In the midst of an otherwise great article on Africa’s Pygmies, we get this clunker:
Drumming propelled their worship of the much-loved Ejengi, the most powerful of the forest spirits—good and evil—known as mokoondi. One day Wasse told me that the great spirit wanted to meet me, and so I joined more than a hundred Mossapola Pygmies as they gathered soon after dusk, beating drums and chanting. Suddenly there was a hush, and all eyes turned to the jungle. Emerging from the shadows were half a dozen Pygmy men accompanying a creature swathed from top to bottom in strips of russet-hued raffia. It had no features, no limbs, no face. "It's Ejengi," said Wasse, his voice trembling.
At first I was sure it was a Pygmy camouflaged in foliage, but as Ejengi glided across the darkened clearing, the drums beat louder and faster, and as the Pygmies' chanting grew more frenzied, I began to doubt my own eyes. As the spirit began to dance, its dense cloak rippled like water over rocks. The spirit was speechless, but its wishes were communicated by attendants. "Ejengi wants to know why you've come here," shouted a squat man well short of five feet. With Bienvenu translating, I answered that I had come to meet the great spirit.
Now, it would be one thing for author Paul Raffaele, in the midst of the second graf, to say “the so-called spirit,” or else to continue to call it a creature, as he did in the first graf, but to simply transition to calling it a spirit, as he does, is journalistically and scientifically unprofessional.
And, lest anyone think this is a one-off, Raffaele talks of a second meeting with “Ejengi” three webpages later, and again uses the word “spirit.”
Reason No. 923 I won’t renew my Smithsonian subscription.
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