I read The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo for the first time when I was in my teens. Colin Turnbull, its author, had been a friend of my mother's since before I was born and so there was a copy in the library at home. They had met in the early Fifties while working for an organization called Racial Unity, of which Colin was for a period the general secretary. My mother's most substantial contribution to the project of racial unity was probably to marry my father—he was an Asante, a colonial subject from the Gold Coast studying law in London, she, an Englishwoman, the child of a prosperous West Country family.¹

Colin Turnbull's considerable contribution began with his account of the Mbuti (the people, as they called themselves, "of the forest"), among whom he lived in the Ituri rain forest of eastern Congo intermittently during the Fifties. The book, which was published in 1962, became an international best seller and is surely one of the most popular ethnographic works of all time. For in The Forest People he showed how these little hunter-gatherers, roaming in search of honey, fruit, and game in the damp darkness of the Ituri rain forest, lived lives of compassion for one another in an environment they adored with a religious passion. He uncovered a world where musical creativity, storytelling, playing with children, flirting, dancing, and feasting were shared in small communities where there was no formal power, and ridicule and (usually short-term) ostracism were the only penalties for adult moral failings.

In one of the many memorable moments in a memorable book, Colin Turnbull described finding Kenge, the young Mbuti man to whom the book is dedicated, his companion and interpreter in the forest, communing with his world:
 

There, in the tiny clearing, splashed with silver, was the sophisticated Kenge, clad in bark cloth, adorned with leaves, with a flower stuck in his hair. He was all alone, dancing around and singing softly to himself as he gazed up at the treetops.

Now Kenge was the biggest flirt for miles, so, after watching a while, I came into the clearing and asked, jokingly, why he was dancing alone. He stopped, turned slowly around and looked at me as though I was the biggest fool he had ever seen; and he was plainly surprised by my stupidity.

"But I'm not dancing alone," he said. "I am dancing with the forest, dancing with the moon." Then, with the utmost unconcern, he ignored me and continued his dance of love and life.²

    I noticed that Amabosu, the singer, was not there. I knew why when, a few minutes after
     the singing had begun, I heard the voice of the molimo answering, way off by itself in
    the forest. It no longer worried me that the trumpet was a metal drainpipe instead of a
     piece of bamboo or wood, because now that I could not see it I realized that...it was the
     sound that mattered.

 Night after night, as darkness fell after long days of hunting, the Pygmies of the Ituri sang with
 their molimo. One day, Moke, one of the older men in the group, explained it to Turnbull this way.
 Normally, he said, all goes well in the world of the Mbuti. But occasionally, when they are asleep
 at night, things go wrong: 

     Army ants invade the camp; leopards may come in and steal a hunting dog or even a
     child. If we were awake these things would not happen. So when something big goes
     wrong, like illness or bad hunting or death, it must be because the forest is sleeping
     and not looking after its children. So what do we do? We wake it up. We wake it up by
     singing to it, and we do this because we want it to awaken happy. Then everything will
     be well and good again.

 This is as close as we get to a statement of the religion of the Mbuti. It is the faith of a people
 profoundly at one with their world. 

 Turnbull's misty-eyed celebration of the Mbuti comes, it must be said, at the expense of the local
 Bantu farmers, whom he calls "the Negroes," the taller people who inhabit the villages on the edge
 of the forest. Each Pygmy family has a relationship with one of these Bantu village families, a
 relationship in which the villagers say they "own" the Pygmies. The different groups of Pygmies in
 the Ituri each speak the language of the Bantu with whom they have these relationships, albeit with
 a distinctive accent of their own that Turnbull thought was a residue of an older Pygmy language. 

 From time to time—at funerals and weddings, and other rites of passage, for example—the
 Pygmies emerge from the forest to bring meat and honey they have gathered in the forest to their
 "owners," who in return provide them with metal goods and the products of cultivation: "rice,
 beans, groundnuts and manioc, and a few of the tiny bitter tomatoes which blend so well with
 manioc leaves and groundnuts in the making of sauce." Before Turnbull's work, the leading scholar
 of Pygmy life was the Austrian Catholic missionary scholar Paul Schebesta, whose account of the
 relations between the Pygmies and their Bantu neighbors was, Turnbull argued, distinctly from the
 Bantu point of view. As Turnbull puts it, Dr. Schebesta 

     gave the impression that the Pygmies were dependent on the Negroes both for food
     and for metal products and that there was an unbreakable hereditary relationship by
     which a Pygmy and all his progeny were handed down in a Negro family, from father to
     son, and bound to it in a form of serfdom, not only hunting but working on plantations,
     cutting wood and drawing water. None of this was true of the Pygmies that I knew.

 Because Turnbull lived not in the village but with the Pygmies, joining them in their forest lives
 away from Bantu surveillance, he saw the relationship entirely differently. For him, as the
 anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker puts it in his biography, the Pygmies "only appeared to be
 oppressed. In fact, he argued, they were play-acting oppression in order to exploit the farmers."
 And, indeed, reading Turnbull's account of the way the Pygmies talked about their supposed
 "owners" and their ability to escape more or less whenever they wanted from Bantu supervision,
 one is easily persuaded of his point of view. 

In establishing this picture, Turnbull tends to represent the Bantu as dupes of the Pygmies; but the
 few Bantu observations about the Mbuti he reports, though distinctly condescending, reflect a view
 that is otherwise rather close to his own. Isiaka, a Bantu chief, remarks: "They are worthless
 people. They only come to the village when they want to steal." And villagers generally, according
 to Turnbull, said, "'They eat us up until we are ready to die'—meaning that the Pygmies take from
 them but give little in return." 

 It is hard—let me speak for myself, here—not to have some sympathy with the villagers.
 Turnbull's Mbuti seem to think stealing from the Bantu is an entertaining sport. And if you are a
 farmer whose life is one of solid, backbreaking everyday work, keeping down the weeds, straining
 at the harvest, the Pygmies' tendency to disappear at apparently random moments, or to take off
 for a month of feasting and song, is exactly the sort of behavior that would mark one of your own
 people as "worthless." It is a classic conflict of values: between grasshoppers and ants, the prodigal
 son and his dutiful brother, the riotous servants of Dionysus and the steady devotees of Apollo.