Pygmies Upgraded from zoo

Congo authorities say a troupe of pygmy musicians made to live at the zoo while performing at a music festival in the country's capital have been given accommodation in a local school.

The plight of the 22 pygmies, whose tents became an attraction for curious Brazzaville zoo visitors, provoked outrage among civil rights groups in Congo.

All the other musicians playing at the July 8-14 pan-African FESPAM festival were provided with hotel rooms.

The pygmies, from Congo's north-east Likouala forest region, had been gathering wood daily in the zoo to prepare fires to cook their food, often with tourists snapping photos of them.

The Congo Government says it ordered the relocation of the pygmies late on Friday.

Organisers of the music festival, which ends later today, told Radio France International that as pygmies normally live in the forest, they had hoped to recreate their natural habitat by housing them in the zoo, which has wooded areas.

Pygmies frequently complain of being marginalised and treated with disrespect by governments in central Africa, while their jungle habitat is degraded and destroyed.

The term pygmy, introduced by European explorers, refers to various ethnic groups of central Africa whose adults are shorter than 1.5 metres.

They use the term themselves but many of them regard it as derogatory and point out there is scant evidence of linguistic or ethnic ties between the different groups.