Cameroon

Cultural Survival is accompanied by Greenpeace and dozens of other organizations in calling for Herakles Farms to own up to their abuses in Cameroon.

Herakles Farms has withdrawn their application to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for their palm oil plantation in the Southwest region of Cameroon.

Two local protests broke out in the Southwest region of Cameroon this summer in opposition to the New York based company Herakles’ Farms, who have already planted nurseries for their proposed palm oil plantation.  

youth text

Indigenous Activists Tell Cultural Survival What The Decade Meant To Them

The low levels of education among the Mbororo—caused primarily by their historical reliance on cattle-rearing and isolated, dispersed settlement patterns—has formed a key barrier to their inclusion within Cameroon society. This problem is particularly acute for Mbororo girls.

The insecurity the Bakola and Bagyeli Pygmies in Cameroon’s Ocean Department are facing due to a new pipeline is an experience that has been shared by many indigenous peoples around the world.

On June 6th, the World Bank approved funding for a $3.5 billion dollar project enabling oil exploitation in Chad and Cameroon. The project includes the construction of 3 oil fields in the Doba Basin of southern Chad, with oil production estimated at 225,000 barrels per day. Once the oil is extracted, it will be transported through a 600 foot-wide pipe crossing Cameroon. An international consortium composed of large oil corporations like Shell, Elf, Agip, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron initially backed the project.

In the Fulani village of Bainjong in Cameroon, a calf afflicted by an infectious disease is treated with a preparation that begins with the harvesting of certain mistletoe leaves; ethnoveterinarian Ardo Umaruis completes this task early in the morning before speaking to anyone. He pounds the leaves into a dry powder and washes a verse from the Koran, written in Arabic ink on a Koranic board, into the powder. When sprinkled onto the calf for seven days, this mixture provides immunity for one year. Alternatively, the inner fibers of the bark of a particular legume are tied into seven knots.

Location, Land, and Climate

The Losses * Inappropriate logging and farming have so devasted the rain forest on the Philippine island of Ormoc that it no longer functions as a natural flood barrier.

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

The reach into the aesthetic worlds of other cultures spans centuries. Today, a variety of motives incite Western interests in Third World arts and crafts. Multinational corporations, tourists, individual entrepreneurs, private and museum collectors are all appropriators of fine "high" art or its imitations as well as handicrafts, both the rare and the mass-produced. Ethnic arts and crafts have found a permanent home in many developed nations, influencing Western tastes and production.

In 1980 developed countries supplied 37% of the $2.6 billion world demand for handmade products.