Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa

Chapter One: Voids and Blinders, Words and Things

One Voids and Blinders, Words and ~rhings Ainsi nous est apparue une premiere province que nous appelons Afrique centre-equatoriale et qui pourrait etre appelee la region anhistorique de l'Afrique Noire car aucun etat important ne s'y est developpe.1 PREAMBLE There exists in Africa a huge area-as large as the arable part of West Africa to the west of the lower Niger, as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, almost as large as western Europe-which remains terra incognita for the historian (map 1.1). Maps of Africa generally depict this as a green mass, since the area is mostly covered with the rainforests of equatorial Africa. Such forests and their approaches cover all of southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Congo, half of Zaire, and spill over into the Central African Republic and Cabinda in Angola (map 1.2). Today some 12 million people live there and ethnologists count up to 450 ethnic groups there.2 Why has this part of the world remained without a historiography? Some blame only the lack of historical sources. Others held and still hold that the peoples living there "were too busy surviving in such a hostile environment" to change. Peoples there supposedly still live today as they have done for centuries or millennia. They have supposedly "preserved prehistoric civilizations until our own day.,,3 That cliche is particUlarly cherished by writers about pygmies, but it is also applied to farmers in the area.4 In other words, environment determines history and the unlucky peoples here have no history because they have never changed. To Europeans the African communities seemed minuscule in size and so unstructured as to deserve the epithet of "anarchies"s or the more euphemistic "segmentary societies." Both foreign observers and the in3 , "10" •'WESTERN .' ...• . I . . .. : 'CAMEROOJ.J "'" ATLANTIC 5" OCEAN 20' CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC 25' • CAMEROON " ...., , 3~" ,-,,~ .../ ..., .;., Uele " . I 5' UELE .~.. '. "',- . ' Z ITURI I··t)!\.~" AIRE ?~ .f ."t,~, " ~ vZ ~ ,Klsangani : \\ ( . ••• : , : : ~ Limit of study area _ - - _ __ Boundaries • CENTRAL BASIN ~uru ---.. " •"\ -'kAsAi" 20' Map 1,1. Equatorial Africa ) '\ r '" " ~ MANIEMA ~ ..' ...",.. . O~OOkm\" 25' ( ..,4.: O· : £fL, Edwa;;· ~ ,..L.KiVU \ 4' \ . -./ : '...._-' i·~ '; ,\ ,/ \\/ .. 3(j" LP Voids and Blinders, Words and Things 5 habitants thought that society here was congruent with kinship, not with kingship, in sharp contrast to the adjoining regions of the great lakes or the savanna to the south. The history of these peoples was that of the demographic growth of kinship groups. When a lineage became too big it split "just as an amoeba does" into two or more smaller lineages, a never-ending process of quasi-biological growth.6 There was therefore no history except for the gyrations and migrations of "clans" or "tribes," which were the perennial units of society.7 Moreover the peoples of this huge area seemed as similar to each other as the trees in their forests. Many ethnographers lumped all of them together in a single cultural whole.8 They matched a never-changing, monotonous, dark, debilitating juggernaut of a rainforest. No wonder that ways of life were unrefined in such a "terrifying" or "brutalizing" environment, which smothered any puny attempt at change.9 Were these people in the forest huddled like penguins on their ice floes, perfectly adapted to their surroundings but incapable of leaving the ice floe? Such a dismal dismissal is mistaken. But it does explain why such a large portion of Africa has been neglected for so long. Perhaps the major deleterious influence of the rainforests has been to deter scholars .lO In fact, the rainforest habitats differed from place to place, and the societies differed more among themselves and were far more complex than has been realized. Indeed the differences between ways and styles of life here are both the proof and the product of ceaseless change over millennia. There is no doubt then that there is more to the past of the rainforests than gyrations and migrations. There is a political, social, and economic history to be recovered here, along with a history of ideas, values, and ideology. But is this past common to all or to most of the peoples in the area? Are we not falling into a determinist trap by delimiting an area and then looking at it as a single unit of study because it happens to be covered with rainforests, whatever its myriad habitats and the diversity among its inhabitants...