ABSTRACT
In 1957, on the way to my first fieldwork, I arrived in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, in what was then the Belgian Congo and is now Zaire. I sought out anyone who could tell me anything about the Suku, the people I was going to study. I was told that they would be pleasant and easy to live with, but that the men were singularly lethargic and lazy, and spent most of their time doing nothing. To a young anthropologist eager to plunge into an uncharted culture, the picture was not unattractive. As to the claims about Suku laziness, I dismissed them as an example of the sort of colonialist obtuseness that anthropology was meant to overcome.
