Pygmies, masters of the forest, tackle tough lifestyle changes
Just back from a hunt with a choice selection of plants, Ebona feels at home in the endless forest where many Gabonese fear to tread.
“Townsfolk paid me to find these leaves,” the Pygmy says, setting the heap down outside his wooden hut, 500m from the rest of Doumassi village in north Gabon. Ebona’s people, the Baka, are held in folklore to be Africa’s oldest inhabitants, living today in forests stretching from Gabon and Cameroon inland to the Congos and the Central African Republic. The dense woods where national borders cease to exist hold no mysteries for the Baka.
“This is our first home,” says another villager, who introduces himself as Jean, declining, like the other Pygmies, to divulge their Baka names used only within the community. “We sleep in it, we hunt in it, we live in it,” he adds. The ethnic Baka Pygmies often have a difficult relationship with their Fang neighbours, the main ethnic group in the area, who tend to treat them like children, leading to complaints by the Baka.
They also struggle to have a legal existence in Gabon, as they find themselves without identity cards, which complicates their lives. “I am Gabonese, 100 per cent, but I don’t have an identity card. They promised us that we would have it, but we're still waiting...,” says villager Christian, who, like other Baka, wants the same rights as other Gabonese citizens.
“How will I send my children to school?” he asks, in frustration. “How will I vote? How do I get medical care?”
Dilemma
Just weeks before parliamentary elections, the first round of which is planned for October 6 with a second round later next month, electoral officials have made little effort to put Baka adults on the voters’ roll.
But many Baka steer well clear of national politics. They say they just want to ‘survive’. Jean-Baptiste Ondzagha-Ewak works for the Association for Family Mediation (AMF) that seeks to bring mutual understanding to the communities. The NGO records Baka births to make them official so the children can go to school and receive health care. For lack of access to health facilities, villager Norbert saw five of his seven children die prematurely, but he joyfully announces that his wife is pregnant once more. For a long time, the ways of ‘city people’ had a limited impact on communities of hunter-gatherers. The Baka are still reluctant to go where ‘cars make a noise’, except to buy goods such as ‘tobacco, soap, alcohol and petrol’, according to Christian.
But the need for money has raised problems for Pygmies whose profound knowledge of the forest is their sole source of income. Seen as one way to help their children go to school, the Baka hire themselves out like ‘integrated GPS’ devices, ready to guide outsiders hundreds of kilometres into the wild to find game. Despite their poor relations, the Baka are nevertheless prepared to hunt for their Fang neighbours, too.
While they tend to treat the Pygmies as ‘subhuman’ purely on account of their short stature, the Fang acknowledge that there is no equal to a Baka hunter’s skills. “At close range, they never miss their shot,” said Rigobert, a Fang who sent two Baka off to hunt for him. He gave them a dozen shells and an ancient gun and they returned in the morning with three prey.