Preserving the Pygmy Way of Life in the Congo

Members of the Mbendjele Pygmy tribe in the Congo.

Editor’s Note: Jim Moore consults for TDS, whose products are described in this article.

For most of us, technology today is largely about incremental advances. You may think a new device is cool or more efficient, and it might even have some very innovative new features, but when was the last time you encountered a mobile device that truly revolutionized your life or transformed your world?

That’s exactly what happened to the Mbendjele people, a tribe of pygmies in the Congo. They were recently introduced to a radical new world—handheld GPS technology. But this is not a case of “selling refrigerators to Eskimos.” The technology is helping them preserve their old ways and the places that are integral to them.

Logging in the rain forest

The Congo Basin rain forest is a swath of trees stretching across six countries. As with much of the planet’s forests, it faces the danger of indiscriminate—and often illegal—logging. Many logging outfits routinely ignore local customs and culture, but Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), owned by Denmark’s DLH Group, is taking extraordinary steps to be respectful of indigenous peoples.

CIB is Congo’s largest private employer and operates a logging project covering roughly 5,000 square miles. Pokola lies in the center of the project. Once a small fishing village, Pokola now has a population of 13,000 and enjoys brick homes, electricity, running water, schools, a nightclub, and subsidized health care. Virtually everyone who works in this town works for CIB.

By contrast, the nearby Mbendjele village of Ibamba is still rooted in the semi-nomadic tribal culture that has existed for generations among the pygmies: leaf huts, subsistence hunting, and months-long forays into the jungle. Until recently, it was a “no-tech” existence. But these days, in addition to spears and bows, the Mbendjele are now carrying GPS-enabled handhelds through the jungle.

CIB is working with the Tropical Forest Trust, which works to promote responsible forest management throughout the world, and the Forest Stewardship Council, which recognizes responsible, sustainable logging that takes into account the rights of indigenous peoples. They have implemented a system that allows the Mbendjele to use these handhelds to identify sacred areas, hunting grounds, village sites, and even specific trees that are important to them. This ensures that logging operations will steer clear of them and allow the pygmies to continue their traditional lifestyle.

A rugged handheld, versatile software, and GPS

The effort to help preserve the Mbendjele cultural touchstones involves a coalition of the Tropical Forest Trust, CIB, and other international partners. Additional funding was provided by the World Bank’s Development Marketplace program. These various entities have teamed up to provide both the technology and the training to allow these tribes-people, few of whom read or write, to create detailed maps of their “community” that show tombs of their ancestors, hunting grounds, sacred areas, watering holes, areas of medicinal plants—even individual trees they want preserved.

The challenge of creating a workable technology solution for the project started with two main concerns: most of the users can’t read or write, and they would be operating in a dense rain forest.