© M. Bartolini
In the heart of Cameroon’s southern interior, some tracts of impenetrable forest have become a reserve inhabited by the pygmy Baka people. The region’s indigenous inhabitants, the sole custodians of the secrets of the primeval forest, now find themselves increasingly marginalised by a society that has partly excluded them from progress and partly rejected them, continuing to cultivate their ancestral way of life.
A people of gatherers and hunters, famous for their small size, the origins of the Pygmies remain quite mysterious. They probably migrated during the time of the ancient Egyptian kingdoms from the Nile Valley, settling on these lands in prehistoric times.
While today the main town of Bertoua is mainly inhabited by the Baya people who belong to the traditional chefferie of Aiba Ndiba, and the fertile fields bordering the savannahs and forests are cultivated by people of Bantu origin, some small communities of settled Pygmies can be found along the road axis leading to the Dja Nature Reserve, in the villages of Mayos and Mbiang.
But this is only a minority of Baka Pygmies who have chosen to integrate with a more modern life. Most of them continue to practise the nomadic life of hunters and gatherers within the virgin forest, in symbiosis with nature and finding in it the necessary subsistence. The pygmy healers are often called upon by other peoples who do not have easy access to modern medicine, and are the true custodians of the secrets of plant properties and perfect control of an environment that seems hostile to most.
The Dja Reserve was inscribed on the UNESCO list in 1987 for its exceptional environmental value, with around 90% of its territory covered by equatorial forests, which have remained entirely virgin. Here, only the Baka communities have the right to practice traditional subsistence hunting, avoiding the protected species that inhabit this green lung, such as mandrills, chimpanzees and the last families of gorillas and elephants. There is a great wealth of birdlife in the reserve, as well as numerous endemic species of plants, whose many culinary and medicinal properties are known to the Pygmies, including the hallucinogenic effects of some of them, used in initiation rituals.
Very isolated from the rest of the country, its wild and intricate interior has remained suspended in a timeless dimension, where the Baka people are constantly on the move, building makeshift shelters, weaving elaborate huts of palm and banana leaves, feeding on berries and game and still practising their ancestral rituals, in perfect symbiosis with the natural elements and the spirits of the forest.
A unique and moving experience in the deepest and most authentic Cameroon.
