The pygmy artists have been given one tent to house 20 people
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1114
Human rights activists have criticised the organisers of a music festival in the Republic of Congo for housing pygmy musicians in a tent at a zoo.
Other artists at the Festival of Pan-African Music (Fespam) are staying in hotels in the capital, Brazzaville.
The organisers say the grounds of Brazzaville zoo are closer to the pygmies’ natural habitat.
But the pygmy musicians say they had expected to be housed properly while staying in the city.
The Baka pygmy musicians, from the far north of the country, were one of the highlights at the opening ceremony of Fespam on Sunday.
It is the fifth year they have performed at the festival and previously they have been treated the same as other guests.
But this year the group of 20, including 10 women and a three-month-old baby, were given one tent to share in the city’s zoo.A spokeswoman for Fespam said the decision was made in consultation with the Forestry Ministry, so that the pygmies would not be cut off from their “natural environment”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6898241.stm
The Baka pygmies are distant relatives of the Twa (or Batwa), who were often hunted and eaten as game by their starving taller neighbors in Rwanda and Burundi, where the pygmies fell between warring Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups. All across sub-Saharan Africa, pymgies and similiarly-diminutive populations (like the Bushmen) are regularly maltreated by Bantus and other blacks. Pygmies have been known to whites as a subject of mysterious fascination and speculation since at least the days of the great Homer, who placed them in Ethiopia (a mark, perhaps, of their subsequent decline). A 4300-year-old letter still is extant from an Egyptian Pharaoh ordering a pygmy to be brought to him as entertainment.