Encounter with Rudeness

When I was fifteen I fell in love with the pygmies from reading Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People. Intent on taking the first plane to the Congo River Basin, I packed my Samsonite overnighter, but Mother said, how about preparing for College Boards first, which I did, and next there was the Junior-Senior Prom, and then a lot of other things came up. Somehow, the Samsonite found its way to the cellar again.

But occasionally I’d take Turnbull’s book from the shelf and reread his glowing descriptions of journeys on foot at break-neck speeds through vine-choked forests, of the cooperative efforts at catching small prey with a joyous beating of sticks and an intricate maneuvering of immense nets, of the pygmies’ casualness and sense of humor about interpersonal relationships, of their night-long flute-playing ceremonies, which brought them into mystical unity with the surrounding forest. From Turnbull’s impassioned prose I came to believe that the pygmy culture, with its lack of rigid institutions, its no-waste ecology, its rather vague but present religion, and its day-to-day acts, all oriented towards immediate vital processes or the celebration thereof, made more sense than the 20th-century American society in which I had been raised.

When I was thirty I found myself in Uganda with a husband and two small children. Our main purpose was to see the game reserves, but when Mr. Samoon, our Pakistani tourist agent, informed us from behind his old mahogany desk that it would be possible to visit a pygmy village, I said, “Wonderful – how soon?” My husband, obediently following behind the footsteps of my romanticism, concurred, and the children four- and five-year old prisoners of their mother’s imagination, had no choice but to follow. The only voice of caution came from Wasswa, the gentle-mannered elderly driver who was to accompany us for a week. “The pygmies have been known to be rude to tourists,” he said, scratching the white fleece on top of his wrinkled black head.

Undeterred by his words, we set out one crisp clear morning on a perilous mountain road in the general direction of pygmy land. I had little idea of where this was in actuality, my sense of the cardinal points being very weak and Wasswa doing all the navigation while the rest of us sat back in comfort, hoping to catch a glimpse of a lion’s tail. I exaggerate. It was not exactly comfort. The vehicle was an old 1958 Peugeot that had broken down before and after Murchison Falls; its seats had lost their springs, and its brakes worked only sporadically.

Not that I mean to denigrate the poor thing. It had seen a lot of hard wear in its time. On the previous day, for example, it had forded a river for us, a river which, according to Wasswa, had not been there the week before; apparently, they have a way of springing up suddenly like that in Africa. The water came up over the hood, but we charged across and then let the thing dry out in the sun for half an hour before continuing our voyage. Wasswa was an old hand at river-fording, which is a common practice in Africa. If we hadn’t done that, we would have had to go three-hundred miles to the south. Of course, nowadays there are all kinds of sturdy vehicles with four-wheel drives, but these events took place in 1972, when things were quite different.

So there we were on a hair-raising dirt track going over the Mountains of the Moon, as they were called then (much more poetic than “Ruwenzori Range”, don’t you think). At the very beginning we noticed a sign in English that said: “One way ↑ 6:00 to noon; one way ↓ noon to 6:00.” We trusted Wasswa and could only hope that any other driver crazy enough to take that dirt track would obey the injunctions of the arrows. Had we met another car, one of us would have had to back up to the very beginning – that is, if either car survived impact. There were no pullovers. Indeed, in places the sides had crumbled and there was barely enough room for the Peugeot. Once, the right front wheel was spinning in sheer air, while the children and I huddled against the mountainside and my husband, up front over the void, closed his eyes and prayed.

Gradually, the road became less intimidating. In some places there was even a patch of gravel. Vegetation grew leafier, steamier. As we descended, the sun climbed. We began to sweat profusely. The children gulped down soft drinks, while adults dabbed brows with handkerchiefs. At last Wasswa put on an old felt hat, which somehow gave him a sense of freshness.

After three and a half hours of sweltering boredom, action hit with a boom. The mountain road ended, spilling us onto a flat dirt track. Standing by the side, as if waiting for us, was a young man in tattered shirt and shorts but with the bearing of a king. Wasswa stopped; the youth opened the door; we moved over; he squeezed in, bringing the smell of the jungle with him. Wasswa explained that he was to be our translator, as he spoke Wamba, the language of the pygmies, in addition to his tribal tongue and Swahili (in which he communicated to Wasswa). We all smiled at each other, and then Wasswa started up the engine. We moved very slowly – at no more than five miles per hour, Wasswa and the youth peering this way and that.

Then, all of a sudden, innumerable brown bodies were crawling all over the car. Cackles, screams and frenzied chatter bombarded us from all sides; hands were reaching in the back window, tugging at my blouse, touching toys on the back seat, stealing the children’s Magic Markers. “Roll up the windows – quick!” said Wasswa, as he got out with the youth. My husband followed them. I was left in the steaming vehicle. I locked the doors, too, for little people were throwing themselves at them, then reeling off unevenly and rolling on the ground, kicking their feet in the air and giggling. An old woman with withered breasts hanging down to her waist was smoking a long pipe and then letting out hideous laughs which incited the others to generalized madness. Suddenly I realized that the pygmies were stoned out of their minds!

They lost interest in the car and swarmed around the three men, who were negotiating with a bandy-legged fellow.. Everyone talked and gesticulated at once, the tops of their heads coming up to the bottom of Wasswa’s chin. A new flood of half-clad people arrived bearing snakeskin drums, bows and arrows, and pouches made of animal skins, which turned out to be foul-smelling.

Finally, just when the kids and I thought we were going to asphyxiate, Wasswa walked over, knocked on my window, and when I rolled it down an inch said, “OK…it’s arranged with the king. They show you huts, they do a dance, you buy some things.”

We got out and were led on a tour of a few twig lean-tos that must have taken all of an hour to erect and were too small to stand up in (except for the kids). They were totally unfurnished – just what one would expect from a people who wandered through the forest, sleeping in different locations all the time. Colin Turnbull had explained all of that. What he hadn’t described was the stink. I’d read a couple of other books by anthropologists and noticed that they never mentioned smells, lice, flies, or filth. Somehow I couldn’t get past these things, in spite of my appreciation of the cohesiveness of the cultures described. I had to admit it: I was a product of the West, with its anomie (alas) and hygiene (thank God).

Next, the pygmies danced for us. That is, they performed a series of obscene and sometimes terrifying gyrations. One particularly-wizened fellow kept pulling down his pants – some holey Bermudas he’d picked up somewhere and which, perhaps, he was not used to wearing. Another bow-legged big-headed man kept lunging at my son as if to jump on him. Throughout all this, the old witch kept cackling and smoking her pipe, the other pygmy women flopped their breasts back and forth, and half the tribe rolled on the ground spasmodically. Wasswa leaned into my ear and apologized: “I’m afraid they’ve been drinking kava and smoking bhang.”

I remembered how Turnbull said they always put on their worst face in front of strangers but laughed and slapped their thighs over their play-acting as soon as they were amongst themselves. I looked at the drunken, hashish-dazed group. Were they really play-acting? It was hard to believe that they would ever regain the dignity that the anthropologist described. Perhaps they’d changed since he’d written his book: perhaps they’d been corrupted by contact with government officials or Western ways.

And what about tourists like us? To the pygmies, it must seem as if we had come to look at them the way we looked at hippos or giraffes. Little did they know that I had read a book that portrayed the intricacies of their culture with care and understanding; little did they know that when I came to them I had had love in my heart. Which had now been replaced by shame – shame at myself. I should never have come, should never have dragged my family into this whim.

My husband paid the king the agreed-upon sum for the privilege of looking into the huts and watching the “dance.” The youth helped him bargain for a bow and arrow and a primitive lyre; then we all got into the car to leave. But as soon as Wasswa started the motor, one of the pygmy men, a murderous look in his eye, picked up a huge stone and stood with it poised to go through the windshield. Wasswa turned off the motor and slowly got out with the youthful translator. They talked with the man, then with the king and the cackling old woman. Finally everyone smiled; Wasswa and the youth got back in the car, Wasswa explaining that the discontented fellow felt we should have shelled out more money; however, the king and the old woman at last convinced him that the original bargain had been right. Wasswa started the motor. The murder-intent fellow, his eyes rolling back and forth in his head, again took aim with the stone; people crowded around the car. Wasswa turned off the motor, and the whole process repeated itself. Three more times! Wasswa showed himself to be a master of patience and slyness, for each time he started the motor he turned the car a little bit more in the direction we had come from.

Finally, our nerves could stand it no more, and the next time the fellow picked up his rock, we shouted, “Gun the motor, Wasswa! Go go go!” I pushed the children’s heads down and lowered my own, fully expecting the windshield to break. The car lurched onto the dirt road; the pygmies jumped out of its way; the man threw his stone, but he aimed low; was it on purpose, or because he couldn’t see straight?

When, four hours later, we arrived on the other side of the mountain, Wasswa pulled up at one of the few roadside stops and phoned to report the pygmies to the government authorities. Shaking his white-tufted head he said, “We can’t allow them to be rude to visitors like that.”

The government, to whom he reported the pygmies’ misdemeanors, one week later expelled all East Asians from the country and then went on a rampage of carnage, tribalism and megalomaniac dictatorship that set the world reeling; it was eventually ousted by an invading army from a neighboring state, which in turn went on its own rampages. They say Uganda is now one of the more stable states in Africa, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I often think of Wasswa and wonder what became of him in those years. He belonged to the Baganda tribe, which was the focal point of attack by Idi Amin’s thugs. Wasswa was such a gentle, civilized man! I can only hope he died before he saw how very rude, indeed, people can be to each other.