In the second-largest forest in Africa, Baka Pygmies still live by hunting and gathering, at the end of the tracks that the logging companies are opening up in their territory. Two days’ drive further north, in the savannah, the Fulani follow their herds from pasture to pasture. Hunters or herders, they are the last nomads of Cameroon, and each, in their own way, wonders whether they will go on walking.
“The life of the Baka is the life we all had 70,000 years ago”, Christophe points out: the forest is their larder, with no stock management.
The Fulani number 40 million in Africa, 3 million of them in Cameroon; only a very small number of them are still nomadic.Nearly seventy Baka settled here barely three months ago. Around the square, their huts are arranged according to friendships and quarrels. Every morning, the men go off hunting without water or food: a machete, an axe, a spear, and the face painted with a mask. It is, Messitti explains, “like a magic protection that makes our eyelid quiver”, to see the snake or the hidden gorilla coming, or to find honey. If it has no effect on Christophe, who goes with them, it is because he does not believe in Jengi, the spirit of the forest. The day is spent digging a tunnel, smoking a rat out of the depths of its burrow, then felling an entire tree to reach the honey of trigonas, stingless bees. The honey is shared out equally and almost all of it eaten on the spot. A rat is a meagre catch: a good one is three or four animals for the whole village. Here, hunting is not a Sunday sport, it is everyday life.
The rat settles at the foot of a trunk and barricades itself in: to know whether it is still at the bottom of the burrow, you have to check that its barricade is still holding.
“They’re going to start seeing things that I don’t see”, Christophe senses at the start of a hunt that can, in reality, “last for weeks”.
At the end of a day’s hunting, the Baka hunter comes home “like you come home from work, as if it were nothing, a day like any other”.Bwabollo feels at ease in the forest, where he leaves marks to find his way back. But he has seen the forest change. “A tree will stay a tree. But the forest is shrinking with the arrival of the loggers.” His grandparents did not know this problem; he has to keep moving back, and he fears for his children, because the loggers cut down the trees that heal. In the past, people would go off for weeks to hunt elephant and gorilla; they move less now, the camp has grown. Tortured and enslaved in the past by the Bantu, those who live on the edge of the forest, the Pygmies are today dispossessed and ignored by the logging companies. Messitti turns the question around: how would Christophe feed a little Baka, at his home, without yams, without honey, without game? So they will make do “with what the loggers are willing to leave us”. When a hut burns down in the night, the women rebuild it in an hour: the camp moves every six months. Ndjébalé gets everything from her husband, and from the forest, which feeds her and lets her barter game for salt and soap. She gives birth with bark and leaves, for lack of money for the hospital, and dreams that her children will one day leave the forest to go to school in the village.
To catch fish, the women dam the stream; they are all different, “but they are all good to eat”.
Some Pygmies want the tradition to endure, others hope to be done with it as quickly as possible, as if to erase the differences.
“One day, thanks to my children, I might be able to get out of here to eat well, have pretty clothes and make myself beautiful.”
Every evening, for hours on end, the Baka dance, sometimes to show their joy after a successful hunt, sometimes to ward off a threat.In the savannah of the North, it is already 45 degrees at eight in the morning. Baadi, his three wives and his twenty-two children have been camping here for two months, in the middle of nowhere, and will move on as soon as the herd calls for it. Here, the cow is queen, the herd is king, and men are their servants. Every animal has a name. The land belongs to the lamido, the traditional chief: to stay on it for three months, Baadi gives him 10% of his herd, and makes sure his cows do not stray into the villagers’ fields. The bow he carries is for the bandits who come from Nigeria. His nephew Moussa cleans a cow’s eye and ear. Being Fulani, he says, “means taking the road for your livestock. It means putting your herd before your family.” Five years ago, highway robbers kidnapped children from the camp; his brother tried to step in, they shot him dead, and livestock had to be sold to buy the children back. In the camp, Sindo shares her husband with other wives: “the conditions of marriage”. If she could choose, she would live a settled life. “It’s moving all the time that I find tiresome.”
In the Fulani camp, the wives take turns to cook, two days each: “everything is hard for us women”.
In every camp, the adults know where the pastures are, the children where the termite mounds are, whose earth they use for modelling.
“It eats, it walks, it eats, it walks, it stops, it sets off again”: the men are “completely dependent on the rhythm of the herds”.
Highway robbers sometimes kidnap two or three children from a camp and demand up to a million CFA francs, seven or eight cows.“We come into the world together. We play together. We grow up together. The cows are part of our family.”Moussa