Pressures from their taller and more dominant neighbors, the Bantu, have also limited the Baka people’s ability to live their traditional lifestyle.

[7] The oldest reference to "pygmies" dates back to 2276 BCE when Pharaoh Pepi II described seeing a "dancing dwarf of the god from the land of spirits",[8] in a letter to a slave trade expedition leader.

[9] In the Iliad, Homer described the "pygmies" as dark-skinned men who had to engage in annual warfare against cranes on the banks of the world-encircling river Oceanus.

Contemporary Greek sources describe them as being as tall as a "pygme", meaning that they measured the length of an elbow to a knuckle, or about one and a half feet long.

[10] About three centuries later in 500 BCE, the Greek Herodotus reported that an explorer had seen, while travelling along the West African Coast, "dwarfish people, who used clothing made from the palm tree".

[9] In 1995, Joan Mark wrote The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies, an interpretive biography of Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam, the anthropologist who spent 25 years living among the Bambuti people in Zaire.

Mark writes that Aristotle, in 340 BCE was the first to relate, in his Historia Animalium, the small men Homer accounted for in the Iliad, to those seen previously on the African coast.

He goes on to explain that, due to the chasm that existed between Europe and Africa after the collapse of the Roman Empire, most Europeans living in the 18th century believed "pygmies" to be creatures of myth.

[9] In 1890, the Welsh journalist Henry Stanley gave, according to anthropologist Paul Raffaele, the first modern account of the existence of such people.

According to the Times, black clergyman and superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, Reverend James H. Gordon, deemed the exhibit to be racist and demeaning.

This non-toxic chemical deprives fish of oxygen, making them float to the surface and easily collected by Baka men.

During the dry season, it is common for the Baka to move and set camp within the forest in order to facilitate fishing and overall nutritional gathering.

Men hunt from dawn until dusk and the women gather two types of fruits: the "mabe" and the "peke", which are used for the provision of juice and nuts.

[4] Journalist Paul Raffaele describes his experience with Jengi: "Emerging from the shadows were half a dozen Baka men accompanying a creature swathed from top to bottom in strips of russet-hued raffia.

Each tribe, having witnessed the death of one of their own, is required to pray to Jengi and dance around the debris covered corpse for an entire night.

After a long night of dancing, the villagers depart from where they were stationed, leaving the corpse behind, and set out to move somewhere else in order to flee the curse.

Because the Baka are an ethnic minority in both Cameroon and Gabon, they are often either excluded from their respective school systems or forced to forgo their culture and assimilate to a Bantu-normative way of life.

The Baka also tend to feel uncomfortable in these public schools, as their physical difference from Bantu schoolmates makes them a target for discrimination and bullying.

These deforestation projects can be extremely detrimental to the Baka, as they destroy the environment on which they so heavily rely for subsistence, as well as for their economic standing in face of Bantu farming communities.

[13] The Catholic missionary group Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes (FEC) set up an initiative to support Baka youth entering the formal education system through the creation of the Mapala School in 1992.

Parents were also able to pay lower tuition 500 FC (or about one US dollar), and their children were able to learn skills relevant to the Baka lifestyle during class time.

Project leaders set up measures in order to attain their goal of conserving the richness, in species and in foliage, of the tropical forest.

These leaders attempted to get the Baka on board with the project as these new regulations would not only help them preserve their natural habitat but would also affect their living tendencies.