Exploring the Dja UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and finding nothing

After having visited two communities situated just outside the Dja Reserve, we decide to go trekking within the reserve in the hope to being able to take pictures of the wildlife which is supposed to be abundant in this UNESCO Biosphere and World Heritage site. The conservation of the reserve has been supported by ECOFAC, a programme of the EU for outstanding Central African Forests since 1992. As we are told by ECOFAC staff in Lomié that the ECOFAC office in Samaloum is the better entry point, we head towards this little town at the northern Dja border.

We pay a lot of money to cover our driver, car, accommodation, food, equipment and the 4 people who are going to accompany us: an eco-guide, an eco-guard, and two bearers. As agreed, we are ready early in the morning to start our journey to encounter buffalos, and monkeys, hopefully gorillas, chimpanzees or even elephants. The next hours are a hard test for our patience. The eco-guard disappears with our car, the guide disappears once and again for personal grounds and stays behind. When we finally reach the entrance of the reserve at 11am, he tells us that the animals are now sleeping, that´s why we cant see them.

We keep on marching for hours in the dense forest. At the beginning, walking is not a problem, but after several hours, my headache becomes difficult to bear. ECOFAC made us pay so much that we had not much money left to buy food and water, so we had to be economic.

Over the next two days, we don’t see a single animal in this supposedly outstanding reserve – apart from heaps of ants, termites, bees and mosquitoes who don’t loosen their grip on us. Instead, we find numerous traces of poachers – elephant bones, shoes, firewood. In the village just before the entrance of the reserve, we meet a woman carrying a Mangaby baby monkey, not older than 1 ½ months. Its mother had been killed and the tiny baby given to the woman to raise it until it´s old enough to be eaten. The rangers try to persuade her to hand over the animal to be raised in an animal sanctuary in Yaounde, to no avail.

During those two days in the reserve, we get to know our guides better and can hardly conceal our astonishment. The eco-guard knows only two types of behavior: sleeping or playing to hunt mammals with his rifle. He talks about cocaine and his second job as guard accompanying trucks transporting logs. He shows high interest in the explanations of the eco-guide about different tree species in the reserve and calculates the price he would get if he felled the trees and sold them in Yaounde. Also the guide seems to be occupied with the economic value of the big trees in the reserve. He explains to us that a certain tree, even though very big and tall, had unfortunately not a very high commercial value. Unfortunately? “Yes, if you sell it you don’t get much revenue for it.”

We are happy to come back to Samaloum and ultimately Yaounde, taking home first-hand experience about the hardship of life in the forests and the difficulties to reconcile conservation on the one hand and livelihoods and the other.