Perhaps you have read in fairy tales of very little people called
dwarfs. There are old stories which tell us about very small men who
lived a long time ago in Africa. They were called pygmies. They were
only one foot high, and they built their houses with eggshells. They
lived in holes in the ground. They had goats and sheep which were much
smaller than themselves, and they had corn which they cut down with
axes, as we cut down trees.
This is what we are told about them; but, of course, those stories are
fables. There never were men so small as one foot high.
But there are real people in Africa called pygmies. They are very
small. The men and women look as if they were boys and girls. The men
are about four feet high.
There are a great many large forests in Africa. It is in the forests
that the pygmies live. The forests are so dark in many places that one
could not see to read at noonday. Only a few white men have been in
the land of the pygmies and seen them. They are shy, like children,
and hide their faces when spoken to.
Some of the pygmies are black and some are red. They do not wear much
clothing. They do not need much, for the weather is always very warm
in the country in which they live. The men and boys wear only a strip
of cloth around their loins.
Many of the pygmies have no houses. They wander from place to place,
and sleep on the ground under a bush. But some of them have little
houses, or huts, built in the shape of beehives and about four feet
high. They are covered over with long leaves. The door is only about
a foot and a half high, just high enough for the pygmies to creep in.
Their beds are made of sticks stuck in the ground with other sticks
across them.
The pygmies live by hunting. They do not shoot with guns, as we do.
They use bows and arrows, and they are very quick and clever at
shooting. A pygmy will shoot off three or four arrows one after the
other so quickly that the last is flying away before the first has hit
the mark.
The pygmies are also very smart in making pits to catch the animals
they wish to kill. They dig large holes and cover them with sticks and
leaves. The animal comes along and falls into the pit and is caught.
The pygmies can kill elephants with their bows and arrows. They first
shoot at the elephant's eyes until he is blind. They then keep
shooting at him till he falls dead.
[Illustration: A Village of Pygmies.]
The pygmies eat the flesh of some of the animals they kill. They sell
or trade the fur and skin and ivory for arrows and knives. They also
get tobacco and potatoes for their furs and skins.
They are also very good at fishing. They can catch large fish with a
piece of meat fastened to a string.
The pygmies do not dig the ground or plant or sow anything. Bananas
grow in Africa, and the pygmies are very fond of them. Often they come
out of the forests to get bananas from the trees on which they grow.
If a pygmy sees a good bunch of bananas that he would like to have, he
shoots his arrow into the stalk. When the owner of the tree sees the
arrow he knows how it came there. So he leaves the stalk until the
pygmy takes it away. Sometimes a pygmy pays for the bunch of bananas
with pieces of meat. He wraps up a piece of meat in grass or leaves,
and fastens it to the stalk where he has cut off the bananas.
A pygmy can eat twice as many bananas as the largest white man. He can
eat as many as sixty at one meal.
Though the pygmies are small, they are very brave, and all the other
people who live near them are very much afraid of them.