Berkley Center

Spending time in Kribi doing research on the Bakola-Bagyeli (Pygmies), I've had a lot of time sitting on the back of a motorcycle watching the jungle pass by to think about the great under-criticized buzzword of our world: “development.” I study development, I work in the field of development, and by this time next year I will have a diploma that cites me as a development “major.” But what is it exactly?

My research here has been about the positives, negatives, and challenges in integrating the Bakola-Bagyeli into Cameroon's education system. One of the questions I ask in my interviews with civil society members outside of the Bakola-Bagyeli community is, “What is development for the Bakola-Bagyeli?” Most of my respondents tell me that this word does not exist in the Bakola-Bagyeli consciousness, and that they have probably never reflected on this question before themselves. This word that is the cornerstone of so many policies and projects influencing the Bakola-Bagyeli has thus been defined outside of their community.

From what I've seen during my trips into the encampments and in conversations and interviews here, there are three different types of competing development:

1)The Cameroonian government is seeking to develop Cameroon's economy by exploiting natural resources for export and processing, such as wood and iron. This means locating the resources within the forests around Kribi, proposing an exploitation plan, and proposing impact mitigation strategies. With the impending construction of a deep-sea port in Kribi, the number and capacity of these types of projects is bound to go up soon.

2)Quality of life and the realization of human capacity are limited by many challenges, and I don't really know how to make an umbrella statement about them so I'll just give an example of what I'm referring to.

Women in Kribi for the most part do not work, staying at home doing the cooking and cleaning and taking care of the kids. I felt that all-American urge to burn my bra and liberate my fellow women upon arrival at my host family's house, until it was my turn to do the cooking for the family last Saturday. I decided to make my mom's special spaghetti recipe, which is pretty easy and requires only a few ingredients. However, buying beef, noodles, tomatoes, onions, and garlic literally took three hours: going to the market, finding quality meat at a good price, getting it ground by a hand-crank-grinder, navigating the crowded stalls, giving the obligatory greetings to each of our acquaintances along the way, and getting all the ingredients back home on a motorcycle taxi. Preparing at home took another two hours: grinding up garlic and pepper with a rock grinder, boiling water over a wood fire, cutting tomatoes and onions with a machete-sized knife and no cutting board, etc. By the time we were done cleaning up the mess we made, it was 4:00 p.m. and we were exhausted.

Cameroonian dishes are in general very labor-intensive compared to this one, involving peeling hard root vegetables with a knife, mashing vegetables with a mortar and pounder, and gutting and cleaning fish by hand. Women in the compound bond over these activities, doing them together in groups while the neighborhood babies play together under their watch. Incorporating women into the workforce would not only require making shopping, cooking, and cleaning more efficient and convenient, but also require women to abandon this lifestyle and community. While I'm not saying that I'm suddenly all for a country of stay-at-home moms, I understand now that in the case of Kribi, it's not something as simple as male oppression that keeps the women in the home. It is this type of infrastructure/culture/process-driven challenges that make up category #2 of development as I see it in Kribi: the little facts of life that keep Kribi from maximizing its human potential.

3)Being understood. This is the type that most directly relates to my work with the Bakola-Bagyeli. They live in encampments in varying degrees of seclusion. Some encampments are located along the roads built for the construction of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, while others live several kilometers away from any type of access road. They are physically, culturally, and linguistically isolated from modernized society in Kribi and Lolodorf, the two major neighboring cities, made up of the Bantu majority. They suffer from lack of access to basic services such as health care and sanitation, lack of representation in local and national government bodies, and poverty due to their removal from Cameroon's market/money economy. The majority of those interviewed have expressed desire to continue living their traditional lifestyle of hunting and gathering in the forest, but believe that this will soon be made impossible due to encroaching projects (see section one of this post).

Development for them, as I understand it thus far, is being able to continue their life in the forest with the best quality of life possible. This requires that the Cameroonian government, their Bantu neighbors, and development enthusiasts like myself understand their way of life and their desires. This final point is why I think education concerning the Bakola-Bagyeli is such an interesting development study. I never before would have questioned the validity or importance of education, but in the case of the Bakola-Bagyeli, integration into the education system means less time to learn traditional practices such as hunting and gathering. At the same time, in order to be able to represent themselves and their interests, they must have a certain degree of education. I think this is a classic stage that I'm in of study abroad—the Questioning Everything I Ever Learned in the United States phase —and I'd love to get some feedback about how people feel about education and development to help me think through this. I'll also have a nice 105 kilometer ride to Lolodorf on Friday to reflect on these ideas some more on the way to the encampments.