Resumo de Facts About African Pgymies !

There are many different 'Pygmy' people living across a
huge area of central and western Africa. The Pygmies are
forest dwellers, and know the forest, its plants and its
animals intimately.In many places they are recognised as
being the first inhabitants of the region. The different
Pygmy groups speak different languages, mostly related to
those of neighbouring non-Pygmy peoples. However there are
a few words which are shared between even widely separated
Pygmy tribes, suggesting they may have shared a language in
the past. One of these shared words is the name of the
forest spirit, Jengi. How do they
live? The 'Pygmy' peoples live by hunting animals such as
antelopes, pigs and monkeys, fishing, and gathering honey,
wild yams, berries and other plants. For them, the forest
is a kindly personal god, who provides for their needs. All
Pygmy groups have close ties to neighbouring farming
villagers, and work for them or exchange forest produce for
crops and other goods. At its best this is a fair exchange,
but it can involve exploitation of the Pygmies, especially
where they have lost control of the forest and its
resources.African forest people tend to be noticeably
smaller than those from the savannas, the Pygmies being the
most extreme example. Their small stature undoubtedly
enables them to move about the forest more efficiently than
taller peoples. Additionally, their smaller body mass
allows pygmies to dissipate their body heat
better. African forest peoples are excellent
hunters and each forest group specializes in its own
hunting method. For example, the Efe people almost hunt
their prey (over 45 species of animal) almost exclusively
with bows and arrows. Other groups use both bows and arrows
and netting to capture their prey. Although in these
groups, men do most of the hunting of arboreal animals
using bows and arrows and crossbows, women play an
important role in the capture of ground-dwelling animals.
The men arrange the nets into a semi-circle and form a
wall, up to one kilometer in length, of hunting nets. The
women scare animals into the nets where the men use spears
to kill the game. 'Pygmy' peoples see their rainforest
homes threatened by logging, and are driven out by
settlers. In some places they have been evicted and their
land has been designated as national parks. They are
routinely deprived of their rights by governments, which do
not see these forest-dwellers as equal citizens. In
Cameroon, the life of the Bagyeli pygmies is being
disrupted by a World Bank-sponsored oil pipeline which is
to be built through their land. The Batwa pygmies of
eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda have seen nearly
all their forest destroyed, and barely survive as labourers
and beggars.

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