Song from the Forest

Louis Sarno lived for six years among the Bayaka Pygmies of Central Africa, recording their epic songs and ceremonies, with occasional trips to Europe to trade full tapes for empty ones.

Musical celebration is a highly valued function of Bayaka Pygmy life. (Some tribes among the Sangha-Sangha linguistic group hold fiestas that last two years!) This collective complex, primal, cathartic, symphonic laughter of improvised song is as fragile, and as immediately threatened, as the rain forest itself Sarno's acceptance by his hosts, and the story of his infatuation and eventual marriage with a Pygmy woman, plays against a backdrop of phenomenal musical events and the constant encroachment of agricultural society upon the Bayakas' hunter-gatherer way of life.

Night was rarely a time for sleep. It was the time of the mokoondi, pulsating, parading, dancing, and floating phosphorescent forms that flew through the air with reckless speed, a gallery of glowing faces, forest beings, animals, creatures, and dots. At Amopolo the women had to sing for hours to summon the mokoondi, and usually they did not come. At Mombongo a single yodel in the evening often drew the mokoondi, who would cry out from the surrounding forest. When everyone was asleep, they moved invisibly through the camp, popping leaves, thumping the ground, making kissing noises, and whistling tunes that might have been composed by Moussorgsky. If we failed to rouse ourselves for the music the mokoondi became demanding, their harassment violent and vociferous as they shook and pounded on huts, shrieking, "Push yourselves!"

The full moon, halfway through its wacky orbit, hovered somewhere north of the zenith and bathed the clearing in bright silver light After several minutes of clowning around, one of the mokoondi - a faceless albino creature - lolloped in a leisurely way across the clearing, pausing within a foot of me. I gasped, as did all the women: it was an antelope! For an instant I thought the Bayaka must have released a captured one, or somehow called one from the forest into camp. But then the antelope reached the side of the mbanjo and began to beat the ground - it was a mokoondi after all. I promised myself then that I would never again doubt what I had see nor rationalize it away. Now, of course, I wonder.

COPYRIGHT 1994 New Whole Earth LLC
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