School of Indigenous and Local Knowledge
To an outsider, the forest of southern Cameroon appears silent, but to the Baka, it is teeming with sounds, smells and sights of flora and fauna.
The Baka effortlessly navigate the forest following unseen tracks. They know the flowering and fruiting cycles and individual properties of thousands of plants and make use of them to eat, quench thirst, heal wounds and cure fevers.
Their understanding of the plants, animals and forest habitats has been developed and passed down orally from generation to generation through stories, songs, and ritual dances. But in the face of rapid environmental and socio-economic changes, the continuation of their rich culture is uncertain, and their songs are being silenced.
The Baka are a traditional hunter gatherer tribe that has roamed the rainforests of central Africa for millennia (~70,000 years, Hewlett 2014). They possess a detailed and intimate understanding of the forest upon which they traditionally relied for food, shelter, and medicine. This knowledge, about the very basics of life and existence, is critical to their way of life, and the richness of their culture reflects the biological diversity of their environment.
When walking in the forest, it is rare to see very far ahead due to the thick undergrowth. Hearing rather than seeing thus becomes the most important sense.
The Baka find their way by listening to the forest. Their vocabulary reflects this, including for instance words to describe the distinct buzzing sounds (link to vocab) that different species of bees make depending on the time of the day or proximity to flowers.
The fundamental importance of listening to the forest soundscape is also a condition and cause for the Baka’s famed musicality (Fürniss 2014).
Baka singing is one of the truly polyphonic traditions which developed outside western Europe. Their songs, characterised by a type of yodelling, range from simple melodic phrases to longer, more complex ones sung by large choirs involving many polyphonic parts, and extend into story-tales or likano that are recounted by individual storytellers.
An aspect of their relationship with forest animals is the mythological and ontological basis of this relationship. Likano and be ritual dances are also a means of transmitting knowledge about the forests and the specificity of animal behaviors, and they abut the spiritual and sacred world (Boursier 1994).
While their music has no written notation, it is accompanied by a rich and detailed vocabulary. The richness of terminology on a subject often reflects its importance to the Baka. Much of their vocabulary is specialized for the forest and is shared between the two related western ‘pygmy’ groups, the Aka and Baka. Their common vocabulary has been posited as the remnant of an ancestral language spoken by both groups before they borrowed from Bantu (Aka) and Oubangian (Baka) languages (Bahuchet 1993).
No other plant has inspired as rich a vocabulary as that associated with the wild yam. It is also the only plant for which the terminology for morphology mostly reflects human anatomy. A bit of detail about this important food source offers a glimpse into the rich cultural context rooted in the Baka’s deep ethno-ecological knowledge.
Baka nomenclature recognises 10 taxa of edible wild yams sapa of the genus Dioscorea. Researchers have reported the ‘paracultivation’ of wild yams (Dounias, 2001). The Baka actively managed wild yams in the forest to maintain productivity, by, for example, extracting the tuber without killing the plant. Beyond its primary function as food, the wild yam is embedded in Baka cosmology, where it holds a central place between humans, elephants and forest spirits (Joiris, 1993).
The social and cultural factors underlying Baka dietary behaviour stem from their deep ethnoecological knowledge. D. mangenotonia is associated with elephants, the only consumers besides people. While humans consume it during the first stages ba, elephants eat the old woody tuber papɛ.
The Baka have specific terms for each stage of maturation of the perennial tuber of the species D. mangenotonia, and use a distinct set of terms to denote the same stages in a ritual context. These terms refer to the spirits of the jɛngi or forest spirit family also called mɛ na ya or elephant spirits (Dounias 1993). In ceremonial jɛngi dances, this spirit puts on a plant mask which is a metaphorical representation of the yam, a favourite food of the spirit, and the dance mimics elephants digging up yam tubers. Members of the jɛngi ritual association are prohibited from eating it.
Humans thus resemble elephants not just because they consume the same food, but also because they share the same forests.
Elephant tracks, larger and clearer than those of other animals, facilitate the movement of Baka families through the deep forest, and they have a detailed vocabulary that distinguishes the various types of elephant paths (Joiris 1993). The yam is symbolically highlighted as the nexus between the ancestral spirit world of both humans and elephants
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The Baka have fundamental understanding of one of the most complex, important ecosystems in the world, including many threatened and endangered plants and animals, and food and medicine sources.
For the past 30 years we and other research groups have been leveraging the profound knowledge of the Baka to conduct ecological and conservation research in the Dja Reserve, designated as a World Heritage Site in Cameroon. Past research projects have provided the Baka with income and offered a way for their unique knowledge to be passed on, allowing elders to teach younger Baka about the forest as they assisted in our field research.
However, many of the most knowledgeable Baka who worked with Prof. Thomas Smith decades ago are now elderly and there are few who have the knowledge to replace them.
Baka culture and its survival, as well as the health, food security and livelihood of its members, are intimately linked to the forest and its protection. As they depend increasingly on agriculture, which is prone to disease and pest attacks and climate change-driven extreme weather, their knowledge of wild foods and fruits serves as a safety net in times of famine and crop failure.
For instance, by encouraging the regeneration of natural yam plots the Baka reduce the unpredictability of gathering, and manage the production over time to better use the resource according to seasonal needs. Yam paracultivation is accompanied by social rules protecting the rights of ownership and taking no more than what they need. This culture of sustainable management might exist for other wild forest food resources like honey trees, oil-producing fruit trees, protein rich seeds and trees harboring caterpillars. Rather than haphazard exploitation, it reflects an effective and practical conceptual management of the forest that should be perpetuated. Societal