ITURI FOREST PEOPLES FUND

The important role of women

Ima-chabo is up early, even after a night's carousing. She has a full day ahead looking after her children, carrying water, gathering firewood, and seeing to the welfare of the camp. Although hunting is hard work, Efe women have more subsistence-related responsibilities and spend more hours working than do the men. The demands of Efe women's work often require that they be out of camp in places where it is difficult or dangerous to care for small children. Even when Chabo was still nursing his mother would often leave him for short periods of time with another lactating woman who would breastfeed him if he got hungry or began to fuss while his mother was away. This type of multiple caretaking may be unique to the Efe, however it does allow Efe women considerable freedom, safe in the knowledge that their children are being well cared for.

Efe women traditionally gather food and fish. Now they also labor in the fields of their Lese exchange partners, all in all providing over 60 percent of the calories within their family's diet. Efe men and women, unlike the Lese, share many of the day-to-day subsistence tasks. Efe men prepare and cook food when their wives are busy, a practice not sanctioned by the Lese who have a much more rigid sexual division of labor. Efe women do most of the gathering and fishing, but seldom help to raid a beehive and only accompany the hunters during the dry season when large musilio, a type of hunt that involves women, are conducted. These hunts are more like picnics, and the women are there only to carry food for the hunters and bring back any game that is killed.

The importance of women in the subsistence economy of the Efe is often overlooked. Although hunting is exciting to write about, it is both highly dangerous and an exceedingly unpredictable source of food. In contrast, within the rain forest plant food is generally more abundant, more reliably collected, and therefore usually provides more calories to the diet than animal food. Woman the gatherer, therefore, contributes more to her family's daily food supply than man the hunter. Thus gatherer-hunter may be a more accurate description of the Pygmies and indeed of most contemporary hunter-gatherers.