Part 6 (1/2)

The Batwas, seen and measured by Dr. Ludwig Wolfe in the middle Congo basin in 1886, were of an average height of four feet three inches. They resemble the Akka in general appearance, and have longish heads, long narrow faces, and small reddish eyes. They bounded through the tall herbage ”like gra.s.shoppers” and were remarkably agile in climbing.

For several years past there have been rumors of a race of Pygmies in the interior of the Cameroons, but these reports were not verified until the year 1898, when the Bulu expedition of the German military force succeeded, with much difficulty, in seeing several individuals of this race, secured through the aid of a native chief. One woman was measured and proved to be just four feet high. The color was from chocolate-brown to copperish, except the palms, which were of a yellowish white. The hair was deep black, thick, and frizzled; the skull broad and high; the lips full and swollen. Like other Pygmy tribes, these are very shy, wandering from place to place in the forest, and avoiding frequented routes of travel. They are skilful hunters and collect much rubber, which they dispose of to the negro tribes.

In the same year Mr. Albert B. Lloyd made a journey in Central Africa, following Stanley's route down the Congo. He was alone, with the exception of a few carriers, and had the good fortune of pa.s.sing through the country of the Pygmies and that of the cannibals of the Aruwimi without conflict or injury, entering into cordial relations with both peoples. He journeyed for three weeks in the Pygmy forest and had excellent opportunities for examining its inhabitants.

After entering the great primeval forest Mr. Lloyd went west for five days without the sight of a Pygmy. Suddenly he became aware of their presence by mysterious movements among the trees, which he at first attributed to the monkeys. Finally he came to a clearing and stopped at an Arab village, where he met a great number of the diminutive nomads.

”They told me,” says Mr. Lloyd, ”that, unknown to me, they had been watching me for five days, peering through the growth of the forest.

They appeared very much frightened, and even when speaking covered their faces. I asked a chief to allow me to photograph the dwarfs, and he brought a dozen together. I was able to secure a snap-shot, but did not succeed in the time exposure, as the Pygmies would not stand still. Then I tried to measure them, and found not one over four feet in height. All were fully developed, the women somewhat slighter than the men. I was amazed at their st.u.r.diness. The men have long beards, reaching halfway down the chest. They are very timid, and will not look a stranger in the face, their bead-like eyes constantly s.h.i.+fting. They are, it struck me, fairly intelligent. I had a long talk with a chief, who conversed intelligently about their customs in the forest and the number of the tribesmen. Both men and women, except for a tiny strip of bark, were quite nude. The men were armed with poisoned arrows. The chief told me the tribes were nomadic, and never slept two nights in the same place.

They just huddle together in hastily thrown-up huts. Memories of a white traveller,--Mr. Stanley, of course,--who crossed the forest years ago, still linger among them.”

The discovery of these forest Pygmies has directed attention to the Bushmen of South Africa, a desert-dwelling race, long known though comparatively little regarded in their ethnological significance. They are now by many regarded as an outlying branch of the forest Pygmies, the chief difference being in the shape of the skull, which is rather long in the Bushmen, rather short in the Pygmies. These degraded wanderers inhabit an area extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert, to near Lake Ngami, and thence northwestward to the Ovambo River. Into these, the most barren portions of the South African deserts, they have been driven by the encroachments of Kaffirs, Hottentots, and Europeans.

They closely resemble the Akka tribes of the north, averaging about four and a half feet in height, and possessing deep-set, crafty eyes, small and depressed nose, and a generally repulsive countenance. Their complexion is of a dirty yellow. Their hair grows in small, woolly tufts. In the vicinity of Lake Ngami, Livingstone found them to be of larger stature and darker color, while Baines measured some in this region who were five feet six inches in height. In disposition the Bushmen are strikingly wild, malicious, and intractable, while their cerebral development is cla.s.sed by Humboldt as belonging to almost the lowest cla.s.s of the human species.

Close in affinity with the Bushmen, and in various respects unlike the dark races around them, are the Hottentots, the original inhabitants of Cape Colony, a race of herdsmen who are much superior in culture to the degraded desert nomads. They are not dwarfish, being of medium stature, but they resemble the Bushmen in complexion, in which and in general cast of features they present some similarity to the Chinese. Their hair, like that of the Bushmen, grows in tufts, with s.p.a.ces between, and they are like them in language, their method of speech consisting largely in a series of clicking sounds. Their manner of talking has been compared to the clucking of a hen, and by the Dutch to the ”gobbling of a turkeyc.o.c.k.” The Hottentots present every appearance of being a developed branch of the Pygmy family, or the result of a cross between Bushmen and negroes.

These tribes of dwarfs, now extended throughout the equatorial forests and over the South African deserts, were probably once far more widespread, inhabiting much of the continent and reaching as far as Madagascar, where a branch of them, known as Kinios or Quinias, are thought still to exist. They extended north to the Mediterranean, and have left their representatives in Morocco in a tribe of dwarfs, about four feet high, who differ widely in appearance from all other people of that country. As to their origin, there is a diversity of opinion. Some anthropologists look upon them as a primeval race, distinct from the negroes, who came among them later. Professor Virchow, on the contrary, is of the opinion that their only important difference from the negroes is that of size, and regards them as the remains of a primitive population from whom the negroes have descended.

In a preceding section a statement was made as to what was the probable general appearance of the man-ape. It was based upon the physical aspect of the Pygmies, whom we hold to form the immediate derivative of man's ape ancestor, and to have made no radical change in personal appearance, if we may judge from the various ape-like characteristics which they still present. Mentally they have made a very considerable advance, and have reached the stage of men of low intellectual powers; but while their brains have been growing their bodies have not greatly changed, and the marks of their origin are thick upon them. There has probably been little change in size, the diminutive stature and small bodily dimensions being in accord with their incessant activity, while the difficulties of traversing the thick growth of the tropical forest may have helped to keep them small. As it is, they are of about half the size of civilized man, the weight of a full grown adult male being probably not over ninety pounds.

Taking the Pygmies as a whole, it may be said that, though many of the Akkas are disproportionate in shape and tottering in gait, on the whole these people are well made, their protuberant paunch being probably a result of their habits of eating. Captain Guy Burrows says that a Pygmy will eat twice as much as would suffice a full-grown man, and that one of them will devour a whole stalk of bananas at a meal, with other food.

Some tribes are described as physically and mentally degenerate, and prognathism is in many cases strongly declared, the lower part of the face having an ape-like contour, and the protruding chin, that feature peculiar to man, being very deficient. In their great abdominal development the adult Akkas resemble the children of Arabs and negroes.

This, therefore, seems the retention of a primitive feature which has become a pa.s.sing characteristic in the more advanced types of mankind.

The Pygmies are not dest.i.tute of intelligence, and are capable of receiving some of the elements of education. Two of them were brought to Italy about 1875, who within two years' time learned to read and write and to speak Italian with much fluency. They showed themselves superior in school studies to European children of ten or twelve years of age, and one of them became somewhat proficient in music. In their habits they resembled children, being sensitive and impulsive, fond of play, and very quick in their motions. Their readiness in gaining the elements of education is in accord with experience in the case of other savages.

It is when studies requiring abstruse thought are reached that the facility in acquisition of the savage races comes to an end.

With this consideration of the characteristics and habitat of the Pygmies we may proceed to a review of their habits. The weapons which they seem to have developed during their long upward progress, and to which their supremacy over the wild beasts of the forest is probably due, consist of two, the bow and arrow and the spear. The bow and arrow are small and insignificant in appearance, and would be of little value but for the poison which the Pygmies have somehow learned how to obtain, and which makes them dreaded, not only by beasts, but by men. Wherever found, from the deserts of the south to the forest of the Welle and Aruwimi on the north, the poisoned arrow is a mark of affinity as decided in its way as their physical resemblance. Its wide distribution goes to indicate that it was the general weapon of the Pygmies ages ago, when, presumably, they had all Africa for their own, and ruled supreme over the animal world in that continent.

It is true, indeed, that the use of the poisoned arrow is not peculiar to them, but is a somewhat common possession of savage tribes in all parts of the earth. This makes it quite possible that it was not original with the Pygmies, but was derived by them from other tribes. On the other hand, in view of its great value in giving them supremacy over the lower animals, it may well have been a primeval Pygmy invention, and these tribes the original source of its existing wide distribution.

They possess more than one poison; one being a dark substance of the color and consistence of pitch, which is supposed to be made out of a species of arum. It is laid in the splints of their wooden arrows, or spread thickly upon their iron arrowheads, when they possess these.

Another poison is of a pale glue color, which is supposed by Stanley to be made of crushed red ants. When fresh these poisons are deadly, producing excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, and deep pallor, soon followed by death. In Stanley's experience one man died within a minute, from a mere pin p.r.i.c.k in the breast. Others lived during different intervals, extending up to one hundred hours. The difference in virulence seems to have depended on the degree of freshness of the venom, which apparently lost its strength as it became dry.

The possession of a weapon so deadly as this, together with the agility and daring and the unerring marksmans.h.i.+p of the forest dwarfs, seem sufficient to give them absolute control of the animals of the African wilds. The lion, the elephant, and the buffalo, the largest and fiercest of the beasts of field and forest, are powerless before the virulent venom of the arrows of the Pygmies, and doubtless for ages they have held dominion as the fearless rulers of wood and wild. Captain Burrows says of the skill with the bow of the Pygmy that ”he will shoot three or four arrows, one after the other, with such rapidity that the last will have left the bow before the first has reached its goal.”

The bow and spear are not their only means of obtaining food. They have certain of the arts of the trapper, perhaps original with them, perhaps borrowed from their larger neighbors. They sink pits in the pathways of their game, covering them with light sticks and leaves and sprinkling earth over the whole. They build hut-like structures, and lay nuts or plantains beneath, for the purpose of tempting chimpanzees, baboons, or other apes. A slight movement causes the hut to fall on the incautious animals. Bow traps are placed along the tracks of civets, ichneumons, and rodents, which snap and strangle them. The Pygmies do not hesitate to attack the elephant, spearing it from beneath, and hunting it for its ivory, which they trade with the settled tribes. In short, they are of unsurpa.s.sed agility, and are the best of woodsmen and hunters, their skill being taken advantage of by the settled tribes, who trade with them vegetables, tobacco, spears, knives, and arrows for meat, honey, the feathers of birds, the ivory of the elephant, and other forest spoil. So destructive are they of game that they would soon denude the surrounding forest if they stayed long in one spot, so that they are compelled to move frequently. Schweinfurth speaks of them as cruel and fond of tormenting animals.

They serve the settled natives in other ways, acting as scouts and informing them of the coming of strangers while still distant. Every forest road runs through their camps, their villages command every crossway, and no movement can take place in the forest without their knowledge, while they are adept in the art of concealment.

The superior woodcraft, the malicious disposition, and the poisoned arrows and good marksmans.h.i.+p of these forest folks make them formidable enemies, and the settled tribes hold them in dread and are glad to keep on good terms with them. Yet they find them much of a nuisance, since their dwarfish neighbors claim free access to their gardens and plantain fields, where they help themselves to fruit in return for small supplies of meat and furs. In short, they are human parasites on the larger natives, who suffer from their extortions, yet fear to provoke their enmity. Burrows says that they will never steal, but that they pay very inadequately for the plantains they take, leaving a very small package of meat in return for an ample supply of food.

The Pygmies build their camps two or three miles away from the negro villages, living in groups of sixty to eighty families. A large clearing may have eight to twelve of these Pygmy camps around it, with perhaps two thousand inmates. Their dwellings are of the shape of an oval cut lengthwise, and are built in a rude circle, the residence of the chief occupying the centre. The doors are two or three feet high. On every track leading to the camp, at about one hundred yards' distance, is a sentry house large enough to hold two of the little folks, its doorway looking up the track from the camp. While wandering in the forest they build the flimsiest of leaf shelters.

The intelligence of the Pygmies is of a very low order. In the arts which they have been developing for ages they are experts, they are thoroughly familiar with the habits of animals, and as hunters they are unsurpa.s.sed. But in intellect they are decidedly lacking. They are dest.i.tute of agriculture, possess no animals except a few dogs, and have none of the elements of culture. The Bushmen, for instance, can count only up to two; all beyond that is ”many.” Yet this low tribe of desert nomads is, as we have said, skilled in the art of drawing, its sketches of men and animals being widely distributed through Cape Colony.

The Pygmies seem greatly lacking in the social sentiments. Burrows, in his ”Land of the Pygmies,” says that they do not possess even the most ordinary ties of family affection. Such common and natural feelings of affinity as those between mother and son, brother and sister, etc., seemed to be wanting in them.