Villager Lands’ Place and Legitimacy in Conservation
Faculté
Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux
Translated by Katherine Collin with Hilary
Kaplan (Sangha River Network)
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the question
of the place and legitimacy of “tradition-al” or “customary” villager lands
continues to fuel heated debate bearing very little scientific background. In opposition to the ultra-conservation-ist
view of protected area management, a current of thought has recently emerged in
which indigenists and social scientists meet happily. Battling the idealized and allegedly “Rousseau-like” vision
maintaining that pris-tine environments must be preserved at all costs, an
equally western and no less romantic trend has surfaced to defend reputedly
oppressed and vulnerable peoples.
This article proposes a more
tempered and scientific approach to the problem of including villager lands in
the conservation of Central Africa’s protected forest zones. Along with social scientists, we begin with
the principle that man and his system of production/ reproduction occupy a
specific place within protected zones.
Along with conservationists, we acknowledge that this system has
undergone profound changes throughout the past century which, in many regions,
have resulted in an irreversible over-exploitation of the sites.
CLARIFYING
OUR TERMS
Before beginning our debate on
the legitimacy of “customary lands,” it is important first to clarify the terms
we shall use:
Traditional, customary, or…?
The lexicon of anthropology
often uses the terms “traditional” or “customary” to describe lands. Sometimes used interchangeably, these two terms
seem most often to enmesh two distinct realities: with the notion of the
“traditional” bearing upon rules, social structures and precolonial rites
(Vansina,1991), whereas the notion of “custom” would refer to the modern
interpretation of tradition in light of the various influences of new contexts
(such as socio-economic conditions, titulary rights, use of other languages,
Christianity; adapted from Weber, 1977).
According to these ideas,
colonization, which was certainly disruptive, would have been the sole agent to
cause a major rupture in communitarian rules and norms. It is likely, however, that early
migrations, wars, and crises of various origins may have also provoked
important ruptures (an example from Southern Cameroon during the 18th century:
the Maka populations’ culture shock in facing the Pahouin invasion and their
host of technical innovations).
In reality, a rule (tradition)
is no more than a referential situation, a model of behavior to which various
agents subscribe in their social relations (or mutual competition). Practice, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word,
is opposed to the supposed immutability of this norm or tradition, which does
not, however, prevent the latter from evolving or adapting over time. Practice is the expression of habitus, a system of incorporated
dispositions, which leads individuals to follow the functional attributes of
rules, and to not follow them when the context does not apply.
Thus, the efficient practices
of societal constituents are always at a “distance” from the tradition they
invoke; at any given moment, society entertains an ambiguous relationship with
the rules it has prescribed for itself.
Tradition always undergoes, at least partially, constant reinvention.
Several years ago, the authors
of “Land Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa” [Enjeux fonciers en Afrique noire]
(Karthala, 1982) noticed a recurring trend in agrarian studies,and notably in
land studies: namely, the construction of a “precolonial referent”. Evolutionary theories, however, are only
legitimate to the extent that they (re)construct a past which has been adapted
to those present demands they aim to promote (in our case, “traditional”
cultivated lands or land-stretches would implicitly legitimate the exploitation
of wildlife across vast expanses of land within protected areas). In the case we are interested in, the
“traditional” is constructed as a negative, in the photographic sense of the
word, of the modern. Such is the
temptation to reconstitute a mythical and idealized tradition.
From this clarification, it
follows that lands do not exist in the traditional (precolonial) or customary
(post-colonial) sense of the term, but rather that a territorial “rule” exists
in more or less rapid evolution and in (more or less distant) daily interpretation.
Spaces, expanses, cultivated
lands and circumscribed lands
We will not enter into the
labyrinthine debate concerning francophone Africa, started twenty years ago in
the successive works of Leroy et al.
(cf. Éditions Karthala).
Along with certain authors, we
subscribe to the following definitions:
The expanse-space dyad (Pourtier, 1986):
à
Expanse [étendue]: Physical space,
man’s external reality, situated on the side of Nature, objectifiable,
quantifiable, stemming from geometry and ecology.
à
Space [espace]: What people
construct based on this expanse (considered a primary resource), in function of
their activities, techniques, social organization, projects. Space may thus be defined as a socialized
expanse.
The cultivated
land-circumscribed land dyad
(Karsenty & Marie, 1997):
à
Cultivated land [terroir]: Group of lands subjected to cycles of cultivation (including
fallows and new-growth forest), divided into assigned geometric lots; the portion of a circumscribed land where
the logic of land occupation prevails.
à
Circumscribed land [finage]: (Etymologically derived from
the Latin “arcfinus”). Land reserves
that may bear wood or pastures, and over which use rights may be exercised;
fallow or “pristine” lands, whose limits are unmarked, and which evoke the idea
of a confines, of portions of space located away from a center, where one
commun-ity’s use rights are weakened to the benefit of another’s, according to
a topocentric representation based primarily on proximity and distance to
inhabited areas.
CULTIVATED LANDS AND CIRCUMSCRIBED LANDS
OVER TIME
Cultivated lands and
circumscribed lands are spatial expressions of a socioeconomic and cultural
system, and necessarily reflect the changes such a system has undergone over
time. Throughout the past century, the
Central African forest has undergone severe changes. Its societies have witnessed the progressive introduction of
cultural concepts and material goods—such as pacification, Christianity,
monetary economies, trade and private income, new varieties of cultivation, new
hunting and fishing techniques, etc.—into their way of life. Numerous authors have insisted on the
cultural upheavals which have interrupted these societies. Few works, however, give us any indication
of the changes in tenure and in land appropriations accompanying such
upheavals. By reformulating the
question of cultivated lands, of circumscribed lands and of their surface areas
according to a chronology of major transformations over the past century, it is
possible to shed new light on this problem.
Figure 1 shows us the evolution
of the day-to-day reality of “cultivated lands and circumscribed lands” over
the past hundred years. It was
developed in function of a time-line addressing major historical events, as
well as the evolution of three basic parameters: population, social structure
and systems of productivity. Although
populations throughout the forest region of Central Africa share many common
traits, this table, formulated from the writings of Pauvert, Alexandre &
Binet, Koch, Laburthe-Tolra, Weber, Vansina, Santoir and Tarkforyan, is only
valid for the region of South-Central Cameroon. The table’s reading should be primarily vertical, with the status
of cultivated lands varying in light of the other factors.
It is obvious from this table
that the status of cultivated lands has evolved considerably over the past
century. One suspects (without being
able to offer numerical data) that necessary surface areas and their
differential uses varied greatly as the sociosystem evolved. There is thus no ideal past model to follow
and reproduce for cultivated lands and circumscribed lands.
Time Frame |
200 years ago |
1850-1890 |
1900-1916 |
1916-1945 |
1950 |
Present |
Event |
Sanaga
migration (savanna) towards the southern
forest (1km/year) Direction
of migration towards the sea |
Atlantic
trade: increase in factories, trade
economy (ivory and rubber). German colonization: pacification, taxes. |
Appearance
of missions. |
French
colonization. Introduction of standard currency; trade economy and factories
abandoned; national policy on cocoa; pursuit of regroupment policies. East-West axes abandoned; movement
towards centralization. |
Appearance
and commercialization of cable; large-scale forest exploitations. |
Politically
independent states. |
HumanSettle- ment |
Determinant
hydrography: repulsive rivers, occupied fords and interfluves. Great axes of
migration-conquests with implantation of chieftancies. |
End
of migrations and wars. Populations regrouped along permanent axes, primarily
according to heads of lineages. Coexistence of road-side and forest villages.
First concentrations of populations around factories. |
Concentration
of population around mis-sions. Reli-gious schisms in certain vil-lages,
strug-gles against polygamy, sorcery and
secret soc. |
Abandoning
of villages along deserted axes; economic depopulation of certain regions. |
Villages
fixed by permanent administrative and health infrastructures; very restrained
mobility of villages at the interior of a defined village space exclusively
along the road. Multi-lineaged,
multi-clanned and occasionally multi-ethnic villages. |
|
Social Struc-ture |
Spiritual
power concentrated in the lineage and family heads. Large autonomous,
self-sufficient families of 20-100 members. Non-hereditary chieftancy. Mobile
habitat, 2-3 times/lifespan, largely linked to resources. Collective and
social mobility. Secret societies transcending lineage and between clans. |
Very
non-utilitarian residential units, sedentarizing habitat. Villages regroup
several lineages; transformation of the warrior-hunter into farmer-planter.
Individual sporadic and economic mobility. Permanent East-West axes towards
the sea. |
Disappear-ance
of culturally cohesive factors (cults, initiation ceremonies). |
Partial
dismantling of the extended family, elimination of the role of elders; the
elementary family obtains its financial and economic autonomy, from inherited
cocoa and land rights. Appearance of a class of “monetary proprietors.” |
Villages
composed of numerous small family units, linked by lineage or not, presenting
cohesion and minimal organization (loose social network). Ritual celebrations replaced by spontaneous
celebrations. |
|
Systemof produc-tivity |
Savanna
agriculture improved. Successive cultures: clear-cut squash crops, nut crops,
fallow 20-25 yrs. 25-30 person/km2 optimal max. Crops regrouped according to
families; collectives hunting and fishing activities aimed at reinforcing
group cohesion. Clearing in lineage cooperation. |
Introduction
of cocoa from the coast. Planted for food production, male labor. Agriculture
surpasses hunting. Double yearly cultivation of nut crops due to early
varieties; decrease in fallow time. |
Decrease
in collective hunting practices linked to animist rituals; introduction of
cable |
Cocoa
becomes progressively more important; competition between itinerant
agriculture and cocoa cultivation for male labor. |
Thriving
cocoa prices. Economic and social
development. Maintaining itinerant agriculture, “stabilized” around villages. |
Cocoa
prices fall; unemployment in the city and return to the village. Revenue
gained from overuse of resources such as fauna. Exhaustion of certain lands
near stabilized villages. Communal labor organized along personal and econ.
affinities and less along social rules. |
Culti-vated lands and Circumscribed lands |
Work
ethic, first-come first-serve rule for occupants, lands acquired by army,
confirmed by exchange of women. Inalienable cultivated land; Lineage-based
territory determined by hunting and
fishing grounds; no rights over fallows. Sustainable rights linked to burial;
strangers may plant fruit trees. Populations that no longer migrate present
lineage-based territories. |
Lineage-based
territories and villager circumscribed lands (sometimes blurred) begin to be
defined more precisely. |
Settling and land rights appear, linked to
cocoa. |
Previously
inalienable parts of the forest escape the control of families extended in
the inheritance of cocoa plantations. Limits between villages appear along
the road, which is independent due to reasons of lineage (and colonial maintenance
rules). Fallow rights are affirmed. |
Decrease
in bushmeat linked to an increase in the number of traps; hunting routes
extended. |
Old
lineage-based territories, replaced/ juxtaposed by “modern” villager lands
with indefinite limits. Hunting takes complete hold on all circumscribed
lands. |
Table 1: Chronological Evolution of “Cultivated Land” and “Circumscribed Land” Reality.
Past and Present Attempts at
Representing Cultivated lands
and Circumscribed Lands
We have just highlighted the
paucity of historical data available concerning cultivated lands, circumscribed
lands and their status and surface area over past eras. We may nonetheless attempt to give a partial
representation of them:
Itinerant agriculture plays a
crucial role in the problematic of forest peoples’ cultivated lands. Studies conducted upon diverse ethnic groups
of swidden farmers reveal that these groups developed out of familial heritage
rights over the fallows and new-growth forest generated by this activity. Certainly, this was not always the case, and
it even seems that these new rights appeared only after the warrior-hunter
developed into the farmer-planter.
Different authors affirm the existence of a past rudimentary agriculture
(Vansina, 1991), but cite the lack of interest and time accorded to this
activity, and the lack of rights over vacated agricultural spaces. Koch (1968), in speaking of the ancient
Badjoués, notes “small expanses of bananas, [colocases], yams, cucumbers” and
“the little care brought to these cultivations.” Roesler (1997), in describing the precolonial agriculture of the
Bomboi of Ituri, evokes small fields of bananas that required little work of
felling, and were abandoned due to village displacement every five to ten
years. He specifies that the labor time
allotted to hunting and to the gathering of nuts and insects was at least as
important as that allotted to agriculture.
Alexandre & Binet (1958) refer to the fallowlands of the Pahouin country
as “abandoned with no hope of returning to the time of the great
migrations.” Finally Weber (1977)
states that “a people in movement does not establish sustainable links with the
cultivated land, and knows no form of appropriation other than that of slash
rights and cleared-land use rights.…the earth’s only value is utilitarian…and
does not appear in the list of estates…the earth is not cultivated to the point
of exhaustion, since populations do not remain long enough in any one place.”
Table 1 has given us an initial
schematic expression of this situation: that of migratory displacement in
reference to the cultivated land and circumscribed land around each
village. Itinerant agriculture, due to
a lack of time spent in one site, does not hinge on the cultivated land.
This convergence of
viewpoints, however, is not shared by all.
Diaw (1997), for example, proposes the idea of a double
itinerant-migratory movement in agriculture as a means for groups to establish
proprietary rights1 rapidly over
vast expanses of forest. This
contradiction is resolved by our time-line: itinerant agriculture serves as a
marker for territorial constitution (lineal, clanic or ethnic)—in other words,
for the end of the migratory process.
This
migratory process, which strongly influences cultivated lands and circumscribed
lands at the moment of migration, but also long thereafter, deserves particular
attention. Vansina (1991) describes the migration of the Sanaga-Ntem group:
“…new villages from the 19th century [were] founded roughly 20 to 30 kilometers
away from old villages… [with] a normal displacement of roughly 20 kilometers
every five years… In this process, a village established behind a border
village would overtake it to settle beyond it.” Alexandre & Binet (1958) evoke the Pahouin migration as “a
leapfrog-like migration; migratory groups corresponded to hamlets (jal) or to villages (nlam2 )
or more precisely to respective nuclear families (nda bot and mvok).”
Laburthe-Tolra
(1981), in commenting on ancient Béti migrations, states that “the lineage
always goes as far as it can, as quickly as possible, from pristine lands which
give rise to marketable cultures, to new peoples with whom alliances or
subjections are formed. The general
movement of migrations […] is translated at the local level by a ripple-effect
dispersion around its epicenters, and by epicyclic movements around a principal
external channel… The migration process is linked to a neo-local (rather than
strictly patrilocal) sedimentation process.
A young man’s father would show him a new site for his future village
and settle him there. The site would be
chosen for its strategic value, generally at a distance of 300 to 2000
meters.” Perrois (1970) describes the
migration of the Bakota group (of Gabon and Northern Congo): “Migrations followed complex trajectories;
[their] comings and goings were based on the obstacles they encountered
(untraversable rivers, swamplands, hostile tribes)…Migrations were above all a
displacement of the familial group (clan or lineage), which was independent
from the rest of the tribe. It seems as
though contact with other groups of the same tribe was avoided to the same
extent as were foreigners…people did not stay long in each village, two to ten
years at most, and three to four years on average…In Etiéla, a Mohongwé village
originating in Ogoué, migratory trends were accurately known: there were
roughly 27 villages every 100 years.”
Finally, Weber’s discussion of migration (1977) mentions three modes of
acquiring land: either the land was free, territories were acquired through
blood ties, or acquisition occurred through the use of arms, with trading of
women.
Table 2 offers us a more
complete schematic vision of the migratory process: the village, a cultural
unit, may either be displaced in its entirety (A) or by a neo-local
segmentation (B) of either isolated individuals or of a more significant
portion of the group. Vacating the site
is not a systematic process. Itinerant
agriculture begins to effectuate its rotations in some of the cultivated lands,
and migration starts to take on a general direction rather than a rigorously-defined
one.
At the end of the migratory
process for the last groups, and from the beginning for the (already settled)
first migrants, each hamlet—synonymous with its cultural unit, in terms of
lineage or lineal segments—tends to establish itself as a “territory”. This latter area must be assimilated into a
vast expanse, which is more or less limited by natural boundaries, partially
exploited in the form of hunting grounds, and eventually defended by arms.The
specific topology of forest groups applies here (Pourtier, 1986): the
appropriation first takes place on the cognitive level; the space is composed
of centers (villages), confines, and itineraries; from these centers there
ensue digressive scales of material and mental appropriation… Itinerant agriculture is practiced in
rotation around the village, which exploits an agricultural cultivated land and
a forested circumscribed land not exceeding the total dimensions of the
occupied territory. Villages are displaced
over time within this territory, and retain specific rights over abandoned
sites. We recall Diaw’s thesis (1997)
of itinerant agriculture as marker of the occupation of vast spaces.
Table 3 schematizes these
concepts.
The colonial period is finally
distinguished primarily in terms of the problematic of spatial occupation:
namely, the political, but more impor-tantly economic, regrouping of villages
along permanent axes. During this time,
certain territories (clanic or lineal) will be progressively inter-rupted by
roads, while others will find themselves “isolated” in the forest (the
vocabulary of certain ethnicities still attests to this situation). Colon-ial authorities will guarantee the
insertion of these isolated villages ac-ross territories comprised of different
cultural unities (clans, lineages). The
current situation thus shows a declining “traditional” definition of space
(lineal, clanic) coexisting with the “customary” modern division of linear
space based upon the road. Villages
distinguish themselves by limits along the road (inherited from the colonial
obligation to maintain routes), with the deep forest space offering no precise
limits.
Within this customary modern
space, displacement strategies are based on the axis of the road. The village and its cultivated land are
displaced along the road, between two defined limits. Contrary to the past, displacement is based more on the criteria
of land-exhaustibility in adjacent village lands than on cultural factors.
The status and differential use
of cultivated lands have thus evolved considerably over the past century,
through varying displacement modalities.
The historical perspective reminds us that “customary land,” the present
subject of land stakes, is a dynamic reality produced by the sociosystem’s
evolution.
3 ECOFAC
(Ecosystèmes Forestiers d’Afrique Centrale—Forest Ecosystems in Central
Africa), a program financed by the Fonds Européen de Développement
(European Fund for Development), seeks to reconcile development and
conservation of natural areas, while including forest populations.
(http://www.ecofac.org)
IDENTIFICATION
OF CULTIVATED LANDS WITHIN ECOFAC’S PROGRAM: VARYING METHODOLOGIES
The study of those ethnic
groups inhabiting protected areas managed by the ECOFAC (Ecosystèmes Forestiers
d’Afrique Centrale) program3—including
their relationship to the environment and the means of including them in the
management of protected areas—requires, among other things, further studies on
“cultivated lands.”
At the outset of phase 1 of the
program, synopses of hunting (Delvingt, 1997) and of human environment (Joiris,
1996) allowed us to evoke different interdisciplinary approaches to the same
problematic. Table 2 offers us a
synthesis of these “cultivated land” studies, divided according to country,
studied ethnicity, number of inhabitants, and surface area of the identified
cultivated land. The “indicator” column
surmises the key elements used by authors to identify the expanse of the
“cultivated land” under investigation.
As this table demonstrates, the
indices retained by authors in various disciplines differ greatly, either in
function of their specific objective (i.e. hunting study), or according to each
author’s particular attentiveness to different problems. One quickly notices the extensive degree of
variation in surface area assessments, which are rarely brought to a pertinent
level of comparative variability (i.e. population density, km2). The methodol-ogies employed are just as
crucial as the cultural heterogeneity of popul-ations in determining size
differences between the studied cultivated lands and circumscribed lands.
One also immediately notes that
the surface areas are always largest when cynegetic criteria are used. It is likely that most of the villages
currently exploit vast hunting grounds, as was done in the past, with the
fundamental difference that the exploited proportion of circumscribed land and
exploitation intensity at a given moment t
are more significant today than in the past. (Cf. on this subject the works of
Dethier, 1998 [in preparation] for the village of Kompia in Eastern Cameroon).
Country |
Village |
Ethnicity |
Number of inhabitants (resident pop.) |
Surface area of cultivated land (or circum-scribed land) (km2) |
Indicator |
Source |
Cameroon |
Ekom |
Badjoué |
192 |
355 |
Former
villages, forest trails, hunting huts. |
Dethier, 1995, Joiris, 1995. |
Cameroon |
Malen |
Badjoué |
156 |
125 |
Trails, hunting huts. |
Debroux and Dethier, 1993 |
Cameroon |
Mekas |
Boulou |
293 |
?
25-30 km “from the trail ” |
Former
villages, forest trails, hunting huts. |
Joiris, 1995 |
Congo |
Diba |
Mboko |
52 |
70 |
Hunting
huts, trap lines, trails |
Gally & Jeanmar, 1996 |
Congo |
Oleme |
Mboko Bakota |
142 |
81 |
Lines, huts, paths |
Gally & Jeanmar, 1996 |
Congo |
Ollémé4 |
Bakota |
144 |
?
10 km “from the trail” |
Gathering
and fishing zones |
Gami & Lia, 1995 |
Congo |
Bossouaka |
Bakota |
187 |
277 |
Hunting,
gathering, gold mining, hunting huts. |
Lia & Gami, 1995 |
Congo |
Mbandza |
Mboko |
518 |
25
km “from the trail” |
|
Gami, 1995 |
CAR |
Kanare |
Yanguéré Ibomba |
89 (117) |
120 |
Lines
and hunting huts, paths, diamond sites, former villages. |
Dethier, 1996, Gally & Jeanmar, 1996 |
CAR |
Bakota |
Bakota |
397 |
450-500 |
Hunting,
fishing, foraging, trails, huts. |
Dethier, 1996 |
CAR |
Ngandi |
Ngandi |
|
90 |
Traps. |
Dethier, 1996 |
Table 2: Synthesis of the Study of “Cultivated Lands” in the Framework of ECOFAC’s Phase One
Legitimacy of “Customary Cultivated lands” in Conservation:
Confirming Current Limits?
This consideration leads us to underscore
the relevance of cynegetic activity indicators for the demarcation of villager
exploitation zones foreseen by management plans.The expanse of currently
occupied forest space is indeed strongly contingent upon this indicator, which
itself depends on current national socioeconomic conditions (and also
occasionally on international conditions, as in the case of competing interests
such as hunting activities and cocoa crops).
If we accept the hypothesis advanced by Joiris that the surface area of
a hunting grounds needs to be vast, since its exploitation depends on a system
of seasonal rotations which allows the area to regenerate (Joiris, 1996), we
should not overlook the fact that the study of circumscribed lands is still
relatively new. Our understanding of
their expanse prior to integration in contemporary monetary economic systems is
at best fragmentary.
Even if villager lands were
correctly identified by a standardized methodology incorporating current
resource exploitation modes, nothing allows us to affirm that rotational
systems are still operational or even possible. Because hunting lands depend on resource access and abundance, as
well as on human population pressure, they no longer resemble hunting lands of
the past. Their continuous extension is
most likely a function of resource exhaustion.
When this extension is no longer possible, the hunting system starts to
orient itself towards smaller species (Dethier, Jeanmar, 1997).
Using a strong hunting
indicator to identify spatial occupation and to demarcate villager exploitation
zones is thus tantamount to basing our approach on an activity largely
influenced by an external attribution of allegedly “traditional” or “customary”
systems.
The Badjoué Cultivated lands: Methodology for a Comparative
Approach
Cameroon’s Dja Wildlife Reserve
encompasses a permanent residential population of roughly 1,300 people within
its northern borders, who belong to the Badjoué ethnicity and are divided into
17 villages along the East-West tract (ECOFAC, 1993). The southern zones of the Badjoué parcel are uninhabited. The linear population density along this
route is 28 residents/km 2.
In the context of drafting a
lay-out of the reserve, the question arises of how much surface area to accord
to each village (villager exploitation zones).
As this introduction has
highlighted, the forest zone south of the villages is uninhabited, as it does
not constitute the object of customary appropriations. Thus, the Badjoué populations in the reserve
encounter no social barriers when expanding their circumscribed lands. These lands often have considerable surface
areas, primarily modeled on commercial hunting activities. Confirming current exploitation limits is
thus not a scientifically-satisfactory solution.
Research currently conducted by
the APFT-FSAGx program outside the reserve on other Badjoué villages offers a
solution to this problematic. The
profiles of villages outside the reserve show that their circumscribed lands
are limited by neighboring populations.
We can reasonably presume that the study of more villager circumscribed
lands will allow us to perceive a trend in optimizing surface areas.
The following methodology was adopted:
Based on many formal and
informal meetings and discussions held with representatives from different
groups (elders and wise people, youth, women, villager assemblies, hunters,
palm-wine makers and local associations) and primarily using the PRA-mapping
tool, we succeeded in obtaining the following information for each village:
·
lineage and lineage segments
·
sites of former villages
·
cocoa plantations
·
rifle-hunting zones
·
trapping zones
·
women’s barrage fishing zones
·
former cultivation zones
·
place-names of rivers
The results of the PRA-mapping procedure
were then plotted on a map of 1/100,000' through a series of field visits to
the different identified sites. An
approximative map of spatial occupation was constructed for each village, and
finally a synthetic map for the group of four villages was drafted. A standard census enabled us to list the
number of residents per village and to bring the population in relation to the
occupied land mass.
In contrast to other authors’
applied methodologies, ours tends to be as comprehensive as possible, including
a large number of various indicators.
To compare villages, we may define a simple density index (number of
residents/km2 of exploited surface area). This index, however, is relatively insensitive to the
occasionally artificial structures of age pyramids in certain villages (i.e.,
concentration of children in certain families caused by the presence of school
infrastructures).
If we define the following index:
Index of spatial occupation (IO) =
Number of km2 of
exploited surface area/familial unit,
we may more easily compare the villages under study.
We take a “familial unit” to be
a group of persons living under one or several roofs, who are identified as
obeying the same family-head and presenting significant behavioral traits of economic
solidarity (Joiris, 1995). This study
does not take into account the eventual external residents who would fit this
definition (but who nonetheless would represent a potential population
pressure). In effect, the adoption of
the familial unit as the referential unit permits the absorption of its average
size with temporal variation. [Please
refer to Table 3.]
Village Name |
Essiengbot |
Ekomo |
Kompia |
Superimposed Circumscribed Lands |
Etol |
Ntsina |
Maleu’leu |
Superimposed Circumscribed Lands |
Number of perm. Inhabitants |
308 |
214 |
316 |
838 |
130 |
130 |
171 |
431 |
Number of familial units |
38 |
33 |
39 |
110 |
14 |
13 |
20 |
47 |
Exploited surface area (km2) |
52 |
77 |
87 |
211 |
82 |
69 |
75 |
160 |
Density (# inhabitants/km2 exploited) |
5.9 |
2.8 |
3.6 |
4 |
1.8 |
1.88 |
2.28 |
2.69 |
Spatial occupation index (# km2 exploited / F.U.) |
1.36 |
2.33 |
2.23 |
1.9 |
5.87 |
5.30 |
3.75 |
3.40 |
Table 3: Indexes of spatial occupation by village (Vermeulen, 1997, Fankap, 1997).
This
study thus bears upon six Badjoué villages (divided into two groups of three
villages) spread out over 211 and 160 km2 respectively. Each village exploits4
a given surface area, which is more or less superimposed onto that of its
neighbors (with variable tolerance according to the activities). Based on this data, it is possible to
calculate an index of average spatial occupation for the zone, which is equal to
3.47 km2/familial unit, if one does not take into account the
superimpositions between circumscribed lands, and 2.65 km2/familial
unit if the latter are taken into consideration. Note that the superimposition of circumscribed lands currently
seems to represent a general trend in the Badjoué zone. The spatial occupation of Ekom, the reserve
village (Joiris, Dethier, 1995), is equal to 16.9 km2/familial unit,
revealing that it has a superior mastery of its surrounding forest space,
compared to the Badjoué “norm.”
This average calculated index
may be used to define the exploitation zone’s surface area by village within
the reserve, based simply on the number of familial units. A general estimation of the necessary
surface area is then obtained, which we will combine with the optimal surface
area currently exploited by each village.
An additional precautionary measure could even be taken by artificially
increasing the average index by one unit when calculating each village’s
surface area.
Thus, the index would determine
that the zone to be allocated to the village of Ekom (21 familial units) would
be 73 km2 (without precautionary measure) or 94 km2 (with
precautionary measure). These figures
should be correlated to the current surface area exploited by this same village
and neighboring hamlets (350 km2) and to the surface area proposed
by Jeanmar (1998), in reference to Ekom, Bodjouo, Koungoulou and Elandjo, for a
current study of sustainable hunting management (281 km2). This management would allow a certain degree
of commercial hunting and would not account for overlaps between villages. A study of the division of vegetation strata
could advance a new surface area based on Maximum Sustainable Production
[Production Durables Maximum] (cf. Dethier, 1998).
It remains to be said that this
method does not exclude necessary management measures to be taken in the
villager exploitation areas, nor does it determine the status of zones located
outside these areas. Graduated measures
may be envisioned for these latter areas, based on contractual management. A generalizing
principle of this method, which may appear unwieldy since it only applies to
one ethnicity, may only be formulated after an average index of various swidden
farmer ethnic groups has been established, based on comparative studies.
Conclusion
After having clarified our
terms, we situated cultivated lands and circumscribed lands in a time-line of
the past century and revealed the considerable tem-poral variability of these
notions. We attempted moreover to give
them a schematic representation or model which would apply to observed facts.
The review of those
methodologies applied to circumscribed land identification during the first
phase of the ECOFAC program allowed us then to insist on the necessary
standardization of circumscribed land studies, in the hopes of furthering
comparative ends. The crucial role of
cynegetic indicators was discussed during this section, and the practical
question of the villager exploitation zones’ demarcation in the Dja Wildlife
Reserve was finally broached. A
comparative approach, that of land “inter-circumscription,” allowed us to
formulate an average spatial occupation index for the Badjoué ethnicity. In demarcating villager exploitation zones,
this index could apply, with eventual corrective factors, to the whole of the
Badjoué zone north of the reserve.
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This
article benefited from the suggestions and commentary of Alain Karsenty.