Baka Village

6.22.08 - Minko'o - We spent an afternoon in this Baka village outside Djoum. The Baka are the hunting tribe in the Dja Reserve and are the only people who know every step of the forest. Living Earth is working with them to stop the bushmeat trade. Commercial hunters have to hire Baka as guides when they go into the forest to kill gorillas, deer, crocodiles, etc. 

The biggest problem is that the Bakas are very easily bribed by commercial hunters to take them on guided trips into the reserve (sometimes for as little as a bottle of whiskey for a service that is worth millions). Living Earth and the government are struggling to provide them with alternatives to the bushmeat trade because the Bakas get what they need to subsist from the hunters or the NGO and don't seem to care, which one offers money first. 

Often while we were in the village, we'd be filming people working in a tradition house and talking about how the trade was harming the forest, and a man with a rifle would walk into the house next door, clearly returning from a hunt. 

Most of these shots are from the village's kitchen where the women were preparing manioc for dinner (a starch made from cassava root served with bushmeat). I think the women got a good laugh out of the non-french speaking white boy who was trying to take their pictures. 

Boy at the first house in the village.
Child from the kitchen
A woman pulling off leaves for the manioc.
Group shot.
This has nothing to do with anything, it was just a nice shot from an afternoon we ran around Djoum looking for some b-roll wide shots of the reserve/forest.