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Ituri Rainforest
The Ituri Rainforest is a rainforest located in the Ituri Province of northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The forest's name derives from the nearby Ituri River which flows through the rainforest, connecting firstly to the Aruwimi River and finally into the Congo. Geography The Ituri Rainforest is about in area, and is located between 0° and 3°N and 27° and 30° E. Elevation in the Ituri ranges from about . The climate is warm and humid, as exemplified by the nearby city of Bunia, which however is at a slightly higher elevation. About one-fifth of the rainforest is made up of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a World Heritage Site. It is also the home of the Mbuti pygmies, one of the hunter-gatherer peoples living in equatorial rainforests characterised by their short height (below , on average). They have been the subject of research by a variety of outsiders, including Patrick and Anne Eisner Putnam, who lived on the banks of the at the edge of the Ituri. They were a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ituri Interim Administration
The Ituri Interim Administration is an interim body that administers the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was established in 2003 by the Ituri Pacification Commission and supported by the UN mission in the DRC. History Ituri District was created by an ''arrêté royal'' of 28 March 1912, which divided the Belgian Congo into 22 districts. Ituri, as Kibali-Ituri, was a province of the DRC from 1962 to 1966. Prior to the adoption of the 2006 Constitution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the legal status of Ituri was a topic of some dispute. From the beginning of the Second Congo War in 1998, it was held by soldiers of the Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF) and the Ugandan-backed Movement for Liberation faction of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD-ML). In June 1999, the commander of UPDF forces in the DRC, Brig. Gen. James Kazini, ignored the protests of RCD-ML leaders and re-created the province of Kibali-Ituri out of the eastern section ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World Heritage Site
A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, scientific or other form of significance. The sites are judged to contain " cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity". To be selected, a World Heritage Site must be a somehow unique landmark which is geographically and historically identifiable and has special cultural or physical significance. For example, World Heritage Sites might be ancient ruins or historical structures, buildings, cities, deserts, forests, islands, lakes, monuments, mountains, or wilderness areas. A World Heritage Site may signify a remarkable accomplishment of humanity, and serve as evidence of our intellectual history on the planet, or it might be a place of great natural beauty. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tropical And Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forests
Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (TSMF), also known as tropical moist forest, is a subtropical and tropical forest habitat type defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Description TSMF is generally found in large, discontinuous patches centered on the equatorial belt and between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, TSMF are characterized by low variability in annual temperature and high levels of rainfall of more than annually. Forest composition is dominated by evergreen and semi-deciduous tree species. These trees number in the thousands and contribute to the highest levels of species diversity in any terrestrial major habitat type. In general, biodiversity is highest in the forest canopy. The canopy can be divided into five layers: overstory canopy with emergent crowns, a medium layer of canopy, lower canopy, shrub level, and finally understory. These forests are home to more species than any other terrestrial ecosystem: Half of the world's sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geography Of The Democratic Republic Of The Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the largest country of sub-Saharan Africa, occupying some . Most of the country lies within the vast hollow of the Congo River basin. The vast, low-lying central area is a plateau-shaped basin sloping toward the west, covered by tropical rainforest and criss-crossed by rivers. The forest center is surrounded by mountainous terraces in the west, plateaus merging into savannas in the south and southwest. Dense grasslands extend beyond the Congo River in the north. High mountains of the Ruwenzori Range (some above ) are found on the eastern borders with Rwanda and Uganda (see Albertine Rift montane forests for a description of this area). Geographic regions Several major geographic regions may be defined in terms of terrain and patterns of natural vegetation, namely the central Congo Basin, the uplands north and south of the basin, and the eastern highlands. The country's core region is the central Congo Basin. Having an average elevat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emin Pasha Relief Expedition
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1886 to 1889 was one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century, ostensibly to the relief of Emin Pasha, General Charles Gordon's besieged governor of Equatoria, threatened by Mahdist forces. The expedition was led by Henry Morton Stanley and came to be both celebrated for its ambition in crossing "darkest Africa", and notorious for the deaths of so many of its members and the disease unwittingly left in its wake. Anxiety about Equatoria The Mahdists captured Khartoum in 1885 and Egyptian administration of the Sudan collapsed. The extreme southern province Equatoria was nearly cut off from the outside world, located as it was on the upper reaches of the Nile near Lake Albert. Emin Pasha was an Ottoman doctor and naturalist who had been appointed Governor of Equatoria. He was able to send and receive letters via Buganda and Zanzibar and had been informed in February 1886 that the Egyptian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Morton Stanley
Sir Henry Morton Stanley (born John Rowlands; 28 January 1841 – 10 May 1904) was a Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa Central Africa is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries according to different definitions. Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo ... and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone, whom he later claimed to have greeted with the now-famous line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?". Besides his discovery of Livingstone, he is mainly known for his search for the sources of the Nile and Congo River, Congo rivers, the work he undertook as an agent of Leopold II of the Belgians, King Leopold II of the Belgians which enabled the occupation of the Congo (area), Congo Basin region, and his command of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Forest People
''The Forest People'' (1961) is Colin Turnbull's ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of the Uturi Forest in then-Belgian Congo. In this book, the British-American anthropologist detailed his three years spent with the community in the late 1950s. The style is informal and accessible. Turnbull contrasts his forest-living subjects' lifestyle with that of nearby town-dwelling Africans and evaluates the interactions of the two groups. The editor for the book was Michael Korda who attended Oxford University with Turnbull. ''The Forest People'' was the version for a general readership of Turnbull's academic thesis, which was published in an expanded, more technical form by Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ... in London as ''Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colin Turnbull
Colin Macmillan Turnbull (November 23, 1924 – July 28, 1994) was a British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books '' The Forest People'' (on the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire) and '' The Mountain People'' (on the Ik people of Uganda), and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology. Early life Turnbull was born in London and educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied politics and philosophy. During World War II he was in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve after which he was awarded a two-year grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, from which he graduated with a master's degree in Indian Religion and Philosophy. Career In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, Turnbull traveled to the Belgian Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) with Newton Beal, a schoolteacher from Ohio he met in India. Turnbull and Beal first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anne Eisner Putnam
Anne Eisner Putnam (1911–1967) was an abstract and landscape painter, watercolorist, and collector of African art, originally from New York where she also died. She became a writer, best known for her book ''Madami: My Eight Years of Adventure with the Congo Pygmies''. This was an account of her time and experiences in the Belgian Congo. She and her husband, Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (1904-1953) met in the USA in 1945 and lived together on Martha's Vineyard and in New York City. They later moved to Africa and later married on July 28, 1948 in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), in the Belgian Congo, what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her husband was a Harvard graduate and student of anthropology who, beginning in the 1930s, established what became known as Camp Putnam along the Epulu River in the Belgian Congo. Camp Putnam was on the edge of the Ituri rainforest of the Belgian Congo, near the home of the pygmies. They ran Camp Putnam for paying tourists, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pygmy
In anthropology, pygmy peoples are ethnic groups whose average height is unusually short. The term pygmyism is used to describe the phenotype of endemic short stature (as opposed to disproportionate dwarfism occurring in isolated cases in a population) for populations in which adult men are on average less than tall. The term is primarily associated with the African Pygmies, the hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin (comprising the Bambenga, Bambuti and Batwa). The terms "Asiatic Pygmies" and "Oceanian pygmies" have been used to describe the Negrito populations of Southeast Asia and Australo-Melanesian peoples of short stature. The Taron people of Myanmar are an exceptional case of a "pygmy" population of East Asian phenotype. Etymology The term ''pygmy'', as used to refer to diminutive people, derives from Greek πυγμαῖος ''pygmaios'' via Latin ''Pygmaei'' (sing. ''Pygmaeus''), derived from πυγμή – meaning a short forearm cubit, or a measure of length corres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mbuti
The Mbuti people, or Bambuti, are one of several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo region of Africa. Their languages are Central Sudanic languages and Bantu languages. Subgroups Bambuti are pygmy hunter-gatherers, and are one of the oldest indigenous people of the Congo region of Africa. The Bambuti are composed of bands which are relatively small in size, ranging from 15 to 60 people. The Bambuti population totals about 30,000 to 40,000 people. Many Batwa in various parts of the DRC call themselves Bambuti as well. There are three distinct subgroups: * The Sua (also Kango, or Mbuti), who speak a dialect (or perhaps two) of the language of a neighboring Bantu people, Bila. They are located centrally and are eponymous of the larger group. * The Efé, who speak the language of the neighboring Central Sudanic Lese. * The Asua, speakers of the Mangbetu (Central Sudanic) Asua language. Environment The Mbuti population live in the Ituri, a tropical rainforest covering a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Okapi Wildlife Reserve
The Okapi Wildlife Reserve is a wildlife reserve in the Ituri Forest in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near the borders with South Sudan and Uganda. At approximately 14,000 km2, it covers approximately one-fifth of the area of the forest. In 1996, the Okapi Wildlife Reserve was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, due to its large population of endangered okapis and its high overall biodiversity. Ecology The wildlife reserve makes up roughly one-fifth of the total area of the Ituri Forest. As a Pleistocene refugium, the forest contains dense evergreen and semi-evergreen forests, dominated by ''Mbau'' trees (''Gilbertiodendron dewevrei''). The Nepoko, Ituri, and Epulu rivers flow through the reserve, surrounded by swamp forests. The granite outcrops in the north of the reserve protect critical habitat for '' Encephalartos ituriensis'', a threatened species of cycad. Because of its relatively stable climate during the repeated ice ages, the wild ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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