As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.
Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was suspended following a recent coup, they have found other, more entertaining uses for the building. There are soldiers with Kalashnikovs on either side of the stage and girls strutting their stuff in traditional African wear as well as formal and casual Western clothes. Number 10 has won the title but Regis Sissoko and I suspect a fix because for elegance, style and sheer beauty, we agree that No 16 should have claimed the prize of a trip to Paris.
To be honest, lovely as the girls are, I'm more concerned with bonding with Sissoko, the fixer and music promoter who will take me deep into the forest to meet the Aka pygmies. In a place like this you need a Sissoko figure who knows where it's safe and where it's dangerous and who needs bribing and how much.
We had flown to the capital of the Central African Republic via Paris and Chad. The Air France aeroplane couldn't land because of fog and circled the airport for an hour. The Jehovah's Witness missionary next to me on the flight said Bangui airport has no radar and started to pray.
When we land, my glasses immediately steam up in the heat and impossible humidity (Bangui, pictured left). There are soldiers wearing cool blue sunglasses looking chic as well as deeply sinister, and there's mayhem in the terminal. Fortunately Sissoko - who, last we heard, was stranded by bad weather in Libreville, Gabon - guides us through the chaos and installs us in the Hotel Sofitel.
I feel like I've walked into Graham Greene's The Comedians. The place has seen better days, and its dubious guests include diamond dealers and soldiers you really wouldn't want to offend. Deals are whispered in the bar, while slinky hookers tout their trade. The man from the Foreign Office, while advising me not to travel there, had said that Bangui was "morally dangerous" - the Aids rate in Central Africa means that misbehaving with one of the girls would be like playing Russian roulette.
We are here on a mission - to track down and listen to what is most likely the oldest music in the world. There are references to the pygmies in the Iliad and their music is mentioned in a report about the source of the Nile to the Pharaoh Nefrikare in 2,500 BC. It is thought there are around 300,000 of them in central Africa - though as nomads they don't tend to fill in forms - and they were probably the earliest inhabitants of the region.
I first heard their extraordinary and haunting music in the Seventies on classic records by the musicologist Simha Arom. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti became obsessed by the complex polyrhythms and irregular multi-part vocalising of the pygmies, which became a great influence on his own work. Far from being primitive, the music of the pygmies is as advanced as anything in the Western canon. It may well be that only now are we actually catching up musically in the West with the complexities of this ancient music. All of which was a great excuse to visit them. I only wished they lived somewhere less volatile and violent.
Look up "the most dangerous city in the world" on the internet and the name Bangui comes up, courtesy of a report by an outfit called Mercer Consulting. There really is a chart - the safest city is Luxembourg, while Bangui is bottom of the chart at 215 (with a bullet). In the days when it was the capital of French Equatorial Africa, the city was nicknamed "La Coquette", the flirt, and you can see the name still used on rusting signs. The country slipped into the familiar nightmares of post-colonial Africa after gaining independence in 1960, with Jean-Bedel Bokassa's reign of terror lasting 17 years and endless political instability since then. In March 2003, shortly before I visited, General Bozize took power to terminate an attempt at democracy. The Central African Republic (CAR) is the only country in Africa that the Lonely Planet guides haven't researched for years, saying it is too dangerous. When I visit, the British and American embassies in Bangui are shut and many non-government organisations have moved out of the country. But, then again, who wants to go to Luxembourg?
Watch a video about the Aka pygmies (YouTube):
As it happens, I didn't find Bangui nearly as scary as some of the other cities on Mercer's list that I have visited, such as Karachi in Pakistan, San'a in Yemen or Medellín, the drug capital of Colombia. Partly that was due to the good-humoured presence of Sissoko, who seemed to know everyone, from ministers and military types to nightclub-owner gangsters and "models". It is, though, tedious and nervewracking to be continually stopped by drunk and armed soldiers in the streets. Sissoko whisked us around assorted music venues which, due to the midnight curfew, open their doors at four in the afternoon.
I was reminded that, whereas most of the successful African pop exports to Europe are from west Africa, it is central Africa that has provided the most successful pop soundtracks in Africa itself. In one rough club where people danced on a concrete square in the middle of a field of mud, a rap-soukous band called Dynstar were cooking up some new rhythmic virus that should spread throughout the region. Sissoko says they call this style Double-O, and the dance that goes with it is called the Kanda Ngoudji, after a way of cooking manioc. Manioc is a staple here and appears as a side dish at most meals; it has the consistency and taste of warm carpet glue.
Day 2: Brand Loyalty
To get to the forest where the pygmies live, you have to head south from Bangui. The journey, says Sissoko, can take between three and seven hours, depending on how much aggravation there is at the checkpoints and what the weather is doing. The country has some of the worst roads in Africa, which is saying something, with car-sized potholes, so you really have to go everywhere by four-wheel drive Jeep.
Leaving Bangui is not as simple as just driving out of town, however. You have to obtain complicated permits from assorted bureaucrats and ministries. Most of the day is spent shuttling round from office to office. There is a computer in one but it is only used to play Congolese pop music. At each there are two costs: for the permit itself and then an extra few thousand Central African francs for the official concerned to "expedite" your permit. Sissoko masterfully cajoles and flatters his way through the system.
This is Africa - you have to have someone with you who knows how to kill
At some point in the previous evening the organisers of the Miss Bangui contest had ascertained that we were from a British newspaper and cajoled us before leaving into meeting the newly crowned beauty queen at the most fashionable patisserie in town, the Phoenicia. It is here that le tout Bangui comes to see and be seen. I was curious to see that Africa's equivalent to the mod movement, Le Sape, although pronounced dead in the more cosmopolitan Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, still has its adherents in Bangui. An abbreviation of the Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance, Le Sape originated in the Seventies, the movement turning style into something close to a true religion (dubbed "kitendi") with Paris-based designers as its deities. It was the time when many of the urban èlite would return from visits to Paris with the latest fashions while rival bands would compete in up-to-the-minute styles, with the less well-off sporting convincing knock-offs. One guy at the Phoenicia showed me the label of his jacket - Alexander McQueen - while Miss Bangui, whose name we discover is Priscilla Kossi, turned up with newly painted purple fingernails.
A black American from Georgia, in town for "diamonds and telecoms", at the next table expressed astonishment that we weren't going out of Bangui with armed protection. "This is Africa - you have to have someone with you who knows how to kill." He was fascinated by the pygmies, particularly their reputed knowledge of jungle herbs. There was a seed, he said, that worked like very powerful speed called "Mille Oiseaux" (a thousand birds) and another made of bark which he could personally vouch was better than Viagra. Sissoko turned up and informed the American that we had protection from the Spirits of the Ancestors, and had no need of arms.
Day 3: Nuns and Troops
At lunchtime, Sissoko turns up at the hotel triumphantly clutching the necessary permits. Our investment of bribes has worked so we load up and leave. Every few miles there are military checkpoints, and most of the soldiers want to see the permits, and every one has to be paid off. The further we travel, the more drunk they seem to be; at one checkpoint they start arguing and the atmosphere turns nasty until Sissoko calms them down, talking about football and music. Deeper into the night, there is just the light of the stars, the kerosene lamps of passing villages and lots of fireflies.
We haven't got permission to go to Bokassa's palace near M'Baiki en route. The megalomaniac leader crowned himself Emperor in 1977 in a multi-million-pound ceremony, eating up the entire budget of the country. The French, concerned for their mineral rights, went along with the absurd charade of his enthronement - Giscard d'Estaing attended the ceremony, and often went big-game hunting in the north of the country. After being deposed in 1979, Bokassa was accused at his trial of cannibalism, and of personally beating to death not just his political opponents, but even children who demonstrated against the closure of their schools; he was convicted of torture and murder. Just over the river Oubangui from our car, in the (laughably named) Democratic Republic of Congo is, the wreck of the even bigger palace of their late dictator Sese Seko Mobutu, who built runways here in the jungle so that he could privately charter Concorde to bring him pink champagne from Paris.
Watch African Pygmy Thrills from the 1930s (YouTube):
There were two more things about this trip that made me nervous. One was reports of swarms of killer bees in the area, including a particularly small and nasty type that specialises in flying into your ears or under your eyelids. The other was that when I looked up where we were actually going, Mogoumba, I discovered it was the place where hordes of murderous young militiamen from the Congo had pillaged, murdered and raped earlier in the year.
These soldiers - some as young as eight - are often made to kill a friend or relative so that they can never return home to their families, and they are pumped with drugs. They are controlled by myriad political and sometimes ethnically defined factions, and have wrought havoc in the region; according to a recent UN report, they have even been practising cannibalism on the pygmies in the Congo, something my informants found entirely believable. The pygmies are somehow seen as both subhuman and at the same time to have magical powers - and therefore great to eat. When the militia came to Mogoumba the local pygmies we were about to meet managed to disappear deep into the forest before they came to any harm. Or ended up as lunch.
These potential dangers cause us one immediate problem on arrival after six hours of travel. The only place to stay in town, the quaintly named Auberge, had been robbed of sheets, cutlery and beds, and was closed. The sisters of a Catholic mission kindly accommodated us instead. There are various types of missionaries in the area, all plugging different brands of Christianity. Some - to be fair - help both villagers and pygmies with healthcare and literacy. It is hard not to feel tremendous sympathy for the pygmies, a peaceable people who evolved a complex and creative egalitarian culture in harmony with nature and their neighbours, caught in the middle of endless conflicts not of their own making.
Day 4: First Contact
There's a commotion at the mission. A large and deadly mamba snake has been discovered in Sissoko's room and his brother, who has been driving us, has killed it and cut off its head. Sissoko seems weirdly unfazed. "You could die slipping in your bathroom, after all. C'est le destin."We get to meet our first pygmies. There are several types in the CAR and these are the Aka, the same ones whose music I had been so inspired by when I first heard it. They have an encampment near the edge of the forest where they come to trade with the villagers. They barter meat, honey and the local delicacy of caterpillars for soap, salt, alcohol, marijuana and cigarettes. (They all seem to love the enjoyably mild dope as well as a peculiarly horrible brew made of fermented manioc - carpet glue diluted with floor polish.)
At the camp they start playing music and dancing. The music, with the forest night sounds of cicadas, birds, monkeys and other animals as background, is every bit as magical as I'd hoped. A song for the dead, called "Boyiwa", is one of the most beautiful, poignant and complex pieces of music I have ever heard. One of my most musical friends, Sam Mills (the partner of singer Susheela Raman), told me before I left that the recording of this group made by Simha Arom was his favourite record ever made. But to really get a sense of how the pygmies live, we agree we should walk to one of their camps deep in the forest. Sissoko, talking in the national language, Sango, to some of the pygmies, translates that it should take a couple of hours.
I sleep in the unbearable heat of one of the mission rooms, with the door firmly closed to keep out the snakes, going for a cold shower every few hours in a vain attempt to cool down.
Day 5: River Serpents
Sissoko's estimate of a two-hour walk turns out to be absurdly optimistic. Our pygmy guides are amazingly agile and make us - the photographer Sophia, Sissoko and me - seem appallingly ungainly and ungraceful. The pygmies are between about 3ft 6in and 5ft tall and seem to have boundless energy and humour. What initially seems for us like a pleasant jaunt rapidly becomes rather gruelling. For one thing, we spend at least half the time wading through rivers - a no-no according to the African guide books that warn of the almost inevitable bilharzia, caused by minute worms in the water. "To avoid catching it, stay out of rivers," says the Lonely Planet. One of the pygmies who speaks some French warns of "beaucoup de serpents", as if I'm not worried enough about snakes already.
While the pygmies aren't averse to laughing at our clumsiness, stumbling over vines, slipping in the mud and being completely lost, they unfailingly watch out for us. Most of them seem to have both French names, which they initially use with foreigners, and African ones. One of them, Bernard Malaka, takes pity on me and takes my backpack; he stops me falling over several times. He also warns me that there is a bad spirit in the forest that can cause people to get lost and never be found. Several times I lose the path and lose sight of the people ahead and behind and have no idea where I am, but Malaka backtracks to find me.
While the edge of the forest has signs of deforestation caused by foreign logging companies, after a couple of hours it becomes increasingly dark and cool. Most irritating are the vicious biting ants that can attack through socks and trousers; the moment you roll your trousers up to wade through a river they take the opportunity to crawl on you and bite like hell. There are antelope and deer in this part of the forest; bigger animals such as forest elephants, gorillas and big cats can only be found nearer to the border with Cameroon. To my intense relief, it's fortunately not the season for killer bees.
Listen to Aka pygmies singing (YouTube):
More than four hours later, exhausted, we make it into a clearing, their camp in the forest. We have bought a pack of pasta to eat, but the pygmies are preparing caterpillars, part of their staple diet. Sophia tucks heartily into a plate of them. I try one and almost throw up, disgusted by the texture of pus and taste of rotting damp leaves. I put up my hammock and rest for a while, and then the pygmies show us an extraordinary array of songs and dances. Nearly all of them are related to specific events in pygmy life - many are the men's hunting songs, or songs to celebrate the forest spirits, or songs for pregnancy and childbirth. The main dance for one of the more impressive routines can only be performed, I am told, "by someone who has killed an elephant or their father has killed an elephant".
Some of these songs are ancient, others are composed to mark recent events. When Laurent Kabila, Mobutu's successor in Congo, took to bombing the area, a song was written about it, although it used traditional melodies. The most gorgeous song turned out to be celebrating the sleek beauty of the antelope. The most striking thing is the amazing vocal harmonies - the pygmies employ a kind of yodelling technique. They also show me the instruments they keep in the forest - the flutes, bow-harps, zithers and drums that are used in the music. One woman who plays a bagongo harp has an uncanny ability when she plays: her notes are seemingly echoed by birds in the forest, as though the music itself were quite literally in harmony with nature.
The main way of punishing bad behaviour (the worst crimes seem to be stealing and incest) is to ignore the wrongdoer, a painful punishment in such a close community. At worst, a pygmy can be banished into the forest, where they find it impossible to survive alone. But mostly conflict is avoided, partly because, as a nomadic people, a group can split off and join another pygmy group. At certain times of year, larger groups of pygmies will gather; it's here that marriages are usually arranged.When quizzed about their music, the pygmies often offer up quite abstract answers. "Music opens things up," said one. "If you are good to the forest, the forest will be good to you." There is a sense that the forest itself, which provides everything, is a deity. When things go wrong, it must be because the forest is sleeping and needs waking up with music and dance.
Day 6: Jungle Charms
I slept rather fitfully in the hammock, partly because the pygmies were still singing and dancing round the fire they had constructed way into the night, partly because the noise of the forest was quite intense. One bird had the same rhythm and sound as my alarm clock and kept waking me up. After a breakfast of crackers and cheese, the children sang for us, some of them singing modern Congolese pop, but in the distinctive harmonies of the pygmies.
Pygmy culture is changing, although the fundamental structure seems strong. Superficial things change - when Arom visited these people 30 years ago, they all wore cloth fashioned from bark; now many wear T-shirts and jeans, some picked up during dates they played in Europe a few years ago. The tour was the brainchild of classical pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who released an extraordinary disc (pictured left) that includes the music of the Aka pygmies and the piano music of Ligeti. Arom worried that appearing abroad might affect them adversely but it's noticeable that they take it in turns to wear these clothes and don't seem to have much of a sense of personal ownership.The trip back to Bangui is if anything more arduous than getting here. Several hours into the walk we have run out of water - but the pygmies know which trees store water best, and cut some branches down from which water literally flows. Sissoko falls over a vine and damages his leg, while Sophia comes up in red blotches from insect bites. One pygmy called Albert Ecolongo, who is the most avant-garde and stylish of the dancers, has put a piece of wood through his nostrils to ward off the rain. "Do you believe in this stuff?" I ask Sissoko. "Has it rained?" he replies. Certainly it's unusual for it not to rain at this time of year.
Day 7: Forever Changes
After a lie-in, we go out to the best French restaurant in town for lunch and Sissoko takes us around some more music clubs before we end up at the Plantation, where cool sapeurs danced to slow "zouk-love" music with their girlfriends. But somehow, after the other world of the forest, this fashionable milieu seems an unreal, unengaging spectacle. All the musicologists who have studied the pygmies' lives have found themselves profoundly altered by the experience. Arom has devoted 30 years of his life to them. The last musicologist to visit the Central African Republic, Louis Sarno, wrote a book about his experiences (Song from the Forest); he couldn't bear his native New Jersey and went back to live with a group of pygmies. He married one; he's out there somewhere now.
Day 8: The Long Echo
They have oversold the plane and we have to bribe our way onto it. The Air France pilots themselves search the cabin baggage. When I find my seat, someone else has also been assigned it and it looks like they might eject me, but after a delay the plane takes off. Sissoko, seeing us off, says he wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I score a glass of champagne and drift off with the melodies of the pygmies echoing in my head.
- Find the Aka Pygmies music on Amazon
- The original article was printed in The Observer in September 2003
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