Italian national daily - CULTURAL PAGE (TUESDAY 10 OCTOBER 2000)
A young Italian ethnologist went through the rite of initiation of the Baka Pygmies.
This is his story
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The ancient population tries to survive fighting against multinational wood companies and AIDS
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A group of young Baka Pygmies, who live in the South of Cameroon, almost near the border of Congo: they are Mauro Campagnoli's «brothers» and are from the same clan he has become part of after the initiation.
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THIS IS HOW I BECAME A PYGMY
Mauro Campagnoli
When the spirit of the forest is watching you from underneath its dress made of leaves, ready to leap at you, then you realise you have gone too far and there is no turning back.
Atemè, my inseparable fellow traveller, was slowly walking in the moonlight. From a faraway, secret place, in infinite darkness, there came the muffled polyrhythm of the drums and my Pygmean brothers' cries. It was just at that moment that a cold hand lightly touched my naked, numb body, curled up on the ground, among banana-tree leaves. I was not sure to be fully awake. Atemè touched my shoulder and said in his inaccurate French: «Now it's time to die». I woke up completely.
I did not know exactly what it was going to happen and what I had or had not to do. Besides, I did not feel ready at all. I would have liked to ask many things, but I did not utter a single word. In fact, I got the impression that I had to hurry, because the sun was about to rise and maybe the "villageois" were already on their way, about to find out our camp.
"Villageois" is the word used by the Pygmies to define the black people settled along the tracks crossing the forest. They had tried to reach us for five days to see with their own eyes what even other groups of Pygmies hardly believed: an almost naked white man dancing in the forest and wanting to become a Pygmy. This must be difficult to understand for a black giant who dreams to live like a European and despises those "shrimps" of the forest... I had the same difficulty, too.
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So we needed to hurry up and do everything in all secrecy as usual. I rapidly got up and darted a glance at my initiation mates. They were visibly scared and they too looked at me from time to time, as if they wanted to sound my state of mind. All my self-confidence and ease, which had stunned the village during the previous days, began to vanish. But there was not even the time to think about it. In a moment I was out of the hut and queued up with the others.
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Mauro Campagnoli during a ritual in the initiation-hut
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It was then that I saw Jengi, the most powerful and dreaded spirit living in the forest, beautiful and terrible, waiting for us impatiently. Fully clad in a dress made of long palm fibres, it would lead us to a place from where we would never return. So we were told. Soon I found myself in the vegetation, along a very narrow path which was shrouded by fog. The damp ground under my bare feet was even harder and colder than usual. The sound of the drums became louder and in a short time we came to a secrect and protected area. I had gone too far and could not come back. The immense curiosity which had supported me for several weeks would not be sufficient anymore.
When you are in front of Jengi you are weak and alone. Alone like you have never been in your whole life. In these moments you find out things about yourself which you could not even imagine and you discover secrets you did not know to have - such as the will to live, an immense thirst for life which fills you and supports you even when you are desperate. The blue light of the moon, filtered by the fog, was reflected in the motionless spirit's vegetal body, exalting its superhuman figure. It was watching us through its impenetrable dress made of leaves. Although we could not see its eyes, we were conscious that it was staring at us. All of a sudden Jengi took life...
Now that everything is over, Atemè tells me about his initiation, how Jengi first ate his liver and then made him return to life as a man. Just like it happened to me some days ago. But in his case thirty years went by. At that time a man could really die during the initation, not only as a consequence of the rite. It was more ferocious but also today you can die... We walk along the paths in the forest and every now and then we cross a camp. The Pygmies come out of their huts and shout to greet me, expressing a joy that I cannot describe. Even if I don't recognise them, I sense that they saw me and spied on me during the initiation, in hundreds, for days and days. They are shouting "Nga gòe!". Goodbye!
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Wait
in the initiation-hut
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It is strange how our way of considering things and relationships changes. I went to Cameroon to study the music and dances of one of the most mysterious and fascinating people of hunters and gatherers in the world, scattered across one of the most impenetrable forests: the Baka Pygmies. I have lived with them for a few months, hunting, fishing, looking for food underground, but above all playing music, singing and recording their fantastic music...
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I have been all over the forest to find musical instruments and traditional dances. Now that I have gone through the initiation with them, now that I am almost like one of them, accepted like one of their own brothers, I feel like I have always lived here, I realised that every single little action in the forest is natural. When they smile at me and raise their arms shouting from a distance to greet me my heart misses a beat and I would like to stay with them a little longer.
What happened during the secret initiation rituals will remain secret. All that I have seen, all that I have undergone and what I have been told cannot be revealed, because every boy swears in front of the spirit not to tell anything about these things to any man who is not an initiate, less than ever a woman. Respecting this secret is the very least I can do for my friends, who welcomed and protected me with infinite enthusiasm and love.
I miss them much but I also feel very bitter. In fact, most of the traditions and rituals I could describe during my journey are vanishing due to multiple factors. First of all the relentless destruction of the forest caused by Western wood companies - also Italian - which are cutting trees everywhere without rules. If things go on like this, the forest is going to disappear in a few years, maybe ten, together with the Bakas for whom the forest is not only the main food source but also an essential, symbolic and cultural horizon.
Besides, Pygmies are decimated by many viral diseases (AIDS is one of them) which make their traditional medicine useless and of which they are often unaware. They are exploited by the Bantu populations (the so-called "villageois") who consider them more or less like monkeys and who pay them for their work in the plantations almost exclusively in spirits and tobacco. On top of this, the Pygmies are forbidden to live and hunt in the forest in order to keep game for rich Western hunters' safaris.
One day my inseparable friend Atemè, a great Pygmean hunter, saw that I was a bit sad and worried about his people and so he told me: «Mauro, bí-lè, yùwà te mò (you're sad, my friend)... Don't worry about us. We live in contact with sorrow and death every day. Maybe when you come back to visit us, because I know that you'll come back, you'll be told that we have disappeared, that we are all dead. If it this doesn't happen today, it will happen tomorrow. That's life».
In the evening, watching the moon or listening again to my friends' songs, I hear something calling my name, stirring within me. When the spirit of the forest is watching you from underneath its dress made of leaves, when it is calling you, then you realise to be part of the forest and that there is no turning back.
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IN THE FOREST: This is why I went there
Carlo Grande
Mauro Campagnoli is the first white man to be allowed by the Baka Pygmies, a group of Pygmies living in Cameroon's Southeastern forests, to take part in an exceptional rite of initiation - i.e. to become a member of their tribe.
Thanks to the Italian Ethnologic Mission in equatorial Africa (directed by Francesco Remotti), and benefitting from funds from the Department of Cultural Anthropology and a scolarship from the Piedmontese Centre of African Studies, last spring Mauro entered the forest. «I overcame the road blocks put by Cameroon police - he told us - to hunt adventurers craving for the numerous gold and diamond mines of the country, and reached a village of about thirty Pygmies, half of them children, half of them adults equally divided into men and women, plus two 65-year-old persons».
He stayed there more than two months, welcomed like a son, like a brother. He sang and played music with them - a young man who studies to become choir director and music composer. «The Pygmies - he points out - are extraordinary singers who perform during the day while gathering food, but also in the evening when they share the food and at night in the forest under the light of a full moon. They use the "yodel" technique (a particular vocal technique also diffused in European popular music) with a great sense of rhythm and polyphony. They sing in hundreds, each one of them with different variations and improvisations». This way Campagnoli's ethnomusicological search has become a deep, shocking experience (also illustrated in a web site) which reminds us the famous book by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan.
During the initiation, Mauro suffered from the cold, was very hungry and thirsty and lived with giant spiders and cockroaches. But his pygmean "family" - his mothers and sisters - helped him lovingly, applying red bark oil to his body. Mauro spent the night before leaving sleepless. The Pygmies kept on singing very sad songs, begging him to stay with them. «It was beautiful and distressing», he told us, his eyes shining, because living in a big city does not suit him anymore and he is looking forward to returning to the forest.
carlo.grande@lastampa.it
Carlo Grande, writer and journalist of La Stampa, is the author of many books, as I cattivi elementi, storie di acqua, di fuoco, di terra e di vento (Bad elements, stories of water, fire, earth and wind), four stories about environmental themes published by Fernandel, La via dei lupi. Storia di una ribellione nel Medioevo romantico e crudele, and La cavalcata selvaggia, published by Edizioni Ponte alle Grazie.
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