Louis Sarno

Louis Sarno (July 3, 1954 – April 1, 2017) was an American-Central African adventurer, recorder of folk music and author. In the mid-1980s until about 2016 he made field recordings of the music of a Bayaka (BaAka) pygmy forest people while living among them in the Central African Republic. Sarno lived in the CAR for more than 30 years, and held dual citizenship there and in the United States.

Life Louis Sarno was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey to a second-generation Italian-American family. He attended Northwestern University, where he became friends with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Sarno transferred to Rutgers, where he graduated with a degree in English. He did postgraduate work in literature at the University of Iowa for three years, but did not complete his degree. He and his then-wife, Wanda, moved to Amsterdam.

While living in Amsterdam, Sarno was introduced to Bayaka music in the 1980s, through a radio broadcast. Sarno had no biological children. He was granted CAR citizenship in 2005. In later years, Sarno expressed dissatisfaction with the book, feeling it did not accurately describe Bayaka life as he later came to know it. where it was honored with the Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. A movie based on Sarno's life called Oka! was released in 2011 (in the Aka language, oka means "listen").