes settle on either of those words depending on if you are from Botswana or South Africa!) one part of the solution was to ask the people what they want. This has been done with the Pygmies to some extent. I did it myself. I have had this conversation with Efe people on many occasions. Efe is the term used, by themselves, for Pygmies that live in a certain part of the Ituri Forest in the Congo. The Efe are both the largest and smallest Pygmies. They live over a larger area of Africa than any other group, and there are probably more Efe than any other group of Pygmies. Since Pygmy stature (they are indeed short) is of such great interest, every group of Pygmies has been repeatedly measured by anthropologists. So, we know that the Efe are the shortest of the Pygmies. Largest (in area) and smallest (in stature).

A local term for the Efe and other Pygmies of the Ituri is “Bambuti” (Singular: Mbuti). The Pygmies that the famous anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived with and wrote about called themselves Mbuti, and they live to the south of the Efe, speak a different language, and have some other cultural differences. Having said that, I did some work in the area of overlap between Efe and Mbuti and the distinction isn’t perfectly abrupt or consistent. Anyway, the non-Efe people of the area often use the word “Bambuti” for the Efe (and the Mbuti) but some people consider “Bambuti” to be a little derogatory. But not everyone thinks that.

The Efe I’ve spoken to know the term Pygmée (the French for Pygmy) and they don’t regard it as derogatory. They never use that word to refer to themselves, however, which makes it inappropriate for local use. The problem is, though, that just like the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia and Botswana recognized, if we want to speak of these folks in a broader context–in classrooms or among those interested in human rights in the area, etc.–we are forced to use the word Pygmy so people have a clue what we are talking about. And, as far as I know, the Efe don’t particularly mind.

I suppose it is more important to be respectful than to speak respectfully.

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!

“So, have you found anything interesting?” which is a standard question to which the answer was always “no” … we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. “So, what to the Pygmies think of your research.” And so on.

I remember that during our second dinner, the fourth or fifth question was this:

“So, since Radiocarbon dating has been proved to not work, how do we really know that the earth is billions of years old?”

Well, that was not one of the standard questions paleoanthropologists like me usually hear, but it is a standard question often asked by creationists. And since Mary and Joseph were pretty hard core and traditional Christians, I could have guessed that they would also be creationists.

So I answered the question and the conversation moved on.

At the next dinner, six weeks or so later, there was more chatter, and more questions, and then one of those creationist questions popped up. I think it was about Piltdown.

“Since Piltdown was a total forgery, how do we know that all the other fossils are not also forgeries?”

I do not know how many times I had dinner with Joseph and Mary. Once or twice each time I stayed at their mission house, in their guest room for rent, and I probably stayed there four times over two years. So there were about five or six dinners. And for all of then but the first, which is when Mary found out that I studied Human Evolution, there were questions like this.

The last time I stayed in their house, things were different. Grinker and I had come into town, I think with a third colleague, and we could not stay at Bwana Ndege’s home (the inn was full, as it were) so we were assigned to the Mission. However, Joseph and Mary were gone. Their stint in the field was over and they were now back in the US, with their kids, probably not ever to return to Zaire again. Or at least not to this mission station. Such is the way of the missionaries; Other than the catholics, who may well stay for an entire life in one spot, the Evangelical missionaries were rotated in and out at various time scales ranging from weeks to a couple of years. Joseph and Mary had stayed a relatively long time as it was.

In fact, no one had been assigned to replace them at this particular station, so we were sent over to Andre’s place first. Andre, who really had little to do with the missions other than the fact that he was a neighbor and, through his retail store, supplied them with goods, was holding the key to the mission house. So we got the key from Andre and went over to the house to fend for ourselves.

Naturally, we had to poke around a bit. We needed to find bedding, pillows, to check out the plumbing to see if the water was on, and so on. The house was mostly deserted, with most of the furniture with which we were familiar removed, and virtually no evidence of Joseph and Mary themselves remained. All personal items were gone.

But there was one room in the back of the house that was of interest. I had noticed Mary frequently going in and out of this room on our visits. I assumed there was some basic household materiel stored there, or something, because she would go in there often enough, even during dinner. So, curious, I went and had a look.

It was a small bedroom converted to a library. There was a modest set of shelves about one third with books. Most were Readers’ Digest anthologies and that sort of thing, there were bibles in various languages, and some language learning textbooks specific to the region.

Then, there was this other book. This was a well worn, dog-eared volume sitting on a shelf more or less by itself, just below my eye level. It has numerous bits of paper sticking out of it, being used as bookmarks.

And the title was: “How to talk to evolutionists.”

Hmm…

So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.

“We have a new tradition we’d like you to participate in,” she said. Her husband glanced at her with an obvious lack of understanding. I guessed he had forgotten about the new tradition and was going to keep his mouth shut for the moment.

“We now read a special bible passage at every dinner, to reinforce the children’s learning.” As she said this, she reached behind her and pulled a bible off a side table, and opened it to a previously marked page.

“Rich, I wonder if you would read this aloud for us?”

What can you do? Hey, even to this day, as a practicing atheist with an activist agenda, I’ll read bits and pieces of the bible at whichever Jewish holiday it is that my in laws do that at. Nobody thinks anything of it. Surely, there was a bit of irony here, in that they picked Grinker, who is Jewish, to read from the New Testament, but whatever. What harm could that be, right?

“Oh, OK,” Grinker said after he took the book. “No problem.”

And so Grinker read the text, and a few sentences in it became clear that this was one of those bible passages that had a lot to say about the Jews. The Jews were bad, the Jews could not be trusted, the Jews needed to convert, and so on and so forth. I don’t remember the passage, it was probably from Matthew or maybe one of those especially anti-Semitic bits from John. When it was over, Grinker was, to me, visibly disturbed by having been asked to read this, and possibly even disturbed that such offensive rambling was even part of a ‘religious’ text that he was undoubtedly unfamiliar with. But he kept a smile on his face and this was not brought up again. Joseph himself looked rather embarrassed as well. It was now obvious to us that Mary had created this ruse of a bible reading after saying grace. She lied, and she offended a guest. She was dissing the Jew, or at least, dissing his presumed religion. A victory, I suppose, would have been if Grinker asked to be baptized at the next possible opportunity.

It is true that there was a great deal of variation across the missionaries in their beliefs as well as their practices. Those who were less radical about the religion and more involved in the work they were doing, however, had to keep up the front of being devout. This was, essentially, a cult and they had to maintain a certain level of adherence to doctrine. It is always the case, internationally, that pilots are treated differently. They do not follow the same rules as other people, they are left more on their own, yet when they break certain rules they are punished more severely. For instance, a pilot who is caught bringing any kind of materiel, no matter how innocuous, across a border without proper papers, may lose his licence or at least his job. This was the case with a pilot who would bring VHS tapes of recent movies from town to town in Zaire and back to Belgium, rotating them among a group of people who shared ownership in them. So it was also true with the missionary pilots. They kept more to themselves, and although they would always pray before takeoff (and sometimes during the flight) they were more pragmatic and appeared less religious than the other missionaries.

The Africans who partook in the mission life, living on these compounds, also varied in their level of indoctrination. One man that I ended up working with quite a bit had been a long time resident of one of the mission stations, and had the status of “teacher.” But on the side he was a trader in black market goods, and had served as a mercenary as well as being a soldier in Idi Amin’s army. These were all things that got him in trouble with the mission once they discovered them. He was required to move off station, though his wife and children could remain if they wanted to.

For every white missionary on a mission station, there are probably several dozen Africans, but judging from what I’ve seen in the more remote stations that were not really full communities, or the urban stations that were satellites to the larger extended ‘villages,’ the ratio of African to Foreigner needed to sustain the middle class lifestyle the missionaries enjoyed was perhaps as low as six to one. The duties of the African workers included cooking (though “madam” was the actual cook, there were many cooking related tasks to carry out, including of course cooking for the staff), cleaning, maintaining equipment like the generators, serving as a guard, rebuilding roofs, teaching Madam, Master and the children a local language, and so on.

I do not know many details of the system, but I got the impression that these workers were being observed and to some extent tested on a regular basis, and if as individuals showed themselves to be literate, devout, and well behaved, they would be asked (allowed?) to do “pastoral work.” This meant going among the masses visiting the sick, reading bible passages to people, and so on.

Most important is this: The Africans were taught a version of the religion that was the most strict of all. Different Americans, Brits, Australians and so on would come and go, with different levels of involvement in the religious aspects of the mission. Pilots were pilots who happened to be protestant. Electricians and other technicians were experts on needed services but not necessarily particularly religious. If the missionaries were the Pilgrims, the others were the crew on the Mayflower that made the voyage happen. But the interface between the community of missionaries and the African community was primarily Madam, and to a lesser extent Master (or “Bwana”) and at this interface only the strictest teachings were carried out. As a result, the Africans who carried out the pastoral work were the most conservative of all members of the communities, and when these individuals rose to prominence now and then, their conservatism had an influence.

About 15 years ago, the English Anglican church, which has missionized in this manner since the days of Livingstone, held the first international meeting in many years, and at that meeting the number of African born, African trained bishops who were of this highly conservative ilk was larger than any other faction of bishops. At that meeting, the bishops voted all sorts of policy changes and moved the Anglican church, worldwide, towards a position of modern conservatism that would be envied by the board of directors at Oral Roberts college.

The chickens. They came home. And roosted.

Actual missionaries

Frankly, I think that the world of sceptics and non believers looks a bit asinine for not making much more of an effort to replace these positive effects in a secular way and to give the missionaries a run for their money.

One of the reasons that I’ve written these essays is because I was asked to address this issue by Mike Haubrich. Mike is the producer of Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio. The idea was that I would write a few blog posts on my experiences with missionaries, and then we would do an Atheist Talk Radio spot on the topic. As it turns out, this coming Sunday’s show will be the last Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio instalment. After this, the show will be off the air forever. So don’t miss the show! Mike is producing the upcoming show, and Stephanie Zvan will be conducting the interview.

In other words, you have no clue, most likely. And not only do you have no clue, but most of the bad stuff happening to these people is your fault. And you’re probably never going to get a clue. In fact, you are going to spend your energy denying that this is all your fault instead of just doing something to undo what your civilization has done.

The reason you not likely to figure this out, and that you are most likely to keep doing the wrong this, is because the reality that you are willfully misunderstanding is actually quite complicated, but you’ve been trained by your culture and society to view Africa and Africans as rather monolithic and simple.

These posts on missionaries don’t help much in that regard. In these posts, the Africans themselves are not really featured, and though they are far from one dimensional (do look and compare the different individuals mentioned) since these posts are not directly about them, there is just not much there. But I do hope that in reading these seven essays that you will come to understand one thing: When the missionary is showing the slide show about the great work the missionaries are doing, whether you are seeing this in church or on the web or at the local community center or public school, and the missionary is asking you for your money to help do more, please do write a check.

And send it to the UN. Or to the Ituri Forest People’s fund. Or some place, but not the missions.

Here are links to the missionary posts:

On a Mission from God

Forget the Maginot Line, What About the Beer Line?

Our Research Camp as a Mission Station

The Great White Missionary

Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, “Whose are these people, anyway?”

Don’t be a Jew

The good book

Now, you have to understand that Zaire is to Afro Pop music what New Orleans is to Jazz. Or more so. Actually, Afro Pop music simply emanated from Zaire and all other contributing regions were satellites, back in the 1980s. So, at these clubs and taverns, it was Afro Pop being played, and you never, ever heard Bob Marley or Michael Jackson’s music. But their faces were always there, and everyone who lived in the mainstream Urban Congolese culture knew their names and understood their significance.

But, as I said, the actual artistic products of these two musicians were not necessarily known to most people directly. Especially the children who generally were not allowed in the taverns and clubs.

So one day, Bwana Ndege decided to fix that.

Bwana Ndege is a friend of mine who hails from Europe but who has lived in Zaire/Congo since the 1950s. Originally, Bwana Ndege had the job of book keeper on a plantation, and owing to the standard technological time warp experienced by this region of Central Africa, he kept the books with a quill pen. He kept the quill pen behind his ear. So the kids started to call him “Mr. Bird.” Now, go look up Mr. Bird in your handy dandy English-KiSwahili dictionary and you’ll get: Bwana Ndege.

Over time, Bwana Ndege became the owner of several plantations, married a local girl, and eventually gave up the plantations and moved to the city to run a safari company. Since his safari company was heavily involved in logistics, and he had an interest in the area of our research project (his plantations were in that general area) and for various other reasons, people on our research project in Zaire had a lot of interaction with Bwana Ndege. I stayed in his very comfortable home many times, and spent many a dinner there, followed by an evening in the living room sipping something or another, and every now and then depending on availability, watching an old movie on the VHS tape machine with Bwana Ndege, his wife, a few friends including local ex patriots and the occasional missionary.

There were also kids on the compound. These were children, grand children, nieces and nephews of several people in the household, including Bwana Ndege’s wife, his company’s managers, the cooking staff, his sister in law, and so on. I never had a very good idea of who these kids were exactly. But when the movies were on, the kids were gone. They did not live (most of the time) in the compound, but rather, at a different location, so by the end of dinner time, they would be home somewhere. We only tended to see them during the after school, pre-dinner period of the day.

So one day, Bwana Ndege sauntered into the living room were several of us were trying to stay cool while waiting for our truck to get fixed, and said, “Look at this!” as he placed something in the VHS player.

Moments later, the music video “Thriller” came on the screen.

“Some of the kids were asking who Michael Jackson is” he said. “Most of these kids have never even seen the TV working before. This will be fun!”

Later that evening, the children were rounded up and brought to the compound and into the living room. The atmosphere was festive. They knew they were going to see something on the TV. All these kids lived in households with no TV (or for that matter, electricity) but since they had links to this middle class household, they had some idea what a TV was, and in truth, most of them must have seen a glimpse of it now and then. But I remind you, they were here during the post school pre dinner phase of the day. If you know anything about these remote jungle cities, you’ll know this: That is when the municipal electricity is generally turned off. It is, in fact, nap time. So generally speaking, this was probably the first time most of these kids were able to sit down in a room with a TV and actually watch it. And what they were going to watch was Jackson’s over the top ground breaking music video, Thriller.

It was dark. Bwana Ndege turned off most of the lights so it was darker. He put in the tape. The machine made funny noises for a while. Then the music video for Thriller came on.

Some of the little ones seemed ready to cry. There was a great deal of shouting and general utterances of amazement. No one’s eyes left the television screen again. All of the children, and some of the adults who had seen it, were totally freaked out.

Then it was over, then there was silence. Then the kids started to yell.

Mara ingine! Mara ingine! Tena tena tena tena!

… And what do you suppose that meant, dear reader?

Remember thriller? Allow me to refresh your memory.

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.