Congo

Quotidian Scenes: an exhibition of photographic anthropology by Karl Frost at the Max Planck Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

Bondongo and Ba-Yaka: Congo

(anthropologist Adam Boyette)

paddling through the swamp to get to a palm tree being used for harvesting palm wine, Congo 2018

river traffic, Bondongo community, Congo 2018

arrangement for harvesting naturally fermented palm wine, Congo 2018

Bondongo man drinking palm wine, Congo 2018

In December 2018, Lucie Benoit, current PhD student with the Ecology department went off for some weeks of field work in Congo with Adam Boyette, who will be arriving at the department this summer. Adam works with the Ba-Yaka, an immediate-return hunter gatherer group, and the Bondongo, a fishing and farming community. I was unable to go, but i sent along a gopro camera to pass out to people in the communities who might be interested in collaborating on video documentation by filming themselves and fellow community members as they went about their regular, daily activities.  Several people took Lucie and Adam  up on the opportunity, generating many hours of video documentation.  One Bondongo fellow was very enthusiastic and, with a friend of his, took the camera out on his boat through the swamp to demonstrate the harvesting of palm wine.  Unfortunately, the settings on the gopro got changed and instead of a video, it turned into a stream of photos.  The side benefit is that i now have a series of high resolution photos.  I was particularly curious at all of the different plant materials gathered to assemble together into the harvesting set-up. I asked Adam about the harvesting of the palm wine.  His editted reply follows…

” … in that photo he’s collecting palm wine, called molenge, from a species of palm – Lucie Benoit might know the species, but I do not. It is a naturally fermented beverage that people consume at least once a day. Men cultivate as many as 8 trees a day the way he is here, visiting 2-3 times per day. I’m a bad judge of distance and I haven’t measured the height of the trees but I’d guess maybe the tree is around 8 meters high. They have to be full grown to cultivate.

 
I don’t know all of the plant names that went into the process. The channel is definitely a banana leaf. The other leaves and the coarser cord on top are there to protect the hole and channel the sap (the wine), and they probably serve as a sort of pre-filter. The grassy stuff is just to cover the spout up, I think, probably because of birds. But this is the first time I’ve seen the whole process close up too, so now I get to ask these questions! Chunks are not desirable, so that was probably just stuff that fell in. They filter it later. But, they put a couple types of tree bark in the container to give it a particular taste and healing properties (e.g. they say it’s good for the stomach). I don’t see those barks in this photo, though.
 
Also, to be clear, the man here, who shot the 2 hour photo stream, is Bondongo, not BaYaka – a fisher and a farmer, not a forager. They do many of the same things, including cultivating molenge, but identify very differently and in contrast to one another.”