Living in harmony with the forest

THE Congo Basin's hunter-gatherer people have the secret to living well with the forest. While doing fieldwork in 2020, I remember walking with indigenous elders Ferdinand Mbita and Félix Mangombe up the small, winding path into their forest in Cameroon, jumping over highways of vicious black ants, shadowed by grand trees. We almost always encountered monkeys chattering when venturing down this path. Once we came across the prints of a gorilla.

- SIMON HOYTE

This path, near the Dja River in the south region of Cameroon, lay next to the small village of Bemba. The village folk, Baka hunter-gatherers, used the path regularly to find forest medicines, work on their farm plots, or to embark on fishing or hunting trips.

When I returned to Cameroon to stay again in the village a year later, the path was unrecognisable. The dense vegetation had been stripped away, trees cut and rivers restricted. The path was now an industrial road, developed by a logging company with permission from the government to chop down trees in a large area behind the village for a year.

Inspecting the damage, Mbita and Mangombe noticed how trees they used for medicine and the places where they'd found honey had been transformed into scarred, muddy earth. We used to see animal tracks here; now the only tracks we could see were those of logging trucks.

"The Baka are dead," Mbita said, taking in what he was seeing.

This story is not unique. At least 40% of Cameroon's forests have been allocated for logging. Add to that concessions also granted to mining companies, sport hunting companies and big agro-industry. They have cut down forests and set up rubber and palm oil plantations. The social and environmental effects have been devastating.