CHAPTER 6 — A LIFE UNDER THREAT
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→ CHAPTER 7 — LOUIS SARNO
Through his recent work at the Pitt Rivers Museum — the essential admin of a life dedicated to recording in the field — Louis Sarno has secured the Ba’aka of his village a place in musical history. But having watched close friends and children die of preventable illness, and the habitat in which the Ba’aka have thrived for centuries gradually eroded over recent years, Sarno’s more pressing concerns centre on the precarious immediate health and livelihood of his friends and family.
In 2009, a malaria epidemic swept through the Ba’aka communities close to Bayanga, claiming the lives of dozens of children in less than two months. The Ba’aka have no natural immunity to the various mutations of the disease and it is the single biggest killer of pygmies across Africa. Sarno improved water supplies and latrine facilities when he helped to remodel Yandoumbé, combating water-based disease, but malaria control (and defence against tuberculosis, which also kills generations of Ba’aka) demands medicine most likely manufactured in the west. Sarno now has a suitcase of pharmaceuticals in his house, from which he dispenses life-saving drugs. Having gradually schooled the Ba’aka in the importance of preventative medicine, there is a constant stream of visitors at his door.
“Louis Sarno plays an important role in the fight against malaria,” Julia Samuel, the Operational Director of the Drive Against Malaria (DAM) Foundation, told me in an email. (Samuel and her team were working in Cameroon in a bid to thwart the ebola epidemic entering the county.) Samuel said the foundation first encountered Sarno after the 2009 epidemic and she forwarded to me an official document in which Sarno is named as the figure around which the program in the Central African Republic revolves. The DAM document offers a chilling assessment of how dangerous malaria is in the region, and how vital Sarno’s work in Yandoumbé is considered. “If there is no swift action, there is a good chance that within a year malaria will again cause mass deaths among the children of Yandoumbé, and at worst will destroy the whole population.”
At time of writing, the ebola epidemic of mid 2014 has not made its way to the Central African Republic, but the mere mention of the disease’s name terrifies the Ba’aka. The first recorded case of ebola occurred in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and there have been a further six outbreaks in the country since then, including in August 2014. Ebola has been known to enter human communities via the handling of infected bush-meat, and residents of Dzanga Sangha, whose rainforest is similar to that of the neighbouring DRC and who live comparable lifestyles, consider the word synonymous with death. Sarno exploits the apprehension in his ongoing attempts to persuade the Ba’aka of Yandoumbé, who are always keen to welcome their friends or visitors with a handshake, to adopt the more hygienic fist-bump greeting. On several occasions during my time in central Africa, Sarno said, in Yaka, “He’s got ebola,” pointing to me, when one of the locals proffered his or her hand. Although it takes more than a handshake to transfer ebola, studies suggest that plenty of other germs can be passed on via this method, and the fist-bump is gradually catching on in Yandoumbé.
Sarno rarely has disposable income, and does not receive payment for his unofficial role as village pharmacist. Instead, throughout his time living in Yandoumbé, Sarno has found various inconsistent means of scratching together money, including as a fixer for the succession of film crews that have recorded footage in the rainforest. His links to the Ba’aka, and his linguistic skills in particular, have made him invaluable to everybody from the doctors on Channel 4’s Medicine Men Go Wild (who also borrowed some of Sarno’s medicine stash) through numerous nature documentary makers, to the newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev, who came through Bayanga on an elephant conservation mission. Sarno has also picked up money for translating the native Yaka language for subtitles or academic papers — a more complicated process than ordinarily might be the case, given the lack of a formal, written version of Yaka. (One of Sarno’s favourite jokes comes when he is asked how to spell out a local word or a name, and he echoes a Monty Python sketch by saying, for example, “Well, it’s pronounced Yambi, but it’s written ‘X-Z-!-P-Q-I-D’.”)
Over the same period of time, some Ba’aka have been able to find work with the Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF), for whom their jungle skills are enormously valuable. The Dzanga Sangha Reserve has a celebrated primate habituation program, which allows researchers or tourists to spend time among a family of western lowland gorillas. The process to habituate the animals required years of exposure to humans, who gradually inched closer to build the trust of the 35-year-old silverback, Makumba, and his family. The Ba’aka, who have lived in the forest alongside all species for generations, are peerless in these roles. They now also monitor the location of the gorilla family at all times, leading tracking parties on hikes of up to four hours to spend time among the primates.
Rod Cassidy, an ornithologist and the proprietor of Sangha Lodge near Bayanga, has also worked with Sarno in offering tourists the opportunity to sample time in the forest with the Ba’aka. When they first met about a decade ago, Sarno told Cassidy about the Ba’aka’s unique life deep in the jungle. The experienced tour guide immediately saw the appeal of a potential expedition for the kind of adventurers who would visit central Africa. Cassidy and his daughter, plus a party of four tourists, accompanied Sarno and some Ba’aka friends for six nights in the forest, where they built shelters, joined hunts and participated in the night-time festivals and dances. “It really was awesome,” Cassidy says. “It’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
Cassidy is a striking 6-foot-plus South African, with long white hair and bushy, bush-man’s beard, who Sarno warned looked like the abominable snowman transplanted to the jungle. He bought Sangha Lodge in 2004 and made his presence in the rainforest permanent. Together with his wife Tam, Cassidy has transformed a dilapidated former safari concession into a charming rainforest retreat and also brings vast experience and plain-talking common sense to a region plagued by the petty bureaucracies of rural government. In addition to bringing tourist dollars directly to the Ba’aka’s hands, Cassidy has also been among Sarno’s allies in confronting the authorities of the region, albeit to mixed results and seemingly continual frustrations.
“I believe, in my heart, that if people had seen the value of the Ba’aka culture in the 1980s or the 1970s, they could have turned this place into an exclusive Ba’aka hunting ground, and allowed tourists in here, and it would have been the biggest wildlife coup in the world,” Cassidy says. “But instead, they formed national parks, ostracised the Ba’aka. The logging companies have come in, trashed their forest for them, and it’s a mess.”
Yandoumbé and Bayanga lie inside the Dzanga Sangha Reserve, a 4,000km2 area of the Central African Republic, which in turn is a part of the Sangha River Tri-national Protected Area, which also spreads into Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville. Two sections, the Dzanga and Ndoki sectors, (covering 495 km2 and 725 km2, respectively) have been designated the Dzanga Ndoki National Park, in which all hunting, including that practiced only with nets by its indigenous people, is prohibited. The Ba’aka have resultantly been forced to take their chances in a region between the national parks, known as the “community hunting zone”. Even the name infuriates Sarno. He says it practically advertises the region to those hunting with guns and wire snares for profit rather than the traditional methods employed by the Ba’aka, who hunt to stay alive.
“For their [the Ba’aka] way of life in the forest to continue, they need an abundance of wildlife because their hunting methods are very inefficient,” Sarno told the audience during a Q&A after the film premiere in Berlin. “If there’s not enough wildlife, they can go hunting all day and not catch anything. The poaching with shotguns is just decimating the small mammals, the duiker populations have crashed, and it’s the same with monkeys. These are animals that the Ba’aka hunt.”
Sarno told me how frustrations have often over-spilled. On one evening at the beginning of the year, after a day watching Bantu hunters traipse past his house with backpacks filled with forest booty, Sarno says he was approached by a 16-year-old Aka boy, who was in tears. The boy said that gendarmes, supposedly ambushing poachers, had beaten him and confiscated his spear, machete and the single porcupine he had caught. “I got really angry,” Sarno said. “So I went down and I didn’t realise because I didn’t look behind me but a whole bunch of Ba’aka were following me with sticks. And when we got there, I guess they saw this big group armed with sticks and they sort of got worried. And the gendarme guy pulled out his pistol.”
Sarno describes a scene of near riot, as he wrestled with the pistol and the Ba’aka came to his defence. After the situation eventually calmed without serious injury, the authorities threatened to arrest and deport Sarno, drawing the WWF into the fracas. “The authorities eventually supported me, but then the World Wildlife came by and said, ‘Oh, it’s very bad that you did this. If there’s a problem with the project, you should bring it up, come and talk to us about it,’” Sarno continued. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve been telling you for a few years now about this problem and it keeps happening.’”
Johannes Kirchgatter, the Africa Projects leader for the WWF, acknowledges that the situation in Dzanga Sangha is far from ideal. He also concedes almost all of Sarno’s points concerning over-hunting and lack of adequate policing in the community hunting zone. However, Kirchgatter, who speaks very highly of Sarno’s value as a bridge between the Ba’aka and the WWF, says the organisation can only do what it can in the extreme circumstances presented in the area, particularly since the 2013 coup d’etat.
“We do not neglect that there are problems that we haven’t solved so far,” Kirchgatter says. “But I can really say, if we were not there, the elephants would have gone years ago. The park would be completely empty by now. For sure, we have not solved many problems. But without WWF the situation would be catastrophic and the fantastic nature that we still see on the ground is only there because we have been working there for years and pushing the governments, paying the eco-guards… The problem is that the WWF is almost the only institution working there. The government is responsible for the eco-guards — they’re the policemen of the government — but as we are the only other institution and the government is very weak, of course all problems that occur are blamed on us. Whatever happens is blamed on WWF.”
The national parks include the gorilla habitat of Bai Hokou as well as Dzangha bai, a vast clearing in the middle of the rainforest rich in mineral deposits, which attracts up to 100 elephants per day. The magnificent creatures spend hours in the bai, bathing in the shallow waters and plunging their trunks into the ground to extract the goodness from the sand, and allowing tourists and researchers to observe them in this natural oasis from an elevated viewing platform. For obvious reasons, many of the park’s resources go into programs supporting these celebrated species, but Sarno is adamant that the small mammals that sustain the Ba’aka demand at least the equivalent protection. The Ba’aka in turn can then protect the rainforest as they have for thousands of years.
The Ba’aka often find themselves without adequate representation in an endless series of high-level talks between the CAR government (such as it is), the WWF and other NGOs, as well as logging companies with their eye on the tropical hardwood. There have been a startling number of reports published through the years concerning how best to carve up the forest with only the most meagre lip service paid to the interests of the Ba’aka. Although one of Sarno’s friends in London jokingly refers to him as the “Ba’aka foreign minister”, he is a reluctant out-and-out spokesperson. “If porcupine hunters are being harassed by the guards, I’ll put a stop to that by having a small riot,” Sarno says, “[but] I don’t go out advocating for them.”
Perhaps the most exciting proposal for securing the Ba’aka’s voice in all levels of discussion is a project by an Oxford-based organisation named Insight Share, with whom Sarno has recently been in contact. Insight Share was founded 15 years ago by the brothers Nick and Chris Lunch and focuses its efforts on bringing video skills to under-represented communities, who are then encouraged to produce short documentary films from a unique insider’s viewpoint.
“Participatory video”, as the process is known, has been enormously successful among indigenous communities in Ethiopia, Peru, Panama, and the Philippines, among others, and also recently brought a wave of awareness and funding to a Baka community in eastern Cameroon. After training from Insight Share, and with a small local organisation named Okani, a pygmy group close to the town of Bertoua produced a film demonstrating the effects of climate change on the community. In the video, a banana farmer tells of depleted stocks and a fisherwoman displays a drying river from which she previously brought home baskets of fish. The video fed into a program named “Conversations With The Earth” and set in motion an extraordinary series of events: Okani received $40,000 from an NGO named Plan Cameroon, with which they bought more equipment and completed more video commissions, and eventually brought a European Union grant after exposing corruption inside local schools. “It’s a wonderful success story of how participatory video made them visible, enabled them to be taken seriously as a group by government, NGOs and donors…whereas before they were totally marginalised,” Nick Lunch, the co-founder, says.
The videos are markedly more authentic for having been produced by trusted community members and provide perhaps the only real representation of the indigenous people’s lifestyle, free from either sentimentality or the editing of inconvenient truths. Insight Share provides a long-term commitment, including training and equipment, and their continued success hinges on the presence of a trusted facilitator — someone like Louis Sarno.
Sarno is confident that the Ba’aka of his village would be hugely enthusiastic for the project and is hopeful that Samedi, who has developed an interest in film through his starring role in the recent German documentary, may be inspired to get involved. Lunch is already working with Richard Gayer, one of Sarno’s close friends based in London, to raise funds and assess logistics to bring participatory video to Yandoumbé some time in 2015.
“Louis’ role is absolutely central, as sort of a gatekeeper, in this project,” Lunch says. “When we raise money for this project, we must allocate a salary for Louis. Louis is constantly broke and never properly compensated for his knowledge or what he does. I’m very excited about that, giving him a clear role and having a stipend or small wage that is built into the funding, so that he has that security as well as a clear, defined role in the project.”
***
One afternoon in Yandoumbé, I sat with Sarno in his house as he mixed oatmeal for his son Yambi, rubbed amoxycilin on a cut on Samedi’s sister Mamalay’s leg, and handed over a supply of malaria medication to Mamalay’s mother Gouma, who was heading off that day for a trip into the forest. Another of Sarno’s friends dropped by with a different type of drug — a courier, really, who deposited a bundle of weed on the sill of Sarno’s hatched window and disappeared on a motorcycle. Unseen by Sarno in the midst of the transaction, a small hand reached up to the windowsill from outside and snapped off a sprig from the delivery, vanishing without trace having committed the perfect crime.
We were joined by the harp-player Mkouti and the man in the Nigeria football shirt who had accompanied him on percussion when the spirit danced in the summer house. Sarno gave me a short biography of both of his friends: Mkouti, who was about 35, had formerly worked as a tracker for American hunters wanting to shoot the bongo antelope in the east of the country, a role that paid him barely the equivalent of $5 per day. The work had dried up after the coup d’etat made travelling in the Central African Republic impossible.
The other man had had an even more traumatic experience. One day, Sarno came back from a recording trip in Congo to find his friend on death’s door with tuberculosis. Sarno found him some emergency medicine, which managed to keep him alive, but his legs had been damaged by the illness and were no longer functional. Sarno went down to Bayanga and found a carpenter who would make some crutches, with which the injured man hauled himself around the village. “Then one day I saw him walking with the crutches over his shoulder,” Sarno said. “He didn’t need them any more.”
I asked whether that made the man beholden to Sarno, as his life-saver. “OK, let me finish this story,” Sarno continued. He went on to describe how he noticed one day that someone had been squeezing into his locked house between palm thatches and roof beams and had stolen a cell-phone and an ornamental box. “It turned out to be him,” Sarno said, indicating the man whose life he had saved. “One of the first things he did when he got better was rob me.”
Sarno chuckled, but did not seem aggrieved. The man, who had also lost a toe on his right foot from an infestation of the burrowing mites known as chiggers, sat contentedly beside me, occasionally pushing in my direction his selection of hand-carved jewellery. “Don’t think they’re beholden to me for anything more than a day,” Sarno said. “That takes away the idea that I’m held in reverence by the people I intervene for. I’m still a resource. They’re hunter gathers. That’s the way they see the world. Everything is a resource.”
