Bayanga

Bayanga sits on ground that Aka forest people and neighbouring farming communities have used for far longer than any settlement records. It began as a small Sangha fishing village, and was made a town in the 1970s by a sawmill that turned it into the main logging centre of the south-west, drawing workers, traders, missionaries and foreign businesses and setting off a period of rapid growth.

Conservation then came to sit alongside the timber trade. In 1990 the Central African government established the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve and the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the forest around Bayanga, and the town became the administrative and logistical base for both. Researchers began long-term work at Dzanga Bai in the same year, identifying individual forest elephants and recording their behaviour over decades, and a gorilla habituation programme was built up with Aka trackers whose knowledge of the forest made it possible.

In 2012 the parks on the Central African, Cameroonian and Congolese sides of the Sangha were inscribed together by UNESCO as the Sangha Trinational World Heritage Site. The crisis that engulfed the country from 2013 reached the area as well, and many residents left, among them migrant workers from the logging industry; conservation and tourism resumed gradually in the years that followed and the town recovered its role as the gateway to the reserve, though poaching pressure and the collapse of the national economy have weighed on it.

Two ways of life meet in Bayanga. The Aka, forest hunter-gatherers of the Sangha and Lobaye forests, have lived by hunting, gathering honey and wild yams, and moving through the forest in small camps; their polyphonic singing, in which voices interlock without a leader, was recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2003, and their water-drumming and dances belong to the same tradition. Alongside them live Bantu-speaking farming and fishing communities and workers who came for the sawmill from other parts of the country.

That meeting is not an equal one, and the reserve's programmes have tried to give Aka trackers and guides a formal place in conservation work and in the income it brings. Guiding, tracking and forest teaching are now among the few paid occupations in the town, and visits to Aka communities are arranged through the programme rather than independently.

Sango is the shared language of the market and the street, with the Aka speaking their own language among themselves and French used in offices. Christianity has a presence through mission churches, held alongside older beliefs about the forest and its spirits. Social life turns on the market street, the football ground, the river and the long evenings after the working day.

Bayanga is small: a 2021 estimate put the sub-prefecture at 8,421 people, and the town is a single main street with quarters spreading behind it. Houses are of timber, mud brick and thatch or corrugated iron, and the forest begins immediately beyond the last of them.

Work comes from three sources. The protected areas employ guides, trackers, rangers, drivers and staff, and account for most of the regular wages in the town. Fishing on the Sangha and farming small clearings of cassava, plantain and groundnuts feed most households. Beyond that there is trading, transport and whatever the forest yields. Timber, which built the town in the 1970s and still employed several hundred people in the 2000s, remains part of its economy, but conservation and tourism have grown up beside it.

Services are thin. Electricity comes from generators, water from wells and the river, and the nearest hospital of any size is a long journey away. Goods arrive by road from Nola when the tracks allow, and prices reflect the distance. The day begins before dawn with the river mist and the first canoes, and the forest sets the rhythm of the rest of it: rain in the afternoon, dark by seven, and the sound of the trees at night.

The kitchen here is that of the Central African forest. Gozo, a stiff cassava paste, is the staple, eaten by hand with a sauce of pounded cassava leaves cooked in palm oil and groundnut paste. Plantain, boiled or pounded, and yams and maize fill out the starch, and rice appears when it can be brought in.

Fish from the Sangha is the everyday protein: grilled fresh over charcoal, or smoked over slow fires so that it keeps for weeks and can be traded inland. Groundnut and okra sauces carry chicken or goat on better days. Koko, the finely sliced leaves of a forest vine, is cooked with palm oil and is as much a local signature here as anywhere in the country.

The forest supplies the rest in season. Wild honey, taken from high in the trees, is prized by the Aka and traded in the town; caterpillars are collected, fried and dried; mushrooms, wild yams and forest fruits come and go with the months. Hunting of protected animals is illegal and the reserve enforces it. Palm wine is tapped in the villages, a strong spirit is distilled locally, and sweet tea and coffee with evaporated milk begin the morning.