Every country is blessed with diverse physical natural environments and forests comprising mountains, rivers, streams, grasslands, hills, caves and wetlands, among others. The value attached to forests is an extension of human intrinsic needs which determine their worth not assumed monetised market value.
In the African settings and other indigenous global forest landscapes, the essential value of forests is within the public, traditional domains and livelihood options, but not cast in terms of current market and economic values.
This means that the value of the African forest is not determined by the monetary value, but traditional worth and sacredness. Forests are not visualised in isolation but as extensions of human survival both in spirit, culture and sources of livelihoods.
There is meaning bestowed on the forests and this is where the spirits, the ancestors, species of value, traditional medicines, where sacred animals, hills and caves are, where animal kingdoms have relevance to the people’s totems, where forests fruits and resources form part of essential food chains and value additions.
In short, African forests are not silent, they communicate with the local people in various ways, through changes in the environment, in the form of mist, windy, cold and occasional rains, among others.
Therefore, local and indigenous communities have reasons to conserve forests and keep them intact as ways of managing them through cultural attachments and worldviews.
Cultural lens provide perspectives for the environment to act as powerful indigenous tools for determining the people’s behaviours towards the environment. It is from the cultural attachments to the forests that the local communities get their understanding of the existing knowledge and practices related forest resources use and management.
It is the indigenous knowledge system that is an embodiment which strengthens the people’s environmental perceptions, behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. In this regard, cultural factors play key roles in influencing the people’s actions hence should be integrated into the modern-day forest conservation practices and environmental stewardship.
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In this view, African forests remain a cultural living museum and a mirror of the local people’s ways of survival. Forests depict the people’s ways of living where songs, dances, customs and beliefs, rituals and practices, have meaning.
Traditional songs have been composed using the names of well-known rivers, mountains, forests, birds and wild animals, among others. The forests are believed to be essential components in rainmaking, providing signs of upcoming droughts, hunger and famine through visual changes that people can trust and understand.
Multiple and serious forest violations emanate from disregarding the traditional forest values and believing in prescriptive laws from elsewhere, aimed at demeaning and downgrading the people’s culture, sanctity and belief systems. While fusion of technology with indigenous knowledge systems is key, it should be real both in scope and content, not just lip service and for glossing purposes. For these reasons, a combination of cultural and technological advancement would help in keeping the remnants of cultural values without lagging in modernisation.
It is a given that local communities are knowledgeable of the traditional ecological and environmental stewardship which should not be superseded by issues of carbon markets and credits. African communities need to practise environmental justices through their culturally driven forest regulations and belief systems not mortgaging their forests to main polluting nations for the benefits that they will never understand, let alone being part of the scheme. By selling forests to rich and polluting nations, it is tantamount to stripping off the people’s cultural heritage for phoney economic values.
The African forests have been people centred ever since, because they have specific relevance to specific places and cultures. This is significant for people to maintain a sense of ownership and control since they always live in close contact with the forest landscapes. Therefore, communities possess vast knowledge about their local and physical environments hence they have local and contextualised ecological knowledge which strategically constitute the vital indigenous intellectual processes that have established community orderliness and cohesion for generations.
This cohesion does not need any outsider to come and maintain artificial orderliness because it has always been there ever since. In this view, people’s environmental behaviours are shaped and constructed by their cultures.
Therefore, what is required is serious documentation and record keeping inventories that strive to tell locally situated empowering stories from their points of view not the other way around. In the absence of that, African communities will continue suffering from imported environmental information overload which is not relevant to their current set up.
The large volumes of environmental information constructed elsewhere would make it difficult for them to resist unwelcome interventions from the outside world. Foreign interventions would normally remove local people at the centre of their cultural and ecological environment, thereby disempowering them. Foreign interventions need to add to what is already there, not to undermine existing knowledge and cultural practices that strengthen the people’s humanism/unhu/ubuntu.
The local people’s traditional ecological knowledge is the basis where their knowledge is derived together with its power to build strong relationships, networks and socio-cultural institutions, sufficient to build complete individuals and sound environmental management systems. While knowledge is powerful, it should not be used to disempower other communities.
Peter Makwanya is a climate change communicator. He writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted on: [email protected]
