Congo
Category archives for Congo
On cannibalism and Jameson
Posted by Greg Laden on February 17, 2015 
A recent twitter conversation prompted me to dig up some old posts on cannibalism, and maybe a few memories of my time in Central Africa. The twitter conversation concerned a story in which it is claimed that James Jameson, heir to the Jameson Irish whiskey empire, bought a slave girl (for the price of six…
Ebola and “the French Disease”
Posted by Greg Laden on October 27, 2014 
Jim Moore and I were both students in the PhD Program in Anthropology at Harvard a few years ago. He graduated about the time I entered the program. To give a rough historical touchstone, I remember the day he needed to get his thesis off to the Registrar, and there was a delay because it…
Sungudogo Second Edition
Posted by Greg Laden on December 17, 2013 
As you know, I wrote a novella as part of a fundraiser a while back. It is called “Sungudogo” and it is the story of the origin of the Skeptics movement and modern cryptozoology. It is also an adventure story in which the protagonists, Archer Mallows and Pat Soffer, travel across the unforgiving landscape of…
New Stanley
Posted by Greg Laden on October 26, 2013 
… As instructed, I arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, in downtown Nairobi, at just before 11:00 AM, to meet Pat Soffer, primatologist. Willoughby didn’t have to tell me about the fish and chips at the hotel’s cafe; I’d eaten here many times. The Thorn Tree was a pretty standard meeting place in Nairobi. A…
King Leopold’s Soliloquy
Posted by Greg Laden on February 28, 2013 This is the book: King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule. If you prefer, this is the on line version. I first became aware of, and read, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which is not his soliloquy but a parody of what he might say according to Samuel Clemens, while doing fieldwork in the ex-Belgian…
Why are some animals rare, and why is this very important?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 12, 2012 
A friend of mine told me this story: As a special forces soldier, a Green Beret, he was alone and traveling through a dense area of jungle in or near Viet Nam during the 1960s. Enemy soldiers were nearby and he intended to pass through their patrol area to arrive at some safe destination, but…
Sungudogo is on Smashwords
Posted by Greg Laden on November 13, 2012 Sungudogo, the highly entertaining and exciting adventure novella set in the Central African rain forest, which provides the Skeptics Movement with its own Origin Myth, has been available on the Kindle for a while now, but it is now also available on Smashwords, HERE. … Sungudogo is a little known zoological mystery, an “undiscovered” primate…
Somebody said something nice!
Posted by Greg Laden on October 30, 2012 Check it out: Thank you Sarah! Here’s the Sungudogo Page in case you want to experience the pain of reading it too! (I mean the good kind of pain, of course.)
In search of the elusive Sungudogo …
Posted by Greg Laden on October 16, 2012 
…Sungudogo is a little known zoological mystery, an “undiscovered” primate living in the remote and rugged region of the eastern Congo, where the Central African Rain Forest fringes the high walls of the western edge of the Great Rift Valley. Sometimes called the “fourth African ape,” Sungudogo is not a Gorilla, not a Chimpanzee, not…
Is it appropriate to use the term “Pygmy” when speaking of…Pygmies?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 5, 2012 Some of the people who live in the rain forest of Central Africa are known widely as “Pgymies.” That word…Pygmy…is considered problematic for a few different reasons. It refers to a person’s physical appearance, because it means “small.” The word is sometimes used in biology to refer to the smaller species among a group of…