The Pygmies of the Congo

This study will provide a summary of Colin M. Turnbull's The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo. Turnbull has a deep respect for the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Congo after living with them for years, and his emphasis in the book is on life as seen, experienced and loved by the Pygmies themselves:

This book tries to convey something of the lives and feelings of a people who live in a forest world, something of their intense love for that world and their trust in it. It is a world that will soon be gone forever, and with it the people (5).

Turnbull wants to show the reader how the people themselves feel about their world, the forest, the sounds, the animal and plant life, their culture, their practices, social system and beliefs. Outsiders---even villagers who live near the forest---do not understand the forest or the forest people. To such outsiders, the forest is a "gloomy" and even "evil place (12-13), but to the Pygmies "it is their world, and in return for their affection and trust it supplies them with all their needs" (14).

Turnbull writes that most of what has been written by outsiders about the Pygmies is wildly inaccurate. He himself discovered this when circumstances led to his presence at a nkumbi, where Pygmy and Negro boys from the nearby village are initiated into manhood. It was a halfway-house experience for Turnbull, the first step in his journey of living with and coming to understand the Pygmies.

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e goodness of their forest world is perhaps best of all expressed in one of their great molino songs . . . that is sung fully only when someone has died." In most such songs "all that is needful is to awaken the forest, and everything will come right." However, whgen someone dies, then the men sit and "sing songs of devotion, songs of praise, to wake up the forest and rejoice it, to make it happy again" (93). The justice system of the Pygmies is shown in the way Cephu is found guilty of his crime against the people, he is punished by simply being mocked and treated as if he did not exist, and this goes on for only a few hours, but the punishment is effective: "Without any formal system of law Cephu had ben firmly put in his place, and it was unlikely he would do the same thing again in a hurry" (110). Still, Turnbull notes that while there is "a confusing, seductive informality about everything they did" (110), there is at the same time a structure of traditions, practices, rituals and beliefs which serve as the glue for Pygmy society. It runs smoothly and effectively. The underlying presence in this structure and its efficient operation, again, is the living forest itself. As might be expected, play is an important part of

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