Central African Republic

The Central African Republic is one of the least-known African countries. This volume is the first to give a cultural overview of the key elements of this former French colony. Wood fork shows how the Republic has the fundamental building blocks, with plenty of natural resources, to take on the challenges of the modern world. The diverse ethnic groups, including Bandas and pygmies, are responding to changes such as increased urbanization.

Readers will learn about the various ways of life of the major groups and their farming, nomadic pastoral, and trading pursuits. The aggressive Islamic and Christian evangelizing alongside witchcraft and indigenous beliefs in other deities and spirits in the Central African Republic is covered as well. The chapter on food and clothing discusses the great vocabularies for food and drink in the country and the typical vibrantly colored clothes. The indigenous and French influences in cultural institutions such as education and media and literary output are explained. Insight into the family and women's roles, celebrations, and music and dance is given as well.

Cutting the Vines of the Past offers a novel argument: African ways of seeing and interpreting their environments and past are not only critical to how historians write environmental history; they also have important lessons for policymakers and conservationists. Tamara Giles-Vernick demonstrates how various outsiders intervening in African land-use practices have repeatedly met failure because of their inability or unwillingness to understand how Africans see their land and their pasts.

Giles-Vernick takes as her focus doli, the environmental and historical perceptions and knowledge of the Mpiemu people in the Central African Republic. She argues that Mpiemu opposition to a modern environmental conservation project—the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park and the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve—derives from the people's interpretations of their past experiences with environmental interventions imposed by concessionary companies, colonial officials, other Africans, Christian missionaries, and the postcolonial state. At the same time, Mpiemu people associate these contemporary conservationists with the bosses and Christian missionaries of the colonial past, viewing them as sources of jobs, consumer goods, and other support.

Giles-Vernick's argument will interest conservationists and policymakers as well as environmental historians. By examining Africans' environmental and historical ways of seeing and knowing, and by revealing how these have changed, Giles-Vernick offers a fresh perspective on the writing of environmental history.