We had climbed in our tank tops and our rubbery hiking boots up the hill from the little market port where we left our canoes. Lake Bunyonyi cooled under a blanket of mist below us. We had hiked for some time toward the border, a ruddy and jovial bunch bursting with nearly every first world flavor - American, English, Australian, Czech, Slovenian, Dutch. Our conversation casually covered the whole world over, like tiny birds flitting across royal rooftops in every hemisphere. For us it seemed, the world was, and had already been, our oyster. We were somewhere around Dubai in 2005 when we came upon them at a cross in the path.
These were the Batwa. An ancient Pygmy tribe who, in their glory, lived among the fresh forests that used to swell at the feet of these hills. But after years of agricultural proliferation spurred by the Bakiga - the dominant local tribe whose population is growing faster than the farmland they need to support it - nearly every scrap of forest has flattened into patchwork shelves of crops and turned soil. Years of war and encroachment by the Bakiga, the Hutu and the Tutsi eventually favored the agricultural way of life over the nomadic. Here near the border, the Batwa fell first to the Bakiga, then to the Bakiga’s locally brewed beer and at last to the mountain gorilla when they were chased from their last forested refuges - the national parks. They now scavenge the border in exile, on a tight rope between blending in and dying out. 40% of them survive by begging. The rest of East Africa either despises or pities them, but all look down on them as the untouchables of these green hills. Worse than condemned, they are simply unseen, ignored and wished away. Left to wander in the small shade of the banana leaves. Hardly any have been educated and few will employ them. But perhaps worse than their deplorable poverty is the slow obliteration of their rich culture and human dignity as a people - of which there seems to be little left to burn. The past they know by heart, without having themselves lived through it - a debt to be paid a penny at a time. The future they bargain away for one more day. There are less than 80,000 Batwa left in the world. And roughly 25 of them were standing before us, standing silently in the hot sun.
A whole head shorter than other Africans, they stood with babies in their arms, ragged wraps on their heads and struggle showing around their mouths. Previously naked except for animal skins, they now bag themselves in old modern clothes and African wraps, not one of which is not heavily soiled and worn. Most small children have large old Tshirts on and no pants or underwear. The women looked shy, with leather cheeks holding tiny babies who are small and thin enough to be newborns. Some looking out from just one eye, with the other blue and blind. They look hearty and resourceful, but still so few - and the angles around the eyes in their faces gave away the terribly tangible trace of sadness and subordination. We fell immediately silent surveying them. Our guide exchanged a warm hug and handshake with their leader followed by a few words. Then they brought out a few piles of dry hay for us to sit on without speaking. We were told they will dance for us now.
A line of them stood behind - the chorus - some with children in their arms. A few created a new line in front, following the lead of the chief. They blinked into the sun at us. A drum beat arose from a stick on an empty cooking oil container. And the back line started to sing.
Never in my life has such a sound brought me to the brink of my very existence and back so quickly. Their voices are full and ringing, with a slight harmony in the words of their language. As the sound rises from their chests, it brings on its wings a story of these people. It bypasses the ears and carries straight to the heart. It is a story, a sound of such immediate joy and immense grief, of earthy release and inhereted oppression, of magic and indignity. within that song, a sad and silenced people appear, awake and alive before your very eyes. A ressurrection, both devout and irreverent, and so twice as hypnotizing. In listening, you do not yourself allow the tears to come - they flow for a few moments on someone else’s orders.
Now, the front line begins to dance. Stomping both feet to the rhythm, waving their arms and pumping their chests as if in a spiritual fit, possessed by the music and their own power coming through them. Jumping and waving, with hands outspread. A return to earth of some uncelebrated celestial power using the unaltered voice of the human heart. It was then clear to me that we had been let in on some great secret, one which we would never at all understand. Little birds alighting on the unmarked grave of the Madonna in their great migration North.
After the songs were finished, the two lines resumed their previous postures of modest distance and reservation. The children started up once again their little fusses and kitten cries in the arms of the women. As instructed, we each went down the line and shook their hands, thanking them with a nod and smile as they most certainly did not understand the English phrase. Most would not look up, but when they did, they would wrinkle their eyes in a smile and you would feel you had just been let back into the womb, in out of the rain into a warm dark cottage with a crackling fire.
With that, we the little birds took wing once again, up the steep path to the next ridge, skirting along the border like a train track following a river. Below us, our guide transferred the designated stack of shillings in meager hopes that some of it escaped the bottle and went to buying food and goods. And on we went, steering away from the borderlands and back into humanity up the left leg of Uganda toward where our camp was waiting.
Like many a witch in the woods, it is local lore that the Batwa have magical powers and that if you jump over a Batwa person that you will be healed of any physical ailments you might have. The mystery belonging to what remains of these native people is harder to penetrate than the old mist-veiled forests they used to glide through. Be they the bearers of life after certain death, or just a painful reminder to the rest of us of what human society can so blindly leave out in the cold, one thing is for certain - the Batwa may be forgotten but they are not yet gone.And like the humility we may have lost along the way, they will be waiting for us, voices rising from the ash of garbage pyres, there at the border with the familiar.
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