538 



PYGMIES AND FOREST NEGROES 



the beasts and some of the birds with which they are familiar. Drawing, 

 it would seem to me, was a very early development of the gesture 

 language, and may have been practised by the earliest human prototypes 

 almost before they could articulate a definite speech. But though the 

 Pygmy has this innate appreciation of form in him, he has in his natural 

 state but little appreciation of colour, and ignores personal decoration. 

 Almost alone among African races, he neither tattoos nor scars his body, 

 he adorns himself with nothing (wears no ear-rings, necklace, bracelet, 

 waist-belt, or anklet), unless it may be finger-rings of iron — and these 

 have probably been borrowed of late from his bigger and more civilised 

 friends, the Mbuba and Eaamba cultivators.* The males of all the Congo 

 Pygmies seen by me were circumcised, and all in both sexes had their 



nj>per incisor teeth and 

 cditines sharpened to a 

 point, after the fashion 

 of the Babira and Upper 

 Congo tribes. In their 

 forest homes they often 

 go naked, both men and 

 women ; yet in the pre- 

 sence of strangers they 

 don a small covering — 

 the men a small piece 

 of genet, monkey, or 

 antelope skin, or a wisp 

 of bark-cloth, and the 

 women leaves or bark- 

 cloth — over the pudenda. 

 They tell me that in the 

 forest they wear nothing, 

 but I cannot say that 

 the Pygmy men struck 

 me as being so callously 

 and unconsciously naked 

 as the Nilotic Negroes. 



* Some of the Pygmies, 

 however, do imitate the 

 agricultural Mbuba and 

 Babira Negroes in piercing 

 their upper lips with holes 

 into which they thrust small 

 quills, nodules of quartz, or 

 even flowers. 



294. AN OLD MAX PYGMY FROM NEAB LUPANZULA'S ( UPPER 

 1TURI DISTRICT) 



