Cameroon’s Baka people say they are part of the forest: that’s why they look after it

By Simon Hoyte, Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Extreme Citizen Science Research Group (ExCiteS), UCL

The Congo Basin’s hunter-gatherer people have the secret to living well with the forest.

While doing fieldwork in 2020, I remember walking with Indigenous elders Ferdinand Mbita and Félix Mangombe up the small, winding path into their forest in Cameroon, jumping over highways of vicious black ants, shadowed by grand trees. We almost always encountered monkeys chattering when venturing down this path. Once we came across the prints of a gorilla.

This path, near the Dja river in the south region of Cameroon, lay next to the small village of Bemba. The village folk, Baka hunter-gatherers,…

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