Bambenga / NBenga / Bofi / Boffi

The African Pygmies (or Congo Pygmies, variously also "Central African foragers", "African rainforest hunter-gatherers" (RHG) or "Forest People of Central Africa") are a group of ethnicities native to Central Africa, mostly the Congo Basin, traditionally subsisting on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They are divided into three roughly geographic groups:

• The western Bambenga, or Mbenga (Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic)
• The eastern Bambuti, or Mbuti, of the Congo basin (DRC)
• The central and southern Batwa, or Twa (Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Angola and Namibia). The more widely scattered (and more variable in physiology and lifestyle) Southern Twa are also grouped under the term Pygmoid.

Bofi foragers live in the Ngotto Forest in the Lobaye region of the southwestern Central African Republic.

Population: 23,500

Region: Boda and Bimbo subprefectures. Those in Bimbo Subprefecture are reported to be mostly pygmies (Ethnologue 2006)

Bofi farmers and foragers live in and around the Ngotto Forest in the Ecosystemes Forestiers d'Afrique Centrale forestry management zone of the northern Congo Basin rain forest in the Central African Republic.

Language: Oubangian language (Bofi). Sometime during the period of the rubber trade (after 1870), some Bofi farmers and Aka foragers became closely associated and some of the Aka adopted the Bofi language and ceased to speak their own. The groups of Aka that adopted the Bofi language are now known as the Bofi foragers.

The Bofi foragers are ethnically and culturally very similar to the Aka foragers but consider themselves quite different from and unrelated to the Aka.

 

Sources:

• Wikipedia.org
• Library of Congress (id.loc.gov)