Meet Sam, the Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner who is working with Baka Forest Peoples to breathe new life into 'the lungs of Africa'.
Indigenous communities, like Sam's own Nninong clan, have long lived in balance with the Congo Basin forests they call home. But large areas were converted into palm oil and rubber plantations by British authorities and, after the colonial era, handed to the state as part of the Cameroon Development Corporation. The legacy of colonialism continues through logging, mining and poaching. This 'development' is unravelling the ancestral lands and thereby nutrition, medicine and refuge of 75 million people, the home of more other creatures than we can count, and the biggest forest carbon sink in the world.
This new story of decolonisation from the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective is a tale of awakening, of the cycles that gifted Sam new beginnings from death, and of the path that he is helping us all to track towards recognising Earth's best custodians. In their rich reciprocal relationship with the forest, there lies hope for reweaving the biocultural diversity that ensures abundance for the entire community of life.
I am Samuel Nnah Ndobe from the Nninong clan in Cameroon.
My home is one of the wettest places in the world. The rains are said to fall from the clashes between our ocean and mountain spirits.
Bright streams flow down the volcanic rocks of Mount Cameroon, across black beaches into the Atlantic Ocean. On the way these rains water rich forests, home to beings as tiny as butterflies and as huge as elephants.
Human beings have flourished here too, for as long as our soles have walked the Congo Basin. Indigenous communities hunted and gathered in balance with the ecosystem, danced and sung in celebration of the ever-renewing cycles of life.
But the abundance gifted by land and water made Cameroon ripe for colonial exploitation.
I grew up on a plantation. Like the oil palms restrained to their production lines, life was unravelled into a competition for cash.
When I was ten, the plantation workers took me with them along an elephant path into the last fragment of wild forest.
Our destination was a ‘Saraka’: elephants killed by ivory poachers, left as a ‘free meat feast’ for us. The path that led me to them would change the path of my life.
Looking death in the eye, I woke up: the pain I felt for the elephants made me profoundly conscious of our connection.
Now, as an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner, I work to restore the community of life.
I began by returning to the roots of the first people who called this forest home. On my bicycle, I visited Indigenous Baka villages, spending my first night with them under a full moon in 1999.
All these years later, I am considered family, and can connect them to local neighbours, national government and international policymakers from whom they have faced systemic discrimination.
By understanding Indigenous wisdom, mapping ancestral lands, and recognising customary governance, we can all benefit from the Baka’s rich relationship with the forest.
One day, while walking to one of their sacred sites, we found an elephant path. For the second time, I followed it, but this time we tracked life, not death.
The path ended in a glade. Elephants drank from a stream beside buffalo, antelope and duiker.
This was a paradise, protected by Indigenous custodians.
It revealed the abundance that is still possible on this bluegreen planet, if we can track our way back home.
ABOUT THE AFRICAN EARTH JURISPRUDENCE COLLECTIVE
The African Earth Jurisprudence Collective brings together dedicated Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners working locally across the continent. It emerged as a home for graduates and facilitators of the unique, UN-recognised Trainings for Transformation.
These practitioners are accompanying Indigenous communities on journeys of revival, using methodologies learnt from the Colombian Amazon. Storytelling, elder-centred dialogues and eco-cultural mapping unearth wisdom that predates colonialism, which is guiding these communities through the restoration of seed diversity, agroecological farming, sacred ritual and intergenerational learning. Wherever a community starts their journey of decolonisation, these processes ultimately reweave holistic biocultural systems.
MORE STORIES OF DECOLONISATION
Our gratitude to illustrator and animator, Tim Hawkins
ABOUT SAMUEL NNAH NDOBE
Samuel Nnah Ndobe is an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner from Cameroon, having undergone the Trainings for Transformation and joined the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective.
A leading advocate for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, he has supported community-led conservation across the Congo Basin and beyond.
Sam has consulted for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Rainforest Foundations, Rights and Resources Initiative, Global Greengrants Fund and Synchronicity Earth.
ABOUT EARTH JURISPRUDENCE
In simple terms, Earth Jurisprudence is a way of relating to our living world with respect.
As a philosophy it enables us to recognise that viewing humans as superior to and separate from nature, as advocated by industrial growth societies, has caused interconnected ecological, climate and social crises on a planetary scale. As a practice, Earth Jurisprudence encourages us to shift to an Earth-centred perspective, and govern our lives according to an attentive relationship with the wider web of life.