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life is most active. With the June rains, men move out one by one into the forest to set their traps and hunt. They remain in the forest for most of the following seven months, returning to the village with their loads of smoke-dried meat only when salt, oil, or garden food stores are depleted. |
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Besides hunting, Pagibeti men's work involves garden clearing, trail maintenance, and village house, garden house, and forest shelter construction and maintenance. Women's work consists of garden planting, weeding, and harvesting, cooking, child care, and water and firewood hauling. |
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The Apagibeti were a subject of classificatory confusion among early Belgian sources. Lying along the line separating what used to be termed Bantu from Sudanic language groups, the Apagibeti are speakers of a Libuale dialect and belong linguistically to the Bantu group but culturally to the Sudanic. Patrilineal and virilocal, all Monveda Apagibeti belong to one of two founder clans, brothers descended from the mythic Kulegenge, common ancestor both to them and to their northern "Sudanic" neighbors, the Ngbandi. Local authority in the chiefless, precolonial era was vested in the some, the oldest male of the senior lineage in each village. He heard disputes and mediated between the village and the ancestors at the ancestral spirit shrine. Birth order is of particular importance in Pagibeti social organization. It structures aspects of social life as various as order of seating, division of game, eating order, goods and wives inheritance, dancing order and officiation over and maintenance of the ancestral spirit shrine, or tolo. |
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Apagibeti live at the juncture of a number of beneficent and maleficent forces. The first is the creator god Nyombo, or Njambe, giver of life, to whom a brief morning prayer succeeded by the pa nzeke, or ritual spitting, is performed by the male head of the household unit. Group cult in honor of Nyombo is an innovation brought first by Catholic catechists in the early 1930s and by Protestant missionaries in 1976. Most Apagibeti are nominal converts to Catholicism, and tension between them and the small Protestant congregation runs high. Evaluations of Nyombo's power also vary. A comment heard frequently among nonbelievers and among many Catholics is that "Nyombo a yoye" ("God has grown tired") or "Nyombo a de boko" (''God has become an old man"). |
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Another force is that of the ancestors. They ensure fertility, food crops, and good hunting for the village, given that good social relations are maintained among village members and the ancestors' living village representatives, the lineage elders, receive their due respect. Due respect includes maintenance of the ancestral spirit shrine by the youngest male member of the village's senior lineage, periodic offerings of kola nuts and meat portions to the shrine, and acceptance of the authority of the senior lineage's senior male, as when he washes the village of misfortune (soseye ngi) or says words to end anger and discord between villagers at the shrine. It also entails the turning over of all forest animals designated as shrine animals to the lineage elder for butchering and distribution. |
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A number of persons are particularly dangerous to hunting, gardening, health, and reproductive success. Among them are twins, witches, mangodo (persons whose top teeth erupted before the lower teeth), yingo (forest spirits), and sorcerers. Sorcerers are by far the most feared, as virtually all villagers have private |
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