Patrick Putnam (1904 - 1953) was a maverick anthropologist who went to the then Belgian Congo in 1928 to study the pygmies, and established in 1933 a wilderness guest house called Camp Putnam near Epulu, which he managed until his death. Although staffed mostly by non-pygmies of the Bira and Lesi tribes, it was largely supplied with meat from the pygmy village a couple of miles away in the jungle. In 1946, he met the American artist, Anne Eisner (1911 - 1967), who followed him to Africa and married him. This is her account of her experiences with the Esamba. I am quoting from the 1956 Panther edition of Eight Years with Congo Pigmies, by Anne Eisner Putnam (originally published in 1954).
The first experience took place when she was returning home at night from a pygmy funeral. She had not taken a hurricane lamp, assuming she would have a pygmy escort, and now found herself alone in the dark.
Suddenly above the beat of the tom-toms I heard a clear mooing sound, half like a cow whose udder is too full, waiting to be milked, and half like that of a French horn, but pitched lower. I cowered against a mahogany tree, almost frozen with fear.The second occurrence was when she was in the pygmy village witnessing their love rituals.
It was the Esamba. I didn't have to be told. All the bits of idle talk, all the wild rumours, all the hushed whisperings of the natives suddenly became pieced together in my mind. Where the Esamba roamed, there went death. Its eerie, lowing voice was the voice of evil. . . .
The mooing started up again. This time it was far to the right of the pigmy camp. How had it moved so fast and so far? My tongue was dry. I couldn't swallow. Again the blood-curdling lowing came out of the darkness. It was farther around again. I thought to myself, "My God, it's circling around to get between me and home."
Terror-stricken now, I ran towards the camp, tripping over roots, catching myself on low-hanging liana vines. . . . The voice of the Esamba came from one side now. It was no longer behind me. I tried to run faster but I was no athlete. . . .
I stumbled, I fell. I gasped and I wept, but I kept on running through the jungle. Each time I heard the mooing it was closer. I knew I couldn't make it to the hotel compound. My only hope rested in the chance I could last until I reached the village of the [non-pygmy] Africans, this side of the clearing. . . .
Then I heard the other noise. Off the path there was a rustling sound, as if an animal - or a man- were moving there in the darkness. Every vestige of civilization drained out of me and I fled screaming down the path, into the village and into the house of Abazinga, the animal keeper. [Camp Putnam had a menagerie.]
He reached for his spear and sprang to the door, but I called him back.
"No, no, don't go," I cried. "The Esamba is out there."
He turned to me, fear on his black face and in his eyes.
"Did Madami look upon the Esamba?" he asked.
"I heard it but I saw nothing," I answered, still fighting for breath.
"Luck walks with you, Madami," he said. "Anyone who beholds the Esamba dies within two days."
I sat by Abazinga's fire until I could walk again and he told me of the evil Esamba. Trees die when it passes, he said, and small bodies of water dry up. When the Esamba is loose, he swore, men hide their faces in their beds, lest they look upon its features and die.
I heard the voice of the Esamba no more that night. I told Pat of my experience, half expecting him to laugh at me. He did nothing of the sort.
"You were right to run," he said. "I have been here in Africa many years, but I do not know its secret. But I don't scoff at it. I can't see the virus that causes pneumonia but I know its power for evil. No on understands all things in the Congo and the white man understands them least of all." [pp 60 - 63]
It must have been midnight when I heard from far off in the jungle the sound of a low mooing. Around the campfire all noise ceased. It came again, like a distant horn, melodious yet not at all as if made by a true horn. I threw the book down and rushed to the door just in time to see the last of the women hurrying inside their huts.According to Colin Turnbull (The Forest People, 1961), the Mbutis scoff at the agricultural tribes' belief that the jungle is infested with evil spirits, but they obviously make an exception for the Esamba. However, the mooing call is presumably made by something far less sinister. What can it be? The immediate guess would be some ungulate - an antelope. But a community which makes its living hunting ground-living game is unlikely to make such a mistake. Nevertheless, unlike the Amazon Indians, the pygmies do not hunt canopy life, such as monkeys and birds. Is the voice of the Esamba made by some night bird? If so, the rustling heard by Mrs Putnam would have been incidental and independent. There would not be many such bird species. However, birds are notoriously territorial and vocal, so why is it not heard much more often? And why is it not familiar to other forest groups?
The men were seated around the fires, looking straight into the flames, never once tearing their gaze away to look towards the part of the forest whence the sound came. Faizi, who had killed a bull elephant with a pigmy's spear, made no move to investigate the eerie sound. Moké, best of the hunters, sat as if glued before the fire. Herafu, old enough to die, yet young enough not to want to, looked only at the dancing flames.
. . .
Across the Leilo, no wider than a country road, the mooing started up again. It came from nowhere and from everywhere. It seemed disembodied. . . .
At dawn the next day a runner brought word that one of Andokala's relatives had died in the Walesi camp, not far beyond the Leilo.
I called Faizi over from his breakfast fire.
"The Esamba walked last night, didn't it?" I asked.
"Yes, Madami," said the little man. "We all heard it and were afraid." [pp 139 - 140]
What about something human: say a witchdoctor blowing a horn, equivalent to the Australian Aborigines' use of the bullroarer? I don't think so. The villagers dread the forest, while the pygmies have no special ritualist class, nor was there any obvious ritual significance attributed to it. Furthermore, I have myself gone through that jungle during the daylight with a pygmy hunting party. I cannot imagine anybody, even a pygmy, wandering deep into the rainforest at night without a light. Also, such rituals tend to be an open secret in most societies. It is unlikely to have remained hidden from an anthropologist of twenty years' experience.
Camp Putnam no longer exists. However, the fact that it was once a guest lodge indicates that it was far from being in the middle of nowhere. Turnbull did his studies on the pygmies over the following years in the same general area. But I have never heard of the phenomenon being reported by anyone else. Is there anyone out there who knows the truth?
Hello Malcolm,
ReplyDeleteI also documented this story about Anne Putnam's frightening experience in my book, 'Mokele-mbembe, Mystery Beast of the Congo Basin.'
I spoke to a missionary in the Congo Republic (Brazzaville) about this in 1985, and he confirmed that the pygmies in the former French colony also feared this alleged evil spirit.
Bill Gibbons
That is interesting, because they are separated by the width of a continent. Did the missionary describe it in the same way ie making a mooing sound at night?
DeleteHello Malcolm,
DeleteThe various pygmy groups are concentrated (mainly)in the equatorial rainforest area, but a few groups can be found as far away as Malawi and Ethiopia. While cultural practises, languages and religious beliefs tend to be quite diverse among the pygmies, the Aka pygmies of the Likouala (Congo-Brazzaville)and the uturi pygmies of the Uturi Forest (Congo-Kinshasa) interact frequently. In spite of the diversity of the languages there, Lingala is spoken by over 10 million people, and the pygmies seem to have little difficulty with interaction and communication. At first I thought that the stories abou the Esmaba were a cross-cultural myth, but the missionaries working in the Likouala region confirmed that the phenomenon has been experienced on the French side of the Congo River.
One missionary in particular, the late Gene Thomas, was in the Likouala region from 1955 to 1992 and told me many stories about similar encounters with sorcerers, witches, demonic activity, etc. Prior to proceeding with a hunting expedition, or leading our expedition into the forest to Lac Tele (1986) for example, both the pygmies and the various Bantu tribes would perform a ritual for protection by (presumably) benevolent forest spirits. The Bantu people also acknowledged the sinister Esamba and were obviously fearful of any encounter with it.
I am hoping to return to Cameroon for an expedition in November, and I will be sure to ask the Baka pygmies there if they have any knowledge or personal experiences with the Esamba.
Bill
Hi Malcolm,
ReplyDeleteYes, the missionaries in the Congo Republic described the Esamba in much the same way as the pygmies of the Uturi rainforest across the river. I have just received a copy of "I Saw Congo," written by E.W. Moon, a missionary to the old Belgian Congo from 1908 to 1923. I will be perusing the book to see if there is a mention of the Esamba, as Moon was a keen student of native culture.
best Wishes,
Bill
Hello Malcolm,
ReplyDeleteI will be visiting Australia and New Zealand this year (July). I am intrigued by the Burrunjor, an alleged bipedal, dinosaur-like reptile that inhabits parts of the outback. What are you thoughts on this, and would you be interested in such an expedition?
Thanks,
Bill Gibbons
According to Rex Gilroy, the burrunjor is widely distributed. Yet the Australian outback is is mostly open terrain, and well visited. Also, the alleged burrunjor is not some shy, medium sized herbivore, but a truly gigantic predator. I can't imagine a breeding population of such monsters being present without becoming well known and notorious.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the lines of evidence for the burrunjor all lead back to Rex Gilroy, a man who believes in a dinosaur inhabiting a small swamp in eastern New South Wales, and gigantic lizards distributed widely throughout the Great Dividing Range. Locating his witnesses is always difficult, but I manage to locate one of them, and she denied everything he said about the giant lizards.
Most serious (amateur) cryptozoologists in Australia regard Gilroy as completely unreliable. Admittedly, by his dogged investigations he does manage to unearth genuine data, but I for one am not prepared to accept anything he says without confirmatory evidence.
Prisoner in Lilliputania, part 1
ReplyDeleteEven more fantastic seems the experience of the Soviet pilot Vasilii Egorov, taken from Jonathan Swift's story "Gulliver in the land of the dwarfs". In August 1945, during hostilities launched by the Soviet army against the Japanese Empire, the fighter plane piloted by Vasilii Egorov was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft forces in Manchuria. Lieutenant Egorov managed to eject in time from the burning aircraft, parachuting into a grove.
Luckily, he had fallen 200 kilometres from the front line, far away from enemy forces, but also far away from those who could have saved him. In all likelihood, Egorov suffered a not very serious concussion on impact with the ground.
According to his later accounts, he woke up with the strange feeling that his hands and feet were no longer obeying him. Lifting his head, he saw his body wrapped in a transparent, finger-wide band, as if he had been wrapped in a giant spider's web. He was definitely in a cave or an underground dungeon, for not a ray of sunlight was visible. Around him were several burning torches, and in their light the Soviet officer began to glimpse how, from behind the stones, tiny creatures, like monkeys, appeared. Only they were dressed, and in their hands they held some kind of swords. They were no more than 18 inches tall. "What kind of people can these be?", asked Vasilii Egorov. He struggled to stand up, to try to explain that he had no evil intentions and should be released. But in a few moments, his head became very heavy and the pilot fell back into a state of lethargy, in which he does not know how long he remained. After a while, the aviator Egorov appeared, strangely enough, on the surface of the earth again.
He was found on an islet, by Mongolian shepherds, extremely weak, pale-faced, more dead than alive. He was cheating something hard to make out in Russian, so the shepherds took him to a camp of Soviet geologists nearby. Soon, he was transported to Moscow and the search for his identity began. After several checks, the army confirmed the officer's account. He was indeed pilot Vasilii Egorov, but he had been declared missing in action and even posthumously decorated. And the airman's story about the "dwarves" who held him hostage and the underground tunnel was unbelievable. Doctors determined that the pilot had probably suffered brain damage as a result of the plane crash, causing memory loss and hallucinations. A plausible hypothesis, indeed, except that from the time he crashed until he was discovered, 14 years had passed!
Because the officer was still complaining of terrible headaches, a cranial X-ray was taken. The doctors were astonished to find that the occipital part of the patient's skull showed traces of a trepanation. The scar, in the shape of a triangle, had very smooth edges, a sign that it was not the result of a blow, but had definitely been left by a scalpel incision.
Prisoner in Lilliputania, Part 2
ReplyDeleteDwarfs´ Labyrinth
A similar triangular-shaped opening in the head bones was also found on a skull found in the village of Vlasovka, near the town of Gribanovsky, Voronezh region, in south-eastern Russia. The area is famous among archaeologists for the hundreds of ancient burial mounds created by migrating peoples in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Moreover, this is a region of mysteries, as magi, sorcerers and pagan priests have lived here since the 8th century. Their ritual artefacts have been discovered and are being studied by Russian scientists.
In 1985, here in the forested steppe on the Don, during archaeological work under one of the burial mounds, researchers discovered a labyrinth with multiple branches, deep wells, smooth walls, many traps and dead ends, specially designed to confuse or annihilate an intruder. The discovery has created amazement. Not only was it the first underground labyrinth to be discovered in Russia, but it was a very special one, apparently dug by a tribe of dwarves! The height of the tunnel was no more than 1 metre and the width around 80 centimetres, which made the search particularly difficult. Strangely, the walls and floor were so finely sanded that they looked like glass. From place to place, in specially created niches, facets that had once been used for lighting were found. But the big surprise came in the centre of the labyrinth, where a human skull was discovered, with clear traces of a triangle-shaped trepanation with perfectly smooth edges. The same surgical marks are found on the skull of the aviator Egorov.
All the discoveries in the tunnel proved that the dwarves who lived there possessed superior knowledge of medicine, chemistry, technology and construction. But what kind of beings they were, where they came from and where they disappeared to remains a mystery to this day.
PS Similar labyrinths have been discovered in Austria as well.