PYGMY KITABU

by Jean-Pierre & Alex Pelle Hallet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 1973

The author of Congo Kitabu and Animal Kitabu, besides being an initiated Masai warrior and a blood brother of the ""Watusi,"" lived for eighteen months among the Efe pygmies of the Ituri Forest and considers them his true adopted people. His enthusiasm for the sweet-natured, fun-loving, artistic and highly moral little folk, and his researches into their myths and language, have led him to challenge prevailing theories of human evolution (especially Ardreyan aggressionites) that's sure to provoke popular controversy and professional skepticism. Hallet's theory is that the Pygmies are a remnant of the ancestral stock of humanity; far from being the savage grandchildren of ""killer apes,"" they invented astronomy, music, metallurgy, monotheism and herbal medicine at a date of unbelievable antiquity. The Pygmies, despite their primitive technology, do observe Ten Commandments with an unchristian faithfulness, are sophisticated monotheists, and have myths of forbidden fruit and original sin, the flood, the journey to the underworld, dragon-slaying, and other themes echoed in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Norse, Celtic, Japanese and Amerindian mythology -- all of which therefore, Hallet says, must be descended from Pygmy ancestors! Their ancient high technology was lost in fire-and-flood disasters which many mythologies record and which Hallet believes were actual eruptions of Central African volcanoes. More: the geography of paradise in Middle Eastern, Germanic and Amerindian myth places a real historic Eden in the Ituri Forest -- and the Pygmy tongue is the ""Adamic"" or ""primitive root language."" Hallet ""proves"" all this with spirit, in a mass of maverick comparative folklore and linguistics which is quite fascinating, though also much too repetitive; cautious scientists will scoff, but venturesome laymen may well be moved to say, ""He might have something there"" -- if not all that he claims.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION