The African Pygmies (or Congo Pygmies, variously also Central African foragers, African rainforest hunter-gatherers (RHG) or Forest People of Central Africa) 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:
The western Bambenga, or Mbenga (Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic), the eastern Bambuti, or Mbuti, of the Congo Basin (DRC) the central and southern Batwa, or Twa (Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Angola and Namibia). The more widely scattered (and more variable in physiology and lifestyle) Southern Twa are also grouped under the term Pygmoid.
They are notable for, and named for, their short stature (described as "pygmyism" in anthropological literature). They are assumed to be descended from the original Middle Stone Age expansion of anatomically modern humans to Central Africa, albeit substantially affected by later migrations from West Africa, from their first appearance in the historical record in the 19th century limited to a comparatively small area within Central Africa, greatly decimated by the prehistoric Bantu expansion, and to the present time widely affected by enslavement at the hands of neighboring Bantu, Ubangian and Central Sudanic groups.
Most contemporary Pygmy groups partially forage and partially trade with neighboring farmers to acquire cultivated foods and material items; no group lives deep in the forest without access to agricultural products. A total number of about 900,000 Pygmies were estimated to be living in the central African forests in 2016, about 60% of this number in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The number does not include Southern Twa populations, who live outside of the Central Africa forest environment, partly in open swamp or desert environments.
Additionally, West African hunter-gatherers may have dwelled in western Central Africa earlier than 32,000 BP and dwelled in West Africa between 16,000 BP and 12,000 BP until as late as 1000 BP or some period of time after 1500 CE. West African hunter-gatherers, many of whom dwelt in the forest–savanna region, were ultimately acculturated and admixed into larger groups of West African agriculturalists, akin to the migratory Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and their encounters with Central African hunter-gatherers.
Name
The term Pygmy, as used to refer to diminutive people, derives from Greek πυγμαῖος (via Latin , plural ), a term for "dwarf" from Greek mythology. The word is derived from , a term for "cubit" (), suggesting a diminutive height.pygmy. Online Etymology Dictionary.
The use of "Pygmy" in reference to the small-framed African hunter-gatherers dates to the early 19th century, in English first by John Barrow, Travels Into the Interior of Southern Africa (1806). However, the term was used diffusely, and treated as unsubstantiated claims of "dwarf tribes" among the Bushmen of the interior of Africa, until the exploration of the Congo basin. In the 1860s, two Western explorers, Paul Du Chaillu and Georg Schweinfurth, claimed to have found the mythical "Pygmies". A commentator wrote in 1892 that, thirty years ago (viz., in the 1860s), "nobody believed in the existence of African dwarf tribes" and that "it needed an authority like Dr. Schweinfurth to prove that pygmies actually exist in Africa" (referencing Georg August Schweinfurth's The Heart of Africa, published 1873).Schlichter, Henry. 1892. "The Pygmy tribes of Africa" , The Scottish Geographical Magazine 8 (1892), 289–301, 345–357. "African Pygmy" is used for disambiguation from "Asiatic Pygmy", a name applied to the Negrito populations of Southeast Asia.
Dembner (1996) reported a universal "disdain for the term 'pygmy among the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa: the term is considered a pejorative, and people prefer to be referred to by the name of their respective ethnic or tribal groups, such as Bayaka, Mbuti and Twa.S. A. Dembner, "Forest peoples in the central African rain forest: focus on the pygmies" Unasylva — An international journal of forestry and forest industries Vol. 47 – 1996/3. "Pygmies are distributed discontinuously across nine different African countries Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Congo and live in innumerable distinct ethnic groups that are separated by geography, language, customs and technology. The one characteristic that is common to them all, regardless of their location or degree of acculturation, is their disdain for the term 'pygmy'. Without exception, they prefer to be called by their appropriate ethnic name, such as Mbuti, Efe, Aka, Asua, and consider the term 'pygmy' as pejorative." There is no clear replacement for the term "Pygmy" in reference to the umbrella group. A descriptive term that has seen some use since the 2000s is "Central African foragers".
Regional names used collectively of the western group of Pygmies are Bambenga (the plural form of Mbenga), used in the Kongo language, and Bayaka (the plural form of Aka/Yaka), used in the Central African Republic.
Groups
The Congo Pygmy speak languages of the Niger–Congo and Central Sudanic language families. There has been significant intermixing between the Bantu and Pygmies.
There are at least a dozen Pygmy groups, sometimes unrelated to each other. They are grouped in three geographical categories:"Mbuti, Twa, and Mbenga". In Stokes (ed.) 2009. Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East, Volume 1 the western Bambenga (Mbenga) of Cameroon and Gabon, the Bayaka (Aka and Baka), the Bakola or Bakoya (Gyele and Kola), and the Bongo; these groups are speakers of Bantu and Ubangian languages the Bambuti (Mbuti) of the Ituri Rainforest, speakers of Bantu and Central Sudanic languages the widely scattered Batwa: the Great Lakes Twa of the Great Lakes, speakers of the Bantu Rundi and Kiga languages the "Pygmoid" Southern Twa, not always included in the term "Pygmy", as they tend to be somewhat taller (male average above 155 cm). Subgroups include the Echuya Twa, Mongo Twa, Lukanga Twa and Kafwe Twa.
Origins and history African Pygmies are often assumed to be the direct descendants of the Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherer peoples of the central African rainforest. Genetic evidence for the deep separation of Congo Pygmies from the lineage of West Africans and East Africans, as well as admixture from archaic humans, was found in the 2010s.Older (pre-2010) studies with inconclusive results: R. Blench and M. Dendo. Genetics and linguistics in sub-Saharan Africa, Cambridge-Bergen, 24 June 2004. The lineage of African Pygmies is strongly associated with mitochondrial (maternal line) haplogroup L1, with a divergence time between 170,000 and 100,000 years ago.
They were partially absorbed or displaced by later immigration of agricultural peoples of the Central Sudanic and Ubangian phyla beginning after about 5,500 years ago,Igor Kopytoff, The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (1989), 9–10 (cited after Igbo Language Roots and (Pre)-History , A Mighty Tree, 2011). and, beginning about 3,500 years ago, by the Bantu, adopting their languages.R. M. Blench, Genetics and linguistics in sub-Saharan Africa (2004), "4.3 The origin of the African pygmies": "The common view, however, is that the pygmies are the ancient denizens of the forest zone, dating from at least the Middle Stone Age (MSA) (e.g., Cavalli-Sforza 1968a). They would have lived by hunting and gathering until they encountered expanding Central Sudanic, Adamawa-Ubangian and Bantu-speaking farmers ca. 4000 bp. Since that date they have lived in a symbiosis with the farmers, often as a despised and marginalised group. If this is the case, then major MSA archaeological sites in the area of the present-day rain-forest are presumed to be the traces of these ancient pygmy groups. There is no doubt the Central African rainforest has been occupied for a very long time (Clist 1995; Mercader and Marti 1999), but there is no direct evidence as to the racial or genetic affiliations of the populations whose stone tools have been recovered. These sites have problems of dating, but it is usually assumed that the sites, 'Sangoan' or 'Lupemban' are >40,000 years old (the usual limit of radio-carbon dating)."
Linguistic substrate
Substantial non-Bantu and non-Ubangian substrates have been identified in Aka and in Baka, respectively, on the order of 30% of the lexicon. Much of this vocabulary is botanical, deals with honey harvesting, or is otherwise specialized for the forest and is shared between the two western Pygmy groups. This substrate has been suggested as representing a remnant of an ancient "western Pygmy" linguistic phylum, dubbed "Mbenga" or "Baaka". However, as substrate vocabulary has been widely borrowed between Pygmies and neighboring peoples, no reconstruction of such a "Baaka" language is possible for times more remote than a few centuries ago.Bahuchet, Serge (1993) "History of the inhabitants of the central African rain forest: perspectives from comparative linguistics." In C.M. Hladik, ed., Tropical forests, people, and food: Biocultural interactions and applications to development. Paris: Unesco/Parthenon.
An ancestral Pygmy language has been postulated for at least some Pygmy groups, based on the observation of linguistic substrates. According to Merritt Ruhlen (1994), "African Pygmies speak languages belonging to either the Nilo-Saharan or the Niger–Kordofanian family. It is assumed that Pygmies once spoke their own language(s), but that, through living in symbiosis with other Africans, in prehistorical times, they adopted languages belonging to these two families."Ruhlen, Merritt (1994) The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: New York, p. 154, .
Roger Blench (1997, 1999) criticized the hypothesis of an ancestral "Pygmy language", arguing that even if there is evidence for a common ancestral language rather than just borrowing, it will not be sufficient to establish a specifically "Pygmy" origin rather than any of the several potential language isolates of (former) hunter-gatherer populations that ring the rainforest.Blench, Roger (1997) "The languages of Africa". In Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and language IV, Routledge, He argued that the Pygmies do not form the residue of a single ancient stock of Central African hunter-gatherers, but that they are rather descended from several neighboring ethno-linguistic groups, independently adapting to forest subsistence strategies. Blench adduced the lack of clear linguistic and archaeological evidence for the antiquity of the African Pygmies, that the genetic evidence, at the time of his writing, was inconclusive, and that there is no evidence of the Pygmies having a hunting technology distinctive from that of their neighbors. He argued that the short stature of Pygmy populations can arise relatively quickly (in less than a few millennia) under strong selection pressures.Blench, Roger. 1999. Are the African Pygmies an ethnographic fiction? In: Central African hunter-gatherers in a multi-disciplinary perspective: challenging elusiveness. K. Biesbrouck, S. Elders & G. Rossel eds. 41–60. Leiden: CNWS.
West African hunter-gatherers may have spoken a set of presently extinct Sub-Saharan West African languages. In the northeastern region of Nigeria, Jalaa, a language isolate, may have been a descending language from the original set(s) of languages spoken by West African hunter-gatherers.
Genetics Genetic studies have found evidence that African Pygmies are descended from the Middle Stone Age people of Central Africa, with a separation time from West and East Africans of the order 130,000 years.