The Okapi Reserve

Category: Community Work, Mbuti Pygmies | Date: Apr 30 2007 | By: admin

The Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a habitat protected area in DRCongo was only created by a Ministerial law on 2nd of May, 1992. It is almost 15 years old. Pygmies who are the first occupants of the Congo live inside the Reserve in interaction with fauna and flora.

An old pygmy woman

We conserve Nature including people, because the Government of Kinshasa decided not to evacuate men from the Reserve, especially Pygmies who depend 100% on the forest. Pygmies are healthy only inside the forest where they have the chance to hunt, pick fruit, mushroom, termite,…. The activity of hunting for them is a kind of gymnastic or relaxation. Could you imagine that an old man of 50 years old can accept easily participating for hunting?? Really it’s happening….

According to their tradition, hut building and the collection of food from the forest is a woman’s task. A woman is there to feed her husband, and it is serious.

Mr. Somba admiring a pygmy Woman building her hut.

The management of the Reserve started to zone the reserve in specific zones such as integrated zones, agricultural zones and hunting zones. At this time some agricultural, and hunting zones are limited. This is a long process which takes time and the community as a stakeholder plays a key role during the limitation. In fact, the main importance of zoning the Reserve into agricultural zones is to see how to stabilize farmers in groups, in case of crop devastation,

Rangers can intervene when there are problems with wild animals. We discourage farmers who do not like to cultivate in groups, because then they cannot benefit from our intervention.

Could you imagine the 13,700 square kilometers is controlled by only 83 Rangers?? Is it easy??? And we are not sufficiently equipped by the Government, and sometimes animals are hounded by poachers from a region and so they slowly move into a secured zone, maybe along the main road.

This is the result of crop devastation in the OWR region. Really farmers are suffering. Below, the recent dung of an elephant that devastated crops of Mr. Madodoyi

Recent dung of elephant in crops.

Favorite crop of the natives are banana, rice, beans,casava, ……

Banana crop

Devastation of banana plantation by elephants.

In case of devastation, we always tell farmers to report to the Management of the Reserve for organizing a patrol, and Rangers once on patrol have the opportunity to communicate with the Warden by satellite phone calls “Thuraya “. This kind of communication equipment allows the Anti Poaching Unit (APU) to be in permanent contact with Rangers in any corner of the area to intervene for instance for crop devastation,……or to readjust their routing.

Mr. Somba in patrol instructing a second rangers team

The lesson learned in the Reserve is that people have not enough money to survive (3 $ are used for feeding a family of 5 people/ day ), also the ICCN as a parastatal company is very limited in terms of job opportunity. We encourage villagers to work close to the road where our intervention can be consistent.

Somba

Technorati : congo, epulu, okapi, wildlifedirect