Presentation short abstract

In Cameroon, human rights discourses mobilized by conservation actors has reduced physical violence, but extended epistemic violence toward indigenous Baka people. Violence enables forests to function as production sites, rather than places of social relationships inhabited by the Baka.

Presentation long abstract

For many years, WWF-funded rangers were accused of extraordinary forms of physical violence toward indigenous people in national parks across the world, including in Cameroon’s Lobéké, Boumba Bek and Nki national parks (Warren and Baker, 2019; Survival International, 2016). These incidents of physical violence diminished with the signing of a 2019 Memorandum of Understanding between Cameroon’s Ministry of Forests and Wildlife (MINFOF) and a Baka indigenous organization, ASBABUK, renewed in 2023. Nevertheless, other forms of violence persist. In this paper, I will explore how conservation actors in Cameroon appropriate the language and discourse of human rights in ways that reduce physical violence toward the Baka, but extend and deepen forms of epistemic violence. Access is subject to temporal and spatial restrictions as well as regimes of control and legibility. These operate as a form of biopower, cutting the Baka off from their life worlds in the forest (Foucault, 1976). At the same time, many decades of physical violence have left their own imprint: violence takes own its own autonomy and many Baka do not go to the forest out of fear that violence of the past will occur again (Feldman, 21). The imprint of violence remains, operating as a form of discipline to keep the Baka out of the forests and to maintain these spaces as zones of production rather than as the Baka inhabit them, as places of social relationships and alternative spatial and temporal rhythms.