Click the picture of Pygmy Kids to learn about Baka Pygmies.
Posted on 08/20/2002 12:37:32 PM PDT by rface
YVOIR, Belgium- Marie Alem and nine other Pygmies came to Belgium two months ago and built a traditional village, complete with huts and life-size figures at a private nature park.
They showed videos about Pygmy life, played music and sometimes performed dances for visitors in return for a cut of the admission fee. The Pygmies say their goal was to bring in money to pay for wells, schools and hospitals for their Baka tribe back home in Cameroon.
What they and the park have mostly drawn is a storm of criticism. For many Belgians, recalling the country's sometimes brutal colonial past and mocking exhibits of Africans in the 19th century, the Pygmy show is demeaning and racist. Few people have visited.
Alem says she and the other Pygmies have had enough of the criticism and they're ready to go home, although the show runs until Aug. 31.
"I don't understand," Alem said in broken French. "We are carrying out a humanitarian project ... for a better life. That was our objective for coming here."
The exhibit was the brainchild of Louis Raets, who runs the Oasis Nature Park in the Meuse River valley just outside Yvoir, about an hour's drive southeast of Brussels. The park normally features tropical fish and butterflies, but those exhibits were removed for the Pygmy show.
Pygmies, not all of whom are below average height, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of Central Africa. Over the centuries, the legendary hunters retreated into the region's dense rain forests to keep away from the more powerful Bantu tribes.
Raets, who said he paid the air fares for the five female and five male Pygmies, said he got the idea for the show as a way to help the Baka tribe during a visit to Cameroon last year.
"This is for a 100 percent humanitarian operation," he said. "Everything has become so political in this case ... All we are trying to do is to give them a hand up."
Not many people have seen it that way.
"We disapprove of this exposition, which brings back the exploitation of humans and defies human dignity," said Joseph Aganda of the Movement for New Migrants, an advocacy group for African immigrants in Belgium.
Human rights activists and the immigrant group appealed to Belgium's civil rights watchdog to halt the show. The agency declined, ruling the show is not racist, but that did not stop the criticism and protests.
"Belgium, like other former colonial countries, has a history of exhibiting people," Johan Bosman, an analyst at a Belgium support group for indigenous peoples, wrote in the newspaper De Morgen. "We only have to look back at the colonial expositions of King Leopold II, during 1894 and 1897, where 'real Congolese' were brought over and looked at by some 1 million people, who threw peanuts at them."
Seven Congolese died in those exhibits from exposure to cold weather.
"Many question if people do this for a good cause, even if they are free to come and go as they please," Bosman added.
Criticism also has come from Cameroon, where the show has attracted widespread media coverage.
In an editorial, the state-run Cameroon Tribune asked if the Pygmies even understood what was happening to them.
"Do they know what is expected of them, and how the resources accruing from their exhibition will be used?" it wrote. "Certainly not. As Jean Bibe, one of the Pygmies noted, he is content with having entered an airplane and a train."
Raets said he couldn't say how much money they show has brought in, but said not many tickets had been sold.
Alem and another Pygmy, Roger Owonu Ze, said the group doesn't know how much money it has raised. They are to get about 40 percent of each $6 admission ticket. But because of the criticism, only a few hundred people have come, Owonu Ze said.
"This (criticism) has created a lot of prejudice," he said.
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In an effort to be politically correct, they have hurt these Pigmies. Now what are these little guys gonna do? We should have a fund-raiser.
Ashland, Missouri
The pygmies probably should've asked for reparations instead.
Now, as I was saying about those evil Americans who don't care about anyone but themselves ..."
Click the picture of Pygmy Kids to learn about Baka Pygmies.
Now if they had a pygmy tossing contest I could understand a little ire...
translation-It's OK to sneak into another country and sponge off that country's social service system, but come there legally to try to raise some honest money and return to the homeland is verboden.
Belgum has a good court system, why don't they sue the people who have critized them in writing for slander, defamation and loss of income due to the above? Its time someone used the liberals own weapon against them, the courts. What a bunch of bleeding PC morons.
On the other hand I am not sure the criticism is what has kept people away. The whole thing sounds pretty cheesy to me. I don't think I would go.
In 1876 he organized, with the help of H. M. Stanley, the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of the Congo. At a European conference (Berlin, 1884–85), the Congo Free State was established under Leopold's personal rule (see Congo, Democratic Republic of the). He proceeded to amass a huge personal fortune by exploiting the Congo directly and by leasing concessions. Forced labor was extorted from the natives, frequently by barbarous methods, until scandal compelled Leopold to turn over the Congo to the Belgian government (1908).
This was the Belgian Congo. This conference essentially partitioned all of Africa among the various European nations, the Germans and the British ending up fighting it out during WWI (one of the most brilliant guerilla campaigns in military history on the part of the Germans). Nearly everything we think of as European colonization resulted from, or was formalized at, this conference. Pieces of this were still causing bloodshed in the 1960s (see Patrice Lumumba). Heck, pieces of this are still at it in the very same place.
These are, BTW, the same people now decrying U.S. "colonialism." Make your own judgment.
Fool, said I
All men are brothers until the day they die,
It's a wonderful world"
Randy Newman
Couldn't resist, sorry
Regards,
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