We take our revenge on our masters using fetishes, by making them drink our saliva in herbal infusions and other potions." 2 A Congolese Babongo Pygmy On the 30 th of June 1865, whilst exploring the mountain range in Gabon that now bears his name, Paul Du Chaillu visited an encampment of "Obongos", or "dwarfed wild negroes" (1867: 315). He was the first European to come into contact with Pygmies and to give a precise description of their way of life 3. Although they were the first to have contact with Europeans, Gabonese Pygmies are the least well known of the Central African Pygmy groups, doubtless because they fail to conform to the stereotype of forest-dwelling huntergatherers. The scanty literature devoted to them includes a few linguistic texts (Raponda-Walker 1996 [1937], Mayer 1987), some rather unreliable work by ethnologically-minded 1 The article was written by J. Bonhomme and M. De Ruyter. The ethnography on which it is based is derived from fieldwork conducted by J. Bonhomme, M. De Ruyter and G.-M. Moussavou. The article has been translated from French by Matthew Carey. 2 Cited in Gambeg, Gami & Bigombe Logo 2006: 137. 3 Du Chaillu does not use the term "Pygmy" in his travel writings, published in 1867. It is only in his 1872 opus, The Country of the Dwarfs, a prettified version for children, that he uses it, following the example of Georg Schweinfurth, who had encountered an Akka "Pygmy" at the court of the Mangbetu king in 1870. There, he also makes the connection to Graeco-Roman legends about Pygmies.
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