Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (review)

This book is unusual among those devoted to human ecology in Africa; it eschews judgment about the rights and wrongs of environmental exploitation. It is mostly about doli, a category in the thought of the Mpiemu people living in the southwestern corner of the Central African Republic. In 1990, the Sangha River basin forest became the internationally funded Dzanga-Ndoki National Park and the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve. The Park permits only approved research and tourism, and the Reserve only hunting with traditional weapons and the gathering of plants for food and medicinal purposes. Doli, which is both an indigenous category and the framework of the book, is the Mpiemu way of understanding their past, present, and future in terms of their environment. Much like Karl Marx and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who is quoted on p.5), the Mpiemu believe that men (and women) construct their identities by material production and social reproduction.

The World Wildlife Fund has described the Park and Reserve as "the last remaining undisturbed tropical lowland forest in the Central African Republic," reiterating a trope all too commonly found in projects intended to rescue Africa.¹ This forest has, in fact, been disturbed by "intensive environmental exploitation for at least two centuries" (5). Besides local exploiters, intruders have included the German and French colonial governments, Catholic and Protestant missions, several regimes in independent C.A.R., and international companies, all trying to "develop" the forest (food crops, coffee, ivory, diamonds, and timber), and more recently a cluster of international agencies eager to "conserve" it. In considering the aims and experiences of these various agencies, the author wishes to show how, "as people interact with flora, fauna, spaces, places and other social groups, they help to constitute an environment just as environments constitute persons" (5). Her methods, which are conventionally anthropological—based on interviews, conversations, and archives in Africa and Europe—are not in themselves interdisciplinary. Her main recommendation is that improvers should pay more attention to the people that they seek to improve.

Doli is untranslatable; the author resists calling it "indigenous knowledge of the environment" because, she says, "indigenous knowledge" has too often been represented as static and also as innately superior to the expertise of outsiders and uniquely beneficial to the environment. Doli is not only knowledge but a social process of communication in which the past is remembered, invented, reinterpreted, and evaluated, from one generation to another, as part of the physical experience of life in the spaces of the forest. As discourse, it is replete with forest images, especially that of vines that connect trees, people, past, and present (hence the title).

One of the main themes of doli is said to be that of hunger, dearth, and deprivation, "a compelling discourse of loss" (144). The author argues that the people learned this pessimistic view in part from the various foreign agents of "improvement," all of whom have blamed what they saw as the regrettable state of the forest on the ignorance, idleness, and apathy of the inhabitants. Much of it, however, sounds more like the common lament that life was better in the good old days. Maybe it was, at that.