Pygmies using technology to protect their habitats

Pygmies joint venture with logging companies and use GPS systems for monitoring

When Congo Republic's northern pygmies go out into the forest these days, some will be carrying handheld satellite tracking devices (Global Positioning Systems) along with their traditional bows and spears.

Using GPS handsets to pinpoint sacred sites and hunting areas, the nomadic forest dwellers are literally putting themselves on the map to protect their livelihoods and habitat against the chainsaws and bulldozers of commercial loggers.

Through the scheme, northern Congo's Mbendjele Yaka people and the central African country's largest logging company are working in an unusual alliance to ensure the forest areas crucial to the pygmies' daily lives are left standing.

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More news about the Plight of the Pygmies

On October 21,2007
A Pygmy delegation from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) met with senior World Bank Group managers including the Vice President for Africa and the Vice President for Sustainable Development, and informally afterwards with President Robert B. Zoellick.
The delegation discussed the implementation status of ongoing forest sector reforms in DRC, and ways in which the World Bank could strengthen its collaboration with local communities and protect the rights and way of life of forest-dependent people, including Pygmies.
Logging and rehabilitation of infrastructure seem to threaten the rainforests - a source of income, food, fuel, medicine, and shelter for their communities. The rainforests also fulfill the cultural and spiritual needs of forest-dependent people, while providing environmental services such as absorbing carbon, the greenhouse gas, on a global scale.
Talk about organizing from the ground up. Only local communities who live issues and challenges can truly share what their experiences are and as such contribute to possible solutions.
READ MORE HERE



245 - Earth's Tree News

"We are going to Washington to tell the World Bank that they must not allow any expansion of the logging industry," pygmy spokesman Adrian Sinafasi said in a statement released by the Rainforest Foundation, which is accompanying the delegation. "We have been stewards of these forests for many generations and to lose them now would be utterly devastating."

The delegation hopes to meet new World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who has said that protecting the environment and indigenous peoples will be two of his main priorities. Since the restoration of peace in most of the former Zaire after a 1998-2003 war, the World Bank has promoted logging as a way of quickly rebuilding the country's shattered economy.

Last week's leaked report -- prompted by a complaint from the pygmies -- criticised the bank for failing to follow its own guidelines on environmental impact assessments, on the verification of logging areas, and on policing. It also accused it of hugely overestimating the potential benefits to the pygmies. The Rainforest Foundation, a charity whose mission is to support indigenous peoples in the world's rainforests, said more than 40 million Congolese depended on the rainforests for their livelihood. "The indigenous `Pygmy' people of the Congo have fought hard to have their voices heard. The recent Inspection Panel report was instigated by these people and the findings have shamed the World Bank," said director Simon Counsell. "Now the `Pygmies' have the chance to meet face to face with the organisation that risked devastating their forests. Hopefully President Zoellick and his colleagues will listen to what we have to say and commit to working with them to protect Congo's forests in the future."
http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL16113873.html
OLYecology weblog - http://olyecology.livejournal.com/

Pygmy Music - ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology, formerly comparative musicology, is cultural musicology or the study of music in its cultural context. Formed from the Greek words ethnos (nation) and mousike (music), it can be considered the anthropology or ethnography of music. Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music". It is often thought of as a study of non-Western musics, but can include the study of Western music from an anthropological perspective

In 1992, the popularization of Pygmy music spread with the release of Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez's Deep Forest. Though the fusion of New Age spirituality with sampled Pygmy music and soft techno was heavily criticized by music purists, the album was a multi-million selling success. Soon after its release, controversy continued amid accusations that none of the money made from recording was given to the Pygmy performers. Despite the controversy, a percentage of the proceeds from each album were donated to the Pygmy Fund set up to aid Zaire's pygmies.

Pygmy styles include liquindi, or water drumming, and instruments like the bow harp (ieta), ngombi (harp zither) and limbindi (a string bow).

Known musicians wanted to develop a more earthy feel to their music. Herbie Hancock, Head Hunters, "I began to feel that I had been spending so much time exploring the upper atmosphere of music and the more ethereal kind of far-out spacey stuff. Now there was this need to take some more of the earth and to feel a little more tethered; a connection to the earth....I was beginning to feel that we (the sextet) were playing this heavy kind of music, and I was tired of everything being heavy. I wanted to play something lighter." (Hancock's sleeve notes: 1997 CD reissue)
The popularization of Pygmy music also spread with the release of Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez's Deep Forest. Though the fusion of New Age spirituality with sampled Pygmy music and soft techno was heavily criticized by music purists, the album was a multi-million selling success. Soon after its release, controversy continued amid accusations that none of the money made from recording was given to the Pygmy performers. Despite the controversy, a percentage of the proceeds from each album were donated to the Pygmy Fund set up to aid Zaire's pygmies.

Source:Wikipedia

Logging increasingly detrimental to pygmy habitat in forests

Aka pygmy habitats threatened by logging

In the late 1980s I had the good fortune to drive through the forest in Central African Republic and interact with the pygmies there.

There was one sedentary village where the pygmies were gathered as there was the hope of sedentarizing them and integrating them into mainstream society.

Pygmies are by nature forest nomads and have been so for hundreds of years. Their division of labor is clear - men responsible for fauna, women for flora. They usually move around the forest, settling in one area until it no longer can accomodate their waste, etc., and move into another area - this is done in a regularized fashion so that when they return to a given area it is usually regenerated and they can live there again.
The Aka “Pygmies” have been named the world’s best fathers, dedicating the most time of all the globe’s peoples to active fathering. For more information read here

That was when the forest was the forest, with trees and animals within, with the music that is known as pygmy music lilting through the atmosphere.

Fast forward to 2007 - the forest is disappearing, many of the trees are cut down, and as such the nomadic nature of the pygmy is forced to undergo a radical cultural change to a sedentary lifestyle, with the attendant disease, lack of sanitation, and other socio-economic issues that they have not had the capacity to understand, much less overcome.

In addition, being different, they are mocked and ridiculed by the larger population and have lost the forest cover which held them intact over the years.

What can be done to help this group of people?

The men know the animals of the forest intimately; the women know the plants of the forest intimately and could treat any disease that might have occurred. Now they are thrust into a sedentary lifestyle without the cover of the forest, they are at a total loss as to how to regain the dignity that was theirs under cover of the forest.

The destruction of a habitat for gentle, non-threatening people is forcing them to undergo scorn, ridicule, hate - they have no idea how to interact with sedentary people, how to do societal work. They kept the forest intact and helped keep us intact. Now that they are thrust into a space in which they have no idea how to behave, they have become the scorned, despite all the knowledge they have about the flora and fauna of the forests, about the plants necessary to treat illnesses - no one is caring about this knowledge. The only concern is how to get them added to a workforce and treat them as slaves and third-class citizens.

Help the Aka pygmy! How? I do not know - maybe someone out there does. Their security assures our security.