RIGHTS: For Cameroon's Pygmies, No Forest Is Impenetrable Enough

[chlamor]

RIGHTS:
For Cameroon's Pygmies, No Forest Is Impenetrable Enough

Sylvestre Tetchiada


YAOUNDE, May 4 (IPS) - With no telephone connection to the outside world, and a single access road that is little more than a forest trail, the village of Lomie might as well be situated at the other side of the earth as far as many Cameroonians are concerned.

For the Baka pygmies, however, the position of the south-eastern settlement is more ambiguous: too accessible for loggers, but too remote for the benefits of modern life to make themselves felt. About 40,000 indigenous pygmies live in the forests of south and east Cameroon, their lives much the same as those of their ancestors from the pre-colonial era.

"Most Baka pygmies survive by hunting and gathering in the forest, their ancestral home and the epicentre of their world: the only place their existence can take root, and in which they have always lived in peace," Clementine Assiga Ndongo, a member of the Centre for the Environment and Development (CED), told IPS. The centre is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in the Cameroonian capital, Yaounde.

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This situation is aggravated by the fact that pygmies are nomadic, moving from one hunting ground to another as the need dictates. Many of their settlements, says Ndongo, "literally do not exist on maps". As a result, the needs of pygmies were not taken into account when national parks were created to protect Cameroonian forests.

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28557

[knowbody0]

1. i have read that these people

are peace loving and very gentle

[chlamor]

3. The music and rhythms

that they play inspires many European World Music groups the most popular might be Deep Forest, amazing music in which the Cameroon pygmies play and chant with the synth beats. Fascinating stuff. They are the ones to teach us.

[alphafemale]

2. They live lightly on the earth - Let them be. Nary a paradise paver -

- amongst them I'd bet.

[okoboji]

4. such a shame

I'm sure somewhere some brilliant evil person is devising a plan of shipping in u-hauls to move the pygmies out of the way so they can cut down the trees, afterall, there maybe oil in the land where those pesky people and trees are.

[chlamor]

5. They Could be in our past-They could be our future

If we would only listen.



http://www.baka.co.uk/bakab/

[alphafemale]

6. Have to ask... Anyone here read "Ishmael?"

If you can't get past a main character being a telepathic ape...

It's not for you.

But since we are progressives here I think most would find it to be an incredible read.