1. Double Date

    Posted in: Photography on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

    boyd & his "half" sisters

    These pygmy ladies took me on a “double date” Ba aka’ style in the Central African Republic recently.  You might call it a dinner date since we were going into the forest near their village to hunt for dinner.  They were hoping to catch a duiker, a small antelope, by trapping it in the nets they are holding in this picture.  The nets are about 25 yards long and three feet high.  The pygmies will string three or four of these nets together in almost a complete circle and then start beating the bushes and yelling hoping to scare a duiker into running into one of the nets.

    The nets are all hand made in a very labor intensive process.  Small branches are cut from trees and then split into then strips and dried in the sun.  The Ba aka’ then roll the dried strips against their thighs like a kid might roll out a piece of clay until it a long round string.  These strings are then tied together to make the net.

    On this day the nets would remain empty.  We didn’t catch any antelope or even see any signs of one.  I did find a shotgun shell, evidence of others who have been in the forest mostly likely illegally hunting the duiker.  Poaching has greatly reduced antelope numbers in recent years in this section of the forest.

    This weekend on my radio show National Geographic weekend I’ll be talking about the pygmies and their lifestyle with Louis Sarno an American who has been living with the Ba aka’ for more than 20 years.

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