o. As a young man,Justin left
Bagandou for several years to work in the city for the national post
office, but he did not like the sedentary job or being supervised by a
boss, so he returned home in the early 1980s blish his own small coffee,
banana, and subsistence farm just outside Bagandou.This was an
unconventional move among Centrafricans, who, in keeping with a still
prevalent French colonial mentality, usually prize office jobs in the
city and look down on those who farm the land.
for both practical
and moral support during my research. Concerned with in-tellectual
issues of culture and politics,Justin speaks and writes well in French
and,
Moreover, one protests, f an entire, ever-changing being
cannot be reduced to conveniently chosen, sifted incidents or
circumstances.
1 1 also arranged to buy a used moped with a
double seat, with the understanding that when 1 completed my research
Justin would own the moped. In this way we shared a rutual
responsibility for the vehicle.
.. Neverthe-less, I had to
actively reject a role that both Africans and non-Africans in this
country assumed 1 would play because of the color of my skin, my
education, and my overseas origin - that of beingJustin's “employer.”
As
a result of this history, most Centrafricans tend to assume that anyone
coming from the outside will exploit them. Many Centrafricans I
encountered believed that I would make bundles of money from a book,
photos, or recordings gleaned from my re-
finally discovered that
I could not fully escape what history made of me here, f forl had
“walked onto a stage . . . set to play to a colonial audience,” as Edwin
Wilm-Sen has noted (1989:37). Moreover, the man who made the comment
that day in the BaAka camp had been partially right. Not only was the
ethnography that I was ex-petted to generate in fact a commodity-an
object of potential value and power gained rny being in Centrafrique-but
the "experience' itself threatened to be lived as a commodity, as
fodder for an ethnography. My presence had an ulterior motive, !even if
it was to speak for the nonmaterial value of music, dance,language, and
human !relationships. My tenuous aspiration to escape ulterioriry made
the man's comment all the more frustrating.
The way to oppose the
lingering effects of the colonial past,it seemed to me, was !to take
hold of the historically defined relationships imposed on myself,Justin,
and the BaAka with whom we would work and knowingly struggle against
that history, re-shaping our relationships to fit our respective values
and actual situation.Justin and I decided that the money for my project
would be available for our collective necessi- I ties instead of my
paying him a “salary.” For Justin, this arrangement had several
ad-vantages, Itliberated him from a social obligation to give his money
to undeserving but }insistent relatives who would otherwise assume,
because he was working with me, that \^he always had extra cash. This
way we could instead apply the funds to our projects Iq!(my learning,
his farming) as required, while keeping on hand emergency
resources-first aid supplies and petty cash-for family, friends, and
neighbors in need,
Through this arrangement I was spared the
untenable role of being my host's em-ployer and was better situated to
construct my ownidentity and relationships free from t the weightiest
colonial baggage. It might. have been simpler and in fact cheaper just
to establish a fixed salary, the way other researchers and business
people usually do. Our way, by contrast, would require a constant effort
to renegotiate financial matters ac-cording to changing
mutualobligations, fluctuating priorities, and emerging circum- ,But,I
felt, such negotiation would arise in response to those very real
circum-stances and would therefore suit our living relationship.
“1 know sharing is the thing here: I wrote in my journal. After
all,they were sharing most of what they had with me (and whar I had with
others). ”
He decided to put up a sign warnin
mauthorized pilferers, but the sign soon mysteriously disappeared.
Finally, he chopped \ down his sugar cane, eliminating the problem
altogether.
Mab (pro )mah-bho) is a specific dance
form, and in the Bagandou area in the late 1980s it was the most popular
of the BaAka dances.9 . Most Bagandou BaAka have learned Mabo from the
BaAka of Minjoukou, in the Cong, a village with which some Bagandou
BaAka have marriage and travel ties (see Figure 1-1 and chapter 5). The
Kenga BaAka,bv contrasL have no snecial ties to the BaAka of the Congo,
and consequently the source of Mabo for them is the BaAka of Bagandou.
it is the traditional territory of the Bembangana group, but
individuals in r.he Bongboku group are often more successful hunters,
drawing accusations of sorcery from the oth-ers. .
in-terviewed a Moaka named Lond, one of many “masters” or “owners” (ba ginda, ba of Mabo.
Being a newcomer, 1 complied. Although l fek good about giving
BaAka something they like in return for hospitality and meat, a supply
of cigarettes also tended to attract hangers-on who would come around
just to mooch a smoke. ThiS one-sided exchange was to me a sign that
there was somethinginherently wrong with the practice. Besides,I was
uncomfortable giving cigarettes, which I disfike and know to be harmful,
and I vowed t.hat when 1 came to stay longer 1 would fmd other means of
exchange. Aker-native articles were unfortunately more expensive and
heavier to carry through the than cigarettes. But 1 felt better
dispensing salt and soap, as well as medicine when necessary, and
occasionally giving spearheads and axeheads, cooking pots, and cloth.
From the beginning, I tried to explain toJustin thatl did not. want to
base my first acquaintances with BaAka on an exchange of commodities for
knowledge, but I did want to make it clear that I was willing to give
as well as to receive.
He thought that we would
suffer at Ndanga for lack of meat and that people would never volunteer
to teach me anything. I argued that may'oe l could not buy an of the
world of the pygmies without cigarettes, but that 1 did not want to buy
it.l rather wanted to earn it. Also, I was gambling on the assumption
that once I showed a sincere and sustained interest in cultural matters,
people would be drawn ro discussion and sociability. It was upserting
for me to hear hirn say he thought l was wrongin taking this gamble, a
gamble on which 1 based much of the in-tegrity of my research. That
evening, both of us angry after our argument, we were silently preparing
some simple spaghetti from our supplies. Suddenly Duambongo, a man soon
to become our friend, appeared out of the dark holding two legs of a
mo-some duiker from that day's net hunt. One leg was a gift from
himself, and the other was from his older brother, Elanga. After a
dipiomatic interval,lustin conceded that I had been right about the
cigarette business.
An incident many months later underlined
my triumph in the cigarette matter. I was walking along the road in the
village of Bagandou wit.h Sandimba's son, a young man called Ndanga
(named for his birthplace). We were on our way to a BaAka dance in a
camp just off the road, and as we walked villagers greeted us. One
jovial milo called out that Ndanga is lucky to be with me, because I
must be giving him lots of cig-rettes. Ndanga called back that, no,I
don't give him cigarettes because cigarettes make you sick with
coughing. Of course, were someone to have offered Ndanga a cigarette at
he would have gladly accepted, but he showed me he understood and
re-spected my position.
During a casual visit
at our camp, Mbousalong, a respected elder hunter, told us that at a
BaAka settlement called Kpeta in the Congo (near Mopoutou, where Eiamba
orig-inated), BaAka acquire Elamba by communicating with the dead. They
do “human sac-rifices,” he continued, pledging the life or health of a
relative via sorcery in order to ob-tain the power of the dance.imba
later told us a similar tale.
We began by
asking Sandimba where, in her opinion, the best Elamba dancers live. She
answered without hesitation-Mopoutou in the Congo. She had heard, she
said, that a woman named Bongoi is t.he ginda and is in fact the mother
of the eboka,the one who had founded the dance. Sandimba added that she
was planning to take a trip there herself, with her daughter Kwanga and
some others, to get the younger and to see how the people in Mopoutou
dance the “real dance”
We had the rest of that
day free to spend in Mongoumba, and I wanted to meet ' BaAka from this
region. This is where Simha Arom had recorded his impressive album
Anthologie de la musique des Pygmtes Aha (1978). When I had played a
tape of that for BaAkain Bagandou and Kenga, they had not recognized the
songs. Yet the album presents the songs as a definitive, classical-type
repenoire of “the Aka.”
When we menuoned
Mabo, they knew what we were talking about but said that they call the
same dance Mondimba, the name of the raffia version of the Mabo mask
(raffia is readily available here near the rivers). They also knew
Ndamb,as well as another dance known as Edjengiin Bagandou and further
to the west. Here,however, they called Edjengi by a more generic term
for dancing spirirs, molwndi (chapters 8 and 9). They were not familiar
with Dingboku or Elamba but said they have a dance named Lemle, which
theylearned from BaAka who live across the Ouban-gui, in Zaire. It was
beginning to seem as if the BaAka repertoire is determined largely I
by the flow o{ social interaction and travel between groups in
different areas but that variations particular to one locality are also
common.
I had a tourist visa, which was the
only feasible way for me to enter the Congo; of: t fzcial Congolese
research permits would have entailed a trip to faraway Brazzaville,which
was beyond my means. I had decided to risk not having a permit
because.Justin had assured me that this area of the Congo is so remote
t.hat we would never be ques-tioned. Unfortunately, times had changed
sinceJustin's last visit here ten years earlier,I and there were now
police posts in the remotest areas. Hoping to get by, we told the Chef
that I was taking a break from my research in Centrafrique so that we
could visit Justins cousin Maurice, a prominent man in Mopoutou.
BaAka in Boyele smiled and gathered around excitedly in
response to my interest in their be'ooka. Like the BaAka of Mongoumba,
they did not know gano or Komba-and they used the term dzambe for “god.”
One middle-aged woman did say that she had heard of Komba, but she was
among those originally from Bagandou. She added that she did not know
much about such things of her parents'generation. They were not
fa-miliar with Dingboku or Elamba either but said they did know another
women's dance.In fact, there was to be a funeral eboka that very
afternoon, and they planned to include }this women's dance-at which
timelintended among other things to take note of the name.
Unfortunately, the lumber truck arrived in the meantime, and I had to
forgo the eboka.
Cousin Etienne, who is fluent
in Diaka himself, chimed in amiably, describing to them the possible
forest routes from Bagandou to Enyele.I took this chance to ask thero if
they knew the women's dance, Elamba. They in fact did but preferred to
call it by an older name, Monira When 1 mentioned Komba, they replied,
as had the other BaAka along the route so tar, that they did not know
Komba or gano. They did know the dances Mabo and Ndamb, however.
of the rnen, who identified him-self as “Jean-Pierre”
(pronounced dza-pyerreh), told us that as far as he knew, Bongoi,the
mother of EIamba, was indeed in Mopoutou. He also informed us that the
BaAka of Mopoutou are familiar with all the dances popular in Bagandou
and eveninclude Ed- I jengi, a BaAka spirit dance (chapters 8 and 9)
in their active repertoire. He also said }there are some elders who are
expert at telling gano that feature Komba. Compared with my impressions
of some of the places we had seen along the way, Mopoutou sounded like a
rich spot for BaAka culture. Since these men had just come from the
large Congo town of Impfond,1 was curious to ask them whatlife is like
for BaAka there. They explained thatinlmpfondo the BaAka mix their
dances with the bilo. They do Mabo, but not well, they said, and
sometimes even bilo join the dance to impmve their own hunting. They
said that BaAka in Imfondo speak both Diaka and Lingala. I
While we chatted that first morning sitting in front of
Maurice's house, Bongoi was joined by her husband, Kuornbo. They
explained how Elamba had come to be: while travelingin an area to the
south, Bongoi's older sister, now deceased, had once seen a new dance
style that she liked, and, on returning to Mopoutou, she and Bongoi had
in-terpreted the interjected that years ago he had seen village women in
the Congo perform a dance that reminded him of Elamba; swinging the
hips is a move-ment more common among bil, and this aspect of Elamba is
somewhat unique among the usually square-hipped BaAka dancing styles.
But Bongoi insisted that Elamba was never a bilo dance. Kuombo said,
rather, that Elamba is based on r.he style of a now rare BaAka hunting
eboka called DjoboIw (see Bahuchet 1985:434.) Boursier notes that for
Baka pygmies of Cameroon, Djoboko (Jobolw) is a spirit force that
presides over a “rite” called Yeli, blessing the hunt and calling for an
abundance of game (1991:26). A connection of Djoboko with womens
dances, then, may be more wide-spread than Elamba, taking shape
differentlyin various regions and changing over time.
p 68 here, there is more descriptive detail
. Some of the newest songs had not yet reached Bagandou,
andllooked forward to bringing recordings of these back with me. There
were also some slight differences in the way they sang the background
parts and elaborauons for a few of the songs l knew,including “Mama
Angeli.”
Over Lime 1 came to understand the
Mabo songs by hearing people sing phrases during the day, and 1 often
discovered that these melodies were actually isolated parts of Mabo
songs One day, 1 was walking to our camp on my way back from the
village.Along the pathl came upon Djongi's daughter, Mokoti, and some
younger children. As they scurried alongin front of me, Mokoti sang out
the phrase of a song. I recognized then that it was the main theme of
one Mabo song very popular at the time, “Makala”
Though the trend-setters and song composers of Mabo come from the
Cong, local varia|_l also come about in Bagandou as elsewhere.7 Songs
fade in and out of popularity with l each season, but melodies from past
seasons can come back in waves of fashion after a rest period.
The song was “Makala,” and singingit came more easily to me
while I danced. As I moved around the circle, the voices of different
people stood out at moments, affecting my own singing and my choices of
variations. Ndami sang a yodeled elaboration I had not heard before.I
could feel fully the interrneshing of sound and motion and move with
/it as it transformed, folding in upon itself. This was different from
listening or singing on the sidelines because, while moving with the
circle, I became an active part of the /kaleidoscope. I was pan of r.he
changing design inside the scope, instead of look-ing at it and
projecting in.
I sat beside l<wanga and
other women who were taking a break from dancing to sing from the
sidelines.l noticed that some singers repeated only one or two
variations of a melody dunng a given song, or dropped out For a while
and then rejoined the cho-rus later. Other singers skipped around
between several elaborate variations and then joined friends in
emphasizing and repeating one particular melody fragment.
although Ndambo was being performed on occasion, it was overshadowed by the pop-ularity of the newer dances.
especially regard clothing and other commodities (such as
nonfunctioning watches) asindications-primarily f to each other-that
they are hip to the modern world. Big dances near the village are
fitting opportunities for such expression.
egalitarian social systems ... u “(hose in which the labor or obedience
of one adult cannot be coerced by another adult. Members retain the
prerogative of withdrawing from untenable relationships or coeKive
commands” (Roseman 1984:413, cites Fried, Collier, and Rosaido);r An
"egal-this sense makes for a cultural climate of constant negotiation
Here the autonomy aspect of egaluarian practice superseded the sharing aspect;
BaAka women can use the round leaf huts they build as leverage in
serious dis-putes with their husbands. During one fight about Bandit's
alleged infidelity, Doua took her hut completely apart and went to live
in her natal camp with her mother, leaving Bandit with nowhere to sleep.
Eventually he made up with her, and she returned. But an angry wife
takes her hut apart in stages, depending on how furious she is with her
husband. Once this season, Duambongo's wife, Mokpake, upset with her
husband's drunkenness, removed all the leaves from their hut. Before
going further, 'however, she allowed her neighbors to convince her
not to take the next and more se-rious step of dismantling the
“skeleton,” the dome frame of saplings. After a few days her anger
subsided, and she covered the frame with new, waterproof mongongo
leaves.Turnbull tells a similar story among the Bambuti (1961:132-3).
? if sheis not the most skilled dancer in the group, her
personality makes her a leader, a socioesthetic steerswoman. When
initiative might make a difference, she usually takes it, and when
someone's behavior is gettingin the way of a performance, she often
chastises the offender.
l Their male identities are
therefore suddenly derived more from labor and consump-tion than from
production. BaAka men also transport water for bilo households, a task
normally performed by village women. BaAka men are thereby feminized in
the eyes of the bil, and perhaps in their own eyes as well. follows that
some of these men find the assertive, playful women's dances more
threatening than otherwise. My preseMy presence and myinterest in the
women, under these circumstances, rnay have also heightened the mens
envy.
\ do not mean necessarily to link gender
tension with gender nequality, but such tension does suggest a time of
flux, a struggle between parties to relationships.
be
seen as subversive insofar as women,through perfomnance, define and
assert their gendered experience within a relatively egalitarian but
still periodically male-dominated environment. But BaAka also show roles
and gender relationships, various kinds of versive repetition" in
response to changing circumstances-
Duxing that long season near
Bagandou village in 1988, rumors began to circulate that.some people
thought BaAka dances like Mabo were “satanic” (ba sata). Suddenly Elongo
and other ardent nzapa followers refused to participate in beboka and
started accusing other BaAka of being satanic. A split developed between
those
Elanga explained to me that for the dance Edjengi each
family has its personalized bedjo. But in 1989 the BaAka of Bagandou
rarely performed Edjengi any-nore. In some regions Edjengiis associated
with elephant hunting; it may have gained in prominence during the
colonialivory trade, and since that trade waned, the dance also faded
(cf. Bahuchet 1979:76). But, startingin 1992, Edjengi appeared again in
the Bagandou area in revival form (chapter 9).
African pygmies
are “conscious of being part of a cultural group that is different. But
the extent to which they are treated as socially inferior does not
escape them. There-fore, the main reason, as they admit, that . . . 'we
want to be like the villagers: is to be-come full citizens” (1991b:12,
my translation).
set forth the shrewd,comic moti that,despite the
bilo's pretensions to appear so-phisticated and superior, they are apes
at heart..
But, my mind protested (1 could her, since1 had to
wait until she pushed the “over” button on the radio),individual
villagers have vested interests in converting BaAka, whether or not they
themselves are sincere believers. Greater access to the cash economy,
command of the I:renchlanguage,and controlof the written word allow bilo
such as Gombo and Maxim to readily dominate neophyte BaAka
“Christians,” while claiming to liberate them (and the false piety of
these particular evangelists became plain later; see chapter 9). Fear of
reason might be related to the fiip side of the ape I
premise, which is that BaAka, when they die, become white people
("bounjon")-real people, as they say.
In any event, despite the
resistance strategies that BaAka have developed over the long term, at
Dzanga it looked as if BaAka were culturally unprepared to resist or
con-trol missionization,
is new to rhem; their expertise is in
hunting. Ironically, what the mis-SiOMries offer, then, canlooklike a
way to bypass the bil, to jump ahead into this neW “modern” world of
survival and independence-a smiling white woman asserting the
.
Although the form of this song was not as dynamic as most BaAka singing,
it carried an unmistakably BaAka sensibility.This was the first time
l'd seen BaAka reconfigure Christian materialinto their own style.
we
had made our comparisons, the women went on to sing something that
amazed me.lt was apparently an Elamba song, but it was unlike anything I
had heard in Bagandou. Listening to it made my head swirl. This song
must have been develop-ing for some time, becoming more abstract as ume
went on, the longer themes and phrases now elaborated into flurries of
intricate parts (CD 2:12, third song). This made me realize that, had 1
begun my studies in this region, it probably would have been
along
the road, and villagers told me about how the coffee industry had been
suffering for the past several years. Because of the slump in the
international market, many farmers had decided not to harvest their
coffee at all this year, and, since BaAka were not needed to help with
the labor, most had remained in forest camps.
. We visited with
him under a thatch awning where he was resting. As we chat.ted, Gbenda
told us that he is a ginda of a new version of Edjengi, now pronounced
Njengi. It seemed that a revival of this dance for t.he big game hunt
had recently made its way up from Minjoukou in the Congo to the
Bagan-dou area.ln fact, he said that Njengi had already surpassed Mabo
as the preferred dance in many areas, Gbenda pointed to a leaf-walled
enclosure in the bushes behind him that served as the secret preparation
place or the Njengi mask.
I observed that many of the most
adamant nzapa followers among BaAka are I men like this one and like
Elongo (chapter 8), who would otherwise be on the fringes of the
community because of a lack of hunting skillor other socialimpairment
but who use nzapa as an opportunity to gain influence. These people tend
to be the ones who ]repeat most adamantly that BaAka dances are
satanic.
He added that an alternate name for the new Njengiis
Nyama, meaning “meat”; during Njengi the ginda can determine in which
direcuon the spear-hunting party should go and can divine how many
animals they will find. I did not quite understand the relation-ship
between the old and the new versions of the dance, and there was not
always con-sensus on this topic, though some men later explained that
Njengi is the “child” of Ed-jengi. Most people agreed that Njengi has
new steps and songs but that the drum rhythms and the style of singing
are the same as in Edjengi.
In both cases, an eboka can emerge as
a mystical, dreamed gift within a family, transferred across genders
and across the threshold of death-for ex-
by extension, their
entire clan Ndanga-with the negative sorcery rumors. Gbenda at Bopouni
had said that Njengi was being rejected by many BaAka on the Bombolongo
clan path, where there were nzapa followers. The seeds had been sown,
then, for a gnarly conflict related to the nzapa controversy, and the
Njengi revival was bringing it into focus.
was confused as lo why
the young people of Ndanga were dancingin this sryle untilllearned that
they had seen it in Bagandou village, where bilo teenagers too were
recreating Bolernba pygmy dances; it had become a teenage trend
throughout the re- I gion. But here at Ndanga they were calling this
dance the “god dance,” the same name they had used a few years earlier
for the informal preaching and hymn singing (chap-ter 8), when many
BaAka had been debating the value of the Christian material. Here the
overt controversy had been settled by now; Djolo explained to me that
the “god dance” is just one among many beboka, and they could dance
their own dances and still"pray to god." Apparently BaAka in the area
were now performing the “god dance” \regularly at funerals, a
response to exhortations by Christians that nzapa be addressed in the
circumstance of death so as to avoid bad spirits and evil in general.
But the in-creasingly eclecuc “god dance,” about which I would soon
learn more, was now poised uneasily within a wider, dynamic BaAka
repertoire thar also included Ekpelu and Njengi, all vying to define an
emerging identity
The families of Djolo and Elanga had seen too
many deaths at Ndanga, and, following a BaAka tradition, they decided to
abandon that location,including the new mudwall huts and the fields
they had cleared
1 could hear some Grace Brethren songs,which
were preceded and followed by Bolemba-style interpretations of hymns
from various Christian sects represented in Bagandou,including Baptist,
Apos-tolic, and even Catholic hymns. They not only blended all that into
the same dance but also mixed in Afro-pop snippets in Lingala (from
radio tunes broadcast from Bangui and Brazzaville). I'hey were calling
this entire mixture the “god dance.” Puzzling over this transition at
Dzanga from hymns in “church” to dancing,I asked a Moaka whether, ,as
some had claimed, it was Bala-bala who taught them this dance. He said
yes, and ;when, incredulous, I asked how she actually dances, he
demonstrated by imitating her body as she piayed the guitar to accompany
hymns.
As llistened to this performance at Dzanga,l began to
view this developing ex pressive forrn,the “god dance,” as a means of
addressing modernity.ln an effort to rein-vent themselves as competent
in a changing world, these BaAka were claiming any “otherness” that
surrounds them and usually excludes them and mixingit into a form they
could define and control.
only to learn that the Congolese
national elections, which had been postponed time after time, were
actually to take ptace the following day.Justin's cousin Maurice greeted
us nervously. Violence often ac-companies elections here, and he was
not pleased that two foreigners-Justin and l-
many BaAka have the
resilience to use the missionary presence to their advantage, even
though some of the BaAka most directly affected might be stripped of the
expressive tools to construct a future. I
When I asked Justin
his opinion, he observed in private that he was per-plexed; in his
experience with BaAka and other local cultures, negative sorcery is
never connected to music and dance, which to the contrary is always
aimed at positive things like healing, social harmony, or food. A full
picture of Njengi as a cultural complex
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