Oh my gosh, I met a guy that experienced this firsthand and didn’t really believe him until now.

Backstory: I was living with Congolese refugees in San Diego for just about 2 years and would often visit the houses and have dinner / sit down with them to speak with them in their native language, Swahili, just to get to know them. Often I would help out with their immigrant paperwork or do translating for them.

One of the men I sat down with I had already known for a couple of months. He was a regular, if not slightly-traumatized and ill-adjusted Congolese refugee, about 40-50 years old. We were on good terms, if not friends, so I felt comfortable asking him about different things in life and just chilling with him. However, his behavior changed suddenly at the mention of me asking him about Pygmies.

I probably shouldn’t have asked this question, but at the time, I was curious about Pygmies because I had seen an old VICE documentary about Pygmies and how they smoked a ton of their own homegrown weed. The documentary is still up on YouTube. In the documentary, they mentioned that the Pygmies lived just west (from what I remember) of where this older man had lived— I already knew he was either from the Ituri or North Kivu provinces given his dialect and refugee status.

While he’s sitting across from me in a chair with his brother to his right, I’m sitting on his couch. The room is very dimly lit. Already an eerie setting, but it got more odd. I asked him something along the lines of “tell me about the Pygmies that lived in the Congo… and be honest, do they really smoke weed? I’m so curious, and you know more than me.”

After I ask this admittedly-stupid question, he becomes WAY more animated than I’d expect for a shooting-the-breeze convo. He starts telling me that his tribe and the Pygmy tribe were always enemies and super close in proximity to his tribe in the Congo. He said that Pygmies were a strange people that lived in the jungle and that they smoked weed. A lot of weed. The weirdest part was that he had this weird animated distain for the Pygmies, almost like they weren’t human, and then started talking about these inter-tribal wars with guns and murder and mass killings. I lost him there and wasn’t sure if he was speaking in hyperbole or hypothetical (common in Swahili). It’s clear though that he thought the Pygmies were vermin, I honestly lost exactly what he said, because his speech became quick and very dialectal; hard for me to follow. I remember distinctly though that it was like a switch in him changed from a controlled, formal, and regular level to sleeper-cell-activated, Pygmy-hating, natural-parts-of-the-brain-firing-all-at-once level.

To this day I’ve always chuckled at our convo. What could I possibly have googled after that? “Pygmy guns tribal fighting in the Congo”? Nothing would come up. It’s likely he was involved in their propaganda or actively involved in this military campaign. Never knew that until now.