THE AFRICAN PYGMIES 471 



THE AFRICAN PYGMIES 



By S. P. VERNER 



nnHE presence of a group of the African pygmies at the World's Fair 

 at St. Louis attracted considerable attention to these little people. 

 It has .also revealed a number of erroneous popular conceptions with 

 reference to them. 



The word pygmy, of course, comes from the Greek, being derived 

 from the word denoting a unit of measure, the ell. It was used by 

 various Grecian writers, among them Homer, Herodotus, Heliodotus 

 and Aristotle, to describe a race of small men, about whom tradition 

 had given accounts, and who were usually located toward the sources 

 of the Nile. Historically, then, the word pygmy applies to these 

 Nilotic small peoples, but anthropology has widened the use of the 

 term to include similar peoples scattered all over the globe, and found 

 in many parts of Africa. 



Paul du Chaillu was the first eminent modern explorer to find these 

 people. He discovered them in the upper Ogowe basin, west central 

 Africa, in July, 1863. After him others found them in various places. 

 These were Schweinfurth, 1869, on the upper Welle, or Ubangi; Wiss- 

 mann, 1886, on the upper Kasai; Stanley, 1888, on the upper Aru- 

 wimi; while Dr. Donaldson Smith located some south of Abyssinia. 

 Others report them in German Kameruns, in French West Africa, on 

 the borders of Uganda and in the center of the Congo Basin. 



The names by which these people are called vary in each locality, 

 but the most widely used term is Batwa. The name Bantu is the word 

 meaning people in a large area of Central Africa. The singular of 

 this is Muntu, meaning a man. These two terms apply to the large or 

 normal people, not to the pygmies. But curiously enough, the name 

 Batwa is the plural for people with the Batwa pygmies, and the sin- 

 gular of this is Mutwa. These last two terms seem to the writer to be 

 diminutives of the words Bantu and Muntu, so that they mean little 

 people and little man, respectively. Sir Harry Johnston, who visited 

 the pygmies in the region where Stanley first found them, spells the 

 name for them Mbute, while Schweinfurth, whose pygmies are not far 

 from those of Stanley and Johnston, calls them Wambutti. It seems 

 to the writer that these are either variations in name or in spelling of 

 the same word. The present governor-general of the Congo, Major 

 Costermans, found some Batwa near Lake Kivu. Wissmann's pygmies 



