The New Song of the Bayaka

Deep in the tropical rainforest of southwestern Central African Republic (CAR), a small group of hunter-gatherers is discovering the Word of God through media.

“They can realize that there is a God who loves them,” said Jean-Anath Ndoukou about the Bayaka Pygmy people, “and they can hear the Word of God in their own language.”

Ndoukou, Central Africa ministry coordinator for TWR, was talking about a team led by Pastor Clarence Mbakossi, TWR’s partner in CAR. The team distributed 150 radio players and 150 SD cards to four villages in a remote region bordering the Republic of Congo, whose capital is Brazzaville. The distribution was in late May 2025. 

The Bayaka – in some places referred to as the Baaka – are known for their small stature, their adaptation to the tropical forest and their complex polyphonic singing – meaning a blending of more than one melody at once.

“In a single song, a multitude of voices weave an extremely dense musical texture,” said Louis Sarno, an American ethnomusicologist so fascinated by the songs that he moved in among the Bayaka in 1985.* “When the music is beautiful, it sometimes moves me to tears.”

The hope of Ndoukou and others is that the Bayaka will sing their beautiful songs to Jesus.

The mission demographics experts at Joshua Project estimate there are 24,000 Bayaka people in all, and about 40% are evangelical Christians. The largest group, however, is still described as “ethnic religions.”

“Though the Bayaka Pygmies today have a strong Christian foundation, they also have a pantheistic view of the world,” the Joshua Project website explains. “Traditionally, they felt linked to the forest, which itself was their god.”

But the radio players the Bayaka received in May are loaded with sound Christian teaching in their own Yaka language: the audio version of the JESUS movie, a telling of the story of the birth of Christ and the entire Gospel of Luke. And crucially, for a culture that so greatly values music and dance, it includes hymns in their own language recorded in a way that fits their musical culture.

Ndoukou stressed the joy with which the Bayaka people received the Word of God in their own language. At least one Bayaka leader affirmed that.

“It is the first time that a Christian organization has made such a gesture to us,” said Pierre Djatela, chief of the Bayaka Pygmies in the village of Ngoundou. “People [previously came] to us with clothes and food, not with the Word of God in our mother tongue. … Every evening, around the fire and with family, they go to listen to God speak to them. I thank the Lord for the good he has done by putting in the hearts of these foreigners his love, and who have thought of us, especially for us who are living in the bush.”

Pygmy peoples often are neglected, Ndoukou said. But this is not the first time he and TWR have reached out to the Pygmies and others of the region. In 2021, it was to the north of Gabon, where today there is an established church. In 2022, it was to the Baka people of Cameroon. In 2023 and ‘24, it was in the war-torn Kivu region of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Another distribution is in the planning stage for next year to speakers of the Nzebi language, in the south of Gabon.

“I’m just happy because people are changing their lives through the distribution of radios among them,” Ndoukou said.

Obed Legoupou, a missionary, is ecstatic that these resources are now available to the Bayaka.

“Most of the missions that go to these people do not bring the gospel in a language they understand,” Legoupou said. “This makes their conversion difficult. Today, I believe that these abandoned and despised people need the gospel. May God bless the bearers of the vision.”

* Source: The Baaka Opera, from the collection Living Cultures, directed by Jean Queyrat, produced by ZED & TF1 Group and distributed by SLICE. 

Images: Left, the team who distributed materials to the Bayaka people