Colin Macmillan Turnbull was a British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People and The Mountain People, and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology.
Mbuti (Bambuti) mythology is the mythology of the African Mbuti Pygmies of Congo.
In anthropology, pygmy peoples are ethnic groups whose average height is unusually short. The term pygmyism is used to describe the phenotype of endemic short stature for populations in which adult men are on average less than 150 cm tall.
Pygmy music refers to the sub-Saharan African music traditions of the Central African foragers, predominantly in the Congo, the Central African Republic and Cameroon.
The Mbuti people, or Bambuti, are one of several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo region of Africa. Their languages are Central Sudanic languages and Bantu languages.
The Aka or Biaka are a nomadic Mbenga pygmy people. They live in south-western Central African Republic and in northern Republic of the Congo. They are related to the Baka people of Cameroon, Gabon, northern Congo, and southwestern Central African Republic.
The Ituri Rainforest is a rainforest located in the Ituri Province of northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The forest's name derives from the nearby Ituri River which flows through the rainforest, connecting firstly to the Aruwimi River and finally into the Congo.
The Baka people, known in the Congo as Bayaka, are an ethnic group inhabiting the southeastern rain forests of Cameroon, northern Republic of the Congo, northern Gabon, and southwestern Central African Republic. They are sometimes called a subgroup of the Twa, but the two peoples are not closely related. Likewise, the name "Baka" is sometimes mistakenly applied to other peoples of the area who, like the Baka and Twa, have been historically called pygmies, a term that is now considered derogatory.
Ota Benga was a Mbuti man, known for being featured in an exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and as a human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. Benga had been purchased from native African slave traders by the explorer Samuel Phillips Verner, a businessman searching for African people for the exhibition, who took him to the United States. While at the Bronx Zoo, Benga was allowed to walk the grounds before and after he was exhibited in the zoo's Monkey House. Benga was placed in a cage with an orangutan as a lampoon on Darwinism.
The Efé are a group of part-time hunter-gatherer people living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the depths of the forest they do not wear much clothing, using only leaf huts as shelter for their bodies in the intense heat. The Efé are Pygmies, and one of the shortest peoples in the world. The men grow to an average height of 142 cm, and women tend to be about 5 cm shorter.
Michael Korda is an English-born writer and novelist who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
Jean-Pierre Hallet was a Belgian ethnologist, naturalist, and humanitarian known best for his extensive work with the Efé (Bambuti) pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest. He wrote the 1964 autobiographical book, Congo Kitabu, the 1973 ethnologic book Pygmy Kitabu, and the 1968 book Animal Kitabu, which details his extraordinary collection of animals in the Congo and in Kenya. He initiated the Pygmy Fund for the benefit of the Efé.
The Bongo people, also called Babongo or Bazimba, are an agricultural people of Gabon in equatorial Africa who are known as "forest people" due to their recent foraging economy.
The Kango (Bakango), also known as the Batchua and Mbuti-Sua, are an Mbuti pygmy people of the Ituri forest. They speak a Bantu language, Bila, apparently in two dialects, northern Sua and southern Kango.
The term Congo Pygmies refers to "forest people" who have, or recently had, a hunter-gatherer economy and a simple, non-hierarchical societal structure based on bands, are of short stature, have a deep cultural and religious affinity with the Congo forest and live in a generally subservient relationship with agricultural "patrons", with which they trade forest products such as meat and honey for agricultural and iron products.
The Twa are a group of indigenous Central African foragers tribes. These cultural groups were formerly called Pygmies by European writers, but the term is no longer preferred based on its cultural and geographic inaccuracy, as well as being seen as pejorative. Cultural groups are being reclassified by themselves based on their function in society, lineage, and land ties.
The 14,000 Twa of the swamp forest north and west of Lake Tumba and between Tumba and Lake Mai-Ndombe in the west of the Congo are one of several fishing and hunter-gatherer castes living in a patron–client relationship with farming Bantu peoples across central and southern Africa. In this case the people are the Mongo, specifically the Mongo tribes known as Ntomba, Lia (Bolia), and Konda. The two castes are called Oto and Twa: The Oto are the agricultural patrons of the Twa.
The Great Lakes Twa, also known as Batwa, Abatwa or Ge-Sera, are a Bantu ethnic group native to the African Great Lakes region on the border of Central and East Africa. As an indigenous pygmy people, the Twa are generally assumed to be the oldest surviving population of the Great Lakes region. Current populations of Great Lakes Twa people live in the states of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2000 they numbered approximately 80,000 people, making them a significant minority group in these countries. The largest population of Twa is located in Burundi estimated in 2008 at 78,071 people.
The African Pygmies are a group of ethnicities native to Central Africa, mostly the Congo Basin, traditionally subsisting on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They are divided into three roughly geographic groups:
Anne Eisner Putnam (1911–1967) was an abstract and landscape painter, watercolorist, and collector of African art, originally from New York where she also died. She became a writer, best known for her book Madami: My Eight Years of Adventure with the Congo Pygmies. This was an account of her time and experiences in the Belgian Congo.
