Small is beautiful

Patrick Skene Catling

SONG FROM THE FOREST: MY LIFE AMONG THE BA-BENJELLE PYGMIES by Louis Sarno Bantam, £14.99, pp. 288 One of the beneficial functions of books about the hardships of exotic travel may be to assure armchair travellers that they are lucky to be where they are and should stay there. On the other hand, real travellers boost their self-esteem and gain appreciation of their relative good fortune by visiting backward people suffering priva- tion in uncomfortable parts of the world. War correspondents, I remember, laugh a lot off camera. Explorers, missionaries and anthropologists, even when enduring the Most severe inconveniences abroad, cannot but enjoy, consciously or subconsciously, a sense of personal superiority and an aware- ness of return tickets.

When Louis Sarno, a native of New Jersey and a recent part-time European (Scotland and Holland), now 38 years of age, ventured to live among the Ba- Benjelle Pygmies in the rain forest (or jun- gle, as people used to call it) of the Central African Republic, he had no return ticket. But he knew that even in the heart of dark- ness, less than four degrees north of the Equator, he was only a bus ride and a Couple of flights away from a book signing.

Sarno was alone, divorced, working as a carpenter in Amsterdam. One winter night, a local radio station broadcast a recording of a song of the Pygmies,

voices blending into a subtle polyphony, weaving a melody that rose and fell in end- less repetition, as hypnotic as waves breaking on a shore.

Music is the most difficult art form to describe, and that is the best he is able to do to describe the siren song that lured him to Africa. It is sufficient to understand that

the very first hearing of Pygmy music capti- vated him.

He did some research, learning that the Central African Pygmies are the world's largest remaining population of hunter- gatherers, whose 'music was a source of fascination for the ancient Egyptians'. Pygmy, denoting a member of any dwarf human race, is a name derived from the Greek pygme, a unit of measurement, the distance from the elbow to the knuckles.

These denizens of the rain forest have sur- vived to the present day with their culture largely intact, carrying with them a music that may well antedate the emergence of agricul- ture.

This book is a personal memoir rather than a work of ethnomusicology or cultural anthropology. The textbook formality of Sarno's introductory paragraphs does not persist. Some readers may feel that his style is sometimes too informal. His first impres- sions of Central Africa were disappointing and his language occasionally reverts to the vernacular of his native land.

The reality of life among the Pygmies, as opposed to what I had imagined . . . proved to be very trying,

in the village of Amopolo, his first base, which had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of a Yugoslavian sawmill, he was 'dismayed' by 'how contemporary, even hip' the Pygmies seemed.

Luck had dealt me a bum hand; Amopolo was the pits.

The village was next to a swamp. The weather was hot and humid. 'Trillions of mosquitoes fed on us each night.' He was accommodated in a shack with a mud floor. In Europe, he had been promised that he would be able to live on two dollars a day, plus money for tobacco. His informant also should have mentioned money for mbaku, the local fire-water. The Pygmies continually demanded cigarettes and drink and wouldn't make music and dance without them. His money went

much faster than he had expected.

Dependent on the Pygmies for food, he subsisted at first on an invariable diet of dough and boiled tadpoles, 'which tasted like mud'. He felt that he had been accept- ed when the menu was extended to include mongoose, crocodile, porcupine, and ante- lope offal stewed in palm oil and blood.

I could make out noodlelike strands in the ruddy gravy, only I knew they weren't noo- dles, they were boiled arteries.

Strange to say (what was the home- cooking like, back in New Jersey?), he was undeterred. Indeed, to the contrary, he insisted that his hosts share with him a couple of dishes they had been with- holding.

'From now on,' I said as I ate, 'if it's good for the Pygmies, it's good enough for me.'

And so he was given bokongo (caterpillars) and maboongi (`giant white grubs cooked in their own fat').

Far from being repelled by the cuisine, the steamy climate, the discomforts of the housing and the laziness and importunacy of the inhabitants, Sarno soon came to love the place and the people. In his view, they were

the most well-adjusted people in the world. Their undaunted preoccupation with enjoy- ing each moment as it came, with no concern for the consequences, made them free from neuroses. They were an example to me of how the full potential of the individual could be realised in the absence of the complex constraints imposed by modern civilisation.

He accompanied them on hunting expe- ditions in the rain forest, catching in nets

the blue duiker (mboloko), a shy, solitary browser, frail, trembly, and no larger than a lamb,

while women of the tribe gathered edible leaves, seeds, nuts, roots, fruit and honey.

His main interest, however, remained the Pygmies' music. He has tape-recorded their singing and performances on harp, flute and drums, in 'a sonic environment of primeval beauty,' where there are parrots, monkeys and elephants. The book contains a discography of recordings made there by him and others. 'Voices of the Forest,' one of his own cassettes, is available from Henry W. Targowski, 16 Langridge, Rhyl Street, London NW5 4LY. All the material Sarno has collected in Africa is housed in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, of the Depart- ment of Ethnology and Prehistory at Oxford University, which helped him with a grant to continue his work.

Though he fears that logging, if not curbed, may seduce Pygmies from their traditional way of life and fatally reduce the rain forest, Sarno hopes that support for the World Wildlife Fund may make it possible to protect the recently created Dazanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve. He is sufficiently optimistic to have married a Pygmy. Ngbali is 18 years his junior, and a terrific dancer.