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The Batwa: Who are They?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

M. D. W. Jeffreys
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Extract

There are no such people, any more than there were such people as the Philistines.

In ‘L'origine du nom Fulani’, I showed that the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Fulani’ come from a common root F-L which in the Indo-European languages means ‘foreigner, stranger, alien’ and, by a secondary meaning, ‘inferior’. Consequently there is no single group of people represented by the word ‘Philistine’ any more than there can be any special group represented by the word ‘Foreigner’. Such names are coined on the well-known principles of ethnocentrism, whereby one calls one's own group ‘The Men’ and all others ‘Outsiders’. Thus Meek writes that the Bachama tribe, Northern Nigeria ‘. . . call themselves the Gboare or Men, a term which is doubtless the same as Gbari (the name of a large tribe in the Niger and Zaria provinces), Bari (in Eastern Sudan) and Ka-Bwari (Tanganyika). The root gba = man is also found in the Upper Ituri regions of Central Africa under the form mu-gba or ba-gba.’

Résumé

LES BATWA: QUI SONT-ILS?

Cet article considère la signification du terme Batwa, qui, sous un nombre de formes différentes, se trouve appliqué dans plusieurs régions de l'Afrique (et, dans un cas, dans l'lnde) à un grand nombre de peuples divers. Pendant longtemps on supposait que ce mot était un nom de tribu, dérivé du mot bantou, signifiant ‘petit’, et qu'il servait à dénommer les pygmées. Plusieurs savants, cependant, constatèrent des cas où ce mot était appliqué à d'autres peuples, par exemple, les Boschimans, les Zoulous, les Nguni, ainsi que des cas où le mot semble signifier ‘esclaves’, ‘domestiques’, ‘gens des forêts’, etc. L'auteur émet l'opinion que la véritable signification du mot est ‘étranger’, et qu'il sert à dénommer toute personne qui n'appartient pas au propre groupe de celui qui parle. L'auteur donne des exemples d'autres mots qui ont une signification semblable, et qui sont employés de la même façon. II suggère, également, que le mot peut être dérivé d'une racine sémitiquechamitique, signifiant ‘étranger’, qui n'a pas été découverte jusqu'à présent, et que l'étendue de son usage en Afrique et dans l'lnde témoigne de l'influence arabe.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 1953 , pp. 45 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1953

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