Why Pygmies Are Dealing Weed to Survive in the Congo
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/democratic-republic-congo-pygmy-grow-deal-weed
What they don’t sell is dried for medicinal purposes. When someone falls ill, a traditional healer is dispatched with marijuana. Ground seeds mixed with water cures stomachaches. Kneaded into a starchy tuber called cassava, they improve appetites. A tea of boiled leaves treats coughs, parasites, fainting, flu, and fever. Mubawa ponders a comparison for the all-purpose treatments. “Like in America,” he says, “you take coffee—it makes you strong.”
There’s new scientific backing for marijuana’s medical benefits. In a 2015 study researchers found that cannabis use among Pygmies in the neighboring Central African Republic actually decreased their body’s parasite loads.
But the medicine and extra francs come at a high cost. There’s a small wooden shack behind the perimeter of their huts. Mubawa says that villagers are often arrested by the Congolese army for selling marijuana and held in that hut. Soldiers patrol the village nearly every day—three or four wander the area during our two-hour conversation—but it’s never clear whether they are there as customers or law enforcers. Villagers say that if the soldiers have recently been paid, they will buy the marijuana. If they haven’t, then they confiscate it and demand the growers pay a fine.
“If you have money, you pay, if not, they beat you until they get tired,” Mubawa says. “He has a gun; I have an arrow.”
et sinon qui n’a rien à voir avec le #cannabis
“There nobody could break our traditions,” Mubawa, the 36-year-old chief of the village, says of the forest. Worldwide, it is estimated that 20 million indigenous people have been displaced in the name of conservation. Today, the land’s new guardians, heavily armed rangers, interfere with those traditions. Survival International, an advocacy group for indigenous populations, says that across the Congo Basin Pygmies “face harassment, arrest, beatings, torture and even death at the hands of anti-poaching squads.” On these foraging journeys, Mubawa says members of his community have been arrested or killed by rangers of Virunga National Park.
In a region where the environment is threatened by armed groups, oil companies, and poachers, Virunga is hailed as an example of successful and sustainable conservation. Rangers are extensively trained, and a community development program called the Virunga Alliance has become one of the area’s biggest employers. But tensions remain between those protecting the park’s two million acres—one-third of the world’s mountain gorillas call Virunga home—and communities that have relied on its ecosystem for centuries.
il y a eu ce reportage sur arte
A la reconquête des forêts
Congo, un nouveau pacte avec la forêt
▻http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/059538-003-A/a-la-reconquete-des-forets
#RDC #pygmées #peuples_autochtones #forêt