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"ONLY WHEN THE LAST TREE HAS DIED
AND THE LAST RIVER POISONED AND THE LAST FISH CAUGHT
WILL WE REALIZE WE CANNOT EAT MONEY"
LO SPIRITO DEL PIANETA VISITS THE PYGMIES IN CAMEROON
The umpteenth refusal by our Embassy in Yaoundè to release the entry visas to a group of Pigmies (although all documents were OK) to allow this group to take part in the festival Lo Spirito del Pianeta, held each year in Chiuduno (Bergamo, Northern Italy), made us think: if they are prevented from coming to us, why don't we go to them? Therefore, Lo Spirito del Pianeta decided to take the festival to the Pigmies. In fact, we are convinced that every human being, tribe, people has the same right to obtain respect and consideration and it has to be given the same possibilities. It was an amazing and a once-in-a-lifetime unique experience. A wonderful experience for us, who lived it, since it was a full-immersion in primordial nature and this stirred up an ancestral feeling in all of us, binding us tightly to mother nature.
The intense green color of the forest in all of its shades, the soil where you walk, soft and enveloping like a natural carpet, the sounds that we no longer are used to hear, the animals and even the insects. they all made us feel that we belong to nature, which embraces and protects us. Our experience was exceptional thanks to the Pigmies we met. It was amazing for them to see that someone had come from such faraway lands just to show them respect and consideration and to give them the possibility, for the first time in their lives, to listen to music and songs from other parts of the world. However, these marvels came up against hard reality. We visited the orphanage in Djoum where 35 Pigmy children live. Their parents are dead and they have survived the high child mortality rate, mainly caused by HIV.
We could experience at first-hand what a hard life these people live. They are enslaved by another ethnic group, the Banthu, who believes that they have the right to decide about the Pigmies' life-and-death, they rape their women and exploit their men, buying their work for very little money and taming them with alcohol, which destroys their mind and physical health. They are enslaved by the multinational timber companies. Using the same system as the Banthu, these companies have forced them to move away from their native lands deep inside the forest and to settle down along the roads built by these companies to transport the timber cut in this incredible ongoing deforestation.