Global Partners | Richard Peterson, p.2

Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Practice in the Ituri

Many people came to learn about the people of the Ituri from the anthropologist Colin Turnbull through his classic The Forest People.⁷ Although Turnbull is rightfully respected for his skills as both a writer and an anthropologist, his depiction of both the Mbuti and their village farming partners is a bit simplistic. The former he tends to romanticize, while he disparages the latter as people afraid of the forest and as bumbling neophytes when it comes to forest skills. However, my own research, as well as that of others, has indicated that the Ituri's farming peoples are in no way strangers to the forest who possess little forest acumen. Like the Mbuti, they are very much forest peoples who have adapted quite well to the forest environment and hold much local ecological knowledge. It is also important to avoid the false impression that the Mbuti are somehow paragons of ecological virtue. It is neither fair nor accurate to consider the Mbuti, any more than any other people, as angelic environmental stewards.

Thus, my research in the Ituri was with both farmer/villagers and the Mbuti. With both I held detailed conversations, recording their responses to my question "What does it mean for you to live well on the land?" Of course, this question propelled our conversations into often long and involved talk of the meaning of land, of the ancestors and their ways of taking care of the land, of the different forces causing the ruin of the land, of the Western organizations acting under a different approach to how land is to be cared for and the difficulties such different approaches hold for them.

Based on this fieldwork and on the work of various Central African historians, I will first present an overview of some of the key perceptions, values, and practices Central African peoples have held, and to varying degrees continue to hold, with regard to the land and forests from which they live.

Drawing upon their cultural foundations, the various groups of Central African forest peoples have coexisted more or less harmoniously with the environment for the better part of their history. This relative balance between human needs and the needs of non-human nature (wildlife, flora, etc.) has stemmed from several factors but key have been the following practices, ideas, and values.

Diversification of the Household Economy

For most of the farmers I worked with, tilling the soil is only one of several ways of making a living from the land. In addition to farming, many also engage in trapping, hunting, fishing, and gathering various forest foods. Although the extent of specialized production for the market is increasing, historically this diversification has kept people from engaging in any one activity full time so as to undermine the environmental foundation on which their livelihoods stood.

Each of these means of livelihood was itself diversified and remains so today, consisting of a wide variety of techniques correlated to particular seasons and to particular species of plants and animals. The number of different species harvested from the forest is truly amazing. During my earlier research in the Ituri, members of one household named forty-one different items they obtained from the forest.⁸ To take gathering alone, the Aka living in the forests of Central African Republic are representative of many other forest peoples in the variety of species they routinely harvest: nine types of fruit, eight types of snails, thirteen types of termites, twenty-two types of caterpillars, two types of honey, and thirty-two different types of mushrooms.⁹

One result of such two-tiered diversification -- both in the variety of economic activities engaged in by any one household, and secondly, in the variety of species utilized by any one activity -- is a wide distribution of the weight of human impact on the natural fabric of life. If all that weight were concentrated in only a few activities, as is the case in economies of specialization, or if people sought out only a few particular species, as happened for example in North America's early fur trade, inevitably the fabric would tear. By distributing their weight across numerous points of contact, Central African peoples increased the chances that the fabric of life would be able to bear their weight without suffering too severe a rent.

Integration and Periodicity of Resource Use

Engaging in a diversity of household economic activities may simply spell increased levels of busyness and exploitation if those activities are left unintegrated. The genius in these Central African ways of making a living from the forest is their total integration into a single system of food procurement. Farming was, and in some cases still is, correlated with trapping, hunting with gathering in a manner bearing enough flexibility to dramatically decrease the risks (much greater in unintegrated or undiversified systems) of going hungry.

The complex and intricate system of correlating shifting cultivation with trapping developed by Central African forest-dwellers over hundreds of years of experiment and experience illustrates the ecological benefits of the holistic system particularly well. Not only did such trapping systems serve to control animal damage to people's crops; they also allowed farmers to obtain sources of protein close to home, thus, indirectly leaving large areas of forest further afield unexploited. Vansina¹⁰ and Koch¹¹ both document how complex these systems were. Throughout the gardening cycle, farmers would change the type of traps they used according to the type of crop being planted and harvested. For example, the planting of forest yams was correlated with setting large traps around the perimeter of the gardens to catch forest pigs, the yams' primary ravager. Smaller and larger animals might very well escape these specialized traps, just as during other periods of the gardening cycle, pigs would likely escape the traps set for monkeys and baboons. Trapping's specialization, periodicity, and complex correlation with farming contributed to the sustainability of these human-inhabited forest ecosystems.

Rotational Harvesting of Game and Fish

In addition to rotating their use of resources over time (periodicity), Central African peoples also rotated their use of the forest across space, from one area to another. The system of shifting cultivation contemporary forest peoples have inherited from their forebears continues to serve as a means of maintaining food production on poor rainforest soils. Such rotational agriculture also allows the forest to regenerate and where sufficient fallow periods are observed, keeps the forest from reverting to savanna. In fact, researchers have found that rainforest rotational agriculture has created a patchwork of primary and secondary forest habitats that can be even more productive than primary forest in both plant and animal species.¹²

The details of shifting cultivation have been written about extensively and are well known.¹³ Less well known are the rotational systems that governed hunting, fishing, and even village settlement itself. Central Africa's various groups of hunter-gatherers have perfected this rotational style of hunting, shifting their forest camps from one area to the next when yields from hunting begin to decrease, as one of them explains to me: "We will take off and go into the forest and make our camp over there. There we might stay for perhaps two weeks. Then the hunting starts to not be so good there, and it's necessary that we go on to look for another area where there is peace."

In the same way that fallow periods allow soils to regenerate, abandoning hunting grounds permits fauna to replenish an area prior to the return of the band to hunt there again another season. Of course, low population densities make such rotation possible, but they do not cause it. Hunting peoples choose to move for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is to optimize returns on their labor, an explanation of mobility favored by Western anthropologists. But many of those I worked with also indicated that they observe rotational harvesting so as to preserve animals for the future. In any case, the result again is that human impacts are more evenly distributed across the land, decreasing the chances of total degradation.

At a larger scale of organization, whole villages also shifted from one locale to another when after years of rotational use, resources of soil, game, and fish began to be too depleted or too distant. Also it was common for villages that became too populous to split. People would move to new, less congested areas resulting in a more even distribution of environmental impacts across the landscape.¹⁴

Sanctions Against Waste

Using the forest rotationally takes lots of skill, planning, and thought. To engage in such rotations pamba pamba (without purpose, in a disorderly fashion) is considered a waste and heavily discouraged. Especially frowned upon is cutting but not planting, killing an animal but not using it.

Pindwa, one of the farmers I worked with expresses the concern his people, the Mbuja, feel about wasting the forest. "There were rules for cutting gardens," he says. "If you cut a garden but did not plant it, it was considered very bad luck. They did not approve of things like that. You would really be laughed at in the village. You would be seen as a person who has no meaning among the people because, what wisdom is there in this going to ruin forest for nothing like this, to leave it useless and to keep from using it? . . . If a person cut but did not plant a thing, it is like he ruined that forest for nothing, because he was in a position to receive something, and he didn't receive a thing. . . . So, they said that if you do not want to cut a garden, leave the forest to sit there like it is."
"For whom?" I ask.
"For the future . . ."

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Footnotes p. 2

7. C. Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1961). Back

8. Peterson, 'To Search for Life', p. 78. Back

9. J. , Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990), p. 89. Back

10. J. Vansina, 'Habitat, Economy, and Society in the Central African Rain Forest', Berg Occasional Papers in Anthropology, 1 (1992), pp. NA. Back

11. H. Koch, Magie et Chasse dans la Forêt Camerounaise (Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1968). Back

12. R. Bailey and N. Peacock, 'Efe Pygmies of Northeast Zaire: Subsistence Strategies in the Ituri Forest', in I. de Garine and G.A. Harrison (eds), Coping with Uncertainty in the Food Supply (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988), pp. 92, 113. Back

13. See R.L. Carneiro, 'Slash and Burn Agriculture: A Closer Look at its Implications for Settlement Patterns', in A.F.C. Wallace (ed), Men and Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 229-234; M. Miracle, Agriculture in the Congo Basin (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1967); and F. Jurion and J. Henry, Can Primitive Farming be Modernized? (INEAC, Brussels, 1969). Back

14. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, pp. 79, 257. Back

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