Biology Reference
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has the clout over who gets what. But the lords of the land always have a spiritual authority, and
people in the know go to them, because if they turn against you, or you act against them, they can
do what they call 'closing the forest,' another category of analysis that Western conservation has
scorned. . . . It means that if you go hunting, you won't kill animals. If you go to do surveys, your
surveys will come to naught. Whatever your activity is in the zone, it's not been opened to you. . . .
“Firstness ties into that. Whoever is on the land first is understood to have certain powers over
success in that land, in whatever form success takes. And that also includes fertility. If you try to
enter an area and live there in contempt of whoever has authority over it, you shouldn't be surprised
by stillbirths, fertility issues, illness.”
Alden explained that the village where he was doing fieldwork wasn't of the same ethnic group
as those in Kokolopori, but it was in the same cultural area, and had similar practices. While the
Belgians had moved most villagers closer to the roads in order to use them for forced labor and
offer them services, the people Alden worked with still lived deep in the forest. He also told me
that the spirits of dead elders attended events and were referred to in the same terms of address and
reverence as those the people used when speaking to living elders. The ancestors are there as long
as someone has a living memory of them, and they influence both how power is wielded and how
the balance of nature is maintained on the land.
Alden's words resonated with Michael Schatzberg's
Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa
.
Schatzberg explains that though Westerners don't have to believe in the Congolese worldview, we
have to recognize their model of causality if we hope to understand their decisions. Even at the na-
tional level, under Mobutu, politicians believed that his regime poured magical substances into the
Congo River to control the people, and that he briefly banned foreign beer so as to force the popula-
tion to consume domestically brewed, mind-controlling potions. Some have attested that payments
to Mobutu's witchdoctors took up 3 percent of the government's budget, more than the Health Min-
istry. During the 1974 World Cup, Zaire sent a plane full of witchdoctors to cast spells, and in other
situations, the power of the ancestors has been said to change the outcomes of national sporting
events and whether the Congolese adhere to “symbols of national unity.” Schatzberg writes that his
own political analyses of Zairian politics were incomplete because his theoretical orientations “did
not consider the possibility that sorcery was important to understanding politics at the national level.
Sorcery, after all, was beyond the parameters of the political as they were implicitly understood in
most Western social science.”
With regard to conservation, Alden continued in this same vein: “There was a form of what we
would call magic,
pomoli
, where if a hunter used it, he would kill more game than usual, but the
whiplash would be that members of his lineage would sicken and die. That's how you knew that a
hunter was working the dark side in increasing his kills in the forest. . . . But what I like about it is
that there's a balance between human extraction from the forest—life in the village and life in the
forest—and if you took too much, more than your share, from the forest, you were punished. . . .
I was fascinated by the fact that they were basically practicing conservation measures. They only
hunted during the rainy season. In the dry season, they were back in the village. . . . And when I
would go out with them, they rotated trapping areas in each lineage's hunting areas. They actually
had the forest demarcated.”
He described the intricate trails, camps days away with crops planted around them, as well as
log bridges just beneath the surface of the water, so that you appeared to be walking on the stream.
