Anthropology Friday: In the Shadow of Man, (5/5)

Today we are finishing our discussion of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, featuring the adventures of a family (or several families) of chimpanzees from The Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania.

Eastern chimpanzee female twins ‘Golden & Glitter’ aged 14 years with their babies ‘Gosama’ aged 3 months and ‘Glama’ aged 1 year, from Jane’s Blog.

Melissa has a baby:

“As Melissa came down the slope toward our camp she moved on three limbs, supporting the newborn with one hand. Every so often she stopped and seemed to disentangle something from the undergrowth. When she got closer we saw that this was the placenta, still attached to the baby by the umbilical cord. …

“She seemed dazed, her eyes not quite focused, her movements slow and uncertain. When one of the mature males arrived, Melissa, usually so quick to greet another chimp, so anxious to ingratiate herself with her superiors, ignored him completely. … She continued to sit, the baby cuddled between her thighs, her feet crossed under his tiny rump, her arm behind his head. …. The baby’s head fell back on her knees, and Melissa, looking down, stared long at the tiny face.”

Fifi the chimpanzee, image from Jane Goodall’s website

Fifi’s fascination with her little brother, Flint:

“Flo sat down and began to tickle Flint’s neck with small nibbling movements of her worn teeth, and Fifi once again sat close and reached out to make a few grooming movements on Flint’s back. Flo ignored this. Earlier, though, when Flint was not yet two months old, Flo had usually pushed Fifi’s hand away each time she had tried to touch Flint…

“When Flint was three months old… he began to respond when Fifi approached by reaching out to her. Fifi became more and more preoccupied with him. She began to make repeated attempts to pull him away from his mother. …

“When Flint was thirteen weeks old we saw Fifi succeed in pulling him away from his mother. Flo was grooming Figan when Fifi, with infinite caution and many quick glances toward her mother’s face, began to pull at Flint’s foot. Inch by inch she drew the infant toward her–and all at once he was in her arms. Fifi lay on her back and cuddled Flint to her tummy with her arms and legs. She lay very still. …

Flo the chimpanzee, image from Jane Goodall’s website

“Flo for the first few moments appeared to take no notice at all. But when Flint, who had possibly never lost contact with his mother’s body, reached around and held his arms toward her, pouting his lips and uttering a soft hoo of distress, Flo instantly gathered him to her breast and bent to kiss his head with her lips. …

“After this, not a day passed without Fifi pulling her infant brother away from Flo. …

“When Flint was very small his two elder brothers, although they sometimes stared at him, paid him little attention.”

Pom and Passion:

“Babies less than five months of age are normally protected by their mothers from all contact with other chimpanzees, except their own siblings. … It was, however, very different for Pom, one of the first female infants born into our group. Her mother, Passion, actually laid the baby on the ground the very first day of her life and allowed two young females to touch and even groom her as she lay there. But then, in all respects, Passion was a somewhat unnatural mother.

“She was no youngster, this Passion… I know she lost one infant before Pom’s birth in 1965. If her treatment of Pom was anything to go by, I suspect Passion had lost other infant, too, for Pom had to fight for her survival right from the start. When she was a mere two months old, she began to ride on her mother’s back–three or four months earlier than other infants. It started when Pom hurt her foot badly. She could not grip properly, and Passion, rather than constantly support her infant with one hand as most mothers wold have done, probably pushed Pom up onto her back. The very first day that Pom adopted this new riding position, Passion hurried for about thirty yards in order to greet a group of adult males, seeming quite without concern for her infant, Pom, clinging frantically, managed to stay aboard–though much older infants, when they tart riding on their mothers’ back, usually slide down if their mothers make sudden movements. …

“Flo, it will be remembered, was very solicitous when Flint was finding his feet, gathering him up if he fell and often supporting him with one hand as he wobbled along. …. Passion was positively callous. One day, precious to which Pom had never been seen to totter on her own more than a two yards, Passion suddenly got up and walked away from her infant. Pom, struggling to follow and falling continually, whimpered louder each time, and finally her mother returned and shoved the infant onto her back. This happened repeatedly. As Pom learned to walk better, Passion did not even bother to return when the infant cried–she just waited for her to catch up by herself.

“… It was not really surprising that, during her second year, when most infants wander about happily quite far away from their mothers, Pom usually sat or played very close to Passion. For months on end she actually held tightly on to Passion with one hand during her games with Flint and Goblin and the other infants. Obviously she was terrified of being left behind.

EvX: Passion, aside from being a terrible mother, was a cannibal. According to Wikipedia:

She, along with her daughter Pom, captured, killed, and ate several newborns at Gombe.^[78]

Passion only had three children who made it to adulthood. Of these, two had no surviving children–Pom had one child who died, and then Pom disappeared; Pax lost his testicles in a conflict between other chimps and his mother, and never reproduced. The Wikipedia doesn’t record whether the third child had any children, but compared to Flo, Wilkie, and even Frodo, Passion was clearly not successful. (Though her cannibalism may have ultimately benefited other, more distantly related chimps in her family.)

Childhood:
“Like Human children, chimpanzee children are dependent on their mothers for several years. …

“Just then Flint, six months older than Goblin, came bouncing up and the two children began to play, both showing their lower teeth in the chimpanzee’s playful smile. Flo was reclining nearby grooming Figan; Goblin’s mother, Melissa, was a little farther away, also grooming. It was so peaceful…. All at once a series of pant-hoots announced the arrival of more chimpanzees, and there was instant commotion in the group. Flint pulled away from the game and hurried to jump onto Flo’s back as she moved for safety halfway up a palm tree. I saw Mike with his hair on end beginning to hoot; I knew he was about to display. So did the other chimpanzees of his group–all were alert, prepared to dash out of the way or to join in the displaying. All, that is, save Goblin. He seemed totally unconcerned and, incredibly, began to totter toward Mike. Melissa, squeaking with fear, was hurrying toward her son, but she was too late. Mike began his charge, and as he passed Goblin seized him up as though he were a branch and dragged him along the ground.

“An then the normally fearful, cautious Melissa, frantic for her child, hurled herself at Mike. It was unprecedented behavior, and she got severely beaten up for her interference, but she did succeed in rescuing Goblin–the infant lay, pressed close to the ground and screaming, where the dominant male had dropped him. Even before Mike had ceased his attack on Melissa the old male Huxley had seized Goblin from the ground. I felt sure he too was going to display with the infant, but he remained quite still, holding the child and staring down at him almost, it seemed in bewilderment. Then as Melissa, screaming and bleeding, escaped from Mike, Huxley set the infant on the ground. As his mother hurried up to him Goblin leaped into her arms…

“Normally, small infants are shown almost unlimited tolerance from all other members of the community; it almost seem as though the adult male may lose many of his social inhibitions during his charging display.”

EvX: At another time, when Goblin got lost in some confusion, Mike rescued him and stayed with him until Melissa returned–Mike wasn’t normally aggressive toward the small children in his troop.

Teenagers:

“Although I never saw a juvenile son who was frightened of his mother, as Miff [female] was of Marina, nevertheless the male juvenile normally shows a good deal of respect for his mother.
One day I came across Figan with the freshly killed body of a colobus monkey. He climbed a tree with the tail of the monkey in one hand and the body slung over his shoulder He was closely pursued by Fifi. When he reached a comfortable branch he sat and began eating, and Fifi, who was about three years old at the time, begged persistently. Several times Figan gave he small fragments of meat.
A few minutes later I saw Flo climbing toward Figan. Instantly he slung the carcass over his shoulder and climbed to a higher branch. Flo remained in a low fork, gazing around, not once looking at her son. He relaxed and began feeding again, though constantly he glanced somewhat apprehensively toward his mother. The old female sat there for a full ten minutes. Then, with only a preliminary fleeting glance at Figan, she very slowly climbed slightly higher, looking oh so nonchalant, and sat on the net branch up. …

“When he reached a very high position in the tree Flo could keep up her pretence no longer–without warning she rushed toward him. Figan with a scream leaped down into the foliage and vanished from sight…

“For the most part, these adolescent males, even when they were ten or eleven years old, continued to how respect for their old mothers. If we offered a banana the son usually stood back and waited for his mother to take the fruit. …

“On many occasions a mother will hurry to try to help her adolescent son. Once when Mr. Worzle attacked Faben, who was then about twelve, Flo, with hair on end and Flint clinging to her, rushed toward the scene of strife. As she approached, Faben’s frightened screams turned instantly to angry waa barks and he began to display, standing upright and swaggering from foot to foot. Then mother and son, side by side, charged along the track toward old Mr. Worzle… Mr. Worzle turned and fled. …

“As the adolescent male grows older, he is increasingly likely to hurry to his mother’s aid when she is threatened. …

“In his dealings with the higher-ranking males the adolescent must be cautions, because now, more than when he was a mere juvenile, an act of insubordination tends to bring severe retribution. …”

EvX: Jane notes that the chimps show sign of trying to avoid incest, though they likely have no way of avoiding father/daughter couplings, half-sibling couplings, and similar such cases.

Pestilence rides a white horse:

“Olly’s new baby was four weeks old when he suddenly became ill. … One morning Olly walked slowly into camp supporting him with one hand. Each time she made a sudden moved, he uttered a loud squawk as though in pain, and he was gripping badly. First one hand or foot and then another slipped from Olly’s hair and dangled down. …

“Next morning it was obvious that the baby was very ill. All his four limbs hung limply down and he screamed almost every time his mother took a step. … Olly only moved a few yards at a time, and then, as though worried by the screams of her infant, sat down to cradle him close. When he quieted, she moved again, but he instantly began to call out so that once more she sat to comfort him. After traveling about a hundred yards, which took her just over half an hour, Olly climbed into a tree. Again she carefully arranged her baby’s limp arms and legs on her lap as she sat down. … The baby stopped screaming and, apart from occasionally grooming his head briefly, Olly paid him no further attention.

“When we had been there some fifteen minutes it began to pour, a blinding deluge that almost obscured the chimps from my sight. During the storm, which went on for thirty minutes, the baby must either have died or lost consciousness…

“Olly climbed down the tree with her infant carelessly in one hand, and when she reached the ground she flung the limp body over her shoulder. It was as though she knew he was dead….

“The following day Olly arrived in camp, followed by Gilka, with the corpse of her infant slung over her shoulder. When she sat down the body sometimes dropped heavily to the ground. Occasionally Olly pushed it into her groin as she sat; when she stood she held it by an arm or even a leg. …

“Finally Olly wandered away from camp and she and Gilka, with me following went some way up the opposite mountain slope. Olly seemed dazed; she looked neither left nor right but plodded up the narrow trail through the forest., the body slung over her neck, until she reached a place halfway up the mountainside. Then she sat down.

“The dead infant slumped to the ground beside her, and other than to glance down briefly, Olly ignored it. She just sat staring into space…

“Now, at last, came Gilka’s opportunity to play with her sibling… Carefully she groomed it, and then she even tried to play, pulling one dead hand into the ticklish spot between her collarbone and neck… We had been so glad for Gilka’s sake when old Olly had given birth again–but it looked as if Gilka was always to be ill-fated. … Only then did Olly’s lethargy leave her for a moment. She snatched the body away, and then once more let it fall to the ground. …

“The following afternoon Olly and Gilka arrived in camp without the body. …

“Had we known at the time that Olly’s infant was without doubt the first victim of the terrible paralytic disease that struck our chimpanzee community, I wouldn’t have have followed the family–for at this time my own baby was on the way …

“When we realized that the disease was probably polio, we panicked, for Hugo and I and our research assistant Alice Ford had not received a full course of polio vaccine. … The Pfizer Laboratories in Naiobi generously supplied us with the oral vaccine, and we offered it to the chimps in bananas. …

“I think those few moths were the darkest I have ever lived through: every time a chimp stopped visiting the feeding area, we started to wonder whether we would ever see him again, or worse, if he would reappear hideously crippled. Fifteen chimpanzees in our group were afflicted, of whom six lost their lives… Gilka lost partial use of one hand and Melsa was affected in her neck and shoulders. … Pepe and Faben both appeared after short absences trailing one useless arm. One adolescent male returned, after a long absence, shuffling along in a squatting position and with both arms paralyzed. He could only eat the bits and pieces he was able to reach with his lips, and he was nothing but a skeleton covered with dull, staring hair. We had to shoot him. And thew ere other victims–like fat, bustling J.B., of whom we had all become so fond–who just disappeared, and we could only conjecture about their lonely deaths.

EvX: Old Mr. McGregor also died, the account of which is the saddest part of the book.

“We did not allow any of the chimps to see his dead body, and for a long time it looked as if Humphrey did not realize he would not meet his old friend again. For six months he kept returning to the place where Gregor had spent the last days of his life and would sit on one tree or another staring around, waiting, listening. During this time he seldom joined the other chimps when they left together for a distant valley; he sometimes went a short way with such a group, but within a few hours he usually came back again and sat staring over the valley, waiting, surely to see old Gregor again, listening for the deep, almost braying voice, so similar to his own, that was silenced forever.”

Let us conclude on a more upbeat note (I think I will just skip who killed whom in the Gombe war; you can look it up yourself if you want to know):

David Greybeard and Jane Goodall hold hands, from Jane’s blog

“One day, as I sat near [David Greybeard] at the bank of a tiny trickle of crystal-clear water, I saw a ripe red palm nut lying on the ground. I picked it up and held it out to him on my open palm. He turned his head away. When I moved my hand closer he looked at it, then at me, and then he took the fruit, and at the same time held my hand firmly and gently with his own. As I sat motionless he released my hand, looked down at the nut, and dropped it to the ground.

“At that moment there was no need of any scientific knowledge to understand his communication of reassurance. … It was a reward far beyond my greatest hopes.”

Anthropology Friday: In the Shadow of Man, (4/5)

Hello! Today we are continuing with our discussion of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, featuring the adventures of a family (or several families) of chimpanzees from The Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. Today’s focus is on social structure.

Social status:

“I began to suspect that Goliath might be the highest-ranking male chimpanzee in the area–and later I found that this was in reality the case. If William and Goliath started to move toward the same banana at the same time, it was William who gave way and Goliath who took the fruit. If Goliath met another adult male along a narrow forest track, he continued–the other stepped aside. Goliath was nearly always the first to be greeted when a newcomer climbed into a fig tree to join a feeding group of chimpanzees. One day I actually saw him driving another chimp from her nest to take it for himself. …

“William, with his long scarred upper lip and drooping lower lip, was one of the more subordinate males in his relationships with other chimpanzees. If another adult male made signs of aggression toward him, William was quick to approach with gestures of appeasement and submission, reaching out to lay his hands on the other, crouching with soft panting grunts in front of the higher-ranking individuals. … When I offered him a banana in my hand for the first time, he stared at it for several moments, gently shook a branch in his frustration, and then sat uttering soft whimpering sounds until I relented and put the fruit on the ground. …

Flo the chimpanzee, image from Jane Goodall’s website

“Even in those days, Flo looked very old. … We soon found out that her character by no means matched her appearance: she was aggressive, tough as nails, and easily the most dominant of all the females at that time.

“Flo’s personality will become more vivid if I contrast it with that of another old female, Olly … was remarkably different. Flo for the most part was relaxed in her relations with the adult males; often I saw her grooming in a close group with with two or three males out in the forest, and in camp she showed no hesitation in joining David or Goliath to beg for a share of cardboard or bananas. Olly, on the other hand, was tense and nervous in her relations with others of her kind. She was particularly apprehensive when in close proximity to adult males, and her hoarse, frenzied pant-grunts rose to near hysteria if high-ranking Goliath approached her. …

“Olly tended to avoid large groups of chimps and often wandered around with only her two year old daughter Gilka for company.

EvX: Gilka eventually became so lonely and isolated that she made friends with a baboon:

“One day when Gilka was again waiting while Olly fished for termites, I heard a baboon bark further down the valley. At the sound Gilka’s whole attitude underwent and immediate change. [from her previously depresesed state.] …

“A moment later I saw Gilka move out from the trees, and at almost the same time a small baboon detached itself from the troop and cantered toward her. … the two ran up to each other, and for a moment I saw their faces very close together. Each had one arm around the other. The next moment they were playing, wrestling, and patting each other. Goblina went around behind Gilka and, reaching forward, seemed to tickle the chimpanzee in the ribs. Gilka, leaning back, pushed at Goblina’s hands, her mouth open in a wide smile. …

“I watched Gilka and Goblina playing for ten minutes, and all the time they were amazingly gentle. Then the baboon troop started to move on and Goblina scampered after it.”

EvX: Olly may have been avoiding other chimps because she was lower status, and being around people of higher status than oneself is often unpleasant.

“Often, too, Olly and Flo traveled about together in the forests, and all four children were playmates of long standing. For the most part, the relationship between Olly and Flo was peaceful enough, but if there was a single banana lying on the ground between them the relative social status of each was made clear: Flo had only to put a few of her moth-eaten hairs on end for Olly to retreat, pant-grunting and grinning in submission. …

Fifi the chimpanzee, image from Jane Goodall’s website

“The adult females of the chimpanzee community are almost always submissive to the adult males, and and to many of the older adolescent males. But they have their own dominance hierarchy, of which Flo was for many years supreme. … Flo was exceptionally aggressive toward her own sex, and she would tolerate no insubordination from young adolescent males. Much of her confidence no doubt resulted from the fact that he was so often accompanied by her two eldest sons,and with the aggressive Fifi as well, the family was formidable indeed.”

EvX: Flo and Olly once they teamed up and literally beat the shit out of a strange female who had ventured into their territory. Perhaps not coincidentally, Flo was the most sexually popular female in the group.

As Jane observed the chimps over the decades, most of them received names that started with the same letter as their mothers. (It is usually difficult to know which chimp was an infant’s father.) So Flo is the matriarch of the “F-family.” According to Wikipedia:

The F-family has produced at least four alpha males for the community, and the matriarch, Flo, played a particularly important role in acknowledging Dr Goodall’s acceptance as a human observer by the community. The G-family has produced at least one alpha male, and also the birth of several twins, which are rare among chimpanzees. There are other families as well which include the T-family and S-family (which has produced one alpha male).

In other words, Flo’s children and grandchildren did very well for themselves. If you were a male chimp in the Gombe, you would want to mate with Flo.

Frodo the chimpanzee, image also from Jane’s website

The Wikipedia also tells us about the lives of some of the chimps born after the book ends, such as Frodo, Flo’s grandson:

Frodo (June 30, 1976 – November 10, 2013) was Fifi’s second oldest son.^[39] His father was the relatively low-ranking male Sherry. Even from a young age, Frodo was large and aggressive. He learned to throw rocks as a juvenile, sometimes throwing them at and hitting and bruising his human observers.^[40] As an adult, he was one of the largest chimpanzees ever observed in the community, at about 113 pounds (51 kg) and remained aggressive.^[37][39] He also became an excellent hunter of red colobus monkeys, and was also able to intimidate other chimpanzees into sharing their kills with him if he was unsuccessful.^[22][41] His large size and aggressive nature allowed him to attain high status…

As alpha male, Frodo maintained his position largely through intimidation.^[22][37][41] He rarely groomed other males, and often demanded that other males groom him.^[22][37][41] Frodo maintained his alpha position until becoming ill himself in 2002.^{[22][33][41][42]} He was then defeated by a coalition of several males and spent most of the next two years on his own recovering from his wounds and illness.^{[22][33][41][42]} …

Frodo’s aggression was not limited to Colobus monkeys and other chimpanzees. In May 2002, he killed a 14-month-old human baby that the niece of a member of the research team had carried into his territory.^[43] … In 1988, he attacked cartoonist Gary Larson, leaving him bruised and scratched.^[43] In 1989, he attacked Goodall, beating her head to the point of nearly breaking her neck.^[43]

Frodo fathered at least eight infants, second most of any group male (Wilkie fathered ten).

Perhaps if Frodo’s father had been high-status, he could have solidified his position via grooming and social coalition rather than violence, and thus perhaps avoided being violently deposed.

The entry on Wilkie notes his very different approach to dominance:

In 1989 Wilkie defeated Goblin and attained the alpha position.^[53] Wilkie, attained this position despite being one of the smallest males in the community, at 37 kilograms (82 lb).^[85] According to researchers at the University of Minnesota‘s Jane Goodall Institute Center for Primate Studies, Wilkie attained his position primarily by becoming popular by obsessively grooming other males.^[79][85] Unlike most males, Wilkie also groomed females.^[85] Wilkie also made effective use of charging displays.^[79]

Mike’s rise:

“Mike‘s rise to the number-one spot in the chimpanzee hierarchy was both interesting and spectacular. In 1963, Mike had ranked almost bottom in the adult male dominance hierarchy. He… had been threatened and actually attacked by almost every other adult male. …

“A group of five adult males, including to-ranking Goliath, David Graybeard, and the huge Rodolf, were grooming each other. The session had been going on for some twenty minutes. Mike was sitting about thirty yards apart from them, frequently staring toward the group, occasionally idly grooming himself.

“All at once, Mike calmly walked over to our tent and picked up an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. … After a few minutes he began to rock from side to side. … his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then, softly at first, he began a series of pant-hoots. … suddenly he was off, charging toward the group of males, hitting the two cans ahead of him. The cans, along with Mike’s crescendo of hooting, made the most appaling racket: no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way. …

“Mike set off again, but he made straight for Goliath–and even he hastened out of the way like the others. Then mike stopped and sat, all his hair on end, breathing hard. …

“Rodolf was the first of the males to approach Mike, uttering soft pant-grunts of submission, crouching low and pressing his lips to Mike’s thigh. Next he began to groom Mike. … Finally David Greybeard went over to Mike, laid one hand on his groin, and joined in the grooming. Only Goliath kept away, sitting alone and staring toward Mike.”

EvX: So Mike becomes dominant.

“… it was fully another year before Mike seemed to feel quite secure in his position. He continued to display very frequently and vigorously, and lower-ranking chimps had increasing reason to fear him, since often he would attack a female or youngster viciously at the slightest provocation.”

The observance of human customs:

“Christmas that year at the Gombe Stream was a day to remember. I bought an extra large supply of bananas and put them around a small tree I had decorated with silver paper and absorbent cotton. Goliath and William arrived together on Christmas morning and gave loud screams of excitement when they saw the huge pile of fruit. They flung their arms around one another and Goliath kept patting William on his wide open screaming mouth while William laid one arm over Goliath’s back. Finally they calmed down and began their feast, still uttering small squeaks and grunts of pleasure.”

Friendship:

“Firm friendships, like that between Goliath and David Graybeard, seem to be particularly prevalent among male chimpanzees. Mike and the irascible, testy old J.B. traveled about in the same group very frequently. … The only two adult females we know of who enjoyed this kind of friendship were almost certainly sisters.”

EvX: J.B. uses his relationship with newly ascended Mike to raise his own social status and get more bananas.

Illness and Death:

“Shortly after Christmas, I had to leave the Gombe stream myself for another term at Cambridge. My last two weeks were sad, for William fell ill. … When he climbed down in the morning I saw that every few moments his body shook with violent spasms of shivering. … One morning, two days before I had to leave, William stole a blanket from Dominic’s tent. [Dominic was the camp cook.] He had been sitting chewing on it for a while when David Greybeard arrived and, after eating some bananas, joined William at the blanket. For half an hour or so the two sat peacefully side by side, each sucking noisily and contentedly on different corners. Then William, like the clown he so often appeared to be, put part of the blanket right over his head and made groping movements with his hands as he tried to touch David from within the strange darkness he had created. … Presently the two wandered off into the forest together, leaving me with the echo of a dry, hacking cough and the blanket lying on the ground. I never saw William again. …

To be continued…

 

 

Anthropology Friday: In the Shadow of Man (3/5)

Chimpanzee family from the Gombe

(Do you know what’s frustrating? When you discover that you can type about three times faster than the words actually show up on your computer screen.)

Anyway, today we are continuing with our discussion of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, featuring the adventures of chimpanzees from The Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. The book contains many interesting vignettes of chimpanzee life and descriptions of their social order. I wish I could share more of them, but my fingers are tired of typing, so here we go. (As usual, for readability I’m just using “” for the quotes instead of block quotes, and they’re organized around several themes.) I’ve tried to bold the names of the chimps the first time they appear.

Hunting and the sharing of meat:

“One day I arrived on the Peak and found a small group of chimps just below me in the upper branches of a thick tree. As I watched I saw that one of them was holding a pink-looking object from which he was from time to time pulling pieces with his teeth. There was a female and a youngster and they were both reaching out toward the male, their hands actually touching his mouth. Presently the female picked up a piece of the pink thing and put it to her mouth: it was at this moment that I realized the chimps were eating meat.

“After each bite of meat the male picked off some leaves with his lips and chewed them with the flesh. Often, when he had chewed for several minutes on this leafy wad, eh spat out the remains into the waiting hands of the female. Suddenly he dropped a small piece of meat, and like a flash the youngster sung after it to the ground. Even as he reached dot pick it up the undergrowth exploded and an adult bushpig charged toward him. … Soon I made out the shapes of three small striped piglets. Obviously the chimps were eating a baby pig. The size was right and later, when I realized that the male was David Graybeard, I moved closer and saw that he was indeed eating piglet.

“For three hours I watched the chimps feeding. David occasionally let the female bite pieces from the carcass and once he actually detached a small piece of flesh and placed it in her outstretched hand. When he finally climbed down there was still meat on the carcass; he carried it away in one hand, followed by the others.”

EvX: it is much easier to dismember carcases when you have tools at your disposal, like stone knives.

“I had taken Hugo [animal photographer and Jane’s future husband] up to show him the peak and we were watching four red colobus monkeys that were evidently separated from their troop. Suddenly an adolescent male chimpanzee climbed cautiously up the tree next to the monkeys and slowly along a branch. Then he sat down. After a moment, three of the monkeys jumped away–quite calmly, it appeared. The fourth remained, his head turned toward the chimp. A second later another adolescent male chimp climbed out of the thick vegetation surrounding the tree, rushed along the branch along which the last monkey was sitting, and grabbed it. Instantly several other chimps climbed up into the tree, and, screaming and barking in excitement, tore their victim into several pieces. It was all over within a minute from the time of capture. …

“During the ten years that have passed since I began work at the Gombe Stream we have recorded chimpanzees feeding on the young of bushbucks, bushpigs, and baboons, as well as both young and small adult colobus monkeys, redtail monkeys, and blue monkeys. And there are two cases on record of chimpanzees in the area actually taking off African babies–presumably as prey, since when recovered from an adult male chimpanzee one infant had had its limbs partially eaten. …

“On other occasions, the hunting seems to be a much more deliberate, purposeful activity, and often at such times the different individuals of a chimpanzee group show quite remarkable cooperation–as when different chimpanzees station themselves at the bases of trees offering escape routes to a cornered victim.

After Rodolf kills a baboon:
“Presently the four chimpanzees emerged from the undergrowth and climbed into the higher branches of a tall tree, whee Rodolf settled down and began to feed…

“Other chimpanzees in the valley, attracted by the loud screaming and calling that typifies a hunt and kill, soon appeared in the tree, and a group of high-ranking males clustered around Rodolf, begging for a share of his kill. Often I have watched chimpanzees begging for meat, and usually a male who has a reasonably large portion permits at least some of the group to share with him. Rodolf, on the contrary, protected his kill jealously that day. …

“Rodolf kept almost the entire carcass to himself for nine hours that day, although from time to time he spat a wad of meat and leaves into a into a begging hand, or one of the other males managed to grab a piece from the carcass and make off with it. …

“At this time, the third year of Mike‘s supremacy, Rodolf was no longer the high-ranking male he had once been. How was it, then, that he dared push away Mike’s hand, he who normally went into a frenzy of submission when Mike approached him? … I had seen this sort of apparent inconsistency before during meat-eating episodes and I often wondered whether the chimps were showing the crude beginnings of a sot of moral values. Rodolf killed the baboon, therefore, the meat was Rodolf’s. More serious consideration of the behavior has led me to that something rather different maybe involved.

“Mike would have attacked Rodolf without hesitation had the prize been a pile of Bananas, yet if Rodolf had gathered the fruits from a box for himself they would have been his property quite as legitimately as as was the meat. I wonder, then, if the principle involved may be similar to the one governing a territorial animal within his own territory, when he is more aggressive, more likely to fight off an intruder, than if he met the same animal outside his territorial boundary. Meat is much liked, much prized food item. An adult male in possession of such a prize may become more willing to fight for it, and therefore, be less apprehensive of his superiors than if he has a pile of everyday fruits like bananas. In support of this theory, I should mention that in the early days, when bananas were something of a novelty, the chimps very seldom did fight over the fruits.”

EvX: The lack of sharing makes the normally dominant males very frustrated and aggressive toward everyone else in the vicinity during these meat-eating episodes. Often, though, quite a bit of sharing of meat occurs.]

On baboons:

“The baboons very soon made themselves at home around our camp, too, and Vanne [Jane’s mother] quickly learned never to leave the tents unguarded. About two weeks after our arrival she went for a short walk; when she returned it was to find our belongings strewn in all directions, and one blase male baboon sitting by the overturned table polishing off the loaf that Dominic had baked that morning. …

“It was far worse when one morning Vanne, who had been dozing after my early departure, suddenly heard a small sound in the tent. She opened her eyes and there, silhouetted in the entrance, she saw a huge male baboon. He and she remained motionless fr a few moments and then he opened his mouth in a tremendous yawn of threat. In the gray light Vanne could just see the gleam of his teeth and she thought her last hour had come. With a sudden yell she sat bolt upright in bed, waving her arms, and her unwelcome visitor fled. He was a horrible baboon, that one, an old male who took to hanging around our camp at all hours of the day, lurking in the undergrowth and dashing out whenever opportunity presented to steal a loaf of bread.”

The Rain Dance:

“At about noon the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. … At that moment the storm broke. The rain was torrential, and the sudden clap of thunder, right overhead, made me jump. As if this were a signal, one of the big males stood upright and as he swayed and swaggered rhythmically from foot to foot I could hear the rising crescendo of his pant-hoots above the beating of the rain. Then he charged, flat-out down the slope toward the trees he had just left. He ran some thirty yards, and then, swinging round the trunk of a small tree to break his headlong rush, leaped into the low branches and sat motionless.

“Almost at once two other males charged after him. One broke off a low branch from a tree as he ran and brandished it in the air before hurling it ahead of him. The other, as he reached the end of his run, stood upright and rhythmically swayed the branches of a tree back and forth before seizing a huge branch and dragging it farther down the slope. A fourth male, as he too charged, leaped into a tree and, almost without breaking speed, tore off a large branch, leaped with it to the ground, and continued down the slope. As the last two males called and charged down, so the one who had started the whole performance climbed from his tree and began plodding up the slope again. The others, who had also climbed into trees near the bottom of the slope, followed suit. When they reached the ridge, they began charging down all over again, one after the other, with equal vigor. …

“As the males charged down and plodded back up, so the rain fell harder, jagged forks or brilliant flares of lightning lit up the leaden sky, and the crashing of thunder seemed to shake the very mountains. …

“I would only see such a display twice more in the next ten years.”

EvX: the chimps do not build nor take any kind of shelter from the rain, but just sit hunched up in it, looking pretty miserable for much of the rainy season.

Getting to know the chimps:

[Jane, upon hearing some chimps nearby, lies down flat on the ground to avoid disturbing them/being seen]

“Suddenly I saw a large male chimpanzee climbing a tree only a couple of yards away. He moved over into the branches over my head and began screaming at me, short, loud, high-pitched sounds, with his mouth open. … He began climbing down toward me until he was no more than ten feet above me and I could see his yellow teeth… He shook a branch, showering me with twigs. Then he hit the trunk and shook more branches, and continued to scream and scream and work himself into a frenzy of rage. All at once he climbed down and went out of sight behind me.

“It was then that I saw a female with a tiny baby and an older child sitting in another tree and staring at me with wide eyes. They were quite silent and quite still. I could hear the old male moving about behind me and then his footsteps stopped. He was so close by that I could hear his breathing.

“Without warning there was a loud bark, a stamping in the leaves, and my head was hit, hard. At this I had to move, had to sit up. The male was standing looking at me, and for a moment I believed he would charge; but he turned and moved off, stopping often to turn and stare at me. The female with her baby and the youngster climbed down silently and moved after him. There was a sense of triumph: I had made contact with a wild chimpanzee–or perhaps it should be the other way around.

“When I looked back some years later at my description of that male, I was certain it was the bad-tempered, irascible, paunchy J.B. … I suppose he was puzzled by my immobility and the plastic sheet that was protecting me from the light rain. He simply had to find out exactly what I was and make me move–he must have known, from my eyes, that I was alive. …

“One evening I returned to camp and found Dominic and Hassan very excited. A large male chimpanzee, they told me, had walked right into camp and spent an hour feeding in the palm tree that shaded my tent. …

David Greybeard and Jane Goodall hold hands, from Jane’s blog

“One day as I sat on the veranda of the tent, David climbed down from his tree and then, in his deliberate way, walked straight toward me. When he was about five feet from me he stopped, and slowly his hair began to stand on end, until he looked enormous and very fierce. A chimpanzee may erect his hair when he is angry, frustrated, or nervous. Why had David now put his hair out? All at once he ran straight at me, snatched up a banana from my table, and hurried off to eat it farther away. Gradually his hair returned to its normal sleeked position.

“After that incident I asked Dominic to leave bananas out whenever he saw David, and so, even when there were no ripe palm nuts, the chimp still wandered into camp sometimes, looking for bananas. …”

EvX: This marks the beginning of the feeding stations, which took several years to perfect (you can’t just hand out bananas all day; eventually the chimps stop doing normal chimp things and just sit there all day waiting for more bananas,) but were critical in getting the chimps to regularly appear in the same places so that Jane and other researchers could actually gather data on them. So the researchers have had to balance between “ability to gather data” and “behavior changes due to free bananas.”

To be continued.

Anthropology Friday: In the Shadow of Man (pt. 2/5): War

Location of the Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

Welcome back to our discussion of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, an account of chimpanzee life in the Gombe National Park, Tanzania. I enjoyed this book quite a bit; my chief difficulty has been deciding which parts to excerpt for you.

Tanzania borders the DRC ne Congo ne Belgian Congo, which was (coincidentally) the location of our previous Anthropology Friday selection, Isaac Bacirongo’s Still a Pygmy.

The book begins with the difficulties inherent in setting up the research–obtaining permits and funding, overcoming the locals’ distrust, (they of course did not believe that this white woman actually wanted to live in the forest and stare at monkeys all day,) and a massive influx of refugees:

Once we reached Nairobi, however, I could think of nothing save the excitement of the eight-hundred-mile journey to Kigoma–and the chimpanzees. … When we reached Kigoma, however, after a dusty three days on the road, we found the whole town in a state of chaos. Since we had left Nairobi violence and bloodshed had erupted in the Congo, which lay only some twenty-five miles to the west of Kigoma, on the other side of lake Tanganyika. Kigoma was overrun by boatloads of Belgian refugees. …

Eventually we ran the District Commissioner to earth, and he explained, regretfully but firmly, that there was no chance at all of my proceeding to the chimpanzee reserve. First it was necessary to wait and find out how the local Kigoma district Africans would react to the tales of rioting and disorder in the Congo. …

Bernard shared his room with two homeless Belgians, and we even got out our three camp beds and lent them to the harassed hotel owner. Every room was crammed, but these refugees were in paradise compared to those housed in the huge warehouse, normally used for storing cargo… There everyone slept in long rows on mattresses or merely blankets on the cement floor, and queued up in the hundreds for the scant meals that Kigoma was able to provide for them.

… On our second evening in Kigoma we three and a few others made two thousand SPAM sandwiches. …

Two evenings later most of the refugees had gone, carried off by a series of extra trains to Tanganyika’s capital, Dar es Salaam.

Belgian refugees fleeing violence in the Congo, 1960

There follows a nice description of the town of Kigoma itself, and of course there is soon a great deal of material about chimpanzees and rather little about humans. Jane doesn’t mention the refugees again. (To be fair, isolation probably meant that she had rather little knowledge about most human affairs for most of the 60s and 70s.)

So who were these refugees? Where did they come from, and why?

Obviously they were Belgians, from the Congo. We briefly covered this conflict back in Anthropology Friday: War, Violence, and More War:

Patrice Lumumba was an anti-colonialist protestor who was jailed for opposing Belgian rule in the Congo and became the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC.

He then gave raises to everyone in the government except the military, so of course the military revolted. He asked the UN for help putting down the rebellion, but the UN sucked so he went to the Soviets.

The Wikipedia page on the Congo Crisis gives far more detail on this conflict–notably, it blames the outbreak of the crisis not on Lumumba failing to give the army a raise, but on a Belgian military commander’s speech:

Lieutenant-General Émile Janssens, the Belgian commander of the Force Publique, refused to see Congolese independence as marking a change in the nature of command.^[36] The day after the independence festivities, he gathered the black non-commissioned officers of his Léopoldville garrison and told them that things under his command would stay the same, summarising the point by writing “Before Independence = After Independence” on a blackboard.

Basically, the Belgians officially proclaimed that the Republic of the Congo was independent on June 30, 1960, thirty years earlier than they had intended to. They seemed to have thought they could get people to stop protesting against Belgian rule by “officially” handing over power, but would still run everything. After all, while the colony had been advancing rapidly in recent decades–

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo experienced an unprecedented level of urbanisation and the colonial administration began various development programmes aimed at making the territory into a “model colony”.^[10] One of the results of the measures was the development of a new middle class of Europeanised African “évolués” in the cities.^[10] By the 1950s the Congo had a wage labour force twice as large as that in any other African colony.^[11]

–most native Congolese still weren’t well-educated in the fields thought necessary to run a country (or army.)

The idea that the Congolese were too dumb and inexperienced to run their own country and therefore needed the Belgians to do it for them went over great with the army:

This message was hugely unpopular among the rank and file—many of the men had expected rapid promotions and increases in pay to accompany independence.^[36] On 5 July, several units mutinied against their white officers at Camp Hardy near Thysville. The insurrection spread to Léopoldville the next day and later to garrisons across the country.^[37]

Rather than deploying Belgian troops against the mutineers as Janssens had wished, Lumumba dismissed him and renamed the Force Publique the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC). All black soldiers were promoted by at least one rank.^[38]Victor Lundula was promoted directly from sergeant-major to major-general and head of the army, replacing Janssens.^[37] …

Of course, the Congolese proved the Belgians wrong by transforming their country into one of the world’s best-run economic powerhouses with an astonishing per capita GDP of $499 and reports of cannibalism. (By contrast, the nearby country of Botswana has a per cap GDP of over $6,000.)

But back to the post-independence anti-Belgian violence:

The government attempted to stop the revolt… but in most of the country the mutiny intensified. White officers and civilians were attacked, white-owned properties were looted and white women were raped.^[37] The Belgian government became deeply concerned by the situation, particularly when white civilians began entering neighbouring countries as refugees.^[40]

A 1960s newsreel reports:

Photo from the newsreel; no caption given

Violence and chaos in the Congo. Barely 11 days after official independence from Belgium, Congolese troops begin a wave of attacks and looting throughout the fare flung sectors of the former colony. Meanwhile in Belgium and African countries bordering on the Congo, refugees are pouring in with harrowing tales of violence and of hasty flight. …

The mutiny first started only four days after independence, on July 4, 1960, in the camp outside Leopoldville. The rebels used machetes on their white officers and broke into the armory. On day eight, all 1000+ Belgian officers were removed from their positions, and replaced with Congolese. With or without an Africanized officer corps, the soldiers are running amok throughout the Congo, and panic-stricken whites are fleeing in all directions. Numerous European targets have been attacked.

The flight of officers has left the army totally uncontrolled, and the new country has no effective instrument to control the territory.

Back to Wikipedia:

… On 9 July, Belgium deployed paratroopers, without the Congolese state’s permission, in Kabalo and elsewhere to protect fleeing white civilians.^[41] …At Lumumba’s request, white civilians from the port city of Matadi were evacuated by the Belgian Navy on 11 July. Belgian ships then bombarded the city; at least 19 civilians were killed. This action prompted renewed attacks on whites across the country, while Belgian forces entered other towns and cities, including Léopoldville, and clashed with Congolese troops.^[40]

This one is captioned “Mike Hoare and Belgian Congo Armed Forces evacuating refugees 1969.” Let me know if that’s inaccurate.

Then parts of the Congo started secede. UN “Peace Keeping” troops tried to get people to stop fighting but without actually defeating once side or the other, so predictably people kept killing each other. The Prime Minister, Lumumba, went to the Soviets for help, which concerned everyone because the Congo made a lot of money selling uranium to the US, which used it in atomic bombs, so the Congolese President dismissed Lumumba and Lumumba dismissed the President, at which point Mobutu dismissed both of them (leading pro-Lumumba protesters in Yugoslavia to attack the local Belgian embassy,) and had Lumumba shot. Mobutu, while awful in many ways, did end the civil war and restore a modicum of order.

“Mad” Mike Hoare was a Irish mercenary active in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa:

In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employeer back in Katanga, hired “Major” Mike Hoare to lead a military unit called 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise (5 Commando ANC) (later led by John Peters) (not to be confused with No.5 Commando, the British Second World War commando force) made up of about 300 men most of whom were from South Africa. … The unit’s mission was to fight a revolt known as the Simba Rebellion.

Later Hoare and his mercenaries worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots, and CIA-hired mercenaries who attempted to save 1,600 civilians (mostly Europeans and missionaries) in Stanleyville from the Simba rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. This operation saved many lives.^[3] Hoare was later promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in the Armée Nationale Congolaise and 5 Commando expanded into a two-battalion force. Hoare commanded 5 Commando from July 1964 to November 1965.^[4]

Mad Mike once tried to conquer the Seychelles, but failed when customs officials noticed his groups’ weapons.

Many of the Belgian refugees, meanwhile, fled to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, which became just “Rhodesia” after Northern Rhodesia changed its name to Zambia (one of the obscurer African countries, with a per cap GDP of $1,143) The white folks + refugees of Southern Rhodesia took one look at the chaos over in the Congo, said “Nope,” and declared themselves independent of Great Britain to avoid handing over power to the black majority (97% of the Rhodesian population.)

The rest of the world (Great Britain included) never officially recognized Rhodesia as a country and hit it with a bunch of sanctions. According to Wikipedia:

Although prepared to grant formal independence to Southern Rhodesia (now Rhodesia), the British government had adopted a policy of no independence before majority rule, dictating that colonies with a substantial population of European settlers would not receive independence except under conditions of majority rule.^[20][21][22] …

After the federal break-up in 1963, then-Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home insisted that preconditions on independence talks hinge on what he termed the “five principles” – unimpeded progress to majority rule, assurance against any future legislation decidedly detrimental to black interests, “improvement in the political status” of local Africans, moves towards ending racial discrimination, and agreement on a settlement which could be “acceptable to the whole population”.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Note that Douglas-Home here is the head of the British conservatives.

Harold Wilson and his incoming Labour government took an even harder line on demanding that these points be legitimately addressed before an independence agenda could be set.^{[24] …}

However, few seemed to initially realise that Rhodesia was no longer within the Commonwealth’s direct sphere of influence and British rule was now a constitutional fiction; Salisbury remained virtually immune to credible metropolitan leverage.^[15]

In October 1965, the United Nations Security Council had warned Whitehall about the possibility of UDI, urging Wilson to use all means at his disposal (including military pressure) to prevent the Rhodesian Front from asserting independence.^[44] After UDI was proclaimed, UN officials branded Ian Smith’s government as an “illegal racist minority regime”^[45] and called on member states to sever economic ties with Rhodesia, recommending sanctions on petroleum products and military hardware.^[24] In December 1966, these measures became mandatory, extending to bar the purchase of Rhodesian tobacco, chrome, copper, asbestos, sugar, meat, and hides.^[24]

Britain, having already adopted extensive sanctions of its own, dispatched a Royal Navy squadron to monitor oil deliveries in the port of Beira, from which a strategic pipeline ran to Umtali. The warships were to deter “by force, if necessary, vessels reasonably believed to be carrying oil destined for (Southern) Rhodesia”.^[46][47]

Meanwhile, of course, no one is allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia, but no one seems to care about that.

You probably know the story by now: the USSR supported the black nationalists, pretty much no one supported the white Rhodesians, and eventually they got tired of civil war and gave up. According to Wikipedia:

In the ten years after independence, around 60% of the white population of Zimbabwe emigrated, most to South Africa and to other mainly white, English speaking countries where they formed expatriate communities. …

While as Rhodesia, the country was once considered the breadbasket of Africa. Today, Zimbabwe is a net importer of foodstuffs, with the European Union and United States providing emergency food relief as humanitarian aid on a regular basis.^[151] The nation has suffered profound economic and social decline in the past twenty years. Recently the agriculture sector has started to do well since the availability of expertise and machines has improved supported mainly by China.^[152][153]

Zimbabwe also suffered from a crippling inflation rate, as the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had a policy of printing money to satisfy government debts, which introduces excessive currency into the economic system which led to the demise of the local currency. This policy caused the inflation rate to soar from 32% in 1998 (considered extremely high by most economic standards) to an astonishing 11,200,000% by 2007. Monetary aid by the International Monetary Fund has been suspended due to the Zimbabwe government’s defaulting on past loans, inability to stabilise its own economy, and its inability to stem corruption and advance human rights.^[151] In 2009, Zimbabwe abandoned its currency, relying instead on foreign currencies such as the South African rand, the US dollar, the Botswana pula, the euro and the British pound, among others.^[154]

Zimbabwe‘s current per cap GDP is $1,054.

I think one of the common misconceptions about NRx is that it is based on a bunch of overly-pessimistic speculations about the future of democracy in places like the US or Germany. There’s plenty of that, of course. But much of Neoreaction is actually based on observation of events that have already happened in places like the DRC, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Chimpanzee family from the Gombe

To be fair, though, we are getting really off track from our original mission of reviewing Jane Goodall’s book about chimpanzees. In the book’s Forward, David A. Hamburg writes:

The picture of chimpanzee life that emerges is fascinating. Here is a highly intelligent, intensely social creature capable of close and enduring attachments, yet nothing that looks quite like human love, capable of rich communication through gestures, posture, facial expressions, and sounds, yet nothing quite like human language. This is a creature who not only uses tools effectively but also makes tools with considerable foresight; a creature who does a little sharing of food, though much less than man; a creature gifted in the arts of bluff and intimidation, highly excitable and aggressive, capable of using weapons, yet engaging in no activity comparable to human warfare; a creature who frequently hunts and kills small animals of other species in an organized, cooperative way, and seems to have some zest for the process of hunting, killing, and eating the prey; a creature whose repertoire of acts in aggression, deference, reassurance, and greeting bear uncanny similarity to human acts in similar situations.

This bold turns out to be false.

In the Shadow of Man was published in 1971; the chimpanzees of the Kahama region of the Gombe Stream went to war against the chimps of Kasakala in 1974:

The two [groups] had previously been a single, unified community, but by 1974 researcher Jane Goodall, who was observing the community, first noticed the chimps dividing themselves into northern and southern sub-groups.^[2] …

The Kahama group, in the south, consisted of six adult males (among them the chimpanzees known to Goodall as “Hugh”, “Charlie”, and “Goliath”), three adult females and their young, and an adolescent male (known as “Sniff”).^[2] The larger Kasakela group, meanwhile, consisted of twelve adult females and their young, and eight adult males.^{[2] …}

The first outbreak of violence occurred on January 7, 1974,^[4] when a party of six adult Kasakela males attacked and killed “Godi”, a young Kahama male …

Over the next four years, all six of the adult male members of the Kahama were killed by the Kasakela males.^[5] Of the females from Kahama, one was killed, two went missing, and three were beaten and kidnapped by the Kasakela males.^[5] The Kasakela then succeeded in taking over the Kahama’s former territory.^[5]

I have the luxury of reading this account after already hearing, at least vaguely, that chimps wage war on each other. To Jane–despite having observed chimpanzee belligerence for years–it came as a surprise:

The outbreak of the war came as a disturbing shock to Goodall, who had previously considered chimpanzees to be, although similar to human beings, “rather ‘nicer'” in their behavior.^[7] Coupled with the observation in 1975 of cannibalistic infanticide by a high-ranking female in the community, the violence of the Gombe war first revealed to Goodall the “dark side” of chimpanzee behavior.^[7] She was profoundly disturbed by this revelation; in her memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, she wrote:

“For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff’s chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi’s prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé’s thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. ^[8]”

War.

I suspect that humans evolved their upright stance to be better at carrying around large sticks with which to kill other apes. This made it harder for us to climb trees, but may have allowed for our voice boxes to descend (the voice box is actually important for closing off the lungs to provide rigidity to the chest while climbing,) allowing for a greater range of vocalizations, which in turn made us better at communicating and so organizing our bashing-apes-with-sticks expeditions. Eventually we stopped hunting other primates and turned our attention to more efficient game, like mammoths.

Refugee flow from the DRC to other nations

Anthropology Friday: In the Shadow of Man, by Jane Goodall (1/5)

Today we begin our discussion of In the Shadow of Man, (published in 1971,) an account of Dame Jane Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park, Tanzania. If you haven’t finished the book yet, don’t panic; feel free to join the discussion anyway, or keep the questions in mind and answer them later. Also, remember that these questions are only meant to help inspire you; if you want to discuss some other aspect of the book or propose your own questions, go ahead.

1. What did you think of the book? Favorite part, least favorite part?
2. Do you agree with Jane’s claim that this was the first observation of tool making in animals, or does something like a beaver building a dam count? What constitutes “tool making”?*
3. To what extent do you think the study of chimps aids in our understanding of ourselves? Do chimps make useful human analogues?
4. What do you think is the nature of chimpanzee “consciousness”? Do they experience the world in some way similar to ourselves?

5. 

   Chimp feeding a leopard cub (source)

   What do you think of the role of dominance (and violence) in chimp social life?

6. What about the role of play, friendship, and love?
7. Do we do ourselves a disservice by comparing humans to common chimps (pan troglodytes) instead of pygmy chimps/aka bonobos (pan paniscus)?
8. Do you think Jane’s use of feeding stations, which potentially raised the level of chimp-on-chimp violence in the Gombe, compromised her research?
9. I found it very interesting that chimps would fight over relatively low-value bananas, but not over high-value meat. Why do you think they did?
10. Is it a good idea to use chimpanzee child-rearing methods with human children?
11. Should humans do more to protect chimpanzees, both in the wild and captivity?
12. Is it possible for chimps to act “morally” or have what we would call a “moral conscious?” Can we condemn the chimps for their treatment of Old Mr. McGregor?

13. 

    Chimp hugging same cub

    If chimps (or other animals) have emotions, are we morally obligated to be kind to them?

14. After the publication of this book, war broke out among the Gombe chimps, shocking Jane (more on this later.) Was her surprise warranted, or would you have expected it, based on the violence described in the book?
15. Why do you think social grooming is so important to chimpanzees?
16. Do humans have any behaviors similar to social grooming? If not, why?
17. It must take an extraordinary sort of person to sequester themselves in the forest (in the age before cellphones or internet,) for months or years on end. Could you ever do such a thing?
18. Should we read another book? If so, which?

*Jane actually notes in the bibliography that reports of chimpanzee toolmaking were published back in 1925, but perhaps these were not well-known outside of the primatology field:

Tool-using is discussed by Harry Beatty in “A Note on the Behavior of the Chimpanzee,” under General Notes of the Journal of Mammalology, Vol. 32 (1951), p. 118, and by Fred G. Merfield and H. Miller in Gorillas Were My Neighbors (London: Longmans, 1956); Wolfgang Kohler reported studies of tool-using and toolmaking by groups of captive chimpanzees in The Mentality of Apes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

Reports of tool use in apes date back to 1843, or perhaps earlier.

It is most likely true that, prior to the publication of Jane’s research, most people–even those interested in apes–weren’t aware of their tool-making abilities. After all, this was not the age of Wikipedia and easy research, when a few clicks of a mouse could bring you to an 1843 paper on primatology. Jane may have actually changed the body of well-known chimpanzee facts, just as Columbus changed the body of well-known continents facts, even though plenty of people had arrived in the Americas before him.

But I still think this all rather neglects the humble beaver, who cuts down trees, strips them of leaves and branches, and then arranges them into large dams, radically altering riverine environments to suit his needs. The world’s largest beaver dam is 850 meters long and still potentially growing.

But enough quibbling — on with the discussion. (Remember, you are welcome to join in even if you haven’t read the book.)

(I’ll be posting my normal excerpts + commentary next week.)

Anthropology Friday: Still A Pygmy (pt 4/4): War, violence, and more war

Today we’re wrapping up our review of Still a Pygmy, by Isaac Bacirongo and Micheal Nest

Mobutu Sese Seko

It’s no secret that Mobutu Sese Seko (ne Joseph-Desiré Mobutu) was a shitty dictator who forced school children to sing anthems praising him every morning and had his own citizens tortured if they disputed his claim to be immortal.

Of course Mobuto was not immortal; he is now very much dead.

But let’s back up a minute:

Patrice Lumumba was an anti-colonialist protestor who was jailed for opposing Belgian rule in the Congo and became the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC.

He then gave raises to everyone in the government except the military, so of course the military revolted. He asked the UN for help putting down the rebellion, but the UN sucked so he went to the Soviets.

Patrice Lumumba

American hates the Soviets, so America + Belgium helped Mobutu overthrow the government, kill Lumumba, and squash the rebellion.

The execution is thought to have taken place on 17 January 1961, between 21:40 and 21:43 (according to the Belgian report.) The Belgians and their counterparts wished to get rid of the bodies, and did so by digging up and dismembering the bodies, then having them dissolved in sulphuric acid while the bones were ground and scattered.^[27] (Source)

Mobutu became dictator and changed the country’s name to Zaire to show that he was totally anti-colonialist, despite using Belgian money and soldiers to overthrow the democratically elected government anti-colonialist government of the DRC.

During his reign, Mobutu built a highly centralized state and amassed a large personal fortune through economic exploitation and corruption, leading some to call his rule a “kleptocracy.”^[3][4] The nation suffered from uncontrolled inflation, a large debt, and massive currency devaluations. (source)

I seriously question the idea of a “highly centralized state” in the DRC, given the lack of basic things like roads, but I think I know what Wikipedia is trying to say.

But, say what you will, Mobutu did crush several rebellions and bring a relative order of peace to his country:

By 1970, nearly all potential threats to his authority had been smashed, and for the most part, law and order was brought to nearly all parts of the country. That year marked the pinnacle of Mobutu’s legitimacy and power. King Baudouin of Belgium, made a highly successful state visit to Kinshasa. …

Early in his rule^[when?], Mobutu consolidated power by publicly executing political rivals, secessionists, coup plotters, and other threats to his rule. To set an example, many were hanged before large audiences, including former Prime Minister Evariste Kimba, who, with three cabinet members – Jérôme Anany (Defense Minister), Emmanuel Bamba (Finance Minister), and Alexandre Mahamba (Minister of Mines and Energy) – was tried in May 1966, and sent to the gallows on 30 May, before an audience of 50,000 spectators. …

Mobutu later moved away from torture and murder, and switched to a new tactic, buying off political rivals. He used the slogan “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer still”^[26] to describe his tactic of co-opting political opponents through bribery.

The idea that Mobutu was somehow more pro-capitalist than Lumumba is silly, of course, but somehow the capitalist colonialists didn’t get the joke:

[Mobutu] initially nationalized foreign-owned firms and forced European investors out of the country. In many cases he handed the management of these firms to relatives and close associates who stole the companies’ assets. This precipitated such an economic slump that Mobutu was forced by 1977 to try to woo foreign investors back.^[29] Katangan rebels based in Angola invaded Zaire in 1977 in retaliation for Mobutu’s support for anti-MPLA rebels. France airlifted 1,500 Moroccan paratroopers into the country and repulsed the rebels, ending Shaba I. The rebels attacked Zaire again, in greater numbers, in the Shaba II invasion of 1978. The governments of Belgium and France deployed troops with logistical support from the United States and defeated the rebels again.

Why the US, France, or Belgium should spend their money to help Mobutu is beyond me, but I suppose he was our anti-European communist oligarch and not the USSR’s anti-European communist oligarch.

Mobutu might have started out as a smart guy. The Wikipedia certainly gives that impression. But he ran his country like an idiot.

He spent most of his time increasing his personal fortune, which in 1984 was estimated to amount to US$5 billion,^[30][31] most of it in Swiss banks … This was almost equivalent to the country’s foreign debt at the time, and, by 1989, the government was forced to default on international loans from Belgium. He owned a fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles that he used to travel between his numerous palaces, while the nation’s roads rotted and many of his people starved. Infrastructure virtually collapsed, and many public service workers went months without being paid. … A popular saying that the civil servants pretended to work while the state pretended to pay them expressed this grim reality.

Another feature of Mobutu’s economic mismanagement, directly linked to the way he and his friends siphoned off so much of the country’s wealth, was rampant inflation. The rapid decline in the real value of salaries strongly encouraged a culture of corruption and dishonesty among public servants of all kinds.

At some point, according to Isaac Bacirongo, Mobutu actually stopped paying the army, telling them “You have guns; go get money yourself.” (I am only remembering the quote so it may not be exact.) Unsurprisingly, the army began exploiting the ordinary citizens even more than usual, and when the DRC got invaded yet again, didn’t bother defending it.

He was also the subject of one of the most pervasive personality cults of the 20th century. The evening news on television was preceded by an image of him descending through clouds like a god descending from the heavens. Portraits of him adorned many public places, and government officials wore lapels bearing his portrait. He held such titles as “Father of the Nation,” “Messiah,” “Guide of the Revolution,” “Helmsman,” “Founder,” “Savior of the People,” and “Supreme Combatant.” In the 1996 documentary of the 1974 Foreman-Ali fight in Zaire, dancers receiving the fighters can be heard chanting “Sese Seko, Sese Seko.” At one point, in early 1975, the media was even forbidden from mentioning by name anyone but Mobutu; others were referred to only by the positions they held.^[41][42]

Isaac Bacirongo once told a neighbor that he didn’t think Mobutu was actually immortal. The neighbor reported Isaac to the secret police, who arrested and tortured him every day for, IIRC, two weeks. They considered transferring him to a formal prison for political prisoners, where he probably would have been tortured more, but in an ironic twist of fortune, decided that Pygmies were worthless and so couldn’t be real political opponents and so not worth the bother of imprisoning. So Isaac was released.

Here the story gets a little complicated, because it involves other countries, but I’ll try to keep it short:

Over in Rwanda, the Tutusis were a small minority of relatively well-off people and the Hutus were a large majority of very poor people. So the Hutus kicked out the Tutsis, leading to a lot of Tutsis living in places like the DRC. The Tutsis got themselves an army, and in 1994, shot down the Rwandan president’s plane. This enraged the already not happy Hutus, who responded by killing all of the Tutsis they could get their hands on (resulting in more refugees.) The Tutsi army responded by invading Rwanda and taking over, resulting in a bunch of Hutu refugees.

Isaac notes that the sudden influx of refugees into his area made the price of unskilled labor plummet. He took advantage of this by hiring workers to build him a second, extremely cheap house.

But of course immigration and the cost of labor have nothing to do with each other.

Private meeting between Kabila, Micheal Jackson, and the guy on the left.

Anyway, then Kabila, a dedicated Marxist who’d worked with Che Guevara back in the day*, with the help of the Tutsi army, invaded and conquered the DRC. This worked out for the Tutsi army, which got to shoot all of the Hutu refugees in the DRC, and worked out for Kabila, who promptly abandoned Marxism in favor of being Mobutu 2.0.

*Even Che Guevara didn’t think much of Kabila:

[Kabila] was sent^{[by whom?]} to eastern Congo to help organize a revolution, in particular in the Kivu and North Katanga provinces. In 1965, Kabila set up a cross-border rebel operation from Kigoma, Tanzania, across Lake Tanganyika.^{[3] …}

 Che Guevara assisted Kabila for a short time in 1965. Guevara had appeared in the Congo with approximately 100 men who planned to bring about a Cuban-style revolution. Guevara judged Kabila (then 26) as “not the man of the hour” he had alluded to, being too distracted. This, in Guevara’s opinion, accounted for Kabila showing up days late at times to provide supplies, aid, or backup to Guevara’s men. The lack of cooperation between Kabila and Guevara contributed to the suppression of the revolt that same year.^[4]

… After the failure of the rebellion, Kabila turned to smuggling gold and timber on Lake Tanganyika. He also ran a bar and brothel in Tanzania.^[5]

Kabila was later shot by one of his own bodyguards.

Isaac himself was only about 500 meters away when the invading army began massacring Hutu refugees who had gathered in his area. He and a friend’s children escaped into the forest, where they reverted to hunting and gathering while hiding from the army. (In this case, it was a very good thing Isaac was a Pygmy; if I had to survive in the Congolese rainforest for a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t know the first thing about gathering food.) Isaac’s entire family thought he was dead until he managed to return home.

The security situation deteriorated from there, with the country split between two armies and a bunch of militias in the forests. Now instead of merely jailing and torturing people, the armies took to shooting them. Trade and commerce broke down because you couldn’t travel anywhere because the different armies would shoot you if you went into a different part of the country, and besides, the armies were just stealing everything. They looted one of Isaac’s pharmacies and then burned it down.

Sad to say, it sounds like everyone was actually better off under Mobutu.

Around this time, Isaac decided to become a Pygmy rights advocate and went to a couple of international conferences to speak about how Pygmies are discriminated against by Bantus, not allowed to hunt in the national parks, etc., and was promptly arrested for making the government look bad. He managed to bribe his way out of prison and fled the country in the middle of the night, convinced that if he stayed, he’d be killed.

Isaac was lucky to escape.

I wager the security situation in the DRC is still a mess.

Come read “In the Shadow of Man” with me

Jane Goodall’s “In the Shadow of Man” was first published in 1971, and apparently revolutionized the entire field of primatology and our understanding of our nearest evolutionary cousins. From Amazon:

Her adventure began when the famous anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that a long-term study of chimpanzees in the wild might shed light on the behavior of our closest living relatives. … For months the project seemed hopeless; out in the forest from dawn until dark, she had but fleeting glimpses of frightened animals. But gradually she won their trust and was able to record previously unknown behavior, such as the use—and even the making— of tools, until then believed to be an exclusive skill of man. As she came to know the chimps as individuals, she began to understand their complicated social hierarchy and observed many extraordinary behaviors, which have forever changed our understanding of the profound connection between humans and chimpanzees.

It has good reviews, so I’m optimistic about using it for our next Anthropology Friday series, in about a month. (Though I am somewhat skeptical about this supposed first observed non-human tool-making, given that beavers and otters have long been observed.)

Does anyone want to read along with me? I can post discussion questions and make it a regular “book club” affair. (I guess “What counts as ‘tool making?’ should be our first question.) ETA: I promise to avoid really dumb questions, like “Explain how Jane got to know the chimpanzees,” or “Why does the author include an introduction?”

Oh, and it’s fine to post thoughts/responses even if you disliked the book or didn’t read it all the way through. Or if you really hate the book, suggest a different one for next time.

Anthropology Friday: Still a Pygmy (pt 3) Bantus, Mobutu, and Witchcraft

Continuing with our review of Still a Pygmy, by Isaac Bacirongo and Michael Nest

 “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Tolstoy

One of the things I find interesting (and reassuring) when reading about other peoples and places is discovering that they have problems, too–it’s not just us. This is a bit of a personal life philosophy–when the going gets tough, I tell myself “Other people have been through this. You are not the only one. They got through it and so will you.” It is always useful to have some perspective on life.

These days, the biggest source of trouble in Pygmies’ lives isn’t leopards, but the Bantus. Of course this must be taken with a grain of salt, since the book was written by a Pygmy; perhaps Bantus have a whole list of their own grievances–maybe Pygmies “hunt” their livestock and “gather” their crops. I should try to be at least a little cautious of accepting uncritically a single account of relations between two groups of people I have no personal experience with.

Thankfully there is a lot of other evidence on the subject, and it looks like the Pygmies are generally on the losing end of Bantu violence, and the Bantus are not generally on the losing end of Pygmy violence. The Wikipedia: article on Pygmies quotes a BBC report:

In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, told the UN’s Indigenous People’s Forum that during the Congo Civil War, his people were hunted down and eaten as though they were game animals. In neighbouring North Kivu province there has been cannibalism by a group known as Les Effaceurs (“the erasers”) who wanted to clear the land of people to open it up for mineral exploitation.^[23] Both sides of the war regarded them as “subhuman” and some say their flesh can confer magical powers.^[24] Makelo asked the UN Security Council to recognise cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.^[25]

It’s sad that we have to add “cannibalism” to the list of “things people have to be explicitly told not to do.”

Since the world of Pygmy activists is pretty small, it’s not surprising that Isaac also mentions Sinafasi Makelo. “My position in APDMAC [A pygmy rights group] was Founder and Coordinator. Sinafasi, a Pygmy from the Mangurejipa Forest in North Kivu, was the Secretary.”

Continuing with Wikipedia:

According to Minority Rights Group International there is extensive evidence of mass killings, cannibalism and rape of Pygmies and they have urged the International Criminal Court to investigate a campaign of extermination against pygmies. Although they have been targeted by virtually all the armed groups, much of the violence against Pygmies is attributed to the rebel group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, which is part of the transitional government and still controls much of the north, and their allies.^[26]

The Pygmy population was also a target of the Interahamwe during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Of the 30,000 Pygmies in Rwanda, an estimated 10,000 were killed and another 10,000 were displaced. They have been described as “forgotten victims” of the genocide.^[27] The current Rwandan Pygmy population is about 33,000, and is reportedly declining.^[28]

By one estimate, the total number of Pygmies killed in the civil wars in Congo and Rwanda is 70,000.^[27]

I am not sure that the Pygmies are actually being targeted anymore than everyone else in the area–the Tutsis have a pretty good claim to have been victims of genocide as well, and the Tutsis got back at the Hutus by massacring them. And plenty of ordinary Bantus living in the area have been raped, shot, massacred, and probably eaten, too. The only difference is that you never hear of the Pygmies being the victors (or aggressors) in these conflicts. Not that Pygmies are peace-loving forest hippies or something like that, but they are a tiny group of hunter-gatherers and therefore don’t have the numbers nor the weapons to attack their neighbors.

Regardless, the situation in the Congo is not good. As Reuters reports (2014):

KINSHASA— A militia leader accused of kidnap, rape and cannibalism in Democratic Republic of Congo was killed on Monday alongside four other people during a firefight as he sought to escape his army captors, the government said. … U.N. experts said in December he switched his focus from poaching elephants to attacking gold mines. They accuse him and his men of kidnapping people to carry looted goods and of forcing women into being sexual slaves for militia members.

They said in another report last July that former captives had told them the group, known as “Mai Mai Morgan”, had engaged in cannibalism on several occasions.

From the Toronto Star, in a report about “child soldiers” (children kidnapped by the Congolese militias and forced into service):

“When you kill a Tutsi, you remove his heart and mix it with special potions, like a medicine,’’ explains Popy Matenda, rather blandly. “Other parts of the body can be eaten too but the heart is special. It gives you the strength of the person you killed, like you are sucking in his spirit. It’s a kind of magic.’’ … “It didn’t make me sick or anything, eating humans,’’ continues 15-year-old Matenda as he slurps up a cola, when what he’d really wanted was a whiskey. “You couldn’t even taste the flesh because it was all ground up with the medicine.”

From Worldcrunch, In Congo, A Tribal Chief Forced to Flee Cannibalistic Militia:

“Since 2003, 40 chiefs have been killed by the Mai-Mai, who ate their flesh, which they believe can strengthen their power and make them invulnerable to bullets. This has happened to the leaders Musumari, Mwele, Lwalaba, Dilenge, Kawama Mubidi, Kiyombo, Ntambo, Kileba …”

As I have noted before, the belief that eating people (or animals) can give you magic powers leads quickly down a very bad path. If you want an historical view, I recommend Cannibalism in the African Congo.

Isaac Bacirongo does not actually dwell much at all on the specific targeting of Pygmies for cannibalism and genocide. However, he does say:

The owners of the forest became those who had guns. If APDMAC went there and said, ‘Pygmies are the owners of the forest,’ they would put us in prison. In the past, pygmies id not worry about the future. Life was easy because it was easy to find something to eat and thee was only one need: meat. … Many had fled deep into the forest because of the fighting but life was hard because militias operated there as well. They might be killed or raped. there was no medicine in the forest and many people died because of this, including my papa. …

A lot of people are suffering back home and there is nothing I can do about it. In the north-east of Congo, a rebel militia went into the Ituri Forest to hunt Pygmies because they thought they could get magic powers from them. One of my aunts was also killed by rebel forces. They found out she was a Pygmy and wanted to learn about Pygmy magic because they thought it would help them in the forest. he told them she knew nothing, so they buried her alive. Sinafasi, one of the founders of APDMAC,went to the Unted Nations in New york to petition to include cannibalism as a crime against humanity, because other militas were eating Pygmies. The militas thout this would help them in the forest.

… In 2005, Kabungulu from Herieters de la Justice, the man who convinced me to become an activist, was murdered, probably because of his activist work. After that I got the news that 56 people in Bunyakiri were killed by a Hutu milita fighting the Congolese government. Among the dead were my sister’s husband, Josephine’s [his wife’s] nephew, the father of Akili (the nephew I brought to Australia,) and many other neighbors. …

The Pygmies’ reputation for magical powers, which earned them a special position in Bantu religious rituals (see last week’s Anthropology Friday,) definitely backfires when people decide they can get those same magic powers for themselves by eating you.

But enough sensationalism–let’s get back to the mundane, because the day-to-day lives of Congolese Pygmies obviously isn’t invading armies or cannibals.

As a small child, Isaac lived on the banana plantation where his parents worked and attended the local school. He was the only Pygmy at the school, for the simple reason that school cost money, which Pygmies generally could not afford, and because Pygmies tend to prefer living their lives and not worrying about school. But Isaac wanted to be like all of the other kids on the plantation, so he bugged his parents until they somehow scraped up the cash and sent him to school.

I first became aware of politics when I was at this school, because every morning we had to stand in assembly and sing praises to our president, Joseph Mobutu. The government forced shops to put up President Mobutu’s picture and some people even had a picture of Mobutu in their homes, although we didn’t in our hut made of sticks and leaves. … Mama and Papa knew about Mobutu but were not interested in politics and paid no attention to any of it.

Having to pay homage to Mobutu as part of a fake religion was pretty dumb, but a lot better than getting shot by invaders. Unfortunately, the kinds of people who set up fake religions about themselves are often idiots who do things like not pay their armies, which leads to your people getting shot by invaders.

My teacher at the school was Mr. Enoch. ‘Which tribe are you from?’ he asked me, as all the other students in the whole school were Shi. I told him ‘BaTembo.’ ‘That,’ he replied, ‘means you are a Pygmy.’ … Mr. Enoch despised me. He made a point of calling me a ‘Pygmy’ in a way that told the other students I was inferior. …

After three months at the Kabuga school I had a very bad experience. One day I wet my pants, and Mr Enoch hit me very hard with his fists and kicked me. Mr Enoch shouted, ‘that’s what I think of Pygmies!’ as he punched me… I remember bleeding from my ears and nose…

(Remember that Isaac was, at this time, only in the equivalent of kindergarten or first grade.)

My parents were not surprised to see me beaten half-dead by my teacher. They had told us that Bantu always treat Pygmies badly. But I did not understand Mr. Enoch when he told me that Pygmies are not human! …

After I arrived home my body started to swell up. My parents massaged me with hot water and herb from the forest. … The police asked my parents to pay 5 makutas–what they called the ‘arrest fee’–to arrest Mr. Enoch, but where could they get 5 makutas? … ‘Will you insist on going to school again?’ Papa asked. … ‘School is not for us. Now you see for yourself why we don’t go to school.’

Eventually Isaac does go back to school, after his parents move to a different area.

Isaac also recounts the story of a time when his mother was selling firewood, and a Bantu man did not like the price she asked for her wood, so he just hit her and stole her wood.

When Bantu cheat Pygmies or refuse to honor a promise of payment, they do not want the Pygmies to react badly. For example, most Pygmies work at times on the farms of Bantu villagers. The villager might promise to give them two or three measure of beans as payment, but then only give one. …

There are Pygmies who have had their lands sold to Bantu. If we complain, the territorial administrator or the lawyers will be given a cow by the person who bought the land, and because they have bee bought off, they do nothing for the Pygmies.

Anyway, Isaac finishes 10 years of schooling (plus part of year 11,) and sets out to get a job. He has more than enough education to become a teacher, but it is very tough to find people willing to hire a Pygmy teacher. He ends up going into business, leading to his successful pharmacy chain. Eventually he gets married to a town girl, Josephine. Unfortunately, Josephine and Isaac’s mom don’t get along:

Mama was not happy. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you are marrying someone from a rich family. Town girls don’t know how to look for crabs or firewood…’ Mama wanted me to marry a girl from the forest. …

Mama also blamed Papa for me wanting to stay in town. ‘I told you not to send your son to school,’ she said, ‘because he will want to live in town. It will change his thinking and he won’t want to live in the forest.’ But Papa hadn’t sent me to school.

… Mama tried everything she could with witchcraft to kill Josephine.

Mama thought Josephine was controlling me, and told me the reason I did not return to the forest was because Josephine had used witchcraft to make me change my mind and beliefs… So Mama went to a witchdoctor to ask for magic herbs more powerful than those she thought Josephine had given me, to kill the power of Josephine’s magic. Mum tried to get me t eat these herbs and she placed others where I was sitting or stepping. The herbs did not work…

Mama then went to a woman who was known to be a sorceress, Nagabushu… Mama said that if Josephine were to die while pregnant with Deborah, people would think it was because of the pregnancy and would not suspect witchcraft. Nagabushu got upset and started fighting with Mum. ‘I’m not a sorceress!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve never killed anyone!’ …

In 1991, ten years after we married, Mama went to a different witchdoctor… He was an older man in his forties. … The witchdoctor told mama how powerful he was. ‘It will be very simple to kill your daughter-in-law,’ he said. ‘I have the power to bring storms, such as lighting storms… Someone died a few months ago from a lightning strike, and it was me who did that. … If you give me your youngest daughter, Sibaruzi, to be my wife that would be enough payment…’

Mama told Sibaruzi that if she refused to be the witchdoctor’s wife, everyone in our family would be killed. … mama escorted her to the witchdoctor and when they arrived he showed them teeth of wild animals, herbs and bottles of liquids. Sibaruzi was afraid. … She was twelve at the time and had not even had her first period. I still do not know how Mama could do this. What a bad heart!

Obviously the witchdoctor failed and Josephine is still alive and well. Eventually Sibaruzi figured out what was up and left, saying she never wanted to see him again. (What a creep.)

Amusingly, sometime I get witchdoctor spam, but being an idiot, I didn’t save the part I wanted to quote for you and my spam folder auto-deleted it. Oh, well. It was funny.

Well, Josephine, if it’s any consolation, I’ve heard lots horrible mother-in-law stories here in the US, too. I guess this means that “horrible mothers-in-law” may be a true human universal.

Anthropology Friday: Still a Pygmy (pt 2)

Continuing with Still a Pygmy, by Isaac Bacirongo and Michael Nest

Isaac begins the book with some background on his family and their life in the forest. (And in case you were wondering about homicide among pre-agricultural peoples, it looks like they Pygmy-on-Pygmy murder rate is pretty high, which fits pretty well with the reported overall homicide rates in the DRC.)

Isaac is one of 12 children, but half of his siblings died in childhood (one died at 15 of labor complications due to having twins without medical care; Isaac notes that sickle-cell-anemia runs in his family, which probably explains most of the others.) Isaac has 11 children, 9 of whom survived (and one of those died as an adult.) The radical difference may be better medical care, but more likely his wife is just not a sickle-cell carrier.

In case the moral of the story is not clear: Hunter-gatherers in the rainforest with no medical care and 50% infant mortality rates can still raise 6 children, while Americans with college degrees and white collar jobs sincerely believe that they “can’t afford” more than one or two kids.

Today’s Pygmies are not exclusive hunter-gatherers, and probably haven’t been for a while. For starters, there are a lot more people hunting in the DRC these days; farmers are clearing forests for agriculture; the gov’t tries to prevent poaching in national parks; and of course armies occasionally march through the area and shoot a bunch of people. Isaac’s family, when he was young, practiced a mobile lifestyle of working part of the year on local farms and exclusive hunting/gathering during other times. Isaac himself, as an adult, lived permanently in town and had a white-collar job running a pharmacy.

You’re not going to get good numbers on the % of Pygmies in agricultural or white-collar occupations because widespread discrimination against Pygmies guarantees that most of the ones who leave the forest hide their identities and attempt to pass as Bantus. (You might think that the most obvious difference between them would be height, but Isaac says it’s lips–Pygmies have thinner lips, Bantus thicker. Also, Pygmies apparently blink more.)

As I’ve mentioned, the Bantus are relative newcomers to the area, and on the grand scale of human genetics, more closely related to Europeans than to Pygmies, who may be one of the most ancient peoples on Earth. This occurred recently enough that the Pygmies, despite having no written history until perhaps this book, still remember the invasion:

According to our mythology, when the people who are not Pygmies–we call them Bantu–came to Central Africa, they came from the north and found Pymies already there. My own ancestors roamed in the forests from Kahuzi up to Walikale and into the forests of Shabunda. This is where you can find the Kalega Forest. The region is very mountainous and the smaller villages are in deep forest and reachable only on dirt paths.

Bantu from many tribes came into our land centuries ago, but before the seventeenth century nobody could talk about BaTembo people [Isaac’s tribe] for the simple reason that they did not exist. About 400 years ago one of those Bantu men called Katembo came into our land. He was the son of Kifamandu, and probably from the Hunde tribe. Katembo fell in love with a Pygmy woman. (I have never heard her name–BaTembo people only want to remember Katembo, not the name of their Pygmy ancestor, so everyone has forgotten her.)

Isaac describes life in the forest as idyllic, but often motivated by extremely practical concerns:

In 1967 a white mercenary from Belgium, Jean Schramme, and his ‘Leopard Battalion’ advanced along the road near where we were living…

Pygmies know how to live in the forest, so we could always find food and build huts, and we were protected. Normally Pygmies move in and out of the forest, but this time we stayed for a whole year because we were scared of leaving.

Later in the book, Isaac returns to the forest again after narrowly escaping a massacre conducted by an invading army from Rwanda. Wikipedia has information on Jean Schramme:

When the Belgian Congo gained its independence in 1960, the country quickly descended into civil war. Several hundred white people were held hostage, and Belgium sent troops to Congo to free them and to protect its interests. … The rich province of Katanga, soon followed by the eastern part of Kasai were trying to gain independence. … A violent clash between pro-secession and pro-unity movements soon broke out.

In 1965, Colonel Mobutu became president and from then on Belgium started protecting his regime against rebellion. …

On June 30, 1967, president Moise Tshombe of Katanga‘s Jet aircraft was hijacked to Algiers, before he could return to Congo after his exile in Spain. He was imprisoned in Algeria and two years later he died in suspicious circumstances. For Schramme, this was a sign that he was fighting the wrong enemy and on July 3, 1967 he began to lead an uprising in Katanga against Mobutu.

…Jean Schramme’s unit, launched surprise attacks on Stanleyville, Kindu, and Bukavu. … Schramme was able to hold Bukavu for seven weeks and managed to defeat all ANC troops who were sent to retake the town. … Extra forces helped the ANC to finally defeat Schramme on October 29, 1967. The surviving rebel troops fled towards Rwanda.

Schramme died in 1988 in Brazil. Jeremy Dunns has some more interesting information about Schramme and his rebellion in his post, The Real Dogs of War. More information in LBJ & the Congo. Christopher Othen, a non-fiction writer, gives a fantastically interesting summary:

Down in the south, the province of Katanga, a rich mining territory, declared its own independence. The Congo had no intention of allowing the renegade region to secede, and neither did the CIA, the KGB, or the United Nations.

… It was a fantastically uneven battle. The United Nations fielded soldiers from twenty nations, America paid the bills, and the Soviets intrigued behind the scenes. Yet to everyone’s surprise the new nation’s rag-tag army of local gendarmes, superstitious jungle tribesmen, and, controversially, European mercenaries refused to give in.

If he writes this well all of the time, I imagine his book (Katanga 1960-1963: Mercenaries, Spies, and the Nation that Waged War on the World) must be a very good read.

Isaac recounts that the Pygmies also lived in the forest for more mundane reasons:

The Belgians tried to get Pygmies out of the forest and make us live in Bantu villages, so we would become workers. We did not like that! Because of pressure from the Belgians, in the 1940s and 1950s some families moved out of the forest but left their eldest sons behind in the deep forest where the Belgians could not find them. After Congo became independent in 1960 we all went back. …

Life was very social in the forest. The small camps we lived in had about five or six different huts, with about twenty people in each camp, and everyone in the camp was related. …

It took Mum and Dad about four hours to make a hut. If you were careful and made a strong frame, you could make a hut that lasted a year. … Bigger huts might have a wall that created a sleeping space for parents. … There were no chairs or tables. Everyone sat on a log or on the ground. My parents liked living in this kind of hut. Many years later I bought them twenty sheets of iron to cover their roof instead of leaves, but they exchanged it for meat. They were happy with their traditional hut and having assets like iron sheeting was meaningless to them. …

This is an important point: most people like their own culture.

Isaac claims to believe in god, but rejects most religious beliefs on the grounds that they are illogical superstitions. Nevertheless, he relates some of the traditional ones for us:

Event though Pygmies are marginalized, we have a special role in Bantu culture because of our connection to the spirit world. Traditionally Pygmies believed in a creator god who created the forest and everything in it, and that the forest was full of the spirits of ancestors who had died. … Pygmies still have ceremonies when we do various things to make spirits happy, and we perform these ceremonies for Batu as well. For example, before gong hunting, Pygmies might perform a ceremony to help catch something. …

The most important ceremonial roles Pygmies held in Bantu culture were when a mwami was put on the throne and when he died. The Bantu were afraid that if they did not give Pygmies a role in these ceremonies it would anger the ancestral spirits of the land. Bantu believe that ancestral spirits respond better to Pygmies because Pygmies are the people of the forest … When something like a destructive storm happens, BaTembo would ay it was because the spirits were upset that Pygmies were not given a proper role in a ceremony that happened earlier, sometimes years earlier. …

When we want to remember someone who has died, we hold a chioba ceremony that might go for as long as a week… When somebody dies their spirits go to the spirit world, and during the chioba people will dance to call the spirits of that person. When the dead person’s spirits come they enter the dancers, who start to dance in an unusal way…

But back to the forest:

… everything in the forest is about food and everything you find belongs to you. This is how Mama thought. In providing for us she was a good mother because we were never hungry as kids.

Life in the forest is not stressful because there are no people around and stress is brought to you by other people. Happiness in the forest comes when you kill an antelope or if you catch some fish, because you know you will eat–and in Pygmy culture if you kill even one monkey everyone in the village will have a piece. …

When I was a child I was so happy when I found fruit and could eat a lot. If there was no fruit then we would go mushroom picking. … Pygmies collect these fruits and sell them to poeople who live outside the forest, as well as eat it ourselves.

Isaac goes into a bit of detail about all of the different kinds of food they had growing up and how they hunted, providing themselves with everything from grubs to elephants. He also  notes that wearing clothes is inefficient in the forest because they get snagged on branches. Gorillas and chimps, however, were not traditionally on the menu:

Normally Pygmies do not hunt gorillas but this one was bothering them [coming into their camp and destroying their banana trees,] so they decided to kill it. They knew that gorilla were powerful animals. Mama said that if you do not have a brother with you, you should not try to hunt a gorilla because if it grabs you, it will smash you. … If you hunt a gorilla with someone who is not a relative he will run away if it gets hold of you, but if you hunt with a brother he will try to stab the gorilla and carry you home if you are injured.

… the only real enemy of Pygmies in the forest was leopards. If Pygmies met a gorilla we would look at each other then each would go their own way. The same with chimpanzees–we would pass each other in the forest, minding our own business. Chimpanzees and gorillas were not harmful to you because they are not aggressive unless you approach their babies. …

Pygmies were only scared of leopards. Because the walls of our huts are not strong and are only made of leaves, sometimes a leopard would pull sleeping people out and kill them. Mama told me about two or three people who were killed that way.

Back in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (first published in 1939,) Dr. Price, a peripatetic dentist who traveled the world in search of good teeth, noted that Pygmies hunt elephants and leopards hunt Pygmies:

The home life of the pygmies in the jungle is often filled with danger. Just before our arrival two babies had been carried off by a leopard. This stealthy night prowler is one of the most difficult to combat and one of the reasons the pygmies build cabins in the trees.

Perhaps this is why, according to Wikipedia:

Fathers of the Aka tribe [Pygmies from the other side of the DRC] spend more time in close contact to their babies than in any other known society. Aka fathers have their infant within arms reach 47% of the time ^[5] and make physical contact with them five times as often per day as fathers in some other societies.^[3] …

Throughout the day, couples share hunting, food preparation, and social and leisure activities. The more time Aka parents spend together, the more frequent the father’s affectionate interaction with his baby.^{[citation needed]} or the more frequent the father’s affectionate interaction with his baby, the more time the Aka parents spend together.

Dad around => less chance of getting eaten by leopards.

(This is why I think it so weird that [some] Americans think it is a good idea to put an infant into a room by itself and then ignore it while it screams. Infants are not rational, thinking creatures who can understand that they’re safe even though it’s dark. They run entirely on instincts, and their instincts tell them that being alone in the dark means they will get eaten by leopards.)

Anyway, here’s another interesting bit, also showing the weird Pygmy-Bantu religious relationship:

In traditional Bantu culture in my area, when a king dies someone must cut off his head and take it for safekeeping to a sacred place in the forest. Bantus have assigned Pygmies responsibilities in this ceremony and it is a Pygmy man who does this. … The muhombe has a powerful magic. He wears a mask, a leopard skin across his chest, a raffia skirt and a necklace made of wild banana seeds and the teeth of a wild boar. He carries his tools in a raffia bag–a few teeth of dead chiefs, and other things to help him communicate with the dead and tell the future. The special place the muhombe protects is called the buhombe. It is very sacred to Pygmies and Bantu, but the Bantu are not allowed to go there. The entire head is placed on a tabernacle int he forest and the muhombe would watch it carefully to see if there are any movements of the skull. … The muhombe cares for the site for thirty or forty yeas, when the role of guardian or caretaker passes to his son. …

The muhombe in the Mafuo Chiefdom traditionally come from my family, and when I was young my father held this role. Bantus said I would have to do this when my father died as I was part of the lineage. I refused … The Bantu then said that as I refused to do it, my sister, Zania, the next in line in my family, would have to carry the muhombe assignment… ‘Carrying the assignment’ meant carrying the next muhombe in her womb. Zania was not supposed to get married because she had to dedicate herself to this assignment, a bit like a nun, but it was all right for her to give birth to the next muhombe.

Unfortunately, Zania died in childbirth and the muhombe-ship transferred to a cousin. Much later in the book, after Isaac and his family have moved to Australia, he reports that:

A few years ago my brother Buhavu sold the land where the Mafuo chiefs are buried, the buhombe hill… There were even some teeth of an old mwami still there. Mama was very upset about him selling this land. Buhavu did not have personal custody of that land and had no right to sell it. … Mama’s dream is to go back to Cong, return the money to the Bantu people who bought that sacred land, and get it back.

Old ways die quickly when there is money to be made.

To be continued…

Anthropology Friday: Still a Pygmy, by Isaac Bacirongo and Micheal Nest

My copy of Still a Pygmy has arrived!

I am excited because this book is probably the only autobiography/first-hand account of growing up with a Pygmy lifestyle in the whole world. (In English, anyway.) Sure, plenty of anthropologists have studied Pygmies and written about their lives, but not many Pygmies have written (or co-written) their own books and gotten them published.

(Since this book was only recently published, and I’m sure Isaac and Michael would like to get their royalties, I am going to quote less than usual and instead try to provide interesting commentary/discussion.)

Basic plot: Isaac Bacironogo, a Pygmy, was born in the Congolese rainforest where he learned to hunt and gather in the traditional Pygmy style. When he was a kid, his family went to work on a local plantation (Pygmies regularly work as hired agricultural laborers,) and noticed that all of the other kids on the plantation were going to school. So after much pestering of his parents, Isaac started going to school. He attended, IIRC, 10 or 11 years of school, learned French fluently, and eventually became a successful businessman who owned three pharmacies and traveled internationally.

Then everything went to shit, between the Rwandan genocide and the Congolese civil war, and Isaac had to get out before the gov’t put a bullet in his brain. Eventually the UN resettled him and his family in Australia.

I have mentioned before that I doubt refugees–wherever they are from–represent a random cross-section of their home societies. They are, at least, the people who managed to get to refugee camps–in Isaac’s case, just escaping required $7,500 in bribes. Additionally, as Isaac has documented in abundant detail, many refugees bribe UN workers in order to get the extremely coveted foreign resettlement slots.

I guarantee that the average Congolese–much less the average Congolese Pygmy–does not have this kind of cash.

According to the Wikipedia:

A pygmy is a member of an ethnic group whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as a member of any group where adult men are on average less than 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches) tall.^[1] A member of a slightly taller group is termed “pygmoid“.^[2]

The term is most associated with peoples of Central Africa, such as the Aka, Efé and Mbuti.^[3] If the term pygmy is defined as a group’s men having an average height below 1.55 meters (5 feet 1 inch), then there are also pygmies in Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Andaman Islands,^[4]Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, and Brazil,^[5] including some Negritos of Southeast Asia.

For the purposes of this post, “Pygmy” only refers to African Pygmies.

Isaac’s people, the BaTembo, come from the region marked on this map as “Great Lakes Twa,” which overlaps the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (hereafter either DRC or just “Congo,” after Isaac’s usage,) Rwanda, and Burundi.

Isaac describes the different Pygmy groups:

… we say there are three kinds of Pygmy. The first we cal BaTwa be Bungukuma in KiTembo. This means something like ‘stocky Pygmies with muscular bodies.’ They are shorter than normal Pygmies, they are strong–their chests are like hard stones–and their whole body works together perfectly. This kind of Pygmy is quite hairy and they don’t like to mix with other people. The second kind is a normal Pygmy, like my family. … The third kind of Pygmy is the Pygmoid people. … Full-blooded Pygmies are sometimes scared of Pygmoid people, because Pygmoid people see themselves as masters of the full-bloods and act like this towards us.

There is a fair amount of debate over whether the various Pygmy peoples are all closely related, or if they are a bunch of different people who all happen to evolve shorter stature just because of some environmental factor, like the rainforest being low on salt. It looks like the answer is a bit of both: the existence of other pygmy or pygmoid people outside of Africa, as far away as the rainforests of Australia and Brazil, suggests that it’s highly likely that rainforests do select for small stature, but the African Pygmies appear to be descended from a single ancestral group that split up thousands of years ago, may have admixed with an archaic population or two, and some of which have mixed significantly with the recently-arrived Bantus.

For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that Pygmies and Bantus are probably about as genetically distant European and Africans–if not more so. (Keeping in mind that there now exist substantial numbers of mixed-race Pygmy-Bantu people and tribes.)

According to Secret Corners of the World, which I coincidentally picked up at a used book shop this week, there are actually glacier-capped mountains on the border between Congo and Uganda, known as the Rwenzori, or Mountains of the Moon. These mountains have some enormous vegetation.

The town where Isaac lived, Bukavu, lies near the Rwenzori, just outside the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park. Wikipedia notes:

Kahuzi Gorilla

…the park’s 1975 expansion, which included inhabited lowland areas, resulted in forced evacuations with about 13,000 people of the tribal community of Shi, Tembo and Rega affected and refusing to leave.^[2] Cooperation by the communities living around the park and employment of the Twa people to enforce park protection was pursued by the park authorities. In 1999 a plan was developed to protect the people and the resources of the park.^[8]

The Tembo, aka BaTembo, are Isaac’s people (“Ba” is a local prefix that I think means “the people”, so BaTembo means “the Tembo people.” They’re the same group whether you attach the Ba or not.) Isaac speaks of this same incident:

White people with the power to help also ignored us. This was the case with the Pygmies who were thrown out of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park that was create din part of our traditional country, and which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The headquarters of the park is called Madaga. This is the name of a Pygmy family that is still living. … The Madaga family’s land, their area of hunting, became part of the national park. So much money is given to support the park but the Madaga family is living in poverty.

Basically, a lot more people have been trying to save the gorillas and chimpanzees than have been trying to save the Pygmies, who have not fared too well at the hands of the Bantus.

(If it is any consolation, it looks like there has been poaching in the park. Isaac reports:

The camp where the Pygmies lived was right on the edge of Mr. Francis’ farm, next to the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. The government authorities wanted the camp moved off the boundary because they suspected us of hunting in the forest. They were right. … Meat was expensive and my father was not rich enough to have chickens or goats, so if we wanted meat we had to hunt for it. All Papa thought about was going back into the forest to check his snares when he was finished work for the day. … In the rainy season, when there were a lot of animals around and they were easy to trap, Papa and the other Pygmies living in the camp would desert the farm for up to three months to hunt. …

The authorities knew that Pygmies and other hunters poached game int he Kahuzi-Biega reserve and used to stop and search them when they were walking into town… if the authorities caught a man with bush meat he would be fined, but they never stopped children, so a few times I used to take meat to sell in town..

Mama developed a strategy to get Papa about of trouble when he was caught poaching. She discovered that the local territorial administrator, Salumu, liked monkey, so several times Mama smoked monkey or antelope meat and gave it to him for free. … When Papa was caught, Salumu would let him off with a warning.

Bribes and corruption are going to be a frequent theme of this series.)

Secret Corners of the World describes traveling from Bukavu to the Rwenzori around 1982:

Our road to the Ruwenzori [older spelling] was filled with scenes of promise, frustration, and vistas of primeval Beauty.

Our journey began in Bukavu, capital of Zaire’s Kivu Province, a place that visiting Americans have called “an African San Francisco.” Appealing, solidly built villas overlook the water from four peninsulas that extend into Lake Kivu–but on the slopes behind them sit flimsy, fly-ridden shacks. Such contrasts inflamed the turbulent 1960s … Now, as non-African visitors, Jim and I drew friendly attention. To the dozens of French-speaking Zairians that we met along the way, we were simply Americains, objects of sociable curiosity and frequently the recipients of help in case of a mired car or parched throat.

Near Bukavu, apparently far from politics, we walked into a Garden of Eden. … In verdant Kahuzi-Biega Park, nearly 250,000 acres, we sought those muscular dwellers of the rain forest, the lowland gorillas.

Our small safari consisted of several Pygmy trackers and the assistant curator of the park… Since 1970, nearly 30,000 visitors have hiked into the volcanic mountains an hour outside Bukavu to see the gorillas.

Quite a contrast to Frederick and Josephine’s more recent trek through the Congo! Years of genocide and civil war have not been good to the region. Secret Corners continues:

For the next stage of our journey to the Ruqenzori, we joled local travelers in a five-hour boat ride to Goma, at the north end of Lake Kivu. …

Just outside of Goma, a lakeside town with a hint of frontier atmosphere, rises Nyiragongo, one of a string of still-active volcanoes. A nearly perfect cone, its outer shell slants steeply upward to forma  achalice roughly 4,125 feet across. That cup holds molten rock.

At 10 o’clock on January 10, 1977, the cone sprang a leak–at least five fissures. A fiery rver rushed toward Goma, obliterating crops and engulfing hapless villagers. As many as a hundred people may lie entombed in hardened lava several meters thick. …

(One of Isaac’s pharmacies was located near Goma, at least until an invading army made travel between villages much too difficult.)

“Anybody working hard with initiative and imagination can make a fortune here,” insists 38-year-old entrepreneur Victor Ngezayo… in their Beni coffee warehouse. Victor started as a truck driver at age 19; now he and Brigitte own a fleet of trucks, a coffee export business, an air charter service, and an interest in a chain of hotels. they provide advice and credit to employees undertaking business ventures of their own.

Isaac was about 20 or 21 when this article was written; his story and Victor’s stories sound pretty similar (though they obviously differ in the particulars.)

I got to wondering how things turned out for Victor, and so Googled around. Looks like he survived all of the upheavals of the 90s and continues being a successful businessman; here’s his picture from an article about him and his hotels in Jeune Africa, 2011. He still has the same mustache he had in the 1983 photo in Secret Corners. In 2002, the local volcano filled his garden with lava; in 2005, he helped found a new Congolese political party, the Convention of Christian Democrats.

Wikileaks has some interesting records of conversations between US ambassadors or other US gov’t officials and Victor in 2007:

Floribert Bwana Chuy bin Kositi, North Kivu provincial secretary of the RCD-G party, was found murdered July 9 in Goma outside the grounds of a hotel owned by a prominent Tutsi businessman. … A MONUC-Goma political officer told us Chuy, a section chief in the Congolese Office of Control (OCC), disappeared on Saturday. His body, which showed signs of strangulation, was found 300-400 meters from the entrance of Goma’s Hotel Karibu. The owner, Victor Ngezayo, told us the body was discovered by a passing motorbike driver around noon. …

Chuy’s position at OCC involved monitoring the quality of imported food. Ngezayo told us Congolese and resident foreign importers often buy expired foodstuffs on the international market for pennies on the dollar and resell them in Goma. Ngezayo hypothesized that Chuy’s killing was related to his job. Just prior to his death, Chuy had ordered the destruction of 80 tons of imported rice which he had determined was unfit for human consumption.

and in 2009:

Ambassador met April 17 with influential North Kivu businessman Victor Ngezayo. Unsurprisingly, Ngezayo was highly critical of the GDRC, particularly its efforts to bring peace to the East, which he characterized as superficial. Ngezayo maintained that the new CNDP was a Rwandan concoction, with no grassroots support. Efforts to impose a “Rwandophone solution” on North Kivu would be a repeat of the disastrous RCD-Goma experiment. … Ngezayo warned that the different regions of the DRC, which he divided into “Congo Occidentale,” “Congo Orientale,” Katanga, and the Kasais were culturally and economically independent from each other.

I don’t know what he’s up to today, but I don’t see any obituaries.

The Secret Corners article also mentions problems like roads marred by giant, car-swallowing potholes and schools with no teachers due to the Congolese government not paying them, but the tone is relentlessly upbeat and cheerful (these children are so enthusiastic, they’re learning even without a teacher! Some helpful passers-by pitched in and pushed our truck out of the giant hole!) I suspect this is partially because they wanted to write an upbeat article, and partially because the region was actually a lot better prior to the Rwandan Genocide than after. People like Isaac and Victor really were coming up from extremely poor backgrounds to become successful businessmen; opportunities were increasing across the region.

Next week we’ll take a closer look at the Pygmies themselves.