Koala-belle was a koala. She was small and furry and clung to her mother's back as the bigger koala climbed gum trees in search of sweet leaves. Mother Koala was proud of Koala-belle. The little koala climbed well with her tiny, sharp claws. She knew the best leaves to eat. And she chose just the right size forks in the tree in which to sleep the time away. One day she asked her mother, "Why can the birds sing and I can't?"
Mother Koala stopped nibbling a leaf. "Sing? But you can. In a koala way, of course," she added.
"That's not singing," cried Koala-belle. "That's just sound. If I could sing like the birds, I'd be really happy."
Mother Koala looked concerned. "Aren't you happy, Koala-belle? You can climb trees, choose delicious food and you never fall out of the fork of a tree when you're asleep."
But Koala-belle wanted to sing like the birds. She listened to the screeches of parrots, the tweeting of wagtails and the warbling of magpies. They sounded so beautiful to her. And so easy.
Koala-belle began to practise. "Eeeech!" She practised the call of the parrots. "Twareeht!" The call of the wagtail. And "Arghyarghyah!" The call of the magpies. The noise was terrible.
"Quiet," hissed Snake. "I'm trying to sleep."
"Go somewhere else and practise," cried Kangaroo.
But wherever she went, there were complaints about the noise.
"I want to sing," Koala-belle explained to the bush animals. "How can I sing if I don't practise?"
"Forget it," said Dingo. "You're a koala, not a bird."
Poor Koala-belle. A tear welled up and slowly trickled down over her stubby, black snout. The next day, she decided to run away. She packed a little cloth bag with some gum leaves, a photo of her mother and a piece of bark from her favourite tree.
When Mother Koala was safely snoozing, Koala-belle clambered down the tree and set off into the thick bush. When she'd gone further than she could ever remember, she stopped and said, "There, I've run away."
She climbed a big tree and nibbled some of the leaves she'd brought with her. She left others for later. She planned to be a runaway for a very long time. She settled back in the fork of the tree. "Now I'll snooze," she said. But the sounds around her were different to the ones back home.
Koala-belle couldn't get to sleep. She felt a little bit homesick. As the sky grew dark purple, she felt very homesick.
"Perhaps I will go home," she thought. "After all, I've been a brave runaway for a whole day." But Koala-belle remembered she hadn't left a trail. She didn't know her way back home. Especially in the dark. Her skin prickled and she felt frightened right inside her koala being.
"I'll have to stay here forever," she said. "At least, until morning." She kissed her mother's photo and decided to eat some more leaves to make her feel better.
Her paws were shaking with fear as she lifted a folded gumleaf.
She opened her mouth, but her breath was shaking too. It came out as little puffs of air.
The puffs of air struck the sides of the folded gumleaf. And then a very strange thing happened. There was music.
Koala-belle stopped in surprise. Music? Where was it coming from? she wondered. She listened hard, but the music had stopped.
Disappointed, Koala-belle again put the leaf near her mouth. Once again, the music started. The koala paused. She put her lips near the leaf and blew. Music. She stopped and listened. No music. She blew again. Music.
"It's me!" she cried, overjoyed, and the leaves of the tree rattled as though they were clapping. "I may not be able to sing like the birds, but I can make music. Gumleaf music!"
Koala-belle smiled wide with happiness.
All night she played her gumleaf music. She played the music of bird songs and the tunes in their heart.
And by the light of early morning, she heard another sound.
"Koala-belle! Koala-belle, is that you?" It was her mother, come in search of her. "I looked everywhere," she said, as she hugged her little daughter, "but when I heard the tunes, I thought, 'That could be my Koala-belle.' And it was."
So the two koalas slowly ambled back off home. And one little koala was filled forever with the happiness of music.
It was just a short arrow, whittled from a stick and sharpened to a point at one end, but Matope Alondo held it very respectfully.
"We make a poison from trees and leaves and put it on the tip of the arrow," he said. "If you cut yourself with this arrow, you die in less than an hour.
"But these days, possession of the deadliest poison is often not enough to thrive in a little village like this one in the jungle of north-eastern Congo, the former Zaire. Alondo and the other pygmies here are finding that antelope, monkeys and other game are disappearing - and the pygmies wonder if they and their culture may face the same fate because of the pressures of encroaching tribes.
For all of the mystery and magic that the word pygmy conjures in the West, life for many here in the rain forest is today a humiliating retreat from traditional ways and an almost daily battle against the contempt of nearby Bantu peoples.
"Some school principals will insult us and say that pygmies should not attend school," Alondo fumed. "They say that they do not want us in school, because pygmies move around in the bush. But how can they say that we move around? We have always been here in the forests. They are the ones who have moved into our area."
Pygmies are scattered across central Africa, but those of Congo have been among the most successful in preserving their identity. In part, the pygmies in Congo were protected by the lack of development of this country and the disastrous state of the roads. The roads are such an obstacle to movement that they have kept at bay the loggers who would destroy the forests that are the pygmies' habitat.
But even here, in the remote north-east, there are tensions between the pygmies and the surrounding Bantu, a reflection of the age-old clash between farmers and hunter-gatherers. To many Congolese, the pygmies are simpletons who inexplicably eschew a life of farming to run about in the woods trying to spear animals.
"They're very simple-minded," Foste Lonu, a 24-year-old farmer, said as he stood outside his home on the road nearby. "The pygmies don't have the way of thinking of human beings. They're always backward, and they don't want to farm."
His friend Apomainde Byondi added scornfully: "They build a home somewhere, and then two months later they move on. They don't want to stay in one place and devote themselves to farming." Villagers like Byondi often hire pygmy servants to work on the farms and do household chores, but these encounters seem to add to the strains between the goups. The pygmies complain that they are abused and treated as virtual slaves - and foreign missionaries confirm that the relationship is sometimes as close to slavery as to employment - while the farmers complain that the pygmies are lazy and unreliable.
"After a while the time comes when they want to go hunting," said Paul Chedda, a local villager. "Then they just go." Partly because of the broad contempt that many people feel for the pygmies, there is almost no intermarriage.
One element of the contempt may be that the pygmies are so short, mostly less than five feet tall. But the main reason seems to be that the pygmies, particularly in this part of the country, live about as traditional a life as anyone in Africa.
They are hunter-gatherers who live deep in the jungle moving from place to place instead of settling in villages along the roads like most other Africans.
Their homes are made of sticks and leaves, sometimes with mud as plaster, and when going off on hunts the pygmies wear only traditional loinclothes made of leaves. Children are much less likely to go to school than other people in the area, and few pygmies are literate or know how old they are.
Still, life is changing in the pygmy villages, and a growing number are planting little vegetable gardens of cassava, sweet potatoes and other crops to supplement their diets.
Pygmies are also joining local churches, and a young man in this area even celebrated a wedding in a Catholic Church here recently. The wedding was almost called off when the bride ran off at the last minute, but then she reappeared and the priest hurriedly declared them man and wife.
Education is a special problem, partly because the schools in Congo charge fees that most pygmies cannot pay since they rarely have money. In addition the pygmy students complain that they are humiliated by other students.
"The other students made fun of us a lot," said Apalimba Lakine, a 10-year-old girl who attended the second grade before dropping out. And then she added shyly, "But I still liked school."
– NYT
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