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Jean-Pierre Hallet would become a heroic figure. His incredible life was about to unfold and his reputation as "father to the pygmies" and the "Abe Lincoln of the Congo" was just beginning. He was six feet five inches tall and 225 pounds.

He was now an agronomist and a sociologist. He returned in 1948 with a Sorbonne education. He was already the height of an average adult pygmy in the forest. At six, he left his playmates to go to school in Europe. Jean-Pierre played with pygmy children, north of Lake Kivu, in the northeastern part of the former Belgian Congo. He founded The Pygmy Fund in 1974, the only organization devoted to the preservation of the lives and culture of surviving forest dwelling Efe pygmies.īorn in 1927 in Louvain, Belgium, Jean-Pierre Hallet was the son of Andre Hallet, the famed Belgian post-impressionist painter, who lived in the Congo. He lived with the Bambuti pygmies for eighteen months and learned six aboriginal languages and seventeen dialects.His extensive knowledge of the pygmy language resulted in a dictionary of more than 18,000 terms, which remains unpublished. In 1957 he was successful in obtaining, from the colonial government, official acceptance of his "Declaration of Emancipation" for the endangered pygmies. In 1955 he lost his right hand, in an explosion, while dynamiting Lake Tanganyika for fish to feed a Pygmy tribe. He Saves Little People A Giant Comes To The Rescue He's The Biggest Of The Little People of Zaire Humanitarian Sows Seeds of Hope and Pygmies Have A Friend in Hallet.Ī friend, indeed. About his mission to save the vanishing Bambuti pygmy tribe in the Ituri Forest in Northeast Zaire, the newspapers and magazines of three decades reported it in various ways. His feats were legendary-what one expects of fiction and adventure movies. In 1957 he was successful in obtaining, from the colonial government, official acceptance of his "De Jean-Pierre Hallet was a man more intimately connected to Africa than perhaps any other westerner. He Saves Little People A Giant Comes To The Rescue He's The Biggest Of The Little People of Zaire Humanitarian Sows Seeds of Hope and Pygmies Have A Friend in Hallet. Jean-Pierre Hallet was a man more intimately connected to Africa than perhaps any other westerner.