A history of the Batwa (Pygmy) people in Africa

by Aldo Bonincontro.

The Pygmy people are, maybe, the most ancient population to have lived in African forests.
Their name derives from the Greek “pygmaios” (one cubit high, that means “small”), in fact, these persons are only 1.40 m high for men and 1.30 for women, in the average.
The Greek, in fact, referred to a legendary dwarf people living southward from Egypt or even in India, always in war against the

storks that devastated their cultivations.

They’re not to be considered belonging to Black people, because their skin is pale-brown, much clearer than in the other sub-Saharian populations.
They live in the topical-equatorial region of central Africa, from Cameroun to the limits of the Rift Valley, between Congo and Rwanda and Uganda, in a region still formed by equatorial forests, in the largest part and they inhabit small villages, in the forests, living od hunting, fishing and collection.Ethnologists have few news about their most ancient history, but it’s likely they were diffused in East Africa, as some legends refer and they should represent the last representatives of the prehistoric African populations in central Sahara region.
They were already known by the ancient Egyptians in the II millennium B.C. who report, in some written witnesses, that they were named “Dancers of the Gods”, for their great ability in dance.
We know a letter sent by a pharaoh of the Ancient Reign to one of his governors in which the first thanked the governor for having donated a “dwarf” coming from the “spirits land”, the name with which the Egyptians named the lands southward their territories.

About 1000 B.C., they welcomed pacifically the Bantu populations coming in their area, creating with them exchange relations giving their hunting products to receive food from agriculture, that the Pygmies have always scarcely practiced, much less than the Bantus.Later, this relation on equal bases with Bantu begun to deteriorate at the expense of the Pygmies, because the Bantus profited of their own technological superiority, with the knowledge of metallurgical art, unknown to the Pygmies and of the same farming practice that gave them more authonomy and economic power.
So, the Pygmy people was often submitted and reduced in a more or less total slavery by tus and this started their decline, when they couldn’t count anymore on forest resources.Only in the last decades, after the arrival of missionaries, doctors and antropologists, the Pygmies started to enjoy again a partial freedom from the Bantus, despite their human rights are still today seriously limited in various situations.

The Pygmies had always been nomadic, given their attitude to move across the territory for hunting and collecting fruits but, more recently, due to the influxes of urban civilization spreading in Africa, they are becoming more and more sedentary.Today, their overall population counts about 250,000 people and they talk various languages, but with various words common to all Pygmy groups and this makes think that, in the past, they shared the same language.

Their life today knows an unprecedented crisis, due to deforestation that is reducing their vital and cultural space; the governments don’t recognize their rights as citizens like the others.
In Cameroun the life of the Bagyeli Pygmies is going to be shaken by the building of an oil pipeline, financed by the World Bank, that will cross their land; in Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo, (where the Pygmies are named Batwa) their forests have been nearly totally destroyed and they live in misery as manual workers and even beggars.