The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies

In 1927, Harvard-educated anthropologist Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam joined a university-sponsored expedition to Africa. He soon left the group to wander alone in the Ituri Forest of the Belgian Congo. Putnam settled in a Bambuti pygmy village and remained among the pygmies for the rest of his life. Anthropologist Joan Mark (A Stranger in Her Native Land: Alice Fletcher and the American Indians) tells the engrossing story of a true eccentric who fled his family of prominent Bostonians to set up a little kingdom in colonial Africa. He built a camp--a tropical dude ranch--on the Epulu River, and in the 1930s, visitors came from all over the world to see pygmies and okapis. Emily Hahn wrote a book about it (Congo Solo). Much later, Colin Turnbull stayed at Camp Putnam to study the pygmies and to write The Forest People. Sadly, at the end of an extraordinary life, driven mad by illness, Putnam tried to destroy his kingdom. While not a success as an anthropologist, he was a bridge between two cultures. Photos. (Mar.)