Global Partners | Richard Peterson, p.4

Sharing

Another facet of Central African communalism is the highly developed and complex practice of sharing. Much of what one had to share came directly from the natural world. "If you catch [an animal] and eat it alone while your brother is sitting there like that -- you have truly killed him," one elder tells me. It is not a jump to conclude that one result of this social ethic of sharing what one procured from nature was a decrease in the level of exploitation required to maintain the sustenance of the community. By giving a leg of the antelope one has killed to one's brother, one frees him from having to go out and kill another animal to get his own leg of meat. In the same manner as today, sharing meant that a little bit goes a long way.

Extension of the Communal Ethic into both Past and Future

It is also important to underline that Central African communal ethics are not limited to the present. Rather they extend into both the past and the future such that one must think of both ancestors and offspring in one's dealings with the natural world. Thus one restrains one's consumption of natural resources in order to guarantee that those who come after will also have enough. As one farmer puts it to me, "If we kill all the animals, kesho watoto wetu watakula nini (tomorrow what will our children eat)?" At the same time, in using the land, one also remembers the admonitions of the ancestors. According to another farmer, one abides by the ancestors' "laws for the purpose of protecting things, . . . whether it concerned fields, or rivers and streams."

Some of the same sentiments expressed by these Central African farmers have been echoed in the words of African philosophers. Kwasi Wiredu, for example, captures well the ecological significance of this extension of obligations toward past and future members of the community when he writes:

Of all the duties owed to the ancestors none is more imperious than that of husbanding the resources of the land so as to leave it in good shape for posterity. In this moral scheme the rights of the unborn play such a cardinal role that any traditional African would be nonplused by the debate in Western philosophy as to the existence of such rights. In the upshot, there is a two-sided concept of stewardship in the management of the environment involving obligations to both ancestors and descendants which motivates environmental carefulness, all things being equal.³⁰

Vibrant Interconnectedness Between the Cosmological, Social, and Natural Realms

Any examination of Central African traditional ecological knowledge, including this one, continuously gravitates toward relationships -- those between humans and land (in its broadest sense, the natural realm), humans and each other (the social realm), and humans and God (the cosmological realm). However, according to Central African thought we would be mistaken to view any of these sets of relationship in isolation. Rather Central African relationships governing the natural, social, and cosmological realms are thoroughly intertwined. The ways in which Central African peoples impact their natural environment, act towards their neighbors, and view the cosmos are intimately interconnected.

For example, a common facet in the cosmologies of many Central African peoples is the belief that certain parts of nature -- specific animals, artesian springs or waterfalls, areas of forest, or species of trees -- are not simply natural phenomena, but are imbued with symbolic meaning, be it political, spiritual, personal, or otherwise. Often an indirect result of such imbuement is some degree of conservation of the natural phenomenon. The totemic animal of a clan may incarnate the spirit of an ancestor and therefore must not be killed; a waterfall or area of forest may be the habitation of various nature spirits and therefore must not be visited; certain animals may be emblems of leadership and power and therefore must not be hunted and consumed in any ordinary fashion.

Granted, the extent of nature conserved through such practices may differ significantly from that conserved in the reserves and national parks that hallmark Western conservation. But the beliefs behind such practices intimate a more general cosmological consciousness among many Central Africans, the ecological significance of which may indeed play an important role. As Kwasi Wiredu expresses it, "Any object, living or nonliving, may be within the immediate province of a superhuman force or power, and one has to avoid reckless and, in some cases, unsupplicated appropriation and use of it".³¹

Thus, according to such consciousness, nature is certainly not considered to be dead matter, nor even simply a living material system, but in many ways, it is spiritually and symbolically charged. Therefore, one must take caution in relating to nature to avoid suffering both social and cosmological consequences. Unlike Western Enlightenment thought that removed much of this symbolic meaning from the natural world, and went so far as to reduce it in some instances to dead matter, in Central African thought and practice, the natural world is alive both physically and spiritually and therefore one must relate to it with discretion.

Another Central African cosmological restraint on the overexploitation of nature lies in "the idea of the limited good", the belief that there is only so much natural wealth to go around such that one person's gain is another's loss. The purpose of such a belief may have been to preserve a sense of equality and cooperation within the community. Since nature's wealth is limited, too much exploitation and accumulation of nature's wealth can give cause for envy and make one susceptible to accusations of sorcery that bear serious consequences one normally would want to avoid.³² Among the Pagabeti people of northwestern Congo, certain techniques believed to increase the number of kills for the individual hunter are still discouraged today since it is believed their use also leads to a "corresponding increase in deaths among the human hunter's kin".³³ Such 'cosmological controls' on human's use of nature can significantly dampen both social and ecological harm.

The painstakingly researched novels of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe illustrate this vibrant natural, social, and cosmological interconnectedness very well. Achebe's most famous novel Things Fall Apart³⁴, clearly reveals how in Igbo tradition, as in that of many other African societies, the way people behaved toward each other had very real consequences for how the land behaved toward them. When Achebe's protagonist Okonkwo accidentally kills his clansman, he commits not only a societal offense but an offense against the earth. To keep the land from being ruined, Okonkwo must go into exile in order to cleanse the earth. If Okonkwo refuses his exile, Ani, the Earth Goddess will spoil the land for the entire community. On another occasion, Okonkwo's best friend chastens him for taking part in the Oracle-pronounced murder of his adopted slave son Ikemefuna: "What you have done will not please the Earth," Obierika tells him. "It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families".³⁵

Thus, in many African traditions, the breaking of the social order affects not just the individual committing the offense but the entire social and natural communities. If something goes wrong in society, in relations between people, the effects will also be felt within the natural world. Conversely, if something goes wrong in the natural world, people seek the solution within their relationships with others.

Put another way, in Central Africa the ecological integrity of the land is vitally connected to the relational and metaphysical integrity of the human community; i.e., as the ethical and metaphysical worlds of human communities begin to break down, the effects are also seen on the land. However, just as natural chaos signifies ethical chaos within the society, so natural harmony grows out of the restoration of right social relations.

Humans as Part of Nature Rather than Separate from Nature

Implicit within such interconnections lies one of the primary components of Central African traditional ecological knowledge: human beings are integral parts of nature rather than being separate from nature. They and the natural world are vitally interconnected cosmologically, socially, and naturally.

Africa's rainforest dwellers, the metaphysical perception of being part of nature has contributed to practices which, while surely changing nature, also dialectically changed human behavior in response so that together humans and the rest of nature could co-exist within a relatively balanced system. For example, one way rainforest villagers have coped with elephants marauding their gardens has been to simply get out of the way, to move their settlements and gardens out of the elephant corridors.³⁶ What a contrast this presents to the image from my own white American heritage of people like Buffalo Bill Cody massacring the bison that roamed Midwestern prairies to clear the land for Euro-American settlement.

The depth of this interconnection between humans and nature was brought home to me most poignantly by the words of one Ituri farmer who told me, "God made us and animals together. If people leave from this forest, the animals will also disappear." His point I believe is that animals and people exist together in relationship. Without animals people will not be able to survive but without people, the animals will also come to an end. Both need each other.

Therefore, Central African forest peoples and the ancestral heritage they hold have much to teach us with respect to learning how to live within the natural systems we are part of, learning how to control ourselves from destroying the natural fabric that sustains us. Here in America, we are proud of an environmental ethic that has spawned one of the most extensive systems of natural preserves, parks, and reserves anywhere on the planet. Yet it is a rare American who looks deeply enough to see that "Creating all these preserves as we do is not so much a sign of success as it is of failure; our preserves simply show that we have not yet learned to live within the natural systems of which we are part. Preserves are confessions that we are unable to control ourselves from destroying the natural fabric that sustains us."³⁷

In contrast, Central African forest peoples and their ancestral heritage uphold not the solution of the human-voided natural reserve, but rather a human-inhabited natural world in which humans, as part of nature, control their use of the resources it offers them since doing otherwise is to bring ruin on both themselves, their future offspring, and the nature that sustains them.

Ecosystem Science and Conservation Management in the Ituri

Now, superimposed upon these local models of land use based on traditional ecological knowledge we find a dualistic model of Western conservation management based on ecosystem science that abstracts human beings out of the nature picture, and manages for a "pristine nature" sans Homo sapiens.

Prime examples of such a scientific management model within the RFO include reserve policies that separate the Mbuti from their village farmer partners by prohibiting farmers from following the Mbuti into the forest; policies that limit garden clearing only to areas of secondary forest; and de facto policies that restrict subsistence hunting and traditional means of controlling animal damage to gardens. I realize that these policies operate within a context that has been influenced by external forces such as modern capitalist markets and the recent human immigration from socially and environmentally stressed areas to the east of the Ituri. Nevertheless rather than helping to restore some degree of balance into natural resource use systems, such policies tend to promote a further distancing from the relatively balanced human/environment relationship that existed prior to such influences.

In addition, such policies hold real-life costs for people living within the reserve. For example, many village farmers recounted how the loss of crops to garden-ravaging mangabeys, pigs, and elephants is causing serious economic strife for their households. By removing the means to control animal damage, such policies may in fact force farmers to overexploit other areas of forest in order to regain the household production they've lost from the destruction of their crops. Over the long term, the effects of such policies represent an 'unnatural' upset of the relative balance that had been maintained by the complex resource management systems based on traditional ecological knowledge that I described earlier.

Less clearly articulated than these practical concerns is how policies such as those of the RFO are rooted in a Western dualistic metaphysic that separates people and nature into two distinct camps. It should come as no surprise that such a metaphysic continues to operate in the Ituri and in numerous other African contexts where Western agencies tend to be in control of natural resource management decisions. The roots of such a metaphysic run deep within our Western heritage and stem from ancient influences including Platonic idealism, Gnosticism, and Enlightenment thought. Such influences lead many Western ecosystem scientists to separate nature and culture, humans and the rest of creation, and then weigh these artificial dualisms normatively such that the human/culture component always comes out in the pejorative.

What conservationists have succeeded doing within certain Western countries (especially the United States) -- socially constructing an idea of wilderness that leaves little room for human beings -- is now being exported to and forced upon cultures and peoples in other parts of the globe deemed desirable for conservation, cultures and peoples whose perceptions of the human/nature relationship are quite dramatically different.

The environmental historian William Cronon has made some astute comments on the consequences of such a process. He writes:

Protecting the rain forest in the eyes of First World environmentalists all too often means protecting it from the people who live there. Those who seek to preserve such "wilderness" from the activities of native peoples run the risk of reproducing the same tragedy . . . that befell American Indians. Third World countries face massive environmental problems and deep social conflicts, but these are not likely to be solved by a cultural myth that encourages us to "preserve" peopleless landscapes that have not existed in such places for millennia. At its worst, as environmentalists are beginning to realize, exporting American notions of wilderness in this way can become an unthinking and self-defeating form of cultural imperialism (1995, 82).³⁸

Finally, especially disturbing is the fact that local and Western natural resource management models (and the world views from which they stem) clash within an unequal power balance under which Western conservation organizations, backed by the State, hold the upper hand. In the ensuing difficulties, many local people stand to be seriously marginalized and further oppressed by reserve policies unless respectful and careful negotiation of such policies with local people takes place immediately.

In the meantime, Central African forest peoples and the ancestral heritage they hold have much to teach us in the West if we but take the time and develop the patience to listen. On both a practical and philosophical level, they can help us learn a great deal about how to live within the natural systems we are part of, rather than separate ourselves from a nature we either iconicize or plunder.

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Footnotes p. 4

30. K. Wiredu, 'Philosophy, Humankind, and the Environment', in H. Odera Oruka (ed), Philosophy, Humanity, and Ecology, Vol. 1, Philosophy of Nature and Environmental Ethics (Acts Press, Nairobi, 1994), p. 46. Back

31. ibid. Back

32. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, p. 96. Back

33. A. Almquist, I. Deshmukh, P. Donnelly-Roark, G. Frame, B. Pitkin, and F. Swartzendruber, African Biodiversity: Foundation for the Future: A Framework for Integrating Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development (Biodiversity Support Program, Washington, D.C., 1993), p. 65. Back

34. C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, London, 1958). Back

35. ibid., p. 46. Back

36. J. Vansina, Personal communication. Back

37. This quote was passed on to me by Dr. Cal DeWitt who heard it from a member of the Dane County Natural Heritage Foundation at one of the foundation's meetings several years ago. I therefore cannot name the source but want to thank this anonymous Wisconsinite for the insight his/her comment opens to me. Back

38. W. Cronon, 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', in W. Cronon (ed), Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995), p. 82. Back

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