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Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

The Pygmies' Plight

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/The-Pygmies-Plight.html

Excerpt:

Three scowling Bantus brandishing machetes stride into the clearing. I fear that they're bandits, common in this lawless place. I'm carrying my money in a bag strung around my neck, and news of strangers travels fast among the Bantu here. Mesumbe points to one of them, a stocky man with an angry look, and in a low voice tells me he is Joseph Bikono, chief of the Bantu village near where the government has forced the Pygmies to live by the roadside.

Bikono glares at me and then at the Pygmies. "Who gave you permission to leave your village?" he demands in French, which Mesumbe translates. "You Pygmies belong to me, you know that, and you must always do what I say, not what you want. I own you. Don't ever forget it."
...

Later in the day at Djoum, I meet the province administrator, a Bantu named Frédéric Makene Tchalle. "The Pygmies are impossible to understand," he says. "How can they leave their village and tramp into the forest, leaving all their possessions for anyone to steal? They're not like you and I. They're not like any other people."

Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

Yes, most people who refused to trade their freedom for possession have been killed. Very few are left.

Those who were willing to exchange freedom for a mess of pottage or some shiny beads, became domesticated chattel like us. Those who didn't were wiped out, except for a few remnants struggling to survive in remote places.

People treasure their possessions, their loss of freedom. It isn't uncommon to hear free people spoken of as if they were animals, because freedom is what people had in common with animals. Now there are very few civilized people who won't kill or pay others to kill so that they can keep their possessions, since they can no longer imagine freedom except as something dirty and disease-ridden. Yet Survival International points out that Australian Aborigines live an average of ten years longer when they're on their own land rather than in settled communities.

Oh, the lies the evil ones tell!

Mark · Site Admin Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1052

I had a bad link to this story and I've fixed it. Sorry!

Paulmb · Guest

Its a general fact that stress is a killer so whether in Australia,Africa or South America the less indigenous natives have of it the better!. Neutral