Hines Mabika Ognandzi

The Congo Basin has an impressive cultural diversity resulting from millennia of contact, networking, intermarriage, and other types of interethnic mingling and pairing. The region has been inhabited for at least 650,000 years. Hunter-gatherer communities probably preceded the others, but Bantu, Ubangi, and Central Sudanic–speaking communities arrived over the last 4 to 5 millennia. Until the colonial period, mobility was the norm; small, local movements and large, regional shifts were frequent. Climatic changes, the search for natural resources and economic opportunities, conflict avoidance, flight from disease, and social traditional beliefs triggered mobility. During the colonial era (c. 1880–c.1960), traditional patterns of mobility were interrupted. To extract timber, oil, and minerals; to produce palm oil and kernels, cocoa, and cotton; and to secure export markets for metropolitan companies, villages were frequently forcibly relocated to sites where displaced people worked on plantations, logging concessions, mining sites, or infrastructural projects. After World War II, colonial settlements evolved into large urban centers. Urbanization is one of the recent changes in the Congo Basin. From 1960 to 1968, the Congo Basin countries gained independence; one-party regimes were installed, and repression and economic deterioration followed. Since the 1990s, political regimes have been challenged, and conflicts have broken out in many parts of the Congo Basin, leading to regional and cross-border migrations. Current challenges include high population growth, a youthful demographic, gender disparities, and the marginalization of minority groups. Urbanization, urban expansion, the urban need for natural resources, conflict-induced migrations, and forestry and mining concessions threaten the high cultural and biological diversities.

Global conservation maps often overlook community lands, impacting decision-making and reducing local agency. We focus on the high-profile and regionally important case of Massaha’s ancestral territory (Ibola Dja Bana Ba Massaha). In Gabon, the forest is largely gazetted into logging concessions and described as an Eden-like wilderness despite long-term human presence. We compare Massaha’s biocultural maps to global, colonial, and post-colonial maps, in a community peer review process. While these maps show Ibola Dja Bana Ba Massaha as devoid of logging and settlement, Massaha’s maps show long-term settlement, sacred areas and industrial logging. Massaha used their maps to request the government to protect their forest from logging and update the forestry code to enable community conserved areas, prompting a national debate on the legal recognition of “territories of life”, while revitalising ancestral practices. We show that “big data” conservation mapping must account for biocultural knowledge if it is to be effective in guiding conservation decisions.