The Batwa: Who are They?
1953; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1156032
ISSN1750-0184
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoOpening Paragraph 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 .’
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