Five months in DRC's central Congo Basin peatlands - Reflections from the stories people tell
As I sit staring off at rolling hills and an angry grey swirling winter sky on this relaxing January day, I find myself reflecting about what lies ahead of me this year, but also about what lies behind me and how this will surely shape my next steps. My third and last funded year of my PhD is now under way. I am a visual person. I see this next year as a steep mountain that I must scale. I tell myself not to worry because I am most relaxed when surrounded by nature’s greatest wonders: mountains, lakes, seas and forests. I know how to push ahead. I enjoy that burning feeling in my legs and lungs when I am pushing myself beyond where I thought my limits lie. I know that voice in the back of my head well. The one that gets me through. The one that repeats some simple mantra, “You’re almost there. You can do this. Be proud of yourself”.
I study people and peat in an epic landscape in the heart of the central Congo Basin, where one of Earth’s rare wonders lie, an immense tropical forest underlain by peat that stores mind boggling amounts of carbon. I study how and why human beings shape and have been shaping the central Congo Basin peatland forest.
I wanted to wr ite this blog to all those who have supported my research on this topic. You know who you are. My crowdfunders, my family and those closest to me, my supervisors and colleagues. I owe a special gratitude to my research team in DRC who had to stick it out with me for almost five months, as we lived together in rural communities on the edge of the DRC’s peatland forest. I am perhaps most indebted to the countless individuals who gave so generously of their time and shared so openly their knowledge about their cultures and livelihoods and how the forest landscape is so intimately related to these.
Looking back
I am a social scientist as heart. I believe that through the study of people, their cultures, practices, and behaviours, we can understand environmental change and tap into different perspectives on the value of the natural world. I also believe that no single form of knowledge or discipline is going to get us out the mess we find ourselves in today. From 2016 onwards up until the start of my PhD in 2021, I worked in the field of aid and international development. This took me away from the Western context wherein I had grown to sub-Saharan Africa. From Ghana in West Africa to DRC in Central Africa to Malawi and Tanzania in East Africa and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa, I travelled mostly to rural areas. Much of the nature of my work whilst in the aforementioned countries involved talking to everyday people about the use and management of different resources, water, trees, plants, pollution, and solid and liquid waste management.
I have learned first-hand through the stories that everyday people have told me how the use and management of natural resources shape one’s sense of dignity and makes visible social and economic inequalities. I have learned that stories about local culture and the history of places inhabited for generations hold clues about the complex nature of the drivers of social, economic and environmental change. In fact, from the stories that local people tell, we can learn a great deal more about the value of nature beyond what one can exploit or take, but also about what is imbued in nature, the intangibles, such as cultural or spiritual beliefs that are held within a forest, for example.
Stories told from DRC's peatland forest
Some stories stick in your mind, sketched in indelible detail, almost like the echo of the storyteller’s words are forever bounding around in your head.
In the first village that we visited in DRC, we met a family that had lived in this particular settlement since its beginning, sometime in the 1970’s. One day, we arranged to visit them in their home, which sat upon stilts on the edge of the great Congo River. We wanted to speak about the Big changes that had occurred over time in this village and why. I drew a big line across my notebook and noted various events along a timeline and listened carefully as they reflected on different time periods. To speak of contemporary history in DRC is to recount hurt, pain and resilience.
DRC emerged from a period of protracted conflict, which affected much of the country, and came to end in the early 2000’s shortly after the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This saw his son Joseph Kabila voted into power, which ushered in a period of peace and signalled, at the time, a commitment to a democratic transition. The eastern border of DRC is still experiencing a period of protracted conflict, which draws its roots back to the period of the Rwandan genocide, but is firmly rooted in the complex geopolitics of the region.
As our conversation on the history of this place with the husband and wife of this family unfolded, the timeline I had etched in my notebook now extended into the 1990’s and 2000’s. We spoke of a time of great hunger as the conflict reduced the flow of agricultural goods along the Congo River, which is like the main highway for transporting people and goods from east to western DRC. It also cuts straight through the peatland forest.
We sp oke of the time that this husband and wife ran into the peatland forest behind them, bringing their children and very little else to escape an armed militia group that had docked at their settlement. The peatland forest can be a cruel place if you need to feed an entire family and live solely within its limits. Just as crops have a harvest period, so do the various fruits and nuts that you can find in the forest. Firing off a gun to hunt a wild boar or other forest mammals would only draw unwanted attention. The family was starving. The wife returned to the village in a desperate attempt to find food. The men from the militia group found her. A man also hiding in the forest ran to find her husband to alert him that his wife had just been captured by the militiamen. He quickly set-off to the village to search for her, fearing the worst.
As I listened to the story, I had to put my pen down. As the husband recounted the tale, his wife sat quietly and stared over my shoulder. He continued, when he found her, he was grateful she was alive. A long pause extended between us. In my head, I wondered what had happened to this women sitting in front of me. I wondered if she had been raped, a common tactic used in armed conflict the world over and a lived reality for a startling number of women in DRC. Was she left just barely alive?
I had read many academic articles that had simply listed forest values beyond what one can exploit, these intangible values. I had read that a benefit of forests is that they can provide refuge for people. The peatland forest, often flooded and its soft easily penetrable ground makes for difficult travel for those unaccustomed to this environment. It struck me that those with knowledge of dry terra firma forests are unlikely to enter such an alien forested landscape. Perhaps the peatland forest is both a refuge and a sort of natural fortress in times of conflict.
I have reflected a great deal on this particular story and the many others that were told to me. I now see the peatland forest landscape as a fertile site for human resilience for its local inhabitants. The ebb and flow of flood waters from the Congo River and its tributaries into communities and further into the forested landscape that borders their settlements triggers a wave of well-learned adaptive measures.
I spoke with a middle-aged widow who had recently come to live in the first community we visited. She left the provincial capital, Mbandaka, to come to this community after her husband had died. He used to be a teacher. A profession that would have afforded her family some degree of stability. However, cities are expensive. It is difficult, if not impossible to make ends meet when the sole income for her family was now reliant on what she could make selling produce at the local market. I remember very distinctly when this woman told me how hard it was to live in this new community, an environment completely foreign to her. She told me she did not know how to fish. She did not know how to swim nor how to stand upright and paddle in a canoe. She explained how she felt like she was spiralling into deeper and deeper hardship.
After about 1.5 months, our stay in this village was coming to an end. I would often gaze out at the Congo River and watch as the local people who we now knew very well went about their daily lives. They would often be paddling out to fish or lasso their canoe onto the many barges that travelled down the Congo River, which were always bursting with people and goods, almost like a floating market place, perfect for exchanging fish or fermented cassava for other food and goods.
One day, I r ecognised the outline of the widowed woman as she stood upright and paddled close to the shore to move between one end of the community to the other. That she had developed this skill at that moment was very timely, as the floodwaters had already invaded the community, a sign that the seasons were now changing from dry to wet. To live next to the peatland forest is to learn to thrive with water. Learning to thrive with water opens up possibilities for overcoming some hardships, keeping in mind that hardship is a relative term. Perhaps for some women, learning to thrive with water means learning skills that buy them back some degree of independence that is lost when one’s status falls from wife to widow. This matters in a context where the life trajectory of women, especially rural women, is typically girl, wife, grandmother, widow, and perhaps wife again. To be unmarried or widowed is to be uncared for, as was explained to me in the second village we visited. Within this narrative, what woman would want that?
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