PYGMIES 153 



been obtained. Anyone who is anxious to procure 

 a specimen of this strange creature must obtain first 

 a special permission from the Congo Government, 

 and, secondly, the friendship of a tribe of Pygmies ; 

 the latter can best be managed by a liberal offering 

 of salt, their most valued necessary. With reason- 

 able luck and the exercise of patience, he might 

 be expected to get an okapi within a few months' 

 time. 



The Pygmies live almost exclusively by hunting ; 

 they grow no crops, and they do not manufacture 

 their bows and spears, which they obtain in exchange 

 for game from the other inhabitants of the forest, 

 who also supply them with bananas and other 

 produce. They have no settled dwellings, but each 

 tribe or family seems to have a definite hunting 

 district, whose bounds they never transgress ; they 

 sleep wherever they happen to be, and we were 

 constantly coming across their tracks and their little 

 shelters, the flimsiest structures of sticks thatched 

 with leaves. The first Pygmy that I met greeted 

 me with a shout of ' Bonzoo, Bwana (sir)'; he 

 had been for a time in a Congo post, and ' Bonzoo ' 

 was his version of ' Bon jour.' He was a cheerful 

 little person, about four feet high, and he shook 

 hands effusively ; his was one of the most perfectly 

 shaped hands I have seen, but cold and clammy, 

 as the hands of most black men are. Now that 

 some of his cousins, brothers perhaps, have toured 

 about England and have been exhibited in music- 



