small grove of virgin forest
In Ani
Mosorou dabouda gay tay sa la oh
Bambo no na lay a say sourou na.
translation:
Friend, in life you will often be greeted
but what will be necessary is patience.
Good news this week as it appears the Moringa growing campaign in conjunction with village health agents has been successful. Many of the now Moringa expert health agents now have small Moringa plantations and have distributed and explained Moringa to other villagers. Another promising sign is that wherever I am in the county folks will come up to me to talk Moringa, even a Fulani the other day.
Now some sobering news: First, I would like to thank Jared Diamond for his book "Collapse : How societies choose to fail or succeed," that I had mentioned in a prior blog and have just finished reading. The book gave me a great set of new lenses through which to view my village. With a million new ideas and questions brought on by the book, I went down to the center of village and began talking to young folks about Easter Island and other societies that collapsed after exhausting their natural resources. A couple young folks and I went to speak to the chief about our local natural resource history, something I had done before but without the book to put it context. I specifically wanted to class my village according to the book’s list of reasons why societies make disastrous decisions about their natural resources (I’ll get to my village’s disastrous decision in a sec). Those reasons are: a failure to anticipate; a failure to perceive; rational bad behavior, irrational bahavior, and no available alternative. So without getting into definitions I will get to my village’s story. (And damn, asking old chiefs about the olden days is quite exhilirating)
Before, when our chief was a child, old growth trees 2ft to 5ft in diameter were everywhere. According to the chief, when one fell, you could not see your friend if he was on the other side of the trunk. In fact, since they had no way of clearing the mammoth trees, they had to farm in natural clearings. Wild animals, including lions, elephants, monkeys and many others, were also everywhere, and the meat of those animals was present daily in meals. One did not have to walk far from the house to find a bush animal for dinner. As the chief grew older he remembers hunters from as far as Ghana and Ivory Coast coming to hunt the village’s forest, which occupied nearly the whole landscape. So dense was the forest that the village inhabitants would often not notice the hunters hidden in the bush until seeing signs of them after their departure. As for the elephants, since the hunters were after the ivory tusks, the hunters would bring the meat to give to the villagers. As the chief aged, he remembers the wild animals becoming rarer. These days, well, I have seen a monkey scurry into the bush on two occasions in the space of one year. So, wild game was the first natural resource to be exhausted in the county. Next came forest cover.
In the early nineties, democracy was announced as the policy in Togo. Unfortunately, democracy was interpreted in my village as “do as you please.” And at that moment the old growth forest was literally liquidated. Folks say that you could not nap at one o’clock in the afternoon, the normal nap hour, because of the humming of the chainsaws. (I must explain that my village is a village of land owners. They own the whole county, thousands of acres, and the male heads of family make decisions about land use. Over half of the county’s population is now made up of foreign ethnicities who have obtained permission to inhabit the land from the heads of family in my village.) Back to deforestation…I asked the chief why folks would liquidate forest on land that they knew would remain family property forever? (from the book: the main reason the Japanese decided to protect their forest was because of the long term interest they had in its survival, as opposed to a logging company that may prefer to cut and run). The chief replied that when people saw their neighbors becoming rich from logging, they simply thought, “damn, I want to be rich too.” Folks are also said to have thought, “well, I didn’t plant the tree what loss is there in cutting it.” In recent years the chief has outlawed logging and folks have seen the correlation between rain, wind, and deforestation, but money is a powerful motivator. My counterpart realized that his brothers were logging behind his back after he suggested halting logging. The liquidation was so severe that a 4 km stretch of road that used to be 75 percent shaded is less than 5 percent shaded today. Before the logging, rain came about a couple months earlier and streams did not dry up in the dry season. Because the village was surrounded by trees, the wind from a storm or the yearly harmattan winds could not be felt, only heard, in village. Today, the harmattan winds can blow tin roof sheets off your house. I have feared as much sitting in my house. Before all the logging, the village's soils were fertilized by all leaves that fell from the trees. No chemical fertilizer was used, the soil was just naturally rich. A few years after the liquidation of the forest, the soils lost their fertility and today's soils can barely produce an ear of corn without chemical fertilizer. After wild animals and the forest cover, the soil was the third natural resource to be severely depleted. It just happens to be the most important resource aswell, it is what produces food.
There is one patch of virgin forest left near the village, see the photo above, that was used for animist rituals before the village converted to Islam around 1970. The trees in the remaining patch are between 40 to 75 feet high I would say. One was blown down this year. The soil in that patch of forest is blacker and richer than nearly any soil I have ever seen.
After the chief’s account of the natural resource history of our village, I collected a couple more accounts yesterday. Those interviewees said that if the loggers had not offered money to villagers, the villagers would have, and in fact did, just cut down and burn huge trees without even turning the wood into charcoal. According to this person, folks often cut just to have more farm land, many folks are cultivating over 12 acres today. When I proposed that there are intensive methods for getting high yields on small surface areas, the person laughed and said “if you tried that, other villagers would say you are lazy for not farming more acres.”
So where did all that money from the logging go? Logging money built mosques, bought tin roofing, and ironically meat to eat.
In a prior blog I mentioned that I was following up on the village’s commitment to build enclosures for the cows, sheep, and goats in order to improve village hygiene and benefit from the excrement as fertilizer. At a meeting we held yesterday morning in the Imam’s mosque, I began by showing the village elders photos of the Easter Island statues and proceeded to describe the reasons for the rise and fall of the Easter Island society knowing that people would see how our village’s experience is mirrored by the depletion of forest cover and wild animals that came to haunt the Easter Islanders. It seemed to me that the thirst for money quenched by logging in our village was in some ways analogous to the Easter Island clan chiefs’ thirst to build more statues, which necessitated logging, and I think our village elders saw that parallel aswell.
I then tied in the explanation of the book with the logic behind pinning up the animals and using their excrement for fertilizer and in this way reminded the village of the commitment it had failed to fulfil. At this point I was very pleased with my performance because the village elders proceeded to passionately self-critique and to discuss remedies for the degradation of the village’s natural resources and the pinning up of the animals. It was a joy to see the passionate debate about what village reforms needed to be put in place. I feel like I put the elders in front of their own truth, and in front of the Eastern Island truth, and they did the rest. Getting everyone to confront the truth is often difficult though, especially when tradition discourages critiquing the family chiefs. Many see the family chiefs’ narrow-minded, and sometimes greedy, management of village resources as a reason for much suffering, like on Easter Island.
Good news now and then a song:
We are planning a new animal health center in village. A young man from village that has been trained in animal health at an American training center called OIC is going to spearhead the project. Right now many folks are discouraged from raising animals because of the animal death rate. People have the money for medicines but one must travel far away to find them and paying for the gas to go get them becomes inhibitive. As the young man has also been trained in beekeeping we will equip the village animal health center with equipment to extract honey from hives that certain villagers already have. Often the couple villagers that have hives are forced to call for someone to come from the city to extract the honey. Animal husbandry, good health of the cows used for ploughing and manure, and beekeeping would be good alternatives to logging no?
Another piece of good news is that results are in and the students at the local middle school were the most successful in this region of Togo last year! I have found a magazine for students that I am distributing to them as a reward.
In Ani
Welay chimi tomo
Welay chimi tomo
Lay chimi tomo
Na bay sa na mo
Translation:
Tell me the truth
Tell me the truth
If you tell me the truth
I will be so happy.
Love,
chris
