| Abstrakt: |
This article presents information on an adventurous tour of explorer Henry M. Stanley to pygmy village of Kampunzu which is along the Congo River, in 1876. After arriving in the village Stanley notes that the village's most singular feature is two rows of skulls running the entire length of the village. When he asks the locals if the skulls are human, he is told that they are soko skulls. When Stanley poses the same question to the chief of the village, he receives a somewhat different reply; they are the skulls of Nyama. The moment in Stanley's account of his journey across Central Africa is an emblematic one for Europeans and Americans in Sub-Saharan Africa. For centuries European attempts to understand the great apes involved a persistent conflation of man and ape, both for satirical and non-satirical purposes, as the nature of the man of the woods became a frequent object of speculation. Stanley, who travels across Central Africa in 1876 and 1877 with a small army numbering, at times, between 350 and 700 men and women, ends up provoking the locals to do battle with him many times over the course of his journey. |
