Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin

Introduction: Forests of Belonging

3 The forest supplies all of the necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing, and fuel for the family hearth. Bark, vines, saplings, leaves, and various resins are all the hunters need to build and furnish their homes. Above all, the sense of belonging to the forest unites the pygmy hunters against nearby village farmers, who cut it down to plant crops. The hunters trade with them, mainly to stop their searching the forest for needed meat and supplies. —“Mbuti Pygmies” diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City Introduction forests of belonging 4 introduction During the early days there was a separation between Bangando and Baka. Bangando lived in their villages, and Baka lived in the forest. You could say that Baka did more hunting and Bangando did more farming. But today Baka and Bangando are mixed together. Bangando and Baka live together in villages along the road. . . . Today there is no difference between Baka and Bangando because of what they do. To call one group “hunters” and one group “farmers” doesn’t make sense today, because today we all hunt, we all farm, we all gather—so that we can eat and also sell something. —Maga, Bangando elder in Lopondji, southeastern Cameroon T his book is about identities that defy simple categorization. It addresses the conundrum of formal, prescriptive categories that identify people according to where and how they live, but that do not fit with the lived experiences and sentiments of belonging among the people themselves. While images of forest people in the Congo River basin reflect intellectual and institutional models that are unitary, oppositional, and paradigmatic, the social realities of belonging in the forest reflect identities that are multiple, cross-cutting, and integrative. This ethnography focuses on the Bangando, a forest community living in southeastern Cameroon that is identified in academic and policy literature as consisting of “villagers” or “farmers.” The research complements existing studies of the Baka “pygmies” or “hunter-gatherers” conducted in the same region,1 and the innumerable studies of “pygmy” communities that scholars have undertaken throughout the Congo River basin of equatorial Africa throughout the twentieth century. This study examines dynamics of belonging and processes of identification, as forest communities encounter profound political-economic, ecological, and social change, and as they reconfigure senses of self and other, negotiate multiple ways and means of intercommunal belonging, and engage with the nation-state as well as international actors and agencies. The Bangando community is numerically small, including approximately 5,000 people who reside primarily in southeastern Cameroon, near the articulation of the borders of Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. The region is distinguished as a region by “Lake” Lobéké, a swampy and verdant inland delta of the Lobéké River, a tributary of the Sangha River. This forest is a pocket of semideciduous, tropical forest introduction 5 within a much larger cultural and ecological sphere of interaction on the western rim of the Congo River basin. The Lobéké region is home to four locally based ethnic groups—Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam— as well as people from other regions of Cameroon and central Africa who identify themselves with many other communities. Despite this evident diversity, scholars who work in this tropical forest seldom consider the possibility that the identities and sentiments of belonging of forest peoples may be based on experiences, relationships, and understandings that derive from neither the forest environment nor an economic mode of subsisting in the forest environment. Where scholars, practitioners , and observers recognize evident categories of self-identification, such as affiliation with speakers of a shared language, they tend to overlay and equate members of this community with predetermined categories of environment and economic subsistence. Thus for example, in the context of southeastern Cameroon, people who are identified ethnically as Baka by virtue of their language are also considered by categorical equation to be “people of the forest” and “hunter-gatherers”; at the same time, their immediate neighbors, the Bangando, are identified by categorical opposition as “people of the village” and “farmers.” As a toddler’s set of stacking cups aligns similar, graduated, and functionally substitutable containers, so categories of identity are assumed to be interrelated and even interchangeable. “Baka,” “pygmies,” “people of the forest,” “hunter-gatherers,” and “indigenous people” all operate as categorical and rhetorical synonyms considered sufficient to identify, delimit, and contain this particular community, usually...