Advertisement

Pygmies Eke Out a Life Amid Growing Threats

Share
ASSOCIATED PRESS

A lifetime of stalking elephants and other jungle prey with bow and arrows has bent Angou’s ancient body nearly double. His mouth is toothless, and he speaks in a frail, halting voice.

Angou--who looks like he’s in his 80s but doesn’t know his age--has vivid memories of his childhood, when Europeans first slashed through the steamy rain forest and entered the realm of the Bongon Pygmy tribe.

“The white men brought us clothing--much better than wearing leaves,” he says with eyes twinkling, sending a group of youngsters into a fit of laughter.

Advertisement

Three generations after those colonial explorers and missionaries first penetrated the wilderness, outsiders are changing the lives of the Bongon as profoundly as pith-helmeted Europeans once did.

A burgeoning wild game and ivory trade threatens the Pygmies’ traditional livelihood as much as an expanding logging industry. And prejudice deters the legendary hunters from leaving their jungle refuge to seek work in towns.

“I have always been a hunter. But if I want to go to the city and become a house builder or a craftsman, other people will stop me: ‘No, you are a Pygmy,’ ” says Avam Ngadi, a 41-year-old Bongon who lives in Toumbi village.

Once nomads who roamed the forest wearing loincloths of leaves, most Bongon now live more settled lives in villages of grass-and-adobe huts similar to those of the taller Bantu tribes that dominate much of sub-Saharan Africa.

But they are far from cosmopolitan. Toumbi, one of the most accessible Bongon settlements in eastern Gabon, is reached only by driving five hours along bone-jarring roads and two-rut tracks over streams bridged by rotten logs.

Pygmies, believed to be the earliest inhabitants of central Africa, have throughout history retreated into woodland obscurity from the taller, more powerful Bantu warriors and farmers.

Advertisement

Around 250,000 Pygmies are believed to remain in central Africa. Most continue to eke out livings as hunter-gatherers amid a growing tide of modernization.

The Bongon, slender people whose average height is under 5 feet and often only 4, rely on their size and dexterity to succeed as forest hunters, using traditional spears, bows and snares.

Once they had the sea of trees and vines to themselves. But now they must share it with commercial hunters armed with high-powered rifles who sell their take in Gabon’s capital, Libreville.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers of big game animals have declined. Environmentalists say hunters sometimes must walk five days to find their prey when it once took only a single day.

The commercial hunters are lured by the steep price of meat in Gabon’s major towns where an oil boom in the 1980s brought cash. Be it beef imported from France or “bushmeat” brought in from Gabon’s forests, meat is a lucrative commodity at urban markets.

Illicit trading in ivory also contributes to the wildlife slaughter. Foreign buyers are known to aggressively seek elephant tusks, although the trade is banned by an international treaty. The “white gold” mostly ends up in Asian markets.

Advertisement

Environmentalists say poaching regulations are rarely respected or enforced. Many Gabonese are not aware that elephant and lowland gorillas are threatened species.

To a lesser extent, the forestry industry also takes a toll on the wildlife population.

Muriel Vives, spokeswoman for the African conservation group EcoFac, says an expanding web of logging roads has given hunters access to animals long protected by the jungle’s isolation.

The World Wildlife Fund is lobbying for a huge nature reserve to be set up in northeastern Gabon, although this seems unlikely. Gabonese politicians and foreign companies have bought the logging rights to large tracts of the region.

Adapting to the times, a few Bongon have begun selling the spoils of their hunts--everything from gorillas to iguanas and rare birds. They advertise the carcasses on poles staked along forest roads.

A monkey fetches the equivalent of about $2, a small gazelle perhaps $4. The meat can be resold in Libreville for 10 times that amount.

“I have no problem with subsistence hunting, but the commercial bushmeat industry is wasteful and harmful,” says Sally Lahm, an American tropical ecologist who has lived in Gabon 15 years. “Most meat never makes it to market because it rots along the way.”

Advertisement
Advertisement