What Pygmies can teach modern man

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 10

What Pygmies can teach modern man

Pygmy Kitabu. By Jean-Pierre Hallet with Alex Pelle. Souvenir Press. 434 pp. N.Z. price $8.95.

Unknown to them, the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in Zaire are at the centre of an important modern controversy. “Pygmy Kitabu” opens with a swinging attack on those who argue that man is innately violent and aggressive (Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris and Konrad Lorenz are mentioned by name).

Instead, asserts Hallet, man is by nature peaceable, moral and nonaggressive. The lives the Pygmies are living are, Hallet claims, proof that a social life without war, aggression or hostility is possible. He returns to this theme in the last pages of the book, and makes an impassioned plea that modem man observe the laws of Efe the Pygmy 7 — in order to avert a world catastrophe.

This much said (others have said it before) Hallet goes off. for the rest of a lengthv book, on an extraordinary tangent. To establish the claim of the pvgmies to attention, and to prove that man was not originally an aggressive “ape” but a peaceable pvgmy, he attempts to prove that the pvgmies were the first human beings on all the continents. Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas as well as Africa, and that the legends the ancient pygmies brought to every inhabitable continent generated all the world’s “religions” or “bodies of organised superstition”. The evidence Hallet presents to support these claims is of all sorts, but based primarily on the content of myths and legends throughout the world, on similarities among many languages, and on the discoveries of physical anthropologists and human palaeontologists. Little attempt is made to organise this evidence. It is a diffuse and amorphous work. Bits of evidence are piled at random on top of each other in an attempt to prove the central thesis.

That Central Africa was at least one f the earliest homes of man as a

physical species is now reasonably well authenticated. But the only sort of proof offered in this book, that Central Africa was the source of all man’s religions and that all men are descended from a common, original physical stock, which first emerged in that part of the world, is proof by exhaustion.

The book is so densely written, so superficially learned and ranges so widely over geographical areas and fields of study that many readers may feel they simply have to conclude that what is argued must be so. But erudition is no proof against error.

Close attention to Hallet’s sources reveals many of them to be suspect. The evidence is presented so unsystematically that his conclusions, when an attempt is made to follow a line of argument through, seem to be too stretched and all-embracing to be credible. What Hallet dismisses as the pseudo-history of mankind — that man evolved from a number of different but closely related physical types, and that some cultures grew up in complete isolation from others — will still seem to many the real history of man, even after the book has been digested. Hallet’s book makes no attempt whatever to refute systematically a great body of information — palaeontological, anthropological and even historical — which supports the traditional views about man’s origin and social evolution. The similarities which he claims can be demonstrated between different bodies of religious belief and different mythical traditions are simply not as striking as he makes then out to be. The worst thing about this book is that it might discredit the valid argument that the lives of the Pygmies, as one “primitive” people, have much to teach modern man. But Hallet’s sort of speculation about the Pygmies is not needed if their lives and their social organisation are to be used in the crucial debate about the nature of man. Their lives prove that what writers like Morris and Ardrey

claim is man’s original nature is, in fact, a nature that has been corrupted. Hallet’s claim that the Pygmies are “by moral, ethical and religious standards.. . a supremely civilised people” need not be discarded along with most of the rest of the book. The Pygmies’ lives do suggest that man does not have to overcome the legacy left him by any “lame-brained, killer ape ancestors” before he can live without 'war and aggression. Hallet possesses great love for and great knowledge of the surviving Pygmies of the Ituri Forest. He has not done justice to himself or the people he has written about.