My musical tastes are eclectic, lending to having grown up in the Jim Crow world of the 50’s and 60’s and to my exposure to many cultures during times abroad in the 70’s. Among my favorite genres are rhythm and blues, jazz, rap and world music because they most closely represent the significant cultural influences in my life.

If I am pressed to commit to such a thing, I’d have to say my all-time favorite band is Deep Forest, the collaboration of French musicians Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet. They compose a new kind of world music, sometimes called ethnic electronica, mixing ethnic with electronic sounds and dance/chillout beats. Their sound has been described as ‘ethno-introspective ambient world music’. Their debut album, Deep Forest, mixes New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from Zaire, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti and the Sahel.

Recently I discovered a favorite track from the first album posted on YouTube. Play Night Bird as you read further.

The haunting yet pleasing yodeling is from a group of young Baka women from the Ituri Rainforest that stretches across Cameroon, Congo and parts of Burundi. They were recorded by an ethnomusicologist working in Burundi in 1967 and this is their formal greeting for guests.

In the few decades since these incredible voices were recorded, the Baka (or Aka or BiAka or Mbuti or ‘pygmies’, as they are known) are disappearing at an alarming rate. As a result of encroachment, destruction of habitat, slavery and the Congo Civil War (2003), their numbers have dwindled to less than 30,000.

Rather than viewing them as ‘primitive’ (and thus valueless) as we in the West typically do, why not learn from these very old peoples? And, old they are, having a high predominance of L1, the oldest genetic haplotype on Earth.

One thing I learned is that Baka fathers spend more time in close contact to their babies than in any other known society. Baka fathers have their infant within arms reach 47% of the time and have been described as the ‘best Dads in the world.’ It has been observed that they pick up, cuddle, and play with their babies at least five times as often as fathers in other societies. It is believed that this is due to the strong bond between Baka husband and wife. Throughout the day, couples share hunting, food preparation, and social and leisure activities. The more time Baka parents spend together, the greater the father’s loving interaction with his baby. Would that I’d spent more time cuddling and playing with my son.

It’s difficult to accept that these incredible voices may be silenced in our lifetime. Please recognize that the destruction of their culture is happening concurrently with others the world over and that losing any one of these ancient cultures is losing a part of our collective selves.

In the Blink of an Eye

Worldwide some 300 million people retain strong identities as members of indigenous cultures, cultures rooted in their own history, their own languages and attached by memories to their particular places on the Earth. These cultures are old and represent much of the collective experience and intelligence of humanity. And yet, increasingly their voices are being silenced, their unique visions lost in the firestorm of change, conflict, globalization and encroachment from societies that marginalize those different from themselves.

National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis has done as much as anyone else on the planet to celebrate the diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures. In this speech given at TED 2003, he gives us a glimpse of his deep experiences among the extraordinary peoples he’s encountered…the very ones disappearing right in front of our eyes.

Franck,

In re-reading your statement, don’t forget that Islamic culture did the very same thing to Africans that the Christian Europeans did. The Chinese are redefining Tibet. The indigenous peoples of Darfur in Western Sudan are being slaughtered for land and oil and the export of American culture everywhere is ‘flattening’ the world at an alarming rate. This is about power, those who have it and those who don’t. Dominant cultures use military or economic superiority to impose their will on cultures then use religious, political and other subterfuge to eventually break them. Without the tools of resistance, indigenous peoples fall and disappear. When I was born, there were 6,000 active languages in the world. Now, that number has dwindled to fewer than 3,000. Each week, somewhere in the world, an elder dies and takes with her the last utterances of her language, how she and a people defined the world.

All resistance starts in the mind. Now you have an idea of why I selected Pan-African Studies as my point of departure from habitual ways of thinking. African peoples were self-determining, built great civilizations, developed strong senses of the sacred to provide themselves with an organic ethos. In so doing, they and we provide tangible benefits to the human tapestry. In rediscovering their value, my value, my intellectual departure from this forced orientation to the world, is actually a return to what was known before. In that sense, I have the potential to become finally whole, to live in the world as a living, breathing and valued member and once and for all shed the label described by a man wiser than I as an ‘ostentatious cripple’.

The Wodaabe (wo' dah' bee) of Niger. A proud people...at risk of extinction.