Villager Lands’ Place and Legitimacy in Conservation

Cedric Vermeulen

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.

Line Callout 3 (No Border): 1The simple term “proprietary rights” should be used with caution here: seeing the goal (a utilitarian concept) of a group as transforming a territory into a property (two “modern” concepts) seems to stem from an over-interpretation of societal practices biased by today’s land practices.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).”

Line Callout 3 (No Border): 2This term designating both the group of inhabitants and their dependent circumscribed land.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

Line Callout 3 (No Border): 4 This is actually the same village referred to by Gally and Jeanmar (1996).           

 

 

 

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).


 

Line Callout 3 (No Border): 5We take the term “exploitation” to mean the whole of activities developped by villagers (hunting, fishing, gathering, cocoa cultivation, etc.)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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Cédric Vermeulen, Faculté Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux, Unité de Sylviculture, 2 Passage des Déportés, 5030 Gembloux, Belgique.

 

Avenir des Peuples des Forêts Tropicales

Université Libre de Bruxelles, Centre d’Anthropologie Culturelle, 44 Avenue Jeanne, 1050 Bruxelles

BP 1857 Yaoundé

 

This article benefited from the suggestions and commentary of Alain Karsenty.