Boyobi is music associated primarily with the net hunt. Given the continued importance of the net hunt in baAka lives, despite the combined onslaught on the forest by both logging companies and
illegal hunters, the boyobi ceremony remains of extreme importance in baAka community life. The musical forces called for in this ceremony are a choir of women and a percussion ensemble that
includes drums, pots, and usually some piece of metal that is tapped with sticks. Plastic jerrycans may be substituted for drums when the latter are not available (as in most forest camps). Boyobi is a versatile music form. A casual visitor to a baAka camp who wants to see a dance will most likely be treated to a performance of boyobi songs. Boyobi is usually what the baAka sing when they are compelled by the local authorities to perform for visiting dignitaries like government
ministers. Boyobi is a popular dance form for entertainment (a boyobi for entertainment will usually have more than its normal share of male singers). In such circumstances the singers (women and men) will usually end up dancing in a circle. When boyobi is performed for the net hunt, usually on the night before the hunt, the purpose is to obtain a kind of blessing from forest spirits known as the bobé. Without it, the hunt will probably not be very successful, and hunters may be injured. In a boyobi for food (that is, to promote the following day’s hunt), many of the men are nowhere to be seen. They are off in the forest preparing by means of certain rituals to transform into these unpredictable and energetic spirits. In boyobi the choir of women usually remains sitting on the ground in one or two groups based on family affiliation. They sing boyobi songs which serve to call the bobé into camp. Once in camp the bobé dance to the singing, continually demanding more.
The women oblige for a while but eventually they will begin to pester the bobé for their blessing. Once this blessing is obtained the bobé will return to the forest to a final song or two by the women.
The appearance of the bobé differs according to circumstances. Normally nocturnal visitors, the bobé appear in roadside villages and in forest camps on moonlit nights in a variety of bushy forms, or naked and pale-skinned with conical leaf hats, or wrapped in tree bark like a tree trunk. On moonless nights in forest camps, where the darkness is so profound one is in effect blind, the bobé come in the guise of luminous beings and creatures. Their luminosity comes from the use of a bioluminescent mold. Flecks of this mold litter the forest floor like stardust, but the source of the bars and strips of bioluminescent material used by the bobé remains unknown to me. The repertoire
of boyobi songs is vast, with new songs being added all the time. Sometimes a woman dreams a new song; sometimes an event will inspire a new song. No topic is too trivial or unimportant for the baAka to make up a song about it. But the words of a song are themselves really of secondary significance. Sometimes other words will be substituted, and most of the time during a performance the words themselves, once used to launch the song, fall away and are replaced by vowel sounds. The three selections presented here come from a boyobi I recorded in 1986 at Kenyé. It was my first encounter with the bobé. They came in the guise of bushes and tree trunks. Back then the hunting was still good in the nearby forest next to the road and the baAka went net hunting regularly. (Nowadays, due to uncontrolled illegal hunting with shotguns and wire snares by the swollen
population of boomtown Bayanga, wildlife near the road is far less abundant, and net hunting is scarcely worth the effort except when carried out from hunting camps deeper in the forest). This boyobi continued intermittently over the next two weeks.
In this track 8 one of the bobé has arrived in camp during a previous song and begins a dialogue with the women. “Why have you called me?” the bobé asks. We called you because of meat, the women
reply. The dialogue extends to other bobé in the distance, whose high falsetto voices can be heard as they cry out in reply to the bobé already in camp.