The pygmies inhabit the forests of Africa between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes, and are divided into different groups such as the Baka, Bambuti, Batwa, Babongo, Efé and others. Traditionally nomadic, they are now in the process of settling.
The aka pygmies live in the forests of the north of the Republic of Congo and the south of the Central African Republic. They speak Aka and try to preserve their way of life and their culture despite the growing influence of modernism in rural areas and the scarcity of resources in a forest gradually devastated by farmers and loggers.
Marginalized and often exploited like most Pygmy groups, the aka maintain client relationships with their Bantu neighbors, performing various tasks for them: hunting, fishing, collecting honey, agricultural work and porterage.
            Children of the forest, the aka know how to take care of it because their life depends on it. The forest provides them with game and plants for food, medicine, and make all the objects necessary for hunting, cooking, harvesting honey…

           Music is part of everyday life and practiced by everyone. As Simha AROM writes: “to hear an aka heart sing, that is to say the whole of a camp, one retains the impression of an extraordinary intertwining of voices and vocal timbres where the process predominates yodel” (aka Pygmy Encyclopedia).
           The aka practice, and this since childhood, a contrapuntal polyphony that the yodel, with its sudden changes of register, makes particularly spectacular. Likewise, their tambourine rhythms, their dances, their instrumental music for arched harp, zither-harp, musical bow, flute, testify to a rich artistic culture now threatened with extinction.
           Originally from the village of Kombola in northern Congo-Brazzaville, the aka musicians and dancers of the Ndima ensemble are therefore committed to promoting and safeguarding this musical heritage and, in doing so, invite us to a journey into the depths of the forest. equatorial. Music and dances from daily life, songs of the spirits of the forest, rites of hunting, healing or lifting mourning, thus offer us a glimpse of an immemorial tradition but also in perpetual recreation.

Sorel ETA