Land Rights and the Forest Peoples of Africa

Land rights and the forest peoples of Africa – Part I
them, and that the current national laws that have been created by the colonial and postindependence
governments to govern their citizens’ relationships to land have rarely taken
into account indigenous peoples’ relationships to land or governance. As a result governments
have ignored such communities’ rights to their land and livelihood systems, and have
marginalised and diminished their ability to pursue sustainable relationships.
C
Discrimination against forest peoples by their neighbours
Woodburn 41 summarises the historic forms of discrimination experienced by Central African
forest peoples and other Central African hunter–gatherers as involving negative stereotyping,
a denial of their rights, and segregation. He argues that all over sub-Saharan Africa there is a
tendency for differences in modes of subsistence to be represented as ethnic differences and,
conversely, that people who consider themselves ethnically distinct often present this as a
difference in mode of subsistence. Thus, in Burundi or Rwanda for instance, Tutsi and Hutu
may both be mixed agriculturalists and pastoralists yet will identify themselves as one or the
other. Likewise, even where hunter–gatherers are no longer hunting and gathering and are
effectively excluded from their forests (as with the Batwa in Uganda), they continue to view
themselves, and are seen by others, as primarily hunter–gatherers.
Woodburn points out that ethnic identity in Africa is very flexible; people of different groups
expect to eat together, drink together, intermarry; ‘in total contrast to India, group identities
for most Africans are not rigid and exclusive but tend to stress the mixed origins of groups’. 42
He points out that the situation of hunter–gatherers in Central Africa is very unusual for
Africa with people such as the Batwa of Rwanda not enjoying this flexibility in ethnic identity.
They are numerically a small minority, posing no political threat to anybody, and yet rigid
barriers have been drawn up against them excluding them from normal dealings with other
people. The severe consequences that can result from such discrimination are evident in the
numbers of Batwa killed during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. Whilst 14% of the total
Rwandan population was killed, 30% of the Batwa were killed, despite making up only
between 0.3 and 0.4% of the population. 43
Woodburn’s description is equally applicable to much of the discrimination suffered by other
forest people throughout the Central African rainforest region. He describes the negative
stereotyping as involving open and publicly asserted stigmatising characterisations of
hunter–gatherers as ignorant, stupid, primitive, lacking in proper culture and not fully
human. From this perspective, any denial of hunter–gatherers’ rights by non hunter–
gatherers is justified since they are seen as neither properly human nor living as people
should. This denial of rights, widely contested by forest peoples themselves, often takes the
form of claiming that forest people should not have control over their own labour, their lands
or their marriages. They are denied rights to the land they hunt and gather on, and ‘are freely,
even casually, dispossessed of the land by agricultural and pastoral people’. 44
41 J Woodburn (1997) ‘Indigenous discrimination: The ideological basis for local discrimination against
hunter–gatherer minorities in sub-Saharan Africa’, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, pp 345–61.
42 Ibid., p 348.
43 J Lewis and J Knight (1995) The Twa of Rwanda: assessment of the situation of the Twa and promotion of
Twa rights in post-war Rwanda, World Rainforest Movement and IWGIA, Chadlington, p 93.
44 J Woodburn (1997) ‘Indigenous discrimination’, p 350.
Kidd & Kenrick 14
March 2009