He is the father of Jean-Pierre Hallet, an internationally recognized human-rights activist (on the behalf of the Efe pygmies in the Ituri forest of the Congo) who also lived in the Congo and Rwanda and was also an avid art collector.
Stories include encounters with mountain gorillas, a breakdown in the Sahara, hunting with Pygmies, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, exploring the Serengeti, the frustration of border extortion, hopping a “gun-run” thru Mozambique's civil war, rafting the Zambezi rapids and arriving in South Africa as Soweto (circa 1990) erupts into violence.
It was the ancestral haplogroup of not only modern Pygmies like the Baka and Mbuti, but also Hadzabe from Tanzania, who often have been considered, in large part because of some typological features of their language, to be a remnant of Khoisan people in East Africa.
Jean-Pierre Hallet (1927 – 1 January 2004) was a Belgian (born in Africa) ethnologist, naturalist, and humanitarian best known for his extensive work with the Efé (Bambuti) pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest.
He "combined recordings of Bayakan music with sounds of their surrounding environment into a two-CD/book package entitled Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the BaBenzl Pygmies (Ellipsis Arts)."
In 2006, Wiegratz starred in the eponymous film version of Cornelia Funke's Die Wilden Hühner as a member of an all-boys group called the Pygmies, and returned for a sequel the following year.
In the Republic of Congo, where Pygmies make up 2% of the population, many Pygmies live as slaves to Bantu masters.