This essay is about a conceptual category of historical and environmental
knowledge and about how a particular group of Africans use that category to
understand and debate change. It is, in effect, an exercise in translation. In
the middle and upper Sangha basin forests of the Central African Republic
(C.A.R.) and Cameroon, Mpiemu speakers have articulated a broad
category, doli, through which they express, debate and make claims of truth
about the past and present. Glossing doli as ‘history’ does little justice to the
richly complex dimensions of this category, for doli encompasses a multitude
of relationships to the past. It can refer to a distant unchanging past, as well
as to the knowledge, beliefs and practices associated with that past. Mpiemu
people hold up the knowledge, beliefs and practices as an idealized framework
to guide their behavior toward one another and their uses of fields, forests,
rivers and streams. But doli can also describe and frame the accumulated
experiences – identifiable events, people and places – of elderly people. In all
of these expressions about the past, Mpiemu use idioms linking persons and
their environments, those of cords and vines and of mobility (wandering) and
stasis (sitting), to articulate doli's central aim of ‘leaving a person behind’.
Tracing doli's different meanings, genres and aims can illuminate how the
category has changed over the twentieth century, how Mpiemu have
interpreted environmental interventions in the Sangha basin, and why they
have engaged in conflicts over their entitlement to valued forest resources.
Hence, it offers insights into why people use natural resources as they do and
provides an alternative to exclusively materialist explanations for conflicts
over resource use.