The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies Book

Joan Mark offers an interpretive biography of Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (1904–53), who spent twenty-five years living among the Bambuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in what is now Zaire. On the Epulu River he constructed Camp Putnam as a harmonious multiracial community. He modeled his camp on the “dude ranches” of the American West, taking in paying guests while running a medical clinic and occasionally offering legal aid to the local people, and assumed the role of intermediary between locals and visitors, including Colin M. Turnbull, author of the classic Forest People. Mark describes Putnam’s mercurial relations with family and with his African and American wives—and follows him to his sad and violent end. She places Patrick Putnam within the context of three different anthropological traditions and examines his contribution as an expert on pygmies.

Publishers Weekly

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.)