Seminar 2000
Page 4
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Optimizing, Not Maximizing, Production
Among Central African forest peoples, sanctions against wasting force, forest, or game were part of a larger strategy of resource use characterized not by maximizing but by optimizing production. According to Vansina, Central Africans were constantly improving their tools for harvesting nature's provisions. "The drive to improve," he writes, "was rooted in a desire to achieve higher returns, but not at any cost. The available evidence shows what almost amounts to an obsession to achieve optimal, not maximal returns".15
Unlike the conventional directive within market economies to maximize production and profits oftentimes regardless of the costs, optimizing production required balancing a variety of costs and benefits, not all of which were material in nature. Maximizing production in Central African societies held significant social and cosmological costs. Wealth gained through such production made one stand out within the community, increasing one's vulnerability to accusations of sorcery.
At other times maximization was rejected because it resulted in a less efficient use of labor. Drawing on Koch's research among the Djue of southeastern Cameroun, Vansina offers the following example of this principle of optimal returns:
The Djue . . . had the choice between building highly effective trapping systems with palisades crossing whole valleys from ridge to ridge or forgoing the barricades and placing only flimsy traps instead. The former solution yielded more meat but took more time and collective labor to set up than the alternative. A single expert could do that in a day or two. Most Djue used the first technique, yet the virtuoso trappers used the second. The loners obtained a higher return of meat per person working than their fellows, and they spent less time on the project. The expert solution was the optimal one. In terms of returns, the flimsy work made more sense than the fine trap and the sturdy palisade.16
Whether to economize labor or to avoid certain social and cosmological costs, the drive to optimize rather than maximize production meant that more of nature was left unexploited and implicitly conserved.
Benign Technologies
In contrast to the technologies that have been introduced into the forest through contact with other parts of the world (guns, cable snares, nylon fishing nets, spotlights, manufactured poisons), the harvesting technologies Central Africans have invented out of locally available materials are relatively benign in their impact on the environment. Bows and arrows and spears are not as accurate or as deadly as guns; nets and snares using twine made from the kusa (Manniophyton fulvum) vine and other botanical sources can rot, and thus are not as durable or as strong as those made with cable or nylon; botanically derived poisons used to stun fish are not lethal and wear off relatively quickly; and torches made from the sap of the ndibili tree (Canarium schweinfurthii) provide enough light for walking but not for hunting at night.
Another farmer named Libeka shares with me his thoughts on technology and its role in both limiting and exacerbating environmental damage: "We didn't have the means to kill a lot of [animals]," he says. "Only a spear. If you threw it . . . sometimes you would hunt and hunt and in the course of an entire year you would only kill one of them. . . . [Other peoples] had their arrows and bows. That's what they would use to do their hunting. They would kill some game with them but not a lot. For a person to kill five [animals] in the course of a year was pretty difficult. Because we didn't have the things made for killing a lot [of game]. And that is why these rifles, these guns that have come now -- they have finished off the animals since they can kill beyond any limits. It kills simply to kill. . . . If it were in the time of the ancestors they would not condone it. Their words, what was often spoken between them was that if there are no more animals, how will our children and our grandchildren ever be able to know animals? Such things were clear. . . . The thing that has finished off the animals is the gun. It is the gun; nothing else but the gun."
Production for Consumption more than for Markets
Many of the farmers I worked with emphasized that their ancestors farmed, hunted, trapped and fished primarily to meet the immediate needs of their households. Buying and selling were uncommon. According to one farmer, the diversification of each villager's occupations meant that "you have some meat in your house, and I also have some meat in mine. . . . There was no need for someone to come and buy from his friend."
In their minds, this absence of production for commercial markets is one of the key reasons why up until recently, forest, fish, and animals have remained abundant. Conversely, they link the entrance of commercial markets for forest and garden products to numerous other changes that have degraded the land -- much larger fields, longer trap lines, full-time hunting specialists, no limits to the number of game killed, and the use of agricultural poisons to kill fish.
Bill Lundeen, a missionary working in northwestern Congo, tells me about a man hunting for market near the town of Bumba. The man happened to be a soldier. Armed with a machine gun, he killed over sixty Red Colobus monkeys in a single day. When I bring up this example in my conversations with farmers, they invariably respond that it is not good; it is not the way the ancestors taught. One farmer in particular responds, "Even in one year he couldn't eat all those!" It is striking that in an age when market hunting is on the rise, this farmer still expresses disgust over the waste of killing far beyond what one can eat, rather than admiration or envy over how much money the soldier will earn from selling such booty.
Controls on Population Growth
Low population densities have of course played a huge role in enabling Central African peoples to make a living in the forest without causing severe ecological damage. But low population densities did not just happen. In the rainforest as elsewhere people had to cope with the problem of becoming too abundant. And so they developed ways to control their population growth. "Conscious demographic policies were followed in equatorial Africa, and population was controlled," writes Vansina. In some societies, after giving birth a woman was not allowed to resume intercourse until her child had mastered walking at ± 2 years of age.17 Breast-feeding, a natural form of birth control used by women in many different societies, also provided space between one child and the next.
Further, as mentioned above, when an area became too congested, some people chose to leave and find new settlements in areas of lower density, diffusing the pressure large settlements placed on the land. The causes of such relocations were not limited to changes in the natural world; i.e., people did not simply wait to move until the soils, game, and fish began to be impoverished. Settlement divisions could also be spurred by social events such as conflicts between senior and junior members of the community.18 Stemming from multiple causes, relocations and population divisions may likely have been frequent and may have often preempted severe ecological degradation.
A bit more traumatic, warfare between different groups also had the effect of limiting population growth within Central African societies. Lila, an informant to historian Robert Harms in his work among the Nunu, puts it bluntly: "In the past people didn't die as much as they do now. The people noticed that they had become too numerous. It was necessary for some to go and die in wars".19 Although popular images of African "tribal warfare" depict violence and devastation, the actual numbers of people killed in such wars is not clear. Oral traditions of warfare may overestimate the number of deaths to stress one group's superiority over another. Thus Harms notes that whereas Nunu oral traditions recount wars between settlements involving deaths of up to 160 men on a single side, one of his informants stated that a typical battle would end after "about two people had been killed on each side".20
Vansina documents that two types of warfare existed in the region. The more frequent "restricted war" was governed by a stringent set of rules that limited the extent of fighting. Elders called a halt to these conflicts usually after one or two men had been killed. The purpose of "destructive war", a second type of warfare, was to truly destroy one's enemy. It involved burning villages, plundering land and wealth, and often taking captives. However, Vansina notes that "in recent centuries they were infrequent, and in early times they may have been even rarer, because competition for resources was less marked".21
Thus one may surmise that warfare reduced local population growth as much or more through the threat of killing than through actual killing itself. The very real threat of warfare meant that one needed to be ready at all times to rapidly mobilize and flee. Having lots of young children to carry would definitely slow you down. Thus although he likely exaggerates the spacing of children, one farmer informs me that among his ancestors, "a woman would give birth to a child, and after the child had reached ten years of age, she would have another. They did not give birth to a lot of children like we do. It was necessary that the first child know how to walk and know how to flee from the wars before they gave birth to another."
Colonial campaigns to end such conflicts, misnamed "pacification campaigns", used warfare themselves, often of a much deadlier variety. After the many years that it took for colonial powers to subdue native peoples, the "peace" these campaigns gained through such tactics as resettling people in roadside villages and appointing erroneous leaders as "chiefs", not only opened the door to new types of conflicts; it also removed a relatively benign means by which Central Africans had limited their population growth for generations.
In addition, Belgian colonial policy regarding Congolese child-rearing practices generally favored an early weaning of children while discouraging various indigenous birth spacing customs. The reason for such policies was, in part, to increase the labor population of the colony after a perceived demographic decline in the 1920s. Nancy Rose Hunt provides some dramatic documentation of the ways in which the colonial regime "entered into some of the most intimate aspects of African women's lives: the birthing process, breast feeding, weaning, dietary choices, and sexual activity" in order "to increase the birthrate, promote infant and maternal clinics, and socialize African women as biological reproducers and mothers." Although the extent to which Congolese women cooperated with such programs varied, "by the end of the colonial period . . . the population crisis had diminished, and in fact reversed itself".22 Any discussion of Central Africa's current population problems must not ignore such historical factors.
Turning from these material considerations involved in making a living from the land to the social and cosmological contexts within which Central African peoples have interacted with nature, we find additional contributions to the maintenance of ecological sustainability stemming from certain cultural values and beliefs shared by many forest dwellers.
African Communalism
Any attempt to understand traditional ecological knowledge of Central African peoples must first gain a deeper sense of the nature of African communalism, the base that supports all African traditions, according to Jimoh Omo-Fadaka. The African community is not composed of a group of individuals "clinging together to eke out an existence".23 Nor is it, as Malidoma Somé has described community in the West, "a conglomeration of individuals who are so self-centered and isolated that there is a kind of suspicion of the other, simply because there isn't enough knowledge of the other to remove that suspicion".24
Rather, in Africa the community is imbued with a certain bondedness. Harvey Sindima captures the fullness of the African understanding of community in the following passage:
The African idea of community refers to bondedness, the act of sharing and living in one common symbol -- life -- which enables people to live in communion and communication with each other and nature. Living in communication allows other's stories or life experience to become one's own. Sharing of life experiences affirms people and prepares them for understanding each other. To understand is to be open to the life experiences of others, to be influenced by the world of others, and this is fundamental in living together as a community. Bondedness to others and the cosmos makes one aware that there are selves other than ourself yet all are united by one creation, one life. This calls for a sense of justice or "just-ness, a correct insertion and reciprocity, in respect toward what is 'ourselves otherwise' ".25
Communal Land Tenure
Pre-Westernized systems of land tenure in Central African forests illustrate well how Central African communalism plays itself out on the land. Unlike our Western emphasis on individual ownership and on seeing land as a commodity, under Central African tenure systems, the goals, aspirations, and property of the individual and those of the community exist hand in hand within a total system in which the two ideals are held in some degree of balance. Land is neither private property, nor is it communally owned and worked in a socialist sense. Rather, land in most cases is held in communal trust, it belongs to the group, to all members of the community, extending usually at least to the level of the clan. In general, such a communal arrangement means that no one who wants and needs land goes without. As Parker Shipton states in a review of African land tenure systems, "Access to land should go to those who need and can use it, and no one should starve for special want of it, at least not within a group whose members consider themselves the same people, which usually has meant a kin group or ethnic group".26
However, within such forms of common property ownership, each individual at the same time has their own piece of land that truly 'belongs' to them. It is land to which they and they alone have usufruct, and for which they and they alone (including family and extended family) are responsible. One's rights to that land are to be respected by other members of the community and one is prohibited from crossing the boundary into another person's land or fishing area without their permission.
Under such methods, the community does not forego the benefits of individual responsibility, effort, care, and motivation that come through individual 'ownership' (but an ownership very different from our Western sense of 'private property'). At the same time, the community keeps individualism from getting out of hand by preserving a communal sense and communal systems whereby the land belongs to everyone. With individual usufruct comes communal responsibilities and various social leveling mechanisms that keep individuals mindful of their obligations to others. If an individual or another group is found violating these responsibilities, the community heavily discourages their behavior and can take action to set things right.
With regard to ecological benefits, the fact that Central African communal tenure systems allow room for land to 'belong' to individuals also enhances a sense of responsibility to take care of one's land and to manage it properly. Furthermore, since one 'owns' a particular area of land within the communal domain, one is entitled to pass that land on to one's children, adding extra incentive to leave the land in good shape for one's future offspring. If all land was 'owned' and worked communally, it might be easy for people to depend on others to do the caretaking; or there might be less motivation for any one individual to invest in proper management of the land, not to mention the confusion it would leave for matters of inheritance.
By providing a check on individual 'ownership' of land, the communal nature of Central African land tenure in turn discourages individuals from abusing land that is considered the trust of the entire community. For instance, there is a great disdain within the community if an individual starts land-grabbing, laying claim to areas of forest by clearing here and there but then leaving the area unworked. Not only do such practices disturb the balance of land distribution within the community, they are also ecologically wasteful, clearing forest for nothing. Parker Shipton reminds us that throughout much of Africa land-grabbing is referred to as "eating someone -- the person as well as the possession".27 Although land-grabbing, the resultant unequal distribution of land, and the host of negative environmental impacts that ensue28 are surely taking place in Central Africa, compared to other parts of the world, they are generally much more limited.29 Such a situation can be attributed to numerous factors but it is well to include among them the strong communal sanctions against individual abuses of tenure that can be found within the heritages of many African peoples.
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Footnotes p. 3
19. Quoted in R. Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural
History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge University Press,
New York, 1987), p. 147. Back
21. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, p. 80. Back
22. N.R. Hunt, '"Le bébé en brousse": European
Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding
in the Belgian Congo', in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of
Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1997), pp. 306-308. Back
23. J. Omo-Fadaka, 'Communalism: The Moral Factor in
African Development', in J.R. Engel and J.G. Engel (eds), Ethics of Environment
and Development: Global Challenge, International Response (Belhaven Press,
London, 1990), p. 178. Back
24. S. van Gelder, 'Remembering Our Purpose: An Interview
with Malidoma Somé', In Context 34 (1993), p. 33. Back
25. H. Sindima, Africa's Agenda: The Legacy of Liberalism
and Colonialism in the Crisis of African Values (Greenwood Press, Westport,
CT, 1995), p. 153. Back
26. P. Shipton, 'Land and Culture in Tropical Africa:
Soils, Symbols, and the Metaphysics of the Mundane', Annual Review of
Anthropology 23 (1994), p. 350. Back
28. W.C. Thiesenhusen, 'Implications of the Agricultural Land
Tenure System for the Environmental Debate: Three Scenarios', Journal of Developing
Areas 26, 1 (1991), pp. 1-23. Back
29. See R.B. Peterson, 'To Search for Life', p. 22; C. Drennon,
'Agricultural Encroachment in Two of Uganda's Forest and Game Reserves', M.S.
Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1990), p. 4; and J. Bruce, 'A Perspective
on Indigenous Land Tenure Systems and Land Concentration', in R.E. Downs and
S.P. Reyna (eds), Land and Society in Contemporary Africa (University Press
of New England, New Hampshire, 1988), pp. 40-62. Back
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