Seize The Dance: BaAka Musical Life And The Ethnography Of Performance Book 977
Taichi Reilly
One anecdote that I tell is that in Cameroon, the government once had a campaign of saying that you cannot refer to the forest people as pygmies, but you have to refer to them as citoyens, citizens. One time I used the term citizen or citoyen just in passing with someone (a non-pygmy who had spent time in Cameroon) and they felt that by using the term citizen, I was insulting them by calling them a pygmy. So it gets very complicated. I prefer just to refer to them as they refer to themselves, BaAka, or Bayaka, forest people, and when it is clear how the term is being used, then I can say pygmies.
B.E.: I want to emphasize that the BaAka are one of many groups that get referred to as pygmies. Isn't that right? What is the commonality that makes for that larger group we call pygmies?
Seize the Dance: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance book 977
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M.K.: Yes, I have heard that. I have heard people from Togo say, when they saw pictures of pygmies from Central Africa, that those people were their ancestors. In western Ghana, this is also part of a traditional belief system where little people with invisible arrows can harm or do good mystically to someone. This is also reminiscent of the idea of the pygmies. So I think the idea is widespread across parts of Africa where pygmies no longer are, that at one time this was the population who lived there.
M.K.: That is true. It is not completely understood. The more recent genetic research, the human genome project, has shed a lot of light on that, so things are becoming clear that could not before the genome.
M.K.: Yes. This utopian narrative takes a number of different forms, but I found that it has a consistent sense of binary opposites. So, either forest people need to be seen by others as sort of living in an Eden, and living an Edenic kind of life, or as fallen dwellers in Eden, that they are somehow tarnished, and not living in the pure way that they ideally should be. And in that case, they are vulnerable to the ideas of missionaries and other people who would like to change them. So they end up being caught in the middle of other people's utopian or fallen utopian ideas.
B.E.: Give us a little sense of the content of these utopian narratives. And maybe as part of that, you can describe the general environment in which you did this work: Forest, rivers, remoteness-- give us a picture.
M.K.: Okay. Well, they live in the oldest and largest uninterrupted expanse of the so-called virgin rainforest in the world at this point. A lot of incursions by lumber companies and village farmers have taken place in this area, but it is still the largest. They live in small, cooperative, extended family groups, and they get together in larger groups at different times of the year, and then they will separate into their smaller family groups for certain seasons, such as honey season, and caterpillar season. One of the books that linked a utopian idea of the forest people with an idea of their music was the famous book by Colin Turnbull published in 1960. Turnbull was an anthropologist who became very well known because his writing was very accessible and personal. He was also an irritant to a lot of professional anthropologists because of how accessible his writing and how personal his writing was. The book was called The Forest People, and the subtitle was "A study of the pygmies of the Congo." In the reissue of the book, they have taken out that subtitle, perhaps because of the pejorative associations with the word pygmies. But it is still in print. It is dated at this point. It uses language that would no longer be used in a current monograph. But it is still so well written and so sensitive to the people that it is still assigned as a college text.
He had an extreme sensitivity to the music. Now, his work was focused in the current Democratic Republic of Congo, near Kissangani. So it is very far from the area where I worked, or where Justin comes from. But it established an idea of African forest people and their relationship to the music that was imitated by many, many adventurers after him, and that is echoed in the work of Louis Sarno, and I would say it is echoed in my work as well. I try to echo it consciously. I also met Colin Turnbull as a graduate student, and that was one of the things that spurred me to go ahead to try to travel to central Africa and learn about the music. Because in fact, he could not teach me how to sing any of this music that he was so fond of. And I had studied other forms of African music from West Africa that I had been able to learn, and someone had been able to teach me. And I had learned something very important by being able to perform some of it, that I was committed to try and see if this was something that I could learn and try to teach to other people.
B.E.: You write about that moment in the classroom, when you asked Colin Turnbull to teach you a song, and he couldn't. It seems like that moment was very important in cementing this idea of a performance-oriented career in research. That seemed like an anomaly to you right off the bat, didn't it?
M.K.: Yes. Especially since he was interested in performance and theater, and he was a very musical person. So I didn't quite understand it except that he hadn't been trained in the way I had to learn African music in a way that you could then teach it and join in directly.
B.E.: Lay out the general historical context for this part of Africa. In broad terms, how have colonialism and the European and Arab slave trade affected the region, and the forest people in particular.
M.K.: This area of forest extends from eastern Cameroon, southeastern Cameroon, into the southwestern Central African Republic, the northern Congo, and it actually also extends across the Ubangi River into the Democratic Republic of Congo. But this big swath of rain forest, the core of it is what is now the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve in CAR (which is administered in part by the World Wildlife Fund) where there is more of a concentration of wild elephants than anywhere else in the world. BaAka are very mobile, and they have ways of being where they want to be and disappearing from places where they don't want to be. It's a survival strategy, and during the colonial period, what I read and what I heard was that they would go further into the forest, and the villagers who wanted to avoid the brutality of the colonial concessionary companies and others, and colonial administration, would join them in these forest camps, or live next to them in these forest camps. That way they were able to keep some distance from the forced labor, the collecting of rubber and other kinds of forest labor. When we were there, we would sometimes see these metal cups that they were using, and I asked about those, and Justin told me that these were left over from colonial times. Is that correct, Justin?
M.K.: I think it would be fair to say that none were. Well, I can't know that for sure, but I would be surprised if any were captured into slavery. I don't believe that any of the forest people were captured and sold into slavery. I think they would have been very hard to access. I have never heard of any connection between the slave trade and actual forest people being captured and sold into slavery.
B.E.: Interesting, and perhaps quite up to the task of leavening the blues as Thompson had it. Maybe this is a good time for Justin to talk about the dynamic of the BaAka and the neighboring people. Tell us about the history of that relationship, and just generally how it worked, the interaction there. It's quite fascinating and kind of unfamiliar to a lot of people.
Justin Mongosso: Okay. I grew up in a Bagandu Village. That is in the equatorial forest. And when I was young, about five or six years, I got to know pygmies, and it was a privilege for me to get to know them because it was a big barrier between my people and them. When I started to become a young boy, five or six years, I was interested in them. I got to know them and I learned their language. But still, I think I was lucky enough to know them because most people my age did not have the opportunity to make this connection because my people, for generations, they saw pygmies as not like living beings. I think my case was a little bit different, because my parents were very nice to them, so they allowed me to know them. But since I was growing, I developed to know them more, and I started to speak the language.
So I will even say that I learned Diaka [the BaAka language] before I went to French school. That's why I developed the ability to know them. But something was striking me, because I didn't know why my people were treating them in a way that was not pleasing. But as I was growing, my attention was caught, and I was trying to understand why there was this barrier. So it took me a long time, and when I grew up, I became 24, 25, I started my own research. I worked by myself in a camp when nobody else was around. So I spent six months with them to understand exactly what was going on. And when I came back to my country, I started to teach my people, people my age, to change their attitude toward pygmies. But it's not over yet. We are still going. It's a struggle. Because people are still keeping the same attitudes.
J.M.: No, my case was unusual. Very unusual. Even now people my age cannot speak Diaka. They see Diaka as a very low language to speak in public. So I was very lucky to learn that language. Sometimes when I look back I laugh, wondering how I made it!
M.K.: And if I can add, you asked also about forging new relationships, I saw cases where there would be BaAka who just really did not like their associated clan bilo (villagers), so they would just simply go to an area that was not within the purview of their bilo, and associate with another group of people, and either not have any ties to bilo directly or forge a new relationship. But it would not have the same kind of overtones or obligations as do the parallel clans. So they have ways of avoiding unpleasant relationships to some extent, or even leaving altogether and going to a different area, such as crossing the border into the Congo.
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