Baka Erotic

The Baka are people of the forest in the most literal sense. For generations they have moved through the rainforest of southeastern Cameroon and northern Gabon, with smaller communities across the borders in the Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. They live by hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering wild yams, nuts and honey. Outsiders have long grouped them with other Central African forest foragers under the label Pygmy, a word many Baka and their advocates reject. What actually defines them is harder to map: a working knowledge of the forest, its seasons and its spirits, that their farming neighbors rely on and rarely match.

Their language is a small puzzle. Baka belongs to the Ubangian family, whose heartland lies farther east in the Central African Republic and the Congo basin, while most of the villages around them speak Bantu languages. Many Baka switch easily into a neighbor's language or French for trade, school and dealings with the state. Their ties to farming peoples are old and run both ways: Baka clear fields and bring out forest goods in exchange for cash, salt, cloth and cultivated food. The terms have often been lopsided, and the prejudice against Baka is real.

Belief is part of ordinary life, not something set apart from it. Komba is the creator, distant but acknowledged. Jengi, the great spirit of the forest, is closer at hand: it appears in ceremony as a shaggy figure draped in raffia, and becoming a man means being initiated into its society. Christian missions have made converts, and plenty of Baka hold both beliefs at once. Music carries as much weight. Polyphonic singing laced with yodeled lines fills camps after dark, and women play the river itself, striking the surface of the water with cupped hands to raise deep, rhythmic thumps.

The sharpest turn came in the mid-twentieth century, when colonial and then Cameroonian authorities pressed Baka bands to leave the deep forest for permanent roadside settlements. Mud-walled houses now stand where dome-shaped mongulu huts of bent saplings and leaves once did, though women still build the leaf huts on the long forest stays called molongo. Logging concessions and protected areas such as Lobéké and Boumba Bek national parks and the Dja reserve have since closed off much of the land Baka rely on. Reports of abuse by anti-poaching guards have turned their situation into an international human rights case. The knowledge endures, but the room to use it keeps shrinking.