Exploiting the Bambuti

The Bambuti people were the original inhabitants of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the oldest national park in Africa. Forbidden from living or hunting inside, the Bambuti now face repression from both park rangers and armed groups. Without access to the forest and to their ancestral lands to hunt and gather, the Bambuti have trouble surviving. Many depend on daily contractual labour from surrounding communities. Muhima Sebazungu, one of Mudja’s community leaders, said that they are starting to forget their traditional knowledge of plants and medicines.

One solution, Patrick Kipalu, of the NGO Forest People’s Program said, would be to recruit them as rangers in protecting the park but the ICCN’s (DRC’sNational Park Authority)  Jean Claude Kyungu said that there are “specific criteria” for recruiting rangers, which the Bambuti do not fulfill, including having a diploma from the state. Norbert Mushenzi, the ICCN’s deputy director of the Virunga National Park, said that the Bambuti have an “intellectual deficiency” and one way for them to benefit from the park is to “sell their cultural products and dances to tourists.” Although official policy under Mobutu’s regime aimed to ‘emancipate’ indigenous people and to consider them no different from other communities, in practice this meant promoting a sedentary lifestyle and agriculture.

A report by Survival International states that forcing “development” on indigenous people has “disastrous” impacts and that the most important factor to their well-being is whether or not their land rights are respected. According to Kipalu, the living conditions of the Bambuti are far worse now than when they were in the forest. “Being landless and living on the lands of other people means that they end up being treated almost as slaves,” he said.

The militarization of conservation

The Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo dates back to 1925 when it was first created as Albert National Park by King Albert of Belgium. The oldest national park in Africa, it was later expanded to include over seven thousand square kilometres of land. Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, it is now managed by a private-public partnership between the National Park Authority of the DRC (ICCN) and the EU-funded Virunga Foundation, and is home to about a quarter of the world’s mountain gorillas. Congolese farmers living around the Virunga said that the park’s colonial history creates the impression that it was “created by the Mzungu (white man), for the Mzungu.”

After independence, other national parks were established, including Maiko National Park, and Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu.  According to the Global Forest Coalition, the creation of national parks led to the eviction of thousands of indigenous people who neither gave their consent nor received compensation for their loss of land. It was, they state, “in violation of international law” and the country’s 1977 law on expropriation for public purposes.

Armed paramilitary rangers from the Virunga National Park are tasked with protecting the park from poachers and trespassers. In Congolese law, human habitation and hunting within the park is forbidden, including for the Bambuti, its original inhabitants. Aggressive conservation activities are part of a widespread trend toward what some researchers call the militarization of conservation, an approach toward protecting nature that is repressive and possibly counterproductive.

“The old school of conservation in the colonial period was ‘people out of the forest’ and ‘it’s a protected area without anyone inside,'" said Patrick Kipalu, the DRC Country Manager for the Forest People’s Program, “When the colonialists left the country, the people who managed those protected areas were trained by the Belgians that conservation should be done without people, in the old-school way. They have kept the same strategies, though the ICCN (National Park Authority of the DRC) is thinking of a conservation strategy which is supposed to include and involve communities.”

The Bambuti living in Mudja said that at times they defy these laws to venture into the park for collecting wood, hunting small animals and gathering non-timber products, but recently it has become more difficult.

“A pygmy cannot live without the park. Before, they could enter secretly,” said Felix Maroy, an agronomist and livestock farmer who works with Bambuti communities. “Since January 2015, the guards are always patrolling the area. And there are other armed groups too, like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).”

 A 2004 report by a consultant to the World Bank, Dr Kai Schmidt-Soltau, found that the ICCN, along with WWF, claimed to have resettled 35,000 people from an area south-east of Lake Edward through a voluntary process, but that in fact the resettlement was carried out “at gun-point.”

Pygmies Exploited

Survival International was founded in 1969 and is the only international organization supporting tribal peoples worldwide.

Tribal children in the African rainforests have been paid in glue to sniff, and alcohol, in return for menial work, a new Survival International report has revealed. 

The report found instances of market traders in the Republic of Congo plying children from the Bayaka tribe with glue in 2013, in exchange for cleaning out latrines.

In Cameroon Baka tribespeople, illegally evicted from their forest homes, are often paid in five glasses of moonshine in exchange for half a day’s manual labor. A combination of poverty and depression caused by the theft of their land forces many to turn to heavy drinking as an escape from their troubles.

Across much of central Africa, dispossessed hunter-gatherer peoples are frequently paid in addictive substances, most commonly home-brewed alcohol.

Atono, a Baka man forcibly evicted from his land said: “Now we are falling ill because of the change in our diet. Our skin doesn’t like the sun and life in the village. In the forest we are healthy and put on weight. Now no one has any muscles, everyone looks ill. We are forced to drink to forget our troubles.” 

Problems of addiction and substance abuse are common among tribes who have had their land stolen from them. In Canada, alienated Innu children whose people were forced to abandon their nomadic way of life turn to sniffing gas from plastic bags. Likewise in Australia, rates of alcoholism among Aboriginal people are higher than among the wider population.

Boniface Alimankinni, an Aboriginal Tiwi Islander, said: “We had no self-respect and nothing to give our sons except violence and alcoholism. Our children are stuck between a past they don’t understand and a future which offers them nothing.”

Drug addiction and alcoholism are not inevitable for tribal peoples. They are the result of failed policy, imposing “progress” and “development” on peoples who are otherwise largely self-sufficient. Industrialized societies subject tribal peoples to genocidal violence, slavery and racism so they can steal their lands, resources and labor. These crimes are often carried out in the name of progress and development.

The Problems of the the Pygmies

 Essomba Dominique, a Baka man from Mindourou in Cameroon’s East Region, sits dulled-eyed in front of his hut, known in the Baka language as the ‘mongoulou’. A wood-transporting truck rumbles by, raising billows of dust in its wake. As he watches his seven children play in the courtyard, Essomba’s mind seems consumed with questions about their future.
“These passing trucks mean these children are going to suffer,” he tells IPS. In the distance, sawmills are busy, and bulldozers as well, opening up access roads to logging and mining sites.“Just look at the way they are destroying this forest,” Essomba says.

For the Baka, the forest represents the beginning and the end of life.

The chief of the Baka village of Mayos in the country’s East Region, Clement Nzito, tells IPS that “the forest is our pharmacy, our food market, our source of oxygen and the cradle of the one who guides us all, the Supreme God which we call ‘Jengi’.”

Samuel Nnah Ndobe, who directs Pygmy programmes for the Yaoundé-based non-governmental Centre for Environment and Development (CED), recalls that in 1994, Cameroon passed forestry laws “that had the effect of forcing the Baka from primary forests, and these were turned into national parks where they are not allowed to hunt.”

The Baka are allowed to hunt in secondary forests, “but that precisely is where timber companies are also allowed free rein to log, and that’s destroying the forests,” Ndobe says. He regrets that the fauna-rich parts of the forests where the Baka used to hunt game have now been protected and guarded. “Logging areas are also guarded, and the Pygmies are now found on the fringes,” he says.

Xenophobic tendencies among Bantu neighbours also keep the Bakas on the fringes.

“Bantu consider Baka as sub-human. They claim Baka kids stink in class,” Alexis Tadokem, head teacher of a government primary school in Ntam Carrefour, a village on Cameroon’s borders with Congo Brazzaville, tells IPS. “Baka are used as servants to Bantu. They are tortured and sometimes killed in the forest by the Bantu,” he says.

“When our children go to school, they are beaten by the Bantus,” confirms Yana Nicolas, a Baka man in Moloundou.

Forestry is for profits not people

Not only has the World Bank been ignoring the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo forests - the Pygmies - in its promotion of the logging industry , the World Bank has failed to demonstrate any benefits for the local inhabitants . Who says so ? The World Banks itself says so .

"Unless strong measures are taken to ensure that the benefits reach local people, the concession system will not make the expected contribution to poverty alleviation of the local people," it noted.

A report, compiled by the bank's inspection panel, followed complaints by indigenous pygmy groups that the reforms had disregarded the rights of millions of forest-dependent people and ignored the existence of between 250,000 and 600,000 pygmies whose lives depend on the forests. According to the World Bank report, the benefits from the industrial harvesting of trees, at the core of the policy and administrative reform, are not going to the people living in and around the forest. Promised benefits to the communities from the concessions such as schools, clinics and other facilities, have also not materialised. The bank's forest projects promoted the interests of asset-stripping logging companies over indigenous groups who are dependent on the forests .

"Bank forest economists admit that they cannot point to a single example of industrial logging in the tropics alleviating poverty or delivering durable economic benefit..." said Patrick Alley, Global Witness Director