Baatsi

Baatsi is the first man of the Efe (Bambuti) creation narrative recorded by Paul Schebesta in the 1930s. The creator — named Arebati in the Efe accounts, though some retellings give the equated names Tore or Epilipili — kneaded him from clay with the help of the Moon, wrapped the clay in skin, poured blood into it, and whispered the one law into his ear: beget children, and let them eat of every tree but the tahu tree. Baatsi obeyed, fathered many children, and when he had grown old and weary of life retired to heaven; he is therefore recorded here as the departed first ancestor rather than as a god. His descendants kept his rule until a pregnant woman persuaded her husband to pick the forbidden fruit at night; the Moon saw it and told the creator, who sent death among humankind. Harold Scheub's dictionary preserves a variant in which the name Baatsi attaches to the creator himself, who 'became old and went to heaven', and a further tale in which Baatsi lowers a long creeping vine to draw the first man up to heaven — a sign of how fluidly the Efe names move between the maker and the made in the recorded tradition.

Parentage

• Arebati

Domains

• primordial humanity

Powers

• to beget the first generations of humankind
• to go up to heaven when grown old and weary of life

Sources

• Paul Schebesta, Revisiting My Pygmy Hosts, trans. Gerald Griffin (London: Hutchinson, 1936), the Efe creation narrative
• Harold Scheub, A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. 'Baatsi'
• Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1938–1950), the Efe creation of Baatsi and the tahu tree
• Harold Scheub, A Dictionary of African Mythology (Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. 'Baatsi'