(Illustration by Juan Bernabeu)
Are Indigenous people inherently better at caring for natural areas, or does nature need to be protected from them? Both of these reductive stereotypes are often repeated, but neither gives the whole picture.
A new study that examines the treatment of the Indigenous Batwa tribe in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) considers how both the government and nongovernmental organizations talk about the Batwa, with the goal of understanding what role the tribe plays in the conservation of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, home to ecologically important forests and endangered species such as the eastern lowland gorilla.
The recent history of the park set the stage for conflicts between the Batwa, the local government, and other groups living nearby. In the 1970s, Congolese authorities pushed the Batwa out of the park in the name of conservation, marginalizing them to communities just outside the boundaries. When, in 2018, some Batwa returned to live inside the park, the government and environmentally focused NGOs framed this development as ecologically disastrous. The Batwa could not be trusted to take care of the sensitive natural areas, they said. At the same time, Indigenous-rights groups took the opposite position, arguing that only the Batwa could adequately steward their ancestral lands.
The authors—Fergus O’Leary Simpson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy; Kristof Titeca, a professor there; Lorenzo Pellegrini, a professor of economics of environment and development at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam; Thomas Muller, a GIS and data researcher at the International Peace Information Service in Belgium; and Mwamibantu Muliri Dubois, a research assistant at the Université Officielle de Bukavu in the DRC—examine both these perspectives. They conducted some 250 interviews with members of the Batwa tribe, as well as with neighboring tribes, government and park officials, and representatives of various local interest groups.
They found that the story of the Batwa is far more complex than the marketing-brochure slogans that NGOs use to raise money from overseas donors eager to support ecological conservation or Indigenous human rights. “The ideal-type narratives ultimately divert attention from a broader political economy of violent resource extraction, which is fundamental,” the authors write.
Satellite analysis before and after October 2018, when some Batwa returned to live in the park, showed that two sectors where these returnees settled lost large percentages of forest cover. But this doesn’t confirm the narrative of the Batwa as forest destroyers. The tribe’s members are impoverished, and the data combined with the interviews show that some Batwa chiefs now living within the park allow access to other groups to engage in the charcoal trade, moving trees from the park to the region’s two biggest cities, Simpson says. Other factors in play include a lack of economic opportunities for both the Batwa and their neighbors, the government’s failure to give the Batwa land titles in an area outside the park where they could settle, and a variety of human-instigated causes that force endangered species from their habitats within the protected parkland.
“The interesting finding here for me is the gap between the story people tell and the reality on the ground of a messy conflict,” he says.
Why does the simplistic, binary narrative persist? Nonprofit fundraisers and politicians gravitate toward one-dimensional views of how Indigenous groups interact with the natural world, because it’s easier for audiences of donors or voters to digest. But it doesn’t reflect the full reality, Simpson says.
“In conservation debates more broadly, there is this idealization of Indigenous peoples as living this very simple life that has low ecological impact,” he says. “But there is also the idea that Indigenous people want the things that other people want because they are also human beings—hospitals, smartphones, schools.”
The study looks at “an important topic and a novel approach—an effort to break the stalemate between the ‘forest destroyers’ and the ‘forest guardians’ camps, which turns out to be a sort of artificial politico-academic construct of narratives rather than a reflection of what’s happening on the ground,” says Christopher Day, associate professor of political science at the College of Charleston. Proving that the Batwa are just one chess piece on the board of the region’s political economy is an important contribution to the field, he says.
Find the full study: “Indigenous Forest Destroyers or Guardians? The Indigenous Batwa and Their Ancestral Forests in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC” by Fergus O’Leary Simpson, Kristof Titeca, Lorenzo Pellegrini, Thomas Muller, and Mwamibantu Muliri Dubois, World Development, vol. 186, 2025.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.