A Story by Randy Olson

Ituri Forest Pygmies | Who Rules the Forest? National Geographic Magazine

“Pygmy” refers to any human group whose adult males reach less than 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches) in height. They can be found in many places, but the highest density anywhere in the world exists in the Ituri Rainforest in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly called Zaire).

Pygmies are the “canary in the coal mine” for forest ecology in the last forests of Africa. As the forest goes, so go the Pygmies.

Most people believe Africa is full of Tarzan-style jungles. The truth is that there is only one strip left in the middle of the entire continent. The most pristine forest in that strip is the Ituri.

Pygmies are nomadic hunter-gatherers who rely on a healthy forest to …

Ituri Forest Pygmies | Who Rules the Forest? National Geographic Magazine

By Randy Olson

Pygmies are the “canary in the coal mine” for forest ecology in the last forests of Africa. As the forest goes, so go the Pygmies.

Most people believe Africa is full of Tarzan-style jungles. The truth is that there is only one strip left in the middle of the entire continent. The most pristine forest in that strip is the Ituri.

Pygmies are nomadic hunter-gatherers who rely on a healthy forest to survive. They have no claim to their own home territory, however, because the colonial Belgians assigned land rights only to sedentary groups. Pygmies have hunting rights in association with the sedentary Bantus, and an age-old relationship that is not just commercial, but social and cultural.

Unfortunately, other groups moving into the area for resources don’t have similar symbiotic relationships and are hiring the Pygmies to cut down their own forest.

Ironically, instability is the main factor keeping this jungle healthy. The Kleptocracies that we are familiar with in Africa are devolving into Khakistocracies (rule by AK-47). During the Cold War, Western colonial powers propped up dictators like Mobutu because he wasn’t a Communist. After the Cold War ended, outside support waned and big countries in Africa are unable to control their own borders.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo and some of its neighbors are run by a loose amalgam of warlords with minimal centralized control. These warlords have been fighting around the Ituri for decades, and this ring of instability is the only thing that keeps the outside hordes from coming across the Albertine Rift, one of Africa’s most important areas of biodiversity in need of protection.

There are roughly 300 people per square kilometer on the east side of the rift and 3 per square kilometer on the west. Even with the instability, it won’t stay this way because the demand for resources is too great. Outsiders mining and smuggling gold and Coltan, another rare metal, are already exploiting the area and its people. Greater security along the Albertine rift will allow hordes to flow into the Ituri in search of its resources.

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A blind Pygmy boy is not excluded from the nKumbi manhood training. He learns survival skills in the forest and takes part in all the rituals over a five month period until the group is initiated and boys become men. When the boys run along the trails he does also, with his hands on the back of the boy in front of him. Like the other boys, he is whipped every morning which is believed to make them tough to survive in the Ituri Forest.
Pygmies are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who rely on a healthy forest for their livelihood. They have no claim to their own home territory, however, because the colonial Belgians assigned land rights only to sedentary groups
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek: Few countries in the world have collapsed as disastrously by the wayside – regressed so starkly into pre-industrial ruin – as Congo. Picked clean during three decades of misrule by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, then gutted by six years of civil war that ended, unconvincingly, in 2002, it is the shell-shocked colossus of Central Africa – a nation the size of Western Europe that seems to have sleepwalked into some feverish dream of the post-apocalypse.
Nowhere is the decline as evident, on such bitter display, as on the roads that span the country’s Wild East, a jungle bigger than Texas where the fighting has never really stopped.
What words can be uttered about those roads? That, before setting off, you must embrace your loved ones as though you are embarking across some uncharted ocean?
Clogged by mud, cratered by neglect, haunted by militias, and strangled by bush, they slither hundreds of miles through the largest rain forest after the Amazon, passing the mildewed wreckage of the modern age. (Factories like Mayan ruins, coffee plantations gone wild, towns with trees growing from their roofs.) These raw, punishing tracks are the skeletons of the Trans-African Highway system built by the colonial Belgians. They are the worst roads on the world.
I depart the frontier town of Beni at dawn on the back of a motorbike. The driver’s name is Willy. He is a stoic in gumboots. His reflexes – his sense of balance – are things of beauty. They have the uncanny, inhuman perfection of feats conducted by idiot savants. Still, this journey into the Ituri Forest, a distance of merely 180 miles, takes eleven hours.
The road is not a road. It is a funnel. A Ho-Chi-Min Trail of survival. It absorbs all the marketable goods for thousands of square miles around. Yet there are no motor vehicles! Since the rainy season began, it has become impassable to machines. Instead, as far as the eye can see, its gluey mud ruts are churned by columns of traders who push their laden bicycles, head down, sweating, through clouds of swirling butterflies.
Siriake Kasereka wears a faded t-shirt that says Dare to Dream. His task: heaving thirty gallons of gasoline from the Ugandan border to the decaying hinterland city of Kisangani. This outing will take him twenty days. He will cover about 800 miles – roughly the distance between Chicago and Atlanta. For this he will earn $50.
“You learn to read the roads,” Kasereka says in a squeezed voice. He explains it while pausing under a tree:
Steady bicycle traffic – life is good, peace prevails.
Knots of angry cyclists stopped at villages, doing nothing – a yellow warning light. Military checkpoints and shakedowns ahead.
Deserted roads – hide. War is coming: possibly even approaching around the next bend, in the form of half-naked rebels smeared with blood and toothpaste. (Toothpaste sticks despite the rain and sweat.)
“Ah, if only Isabella Rosellini knew our situation,” an Italian priest tells me at a mission station on the edge of the Ituri. The padre, a veteran of Congo’s chaos, explains that Rosellini, the glamorous international film star and daughter of Ingrid Bergman, donates to African reconstruction projects.
I have stopped at the mission to rest and eat. I am almost too exhausted to speak. Sore-assed, I can barely sit at the priest’s table. “Rosellini could help fix our road,” he goes on, “if only she knew about it.” But his eyes betray him. He stares wistfully into his pasta. Because, of course, she doesn’t know.

Pygmy Girl is Indentured Servant to Take Care of Bantu Children
Kenge is possibly the most famous pygmy. His daughter was traded off to a wealthy Bantu family when the father had a good job with GIC and his wife needed help with the kids. During the war, the family moved to Beni, because it was a little more secure than Epulu… they brought their pygmy with them. She does various chores around the house… laundry, sweeping, mopping, washing children… anything that is necessary.
From my journal:
I photograph one last situation… a pygmy girl that was “given” to a Bantu household when that wealthy Bantu family needed help with their young children… these are sad photographs of her washing the kids and mopping the floors… the lowest caste… the indentured servants… It is even more ironic that she is the offspring of probably the most famous pygmy—Kenge, the main character of “The Forest People” by the second white settler in the Ituri… the book is told thru Kenge’s eyes and it is the book the Harts were reading in the 70’s when they were in the Peace Corps… possibly the reason they came and worked where they are… Kenge is now a sad drunk and his family is giving away their children to work for the Bantus… It’s hard not to think that this is just the way things will be for these people…
I call Larry at Mission Air to charter the plane to Entebbe… It’s time to leave… I’ve given everything away that I can… Backpacks, GPS’s, water filters, etc… Paluku is truly sad to see me go… What a window into a place though… a truly African, wonderful experience… who knows how long this place will last.
From a conversation with Terese Hart, Scientist and Conservationist:
The war is about land and is thus irrelevant to the Pygmies who have no land rights. They will be losers no matter who wins.
Their buffer to the war and to outside pressures in general is the forest. But they do not own the forest.
The highest density of pygmies anywhere in the world is the Ituri forest and the Okapi Faunal Reserve, which is propped up only by management by international agencies like WCS. They pay the salaries of the guards along with CI and GIS and WWF and they provide the infrastructure. They even pay the head of the DRC governmental agency ICCN in Kinshasa.
There is a perfect storm of forces surrounding the Pygmies and their forest. On the eastern side of the Albertine Rift there is a population density of 300 per square KM. On the Pygmies side in DRC there is a density of 3 per square KM. The only thing that keeps the hordes at bay is insecurity. But even with insecurity, they are forcing their way in from the east. From the western side are huge red zones of logging concessions. And scattered about are mineral concerns—red zones that leapfrog linear expansion, creating pockets of deforestation randomly around the reserve depending on availability of gold, diamonds and coltan. A watershed that runs through the Ituri forest has eroded the hotly contested mountains of gold around Bunia. Artisanal gold miners create extractive outposts that then grow like cancer in the pygmies forest.
The people of the mountains who are moving into the forest, the Nande, do not see the forest they see the land. They know only the wealth hidden in the ground and gravel of the forest’s streams. Where wealth springs from the ground, mud-walled Nande shops spring up and the forest is cleared for gardens and further expansion.
These people know the wealth of the forest only when it is cut, sawn and packed into trucks across the border to Uganda. The Nande are not alone. The budu from the north and the Bashi from the south, and others join the Nande advance on the standing forest seeking to cut it, to tame it. They know the cultivated wealth that can be coaxed from the soil.
Poverty is a differential not an absolute. My neighbors are rich and we are poor because my neighbors have two cooking pots and we have only one, because they have turned two hectares of forest into beans and bananas and we only one. The Mbuti don’t think that way. The forest is generous; they can disappear into it knowing that they will eat well; tomorrow they will come out with game meat or honey and the small scale agriculturalists of the forest, the Mbo, the Bila, the Pere, the Lese, the Ndaka, will share their plantains like the Mbuti share the wealth of the forest.
Like the Mbuti, these small-scale agriculturalists also don’t calculate their wealth on the backs of their neighbors. They sit at the same barazza with the Mbuti as they have for generations, they will circumcise their boys together, and together they will be rich in their rags in the center of the forest.
This is not the case with the Nande immigrants—they need land. Unwritten but inevitable: the forest will be carved into their gardens and shipped out in their trucks. When they deal with the forest people, it is not with the Mbuti of the forest, but rather with the traditional agriculturalists who own the land on which the forest grows, and who will cede land and forest, hectare by hectare, for a goat or for a clutch of chickens or two new lengths of cloth for their wives.
The struggling new government of the emerging Congo also needs forest. If a state is to be built from the chaos of the Congo’s long years of mis-rule, then a healthy forestry industry that provides taxes and transforms timber to finished product is essential.
Why can’t forest tenure exist just as land tenure exists? And why not—in some places—have forest tenure take precedence over land tenure? In a new post-war Congo some areas of traditional land tenure rights will be reconfirmed, in other areas government rights (or warlord?) rights will be asserted. The statutes of classified forests will be reconfirmed, such as Congo’s rich tradition of world heritage sites and parks that protect endemic okapi, gorilla and bonobo chimpanzees. Likewise why not classify some forest, extensive forest, as traditional hunting areas where Mbuti, in collaboration with National Parks and international Conservation NGOs, are responsible for forest conservation.
This experiment is underway in the Ituri, where Mbuti hunting grounds are being confirmed around a core of complete protection and with an outer fringe of traditional forest agriculture protected from immigration. In other areas beyond the Ituri, are areas of dense landless Mbuti populations wedded to the forest. There, too, all along the forests of the Rift frontier, this experiment should be extended.

Pygmy Girls in Salate Market Feel Uncomfortable Outside the Forest
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek:
More than three million people have died in Congo’s six years of civil strife. This dead consists mainly of civilians. They perished mostly from starvation and disease: the worst human calamity since World War II. Yet, inevitably, it is Congo’s lurid tales of cannibalism, its sensational stories of human sacrifice, its ornamental killings, which end up bubbling into the news.
Magical violence makes it easy for journalists to reach for Joseph Conrad’s bleak fable Heart of Darkness every time a Congo headline is required. This fixation on “unspeakable” rites in “Darkest Africa” obscures the actual origins of the war: bitter ethnic grudges, meddling by powerful neighbors such as Uganda and Rwanda, and endless squabbles over Congo’s immense storehouse of gold, diamonds, coltan, and timber.
Still, this much is true: the miasma of juju is inescapable in Congo. It is like swamp vapor. Invisible. Pervasive. Soccer teams hire sorcerers to hex their rivals. Prostitutes pay good money for charms that make them irresistible. And in the nation’s Wild East, the magic becomes explosive, toxic, like the volcanic gases that are trapped in the bottom of its deepest lakes.
From my journal:
The Pygmy group we find in Beni is interesting because they have given up on the nomadic leaf structures of traditional pygmies and they have built mud and wattle houses like the Bantus…
I had sent Paluku out to scout for Pygmy groups without a forest and Pygmies to find Pygmies in Beni. Paluku found three Pygmies working in Beni under slave like conditions.
Each time we go outside Beni it seems the soldier buildup is increasing. We always leave early, so we aren’t hassled… But always on the return trip some thug soldier that has to get to Beni commandeers our car… They don’t give us an option… I guess it’s better than what they are doing with the Toleca drivers… they are just stealing their bicycles for the war effort. I have to be careful though, because I have absolutely no authority to work outside the reserves. And the commandant said straight up he didn’t like white people… His concern, I believe, is he thought they were probably all spies… The cameras stay in the backpack for the entire trip back.
Paluku decided not to tell me about the fighting in Goma, Bukavu and South Kivu so I would not be unnecessarily concerned… But he does decide it’s not a good idea for me to take moto taxis or walk around Beni anymore. The first Kabila financed his war by kidnapping a wealthy white guy… the ransom may be the reason he ended up running the country. I do have a satellite phone though and Melissa read me the news the other day. Also the airport next to the logging tycoon house I am staying in is abuzz with Antonovs coming and going… I am told they are flying in commanders to rally the troops… to get them ready for war.

A Bantu organizes a Pygmy choir in a church in Epulu | DR Congo
Pygmies have no land rights. The colonizing Belgians assigned land rights to residing ethnic groups and this still holds. Because Pygmies are nomadic and had no chiefs, they also did not receive land rights. Pygmies land rights are only in association with the sedentary groups. A Bantu chief will tell another Bantu chief, “Your Pygmies are hunting on our Pygmies hunting grounds.” Pygmies are also at the bottom of the social caste system—they have no power. Strong ethnic groups still have strong land rights.
The Belgians had to stabilize land quickly so they could manage the country. The Gold fields were rushed into production in the early 40’s to pay for the allied WWII war effort.
So ritual authorities rule land and their ethnicity links them to the administration of that land.
After the end of the cold war, 1st world countries were less likely to prop up non-communist African countries. This has led to a general collapse of the infrastructure of a number of countries including DR Congo.
From my journal:
We are leaving Epulu for good. Medar (the world’s best 4WD driver) has brought the WCS Land Cruiser up from Beni… We load all my luggage in and don’t even get to the edge of the reserve when the Conservator commandeers our car to go to Mambasa. The evening before all sorts of men were going by my window with flashlights waking me… They were talking to John thru his window saying a pygmy had been killed in a shoot out with the soldiers and he had to send his huge Volvo truck with four rangers as backup… Pretty ridiculous notion in the first place… just put them on bicycles… but the whole thing turned out to be a hoax… another wacky episode from this screwed up conservator… So now in the car this same guy is asking where I am staying… Paluku says later that the conservator said… he is a white man… he has much money… we must stay around him and get his money… Paluku lies and says I am staying at a CEFRECOF transfer house and then he arranges for me to stay at the Catholic Mission in Mambasa.

Pygmies Are Hired to Cut Down Their Own Forest | Ituri Region | DR Congo
Pygmy Logging Crew
A logging company hires Pygmies to cut down their own forest. They are one of the few registered logging concessions around the Ituri. The government is so frail, why bother to register a concession? There will be massive logging around the Pygmies in the next few years.
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek:
What will happen to poor Congo?
Africa is the most unpredictable continent in the world. Yet no African nation confronts a future so unscripted, so fraught with disaster and sheer possibility, as the misnamed Democratic Republic Congo. Will war resume, and Congo shatter into smaller, squabbling states? Possibly. Can the frail but hopeful peace last, allowing Congo finally to put her fabulous riches to work? Conceivably. Everything is so unclear, so unfathomable. An historic election – the first truly democratic ballot since independence from Belgium in 1960 – is scheduled for June 2005. But UN experts warn that some 100,000 rebels, bandits, militiamen, and assorted other killers have yet to disarm. And the ethnic and political rumbling along the eastern Rift won’t likely stop with a mere presidential poll.
And so, with astonishing patience and good humor, almost 60 million people in the core of Africa hold their breath. Maximum extremes of violence, destitution, and disease have made them outcasts from the world. Waking up every morning, they take a deep breath, and peek warily from their windows, from their lean-tos, their thatched huts, afraid of what they’ll see. Will it be the usual mud patio with its bedraggled chickens? Or a canyon that has gaped open overnight – an abyss plummeting beyond sight, to the very core of the Earth, into which they will shortly tumble?

Artisanal Logging by Bantus Creating Holes in the Ituri Forest | Congo
Small loggers, miners and the resultant villages are killing the Pygmie’s forest like little cancers.
From my journal:
We leave early the next morning to photograph artisanal logging. Eric did a map of all the concessions impinging on the Ituri and John said that logging concessions just represented 10-15 percent of the actual logging, because small operators were doing so much of it. So we are going to see those small operators at the edge of the forest proper before it dies out well above Beni. Yesterday we watched folks with one chain saw, cut down and cut solid planks of mahogany… field stripping as it were… the 2inch by 12inch by 15 foot planks of solid mahogany were head loaded out… each plank brought the logger one dollar…
So, today it is just guys with long saws… two on top, two on bottom… the trunk is suspended on a platform and the huge squared off trunk is cut into nine equal segments… the mud houses around here are supported by solid mahogany 3 X 3’s… again, 15 feet long… 1 dollar.
Then we proceed down the road to Beni. John and Eric have caught up with us on rental motos… one moto has such a bald tire in front that Eric went over three times on the trip from Epulu to Mambasa. What follows has to be the worst road I have ever seen a 4WD get thru. Medar uses techniques I have never seen before and NEVER looses his cool. We can be in a mud hole 5 feet deep and at a 45 degree angle and he is smiling and spinning the tires to dry out the hole, then slowly working his way back and forth until we get out. We hit three impossible holes that take about an hour each to dig out of. There are two drivers on the trip because they know they will be using picks and shovels and bailing water out of holes and jamming bark under the tires to get out… they actually could learn a few things from the Australians I was with a few months ago, but this is hands down the best driving through the most miserable conditions I have ever seen. John has enough sense to walk some of the really bad patches… Eric and I are caught in the car for one extended “Disney amusement” style ride… All I remember is that the car was on its side, and that side was scraping along the embankment… Eric was trying to keep my case of cameras from flying off the seat and at the same time the rear door was flying open from the horrendous vibrations. Eric had to shove the cameras in place, jump back to the door and slam it and then come back to the cameras… I remember him having to do that three times.

Urbanization in the Ituri Forest | Mineral Extraction Towns | DR Congo
Disruption of the traditional Mbuti-Bantu relationship is occurring in all but a few isolated areas of the Ituri.
An academic paper by Robert Bally:
When new agriculturalists move into the area, however, the Mbuti is understandably tempted to shift away from his long-term exchange partner in order to seek the highest possible price for his forest products. As the Mbuti turns to this broader market, his villager no longer views him as a reliable exchange partner worthy of credit and is consequently less likely to come to his aid in a time of crisis. While the Mbuti has gained an independence rarely attainable under the traditional system, he has lost a great measure of the security that same system provided.
Disruption of the traditional Mbuti-villager relationship is occurring in all but a few isolated areas of the Ituri resulting both from the establishment of coffee plantations and the increased demand for meat from the populated districts on the edges of the Ituri forest. A commercial meat trade has developed whereby traders from town travel to Mbuti forest camps with cultivated foods which they exchange for meat. This trade bypasses local villagers altogether and puts severe strains on relations between the Mbuti and villagers. Even more disturbing in the long term is the strain the commercial meat trade puts on the forest mammal populations and therefore the Mbuti subsistence base. Game populations cannot sustain the levels of cropping demanded by the commercial traders. Already in many areas near the edges of the Ituri the meat trade has collapsed because the forest animals have been so depleted and the Mbuti have either moved to less populated districts where sufficient areas of unexploited forest remain, or they have shifted out of their traditional subsistence culture to become agriculturalists and laborers on the plantations.
The Mbuti subsistence culture has shown great resilience at many points in the past, but it cannot withstand excessive pressure on the forest and its resources. Evidence has shown that the Mbuti fare best where populations of agriculturalists are present, but where these populations are neither too sparse for effective production of starch, nor too dense for the maintenance of sufficient forest resources.
In many areas throughout Central Africa Pygmy populations have been adversely affected by exploitation of the forest habitat. The Tsua of central Zaire, the Twa of Rwanda, and many others have intermarried with the Bantu, turned to agriculture and day labor, lost most of their cultural heritage and retained very little of their independence. This has not yet happened in most of the Ituri where Mbuti can still exercise choice in their contacts with outside populations because they still retain command over valuable meat resources. However, there are significantly large areas of the Ituri where Mbuti subsistence culture has completely disappeared – particularly in the northwest near Isiro and Wamba – and it is very unlikely that it can long withstand the growing populations pressing on all sides and already reaching into the center of the forest. As more resources are extracted from the forest, increasing numbers of Mbuti will have no choice but to adopt a more generalized agriculturally-oriented subsistence. Unless sufficient areas of forest are set aside, a unique subsistence culture based on hunting and gathering forest resources will be lost in the Ituri and throughout central Africa forever.

Trans-African Highway | Main East West Highway in DR Congo
Our motorcycle bags have to be full of Jack Daniels for the warlords. It is the only way to move through this area outside the Ituri Forest in DR Congo.
From my journal:
There is always a problem with the motos… it take forever for Coco to get transmission fluid for our rental moto and then he gets gas on a second trip and it’s not enough so he has to make a third trip. They’ve known about this for days. It’s now about 9:30 am and I figure if we don’t leave soon we won’t make it by dark. Our motorcycle bags have to be full of bottles of Jack Daniels for the warlords. It is the only way to move through this area. We take the Trans African a little beyond the edge of the reserve and then turn north into rebel controlled gold mine area. Travel is slow because we have to stop at every locality chief and he has to read our Fait de Route (lips moving as they read)… then they stare at the paper for another half hour just to infuriate you… and finally one of their minions brings a stamp and they laboriously write on the back of all three of our papers. We also have to have the military guys do the same thing… and they are scary so we give them bottles of Jack Daniels. The road that goes north is only a moto tire wheel or so wide and the grass and branches have overgrown it… so you are being whipped by grass and twigs for hours at a time.
It’s actually very painful to be on a motorcycle that long… Coco is driving the rental with our packs and Paluku Raymond is driving our bike. The commandant we just schmoozed with Jack Daniels told Paluku he doesn’t like white people. “They say one thing and then they do the opposite.”
We finally enter the outskirts of Quarantesepte (47km mile marker town) and there is a woman coming towards us with water on her head… When we are about five feet away from her I hear the water drop and she says “Mon Dieu, un blanc…” I guess there haven’t been many white folks here. Paluku did this trip two weeks ago just to prepare for my arrival, and figure out who we had to schmooze. Since this is a war zone, it’s safer to send a local to figure out if you can complete your task.
The chief we are going to stay with isn’t home and I am just exhausted… the chief of the “gold mine men” is in a dark corner of the barazza, but I am too tired to talk to him.
The next morning we have to go to the police chief of the locality to get more permission stamps on our travel papers.
A woman has shown up that is hanging all over Coco, our moto driver/mechanic… turns out she is his first wife and he sent a letter to her two days ago… he seems to be organized when it comes to thinking with his little head… But when we finally got all the chiefs on board to go to the mines, Coco lumbered out to the motos and scratched his head about the gas and then slowly went in to get it and fill the tanks… Finally ready to go, we all sat and waited for him…
We finally get to walk to an open pit gold mine… it only takes about half an hour to get there, but we have to stop in the little frontier mine town for tea with the locals and have various tours… by the time we get to the pit it’s bad light and the moment I go to the edge and everyone sees me, they all start yelling, dropping their shovels… wanting something, but I can’t tell what… 100 screaming miners in bad light… great…
The chief from Quarantesept is finally home… he is a very pleasant guy. But there is a very unpleasant guy arguing with him when we get there. The guy is a soldier who isn’t getting the proper level of extortion from the local merchants… one of those sunken eyes–I’ve killed people–I don’t give a shit anymore kind of characters. He says he will shut down the pharmacies that aren’t paying him off and the chief says he will throw him in jail… The soldier stands in the middle of the barazza and says you can’t throw me in jail, I have a machine gun and I will kill all of you… he holds his gun and slowly turns in a circle as if he was shooting the chief and all his assistants.
I decide it’s time to leave, I retreat to my room… but the argument just gets bigger with townspeople yelling at military and vice versa… in my mud hut room, there is an open air space between it and Coco’s room, I hear him crooning to his ex and I hear her soft flirty laughter… The military finally leaves and Coco’s ex has suggested he come to her place and sleep with her… there seems to be no pretense about this adultery… there is a different attitude here about sex that probably makes AIDS very difficult to stop… the chief has five wives and 15 children…
I tell Coco it’s fine to go schwang a local, but he has to be back here at 5:30 am to go to the gold mine… he is only 20 minutes late… not bad for Africa… We have to register every movement with the police chief in Cinqante and we wake him up to tell him where we are going. It’s just Paluku, two chiefs and me on the 3-hour walk to the mining camp… All along the walk are particularly pretty African women ferrying fresh bread, cooking pots full of coco cola on their heads, water. There is a sign in the woods that basically says this is the taxing point of the locality and there is a scant little barazza hacked into a clearing… everyone carrying something in to the miners has to pay a tax on their trip. The chief has his own gold mine, and I realize that one reason he is so nice is he has this system pretty well schmoozed.
There is another hour and a half walk to the mining area itself… I thought we were going to see “plungeurs” who dredge an area with just a tube in their mouth for air… but we are seeing the “motopump” a piece of technology they are particularly proud of… it’s a sump pump basically, something you would rent at A-1 rentals if you had water in your basement. This is particularly pathetic because they are working in the shadow of dead Belgian colonial machinery… there are huge brick Belgian buildings with smoke stacks, ancient diesel generators that have been looted for metal pipes to pound rocks. The gold from this area was hastily mined to generate the cash to pay for D-day and the rest of the allied war effort in WW II.
Everyone keeps mentioning this Canadian that came through ten years ago… It seems that Africa is devolving from Kleptocracies to Khakistocracies with the associated insecurity… this place seems to be solidly in the grips of the warlords… there won’t be another white guy in this town for a while.
The motopump isn’t that interesting, so we head for a gold mine that was drilled into the side of a mountain by some huge Belgian machinery… We walk in this perfectly formed tunnel for about an hour… The ceiling is high and the shaft is wide… it’s rare that I have to duck… But we’ve come in elevation and it’s gotten really humid… lots of bats… I can’t see thru my glasses, they are so steamed up… I do see some dim flashlights at the end of the shaft… There are Congolese sitting on the floor of the deserted shaft and they are just knocking rocks together hoping to see a glint of gold… I doubt if they even have an extra set of batteries for their flashlights… there are also a few folks digging away in areas that are way to dangerous for us to go… pretty desperate.
As we leave the tenement town, the Islamic guy that owned the marvelous new “motopump” technology comes running after us with a letter… it says… “Exscuzez me, one new engine from yew pleaz…”

Girl Pygmies Hide From Whipping in Salate Village | Ituri Forest
The nKumbi is also a courtship ritual. The boys are set free from the woodland camp periodically to come into the town where they try to sneak up on girls that they like and whip them. This somehow shows affection. These Pygmy girls are trying to hide from the boys that are running through the town. The woman outside the hut is a Bantu.

Medicine Man Bantu Fake Pygmy in Salate in nKumbi | DR Congo
From my journal:
There is one special ceremonial skirt that each boy will wear as he dances alone thru the town… they fit the lone Bantu to the skirt first, carefully tying the grass into bundles—measuring the length with a long blade of grass and then cutting each bundle with a machete. They are very serious about this and six of them constantly confer about the length.
Then the chief with the bright red fleece hat with ear flaps (Potolico’s brother) moves his chair to a remote corner and a Pygmy father brings the stack of small whips they made this morning. Red Ear Flaps chief motions over the first boy and starts whipping him around the legs and ankles—the boy is in tears as both the Pygmy and chief go thru the stack of 30-40 whips sometimes faking and then throwing the whip aside and sometimes beating the boys mercilessly.

Pygmies Whip Each Other at End of Pygmy Manhood Ritual | Salate, Congo
The whipping is more severe on the last day and includes a ceremony where the boys are secluded within a phalanx of men all carrying whips. The men are met halfway thru the village with women carrying whips and a melee ensues trying to control the destiny of the child…the men win…the boy is now a man and cannot be claimed as a child anymore by his mother. There is also ritual scarification on this day and each boy is paraded, one by one thru the village accompanied by a masked elder and someone to collect the money being thrown at his dancing feet.
From my journal: The boys put on their skirts and there is a procession of whips and boys out of the forest camp. They strip leaves as they go and by the time they get to the village, the boys are covered with leaves in the middle of a protective phalanx of whip carrying men. At the other side of the village, the women have gathered with their whips. Some of the women have heavy clothing and others (showing their fearlessness) are covered with as little as possible. It’s the women in the heavy clothing, however, that lead the charge.
Most of these women are from the chief’s family—I guess they are obligated more than others to defend the village. The other dynamic is that this is symbolic of the women trying to get their boys back…I figure they will lose, because at this stage of the play, these boys have become men.
But the ensuing melee is substantial… these people are beating the crap out of each other. At one point I look around for Paluku and he is nowhere to be seen… later he comes up and says, “I was so afraid…”
The women whip the men without mercy, wearing heavy clothes, sweat pouring off their faces. There seems to be a protocol to this drama. The man whips the woman twice and then stands with his whip in the same position as the boys with the log the previous morning as the woman then gets to whip him twice… wives are whipping husbands and vice versa.
Pygmies are part of the crowd as well…there is a lot of running screaming and periods where six or eight couples are all whipping each other in the middle of the street. This all continues until they reach the end of the village and the boys are successfully ushered back into the forest by the men.

Trio of Pygmy Boys waiting for Whipping | Ituri Forest, DR Congo
The Salate at the end of the nKumbi Pygmy manhood ritual. The men watch over Pygmy boys who have been secluded for 5 months.
From my journal: Paluku knocks on my mud hut door very early and we go up to the nKumbi area before the boys come out of their sleeping area in the woods. They come in clumps shivering from the cold and what is to come on their last day. The men don’t allow them by the fire—they are sent to sit on their little line of logs at the edge of the forest. The boys’ shivering gets worse as the camp turns into a whip-production factory. Men have cut about a hundred little trees and they are burning the centers in the fire where they want the whip to bend….above that bend point; they twist the limb to make them more flexible… into a more effective whip.

Scarification is part of the Pygmy Manhood Ritual | Ituri Forest
From my journal: I had been prepped somewhat for the whipping part of the manhood ceremony, but not the scarification. Each boy was cut with razors around his chest with a half-inch incision about twenty times. And then the chief rubbed black mud into the wounds. One of the chief’s brothers is wearing a mask and bells on his legs and a tutu of leaves. He leads the boys one by one thru the town with a basket guy to pick up the money people throw at the boys’ feet. Five to seven men beating sticks in unique syncopation surround these three. But these boys have to dance like crazy—one of them stops for a minute because the bells on his leg fell off. As the men retie the bells, I look into his glazed eyes—he is completely at the end of his energy. I know that is the plan—pygmy boot camp—but I feel sorry for these baby boys.
Pygmies believe in the mystical rite of passage process and very few Bantus believe in it anymore. The church has banned the practice and it’s heathen overtones. There is also a health risk—these boys are circumcised with machetes, knives or under the “magic system” some of the old men use their teeth, according to Paluku. They using teeth is a magical way to avoid infection. Infection is rampant, however, and the blind boy was really badly infected and had to be hiked out to the nurse at the dispensary in town. In general, the nKumbi only uses “leaf medicine” to deal with the boys wounds from circumcision, or whipping.
Since Bantu’s have a structured sedentary community that organizes the nKumbi and Pygmies don’t and now that most of the Bantus want a clinical-one-day-process at a hospital versus weeks of pain in the forest that is a many day walk to a clinic with a leaf wrapped infected penis—this tradition will not continue much longer.

Pygmy Boy Examines Scarring after 5 Months of Whipping | Ituri Forest
From my journal: We’ve come back to Salate for the end of the nKumbi. I hear the music of beating sticks and chanting boys in the forest. Tomorrow is their last day before being set free. This is the only education they will get their entire lives. This education is all about what leaves to pick for various tasks, what bark to peel, how to fish and hunt and survive in the woods.
They’ve been whipped every morning for five months. This morning the sole Bantu boy ran away because the men said that tomorrow—their last day—they would beat them severely. The entire village looked for this boy and found him hiding late in the afternoon. The chief was very upset, but not upset enough to stop the whipping the following day.
We went up to the nKumbi ground. One group of boys is painted and sitting on their little circle of logs. Another group of three are still painting each other… they are also singing—being led by the adults. The adults are singing and twisting limbs to soften them and make them more effective whips—one boy on the bench is shaking so hard that he can barely sing—other boys are shaking, but not as hard. Some of the other boys just seem resigned to their fate. If they are shaking after five months of beating, I guess it really is going to be severe.
The first boy gets in position to be whipped. They allow them to hold a log toward the whip to take the initial blow. The Bantu chief, Potolico Putnam, whips the first three and the pygmy chief whips the next group. Each boy is whipped twice and then drops the log and marches away without tears.
The truth is these boys are just babies—they have little stick arms and distended stomachs. But they have to be tough and they have to be tough early in life. It’s a full time job just to eat. All of these towns are hungry and have very little protein. Even in Epulu at “Le Palais” I am eating mostly leaves (Sombe) and rice because the town is so hungry. But, like I said, these boys are babies and they have to be hard to live in the forest most of the five months of this rite… Their little penises are cut and then covered with salt and then wrapped in leaves—and that’s the least of it. If an adult snaps an order, they’ve been so well trained that they just run off in their little grass skirts and cut down piles of the sticks necessary to strip bark and make clothing or weave into cord or whatever task is important to the men at the moment. They do it without even speaking. Often, not speaking is part of the deal—they have an apparatus that is sticks and a big leaf that they put in their mouth so they can’t talk.

Manhood Ritual | Ituri Forest, DR Congo
After several months in the Ituri Forest, Pygmy boys have learned skills to survive on their own. They hunt, fish and learn to read the forest to recognize the slightest details. But on the last day of the nKumbi, the whipping is more severe and includes a ceremony where the boys are secluded within a phalanx of men all carrying whips. The men are met halfway thru the village with women carrying whips and a melee ensues–the intent is to control the destiny of the child. The women want the boy to stay a boy and the men want the boy to be acknowledged as a man. The men win. The boy is now a man and cannot be claimed as a child anymore by his mother. After the Bantu man raises his long branch to white, there is also ritual scarification. Each boy is paraded, one by one, through the village accompanied by a masked elder, and money is collected at his dancing feet.

Pygmy Woman Carries Fire in Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As the semi-nomadic tribe sets up camp to hunt, they make camp fires use the smoldering embers to drive away bees when they find a hive and take the honey. For hundreds of years, the small statured people have lived in the rainforest without stressing the environment. But outside forces are moving in that will put pressure on them as the forest is logged. This is flash blur because it was dark, and I panned the photo trying to get a feeling for the mystical quality of the forest.

Net hunting Pygmy smokes marijuana or weed while walking to their hunting camp in the Ituri Forest, DR Congo.
National Public Radio reports that “about 70 percent of Aka men regularly use marijuana,” according to scientists at Washington State University in Vancouver in the American Journal of Human Biology. Besides giving pleasure, it may kill intestinal worms.
From my journal: On the first hunt, they don’t catch anything. Lightning is crackling over the hole in the forest over our heads, and a cool wind is starting to move through. They cleared a spot for my tent where all the water will wash thru it…but now the only flat place to move the tent is right in the middle of all the pygmy campfires. Pygmies expect a big rain and build a trench around the tent with machetes. This is a surreal scene…I am in my tent, at night…and 70 pygmies with their cooking fires throw their shadows onto the tent walls.

A Pygmy net hunter captures a blue duiker in a net near a hunting camp deep in the Ituri Forest. A duiker is a small antelope and main source of protein for Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
From my journal: I’m finally getting my act together in this environment. I can go for days if I have to out of my small backpack. I’m glad I’ve done a few trips that require these skills. I have to travel by motorcycle in the wet season trying to dodge rains that could knock you senseless and then try to do digital photography in a 60,000 square KM area where there is only one outlet. The shocking part of all this is not just that it is working, but that it is all working in such a pleasant way.
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek: Pygmies dislike rain. It is not only the clammy discomfort of moving through a damp forest. Water weakens the hunting nets. Antelope wriggle through the wet weave of liana bark like fish. Musa coils his net. He hulloos his farewell to the other hunters – a sound that is itself watery in the suddenly darkening jungle.
Darkness is not necessarily feared by the Mbuti. They have a feeling about it. Whatever the forest brings cannot be bad. Sometimes, they sing this song over their dead:
There is darkness upon us;
Darkness is all around,
There is no light.
But it is the darkness of the forest,
So if it really must be,
Even the darkness is good.
Musa fires up a leaf-rolled marijuana joint. For fatigue. He passes it to Mayuma, his wife. She grips a slain duiker by its rear hooves – a small, jewel-like animal. Its dead eyes shine and its hooves are not much bigger than a man’s thumbs.
Smoking, they wait for their children to gather, and Musa holds Mayuma’s gnarled left middle finger in his calloused right hand. A pleasant silence. They will sleep tonight in a small domed hut of mongongo leaves. Such huts are everywhere in the Ituri Forest. They begin to decay into piles of powdery frass almost as soon as they are built. The pygmies have erected them since the time when forest was born. They will continue to do so for as long as the forest lasts.

After setting up a hunting camp, Pygmies do deeper into the Ituri Forest to set up nets to catch game. The semi-nomadic tribe depends on fish, honey and duikers which are small antelope. The short statured people have survived living in the forest for thousands of years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Changes in rural Central Africa are resulting in rapid erosion in the culture of forest peoples.
From my journal: Paluku and I head out with the net hunters… most of our time is without paths…I feel like an elephant around a bunch of little mice… I am constantly tripping on vines; leaves are whipping my arms, legs, even drawn thru my mouth just trying to keep up with these little guys. I think to myself that it makes sense that these folks were formed by this place as a six-foot person, I try to follow a 4-foot guy who is using a machete to cut out a hole in the jungle just his size.
It’s been over a week since I went net hunting and as we go from Pygmy camp-to-camp encircling the Bantu village, I am greeted with great enthusiasm from everyone who was on that hunt. They come running out of their huts yelling, emotional, and I remember a segment Raymond translated from one of the more fervent evening speeches from one of the pygmy chiefs. He basically said how different the times were… “It used to be, if we saw a white man, we would run away, now we are sharing the same campfire with one.”

Pygmies catch blue duikers, a type of small antelope, when they set up hunting camps deep in the Ituri Forest. A Mbuti hunter carries a coiled net of twined liana bark, his most prized possession, on his head as he walks through the forest. Hunters drape nets between trees and flush antelope and other game toward them. Meat is exchanged with Bantu farmers for vegetables, grains, and other goods in an interdependent relationship.
From my journal: The Bantu chief berates his pygmies for the lousy hunt yesterday when they only caught three blue duikers. He says he consulted a wise man before they entered the jungle and the wise man told him one of the members of the hunting party was bewitched and that it was a woman who desired the hunt to go poorly and had thrown a spell on it. He also tells them he needs the meat for the celebratory feast at the end of the nKumbi—the nKumbi boys are secluded off to the side in this deep forest camp. They have learned to slip into the woods alone and hunt with just a stick or a fish hook… all you hear is the swish of their grass ceremonial skirt.
The next morning there is a change of strategy—the chief’s wife goes out first to make the fire in the woods for the hunters to gather before the hunt—usually a man does this. The women in the camp then wander from net to net, spitting on the nets for good luck… I’m sure they all feel obligated because the chief said “the bewitched” was a woman. A normal hunt with two camps of pygmies should yield at least 10 blue duiker a day.

A Pygmy hunt involves using found forest materials in DR Congo. One Pygmy in the hunting group spots bees swarming and needs to get 60 feet up in the air. He is nearly naked and carrying nothing – but he quickly manages to make a long rope out of vines and a basket out of vines and leaves. His wife carries a smoldering log he places in the leaf basket to use as a smoker. He drives the bees out of the hive and collects the honey then climbing down with his prize. Pgymies depend on honey as a dependable food source in the Ituri Forest. The semi-nomadic group also hunts small mammals with nets.
From my journal: The first hunt of the day nets nothing, but on the way they see bees streaming out of a tree about five stories high. They stop and make a long rope out of vines and attach a basket they assembled from leaves and vines, and put fire inside it to smoke out the bees. The women turn the embers they are carrying into a full campfire in no time flat…but not as fast as the male pygmy can manufacture 10 stories of rope from vines.
Paluku says I am the first white man they have seen. Four days walking with Pygmies thru dense forest is quite a workout. What they consider paths, I would consider bushwhacking…and at four feet tall, they sail right through openings where I constantly bang my head.
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek: Musa the pygmy has found a honey tree. This is an event. All hunting stops if asali, as it is called in Swahili, can be located and consumed.
Among the Mbuti, the quest for wild honey is tireless, constant, almost obsessive. They have honeycomb on the brain. It is their favorite food. The honey season in the southern Ituri is measured out according to the flowering cycle of the mbau tree – the bee’s main source of fructose. In May the towering giant blossoms, and real honey production begins. This is white honey: young, virtually transparent and cool to the taste, like a pale wine, or the first breaths of dawn. Later, by August, the honey turns oil-dark. Black honey is strong, warm, musky with distilled sunlight and the pollen of a myriad tropical flowers.
“We like it all,” Musa says unnecessarily. Then he knots together a 150-foot rope of lianas and does what must be done.
He and a hunter named Jolie, who at four feet tall is tiny even by pygmy standards, shimmy some 60 feet up the smooth, fat shaft of the tree to ax a hole in the trunk. The women send up a smoker fashioned from a basket of embers and leaves. Within minutes, to small yelps of anticipation, the combs are lowered like hunks of gold. Soon the entire band, stuffing their stomachs with pounds of sweet liquid, feels the sugar’s glow. The men argue and holler at each other loudly. The women guffaw even louder at sex jokes. Somewhere up among the attic of leaves – 30 or 40 feet off the ground – children as young as five or six, smeared with honey, bombed by angry African bees, are chattering with delight.
Tasting rain forest honey for the first time is an unforgettable experience. It goes quickly to the head. Its delicious perfume carries with it the suggestion of a better world. As it seeps directly from the membranes of the mouth into the bloodstream, immediately yielding up its concentrated energy, generously radiating its stored warmth, a single word comes to mind: Yes.

Pygmy boys learn fishing and other skills at their hunting camp in the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Boys go through the circumcision ceremony called nKumbi accompanied the adults to the camp. There is a strict regiment of learning survival skills to hunt and to recognize all there is to know about the forest. They are whipped every morning to make them tough, and then they sent off into the forest to hunt or fish. The boys pull a small hook out of their skirts and get a vine and a stick—they know where to dig for worms. They catch five or six 2inch long fish and eat them raw for lunch.
It took everything I had to follow these fast little guys. My biggest problem was when I finally stopped to photograph, my glasses completely fogged. A lot of photographs like this one are shot on the run, just pointing the camera in the general direction.

Double leaf construction of a Pygmy leaf-hut is covered in large phrynium leaves making it more impervious to rain. The shelters are built in a couple of hours and stand approximately six feet high. They are a beehive-shaped frame of sticks by women who bend branches to create superstructures. They collect large leaves placing them overlapping like tiles on a roof. The forest hunting camps are about 10k apart, and 10K from where they string their nets to hunt in DR Congo.

Pygmies hiked for two days to a site where they made a hunting camp in the Ituri forest. Women constructed the nighttime shelters in a couple of hours, bending branches to create a superstructure they later covered with leaves from the forest. The forest hunting camps are about 10k apart, and 10K from where the hunters string their nets. Boys who are going through the end of the circumcision ceremony called nKumbi accompanied the adults to the camp. They had their own structure housed off to the side, and were sent off into the forest to hunt or fish.
From my journal: The next morning I need to change shirts, and I realize I should go into the tent to do it, but it is a production to do anything in a small tent, and all of these folks are half naked anyway… So… I take off my shirt in the middle of the camp and 70 pygmies all gasp and cry out at once… the sight of that much white skin is a bit much for them. I am ok with that, but I am really tired of all the babies crying when I come near and even their friendly little dogs start barking like crazy when I am close to them.
Pygmies are noisy and happy… they stay up late yelling at each other and telling hunting stories… acting out the animals. After being around these folks I know one thing is true… most westerers have no idea how to have fun. Pygmies laugh until they need others to help them stand up.
Pygmies have access to matches, but they prefer to carry fire—usually just a smoldering chunk of log or sometimes embers wrapped in leaves. I try not to use strobe because it really scares them, but reviewing photos on the back of a digital camera can draw a crowd of thirty or more—all making noise and excitedly pointing at the back of the camera.
Pakulu’s cheap batteries are starting to go, but every day we get news of troops massing at the Congo/Rwanda border. The station in Epulu has an “early warning system” – when the toleca (bicycle transport) riders quit coming on the trans-African highway (footpath) they go into high alert.
There are three chiefs in our hunting group. The king of the pygmies is the Bantu chief who owns 122 pygmies; his name is Potoliko Putnam… his father worked for Putnam, the first white man to settle in the area and Potoliko’s family assumed the name. The chief of the pygmy group that was our guide thru the woods is Aposindakala and the other pygmy chief is Angotu.

Pygmies play hand made flutes to pass the time in their smokey hunting camp in the Ituri forest in DR Congo. Pygmies are noisy and happy… they stay up late yelling at each other and telling hunting stories… acting out the animals. The semi-nomadic tribe sets up nets to hunt small antelope called duikers.
From my journal: It’s been over a week since I went net hunting and as we go from Pygmy camp-to-camp encircling the Bantu village, I am greeted with great enthusiasm from everyone who was on that hunt. They come running out of their huts yelling, emotional, and I remember a segment Raymond translated from one of the more fervent evening speeches from one of the pygmy chiefs. He basically said how different the times were… “It used to be, if we saw a white man, we would run away, now we are sharing the same campfire with one.”
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek: Rain forests are light-struck places. This comes as a surprise. Countless books and movies would have us believe otherwise. The world beneath a jungle canopy is neither dim, nor gloomy, nor monochrome. It glows with the light of some alien order – a light so improbable it has a dreamed quality, the way colors in dreams possess actual weight, or create sound, or stop time.
Musa fires up a leaf-rolled marijuana joint. For fatigue. He passes it to Mayuma, his wife. She grips a slain duiker by its rear hooves – a small, jewel-like animal. Its dead eyes shine and its hooves are not much bigger than a man’s thumbs.
Smoking, they wait for their children to gather, and Musa holds Mayuma’s gnarled left middle finger in his calloused right hand. A pleasant silence. They will sleep tonight in a small domed hut of mongongo leaves. Such huts are everywhere in the Ituri Forest. They begin to decay into piles of powdery frass almost as soon as they are built. The pygmies have erected them since the time when forest was born. They will continue to do so for as long as the forest lasts.

Pygmy girls daub each other with clay in solidarity with the boys’ initiation into manhood. paint each other in support of their brothers who are going through a manhood initiation ceremony. They have just hiked for two days to their hunting camp and they construct nighttime shelters in about two hours. Women bend the branches to create a superstructure and then go off in the woods to get the right kind of leaves. The forest hunting camps are about 10k apart, and 10K from where they string their nets. Boys who are going through the end of the circumcision ceremony called nKumbi accompanied the adults to the camp and were housed off to the side. They were whipped every morning and then sent off into the forest to hunt or fish.
From my journal: The Bantu chief from town came with us and the nKumbi (circumcision/manhood rite) boys in tow. The chief owns 122 pygmies, but only the strong ones with their families are in this camp. We are in the only clearing about 10km from the village-one of the few places you can see the sky. Three of the pygmy girls have complete body paint with white clay in support of their brothers in the nKumbi. They are not to wear clothes other than a loincloth. One cold morning when they try to cover up the older women admonish them. The boys only clothing is bark cloth loin cloths tucked under a vine that encircles their waist. They make these clothes in the woods. The boys dance dance and tomorrow as they are set free. They will come, one by one, down from their forest camp and dance the entire length of the village and be welcomed back into the community as men. When they reach the end of the village they will climb a tree and hang their grass skirt around the trunk, signaling their manhood to anyone entering the village.
Life is hard for everyone here. My fixer/guide/translator/motodriver, Paluku Raymond has a wife and four kids in Beni. They are in Beni because there is a school there. But he only sees them once a year for twenty days or so. It would cost $100 each for his family to come by motorcycle to visit him… or $20 each to come on sacks of rice in the back of some transport truck. He is excited that he will be guiding me to Beni, because he will see his family.

Pygmy boys dance wearing leaves on their mouths for silence as they go through a manhood initiation called nKumbi. They wear the ceremonial skirts for their circumcision ceremonies, and when the ritual is completed, the skirts will hang in the trees at the entrance to their village in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Pygmies are nomadic hunter-gatherers who rely on a healthy forest to survive. They have no claim to their own home territory, however, because the colonial Belgians assigned land rights only to sedentary groups
From the National Geographic story by Paul Salopek:This is the Albertine Rift. It is the westernmost of the famous African Rift Valleys that began yawning wide some 35 million ago as the Arabian Peninsula drifted away from the continent. The Albertine Rift is especially beautiful. It shadows Congo’s eastern border, cupping a series of enormous, limpid lakes in its belly, separating Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi from Congo proper.
This rift also is a human quake zone. It is the frontier between Francophone Central Africa and Anglophone Eastern Africa. It marks an economic divide between countries with few natural resources (Rwanda, Burundi) and one that overflows with them (Congo). Moreover, it is a violent ethnic front. The Hutu perpetrators of Rwanda’s 1994 mass murder of Tutsis have escaped into Congo’s jungles, sparking years of cross-border reprisals by the Rwandan army. (The militaries of at least five other neighboring nations have invaded weak Congo recently, for much more venal reasons.)
But to Hart, the most troubling chasm of all is demographic: east of the Albertine Rift, population densities exceed 1,000 people per square mile; to the west, in Congo’s vast, lawless rain forests, it drops to less than 10.
“All these people have to go somewhere, right?” he says, gesturing out beyond the farm-scalped hills around Bukavu. “It’s inexorable. Unstoppable. This is Africa’s last big frontier. All we can do it try to create islands of habitat that the crowds will hopefully flow around.”
Hart works for the Brooklyn-based Wildlife Conservation Society. He and others like him are behind a quiet international relief effort to rescue the richest diversity of birds and mammals on the African continent. Mountain gorillas, bonobos, rare okapis, hippos, forest elephants – all face oblivion at the hands of eastern Congo’s private armies and a tide of land-hungry peasants.
Imagine, for a moment, that the United States has been prostrated by civil war. Imagine further that, after many years of anarchy, gangs of unsavory militias have holed up in famous American national parks. Neo-Nazis occupy Yellowstone. They are machine-gunning the last buffalo. Desperate bureaucrats in Washington have invited foreign green groups to come and help – to save whatever they can. British environmentalists respond by assuming the management of the Grand Canyon, where gangs of thugs are brazenly dynamiting fish from the Colorado River and pit-mining gold. Japanese wildlife experts, meanwhile, face gunfire while re-supplying beleaguered US Park Service rangers, scores of whom have been killed in the mayhem.
This is modern conservation work in Congo.
“The war has been hard,” Hart says, tipping back a warm beer. “But just wait until things stabilize. Wait until the big loggers think it’s safe to move in. That’s when the real plunder begins.”

The thin whisper of skirts dissolves into the Ituri rain forest as boys trail their elders on their way to a hunting camp. The Mbyte are one of several Pygmy groups still following semi-Nomadic traditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Part of the nKumbi manhood ritual involves young Pygmy boys learning survival skills. They walk single file on a path to meet net hunters wearing grass skirts while they train for five months before their initiation into manhood. At that time, they will be on on their own and will share adult responsibilities and feed their families.
From my journal:
I’ve made coffee for the chief and his brother. I think they hate my coffee but there is a sense of sharing a table with a foreigner that supersedes the coffee. I was trying to call Melissa on the sat phone under the stars with a pygmy group singing like crazy… and the chiefs all quietly pulled up their chairs into my little clearing to sit next to me.
Pygmy women haul water to the house and another pygmy is helping in the kitchen. I ask Paluku what the arrangement is… the chief’s wife says they work for her only when she has tobacco or money. Actually the best way to run a garden or have pygmy labor, Paluku says, is to have a small hidden dope patch. On our net hunting trip, Paluku saw Potolico had a little bit of pot. Pygmies will seed a hunting camp with marijuana as they leave and then quietly go back to harvest. Generally the wives of govt. officials who are above the law are the main engines for dope production.
Paluku tells me the reason there is one Bantu and many pygmies is that Potolico had one boy for the nKumbi—his sister’s fatherless child. He feels responsible for this child and he also feels responsible as Chief to continue the ancestral traditions.
There is a man close to death from diarrhea on my left and four teenage boys on my right dancing in feminine suggestive ways to a boom box with four ounces of electronics and four pounds of pulsating flashing lights. Of the three pygmy girls that were painted, only one knows what her full name is. The dying pygmy proudly states in Swahili that he knows his full name.
Paluku has a good job at CEFRECOF (Basically a WCS NGO) That is why he is in Epulu. He only has a secondary education, but he speaks four languages and is very smart—especially in how he handles folks in these communities.

Pygmy Boys in a nKumbi Manhood Ritual wear a leaf mouthpiece to keep them quiet near Epulu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Forest Pygmies are indigenous, semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherers in the rainforest of the Congo Basin. An adult Pygmy man’s average height in adult men is less than 150 cm or 4 foot 11 inches high. The BaMbuti Pygmies perform a nKumbi or initiation that lasts five months where the boys live at a camp in the forest and go off daily to learn survival skills.
From a conversation with John Hart, Scientist and Conservationist: “Culturally and biologically, all of Africa meets at the Albertine Rift. It is the source of the Congo and Nile rivers and it is the heart of the continent.” The rift is also the most hotly contested area in Africa… DR Congo borders Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and on the east side of the rift you have huge population density (300 people per square kilometer) trying to eke out agriculture. On the west side of the rift you have jungle and 3 people per square kilometer. The rift frontier is the Pygmies homeland. DR Congo has half of all the forests in Africa and the Ituri region has the highest density of Pygmies… They are the original indigenous group for this forest.
DRC is the biggest country in Africa that has great mineral and natural resource wealth. Algeria and Sudan are bigger countries, but they are mostly dust. Sudan is 2.5 million sq. KM with 36 million people. DRC is 2.35 million sq. KM with 53 million people (3rd largest pop in Africa)
Ironically, the greatest long-term threat to the pygmies is peace and prosperity. No one wants to rape their land when it is still in a war zone. They have been left alone in their forests because foreign companies and individuals are too intimidated by the jungle or to do work here. The fledgling political system of DRC will never be able to handle the influx from the Albertine Rift and other areas. They are certainly not organized enough if the Chinese or other groups decide it is safe enough to come to DRC en masse for it’s natural resources and mineral wealth. The Ituri River erodes the mountains of gold near Bunia. The militias hotly contested the few gold extraction operations in the Ituri drainage, but the real conservation problems will start when people on the densely populated east side of the Albertine Rift realize this area is secure and contains gold. And then those that follow the extraction points, will clear the forests.
Pygmy heartland is still a frontier – partially because sedentary groups are afraid of the jungle and partly because the main East-West Road in DRC (the Trans-African Highway) is basically a footpath. But the frontier is being invaded. The first toeholds into this zone are mining for minerals like gold and coltan. But once the jungle is breached, other groups follow. One of the most pervasive is the Wanande from Uganda. They follow the miners and set up shops and little cottage industries to make money. Then the general population follows. This is already happening all around the Ituri region. One of the photographs I’ve made is Pygmies on scaffolding around trees chopping them down for agriculture. They are being hired to chop down their own forest.
Once security is regained in this region, the influx from the eastern Albertine Rift will be horrendous. At the moment DRC is amassing troops at their border here to protect their interests in the region. The rioting in Kinshasa and fighting in Bukavu were basically over control of the rift. Rwanda would like to annex the area. Pygmies dissipate and evaporate with the forest. They don’t stay and fight.
The Wanande is the largest ethnic group invading the frontier and they have businesses, churches, schools, money… And the Mbuti just have small hunting clans, leaf huts and a few pots and plastic bottles. The Wanande don’t care about the traditional trading arrangements the pygmies have had over time. Pygmies go into the forest and hunt for protein and the sedentary Bantus have traded starch for the pygmies’ meat.
While most of the Ituri has fewer than 3 inhabitants per square kilometer, the forest is surrounded on all sides by districts, which support the highest population densities in all of Zaire outside of its capital, Kinshasa. The frontier moves with these extractive outposts (like gold mining) and the jumps are unpredictable. For example, John Hart’s PHD on hunting was done in a forest site in the 70’s. There isn’t a tree left in the area. The Harts are really in a unique position to study.

Ituri Forest Pygmies | Who Rules the Forest? National Geographic Magazine

Ituri Forest Pygmies | Who Rules the Forest? National Geographic Magazine

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