Pigmies Making Fires

Abstract

IN the review of Dr. P. Schebesta's book in NATURE of August 12, it is stated that “Although the pigmies use fires and are familiar with the use of the fire-drill among the surrounding peoples, they do not make fire themselves”. This refers to the pigmies of the Ituri forest, but a couple of hundred miles to the south, the pigmies of the forested highlands west of Lake Kivu certainly do make fires. The Cockerell-Mackie-Ogilvie expedition obtained a moving picture of the whole operation, taken by Miss Alice Mackie. The sticks used, and the entire procedure, agree almost exactly with the methods of the Australian blacks, as shown on a film we obtained when in Australia. It is extremely interesting to see this identity of method among primitive peoples so far removed from one another. The pigmies of the Kivu district may be appreciably different in some respects from those of the Ituri (it has been claimed that the Kivu gorilla is separable from that of the country northward, but apparently on very slender grounds); a picture of their chief will be found in Natural History, 1932, p. 403.