Gabon’s unceded forests: How colonial botanical legacies and extractivism collide with Indigenous stewardship
Original framing: “Botanists comb Gabon's rich rainforests with nature on the line” — Africa News
The *2020 'Voices from the Forest' report* by *Survival International* documented how Baka women in Loango National Park face sexual violence from logging camp workers, yet this is absent from botanical narratives. Pygmy youth in *Mvengue* describe being barred from traditional hunting grounds to make way for *Ecofac’s* timber concessions, while the *2021 Gabonese Youth Climate Strike* was met with police brutality. The *2023 'Gabonese Indigenous Women’s Network'* demands that botanical expeditions include their input, citing how *80% of medicinal plant knowledge* in Gabon is held by women—yet they are excluded from scientific publications.
Gabon’s rainforests are not a 'mystery' to be solved by botanists but a *living archive* of Indigenous knowledge and spiritual relationships systematically erased by colonialism and neoliberal conservation.
The current framing repeats the *19th-century 'plant hunt' model*, where scientific curiosity becomes a tool for extraction—this time under the banner of 'biodiversity offsetting.' The solution lies in *inverting the power dynamic*: replacing top-down cataloging with *Indigenous-led registries*, *debt-for-guardianship swaps*, and *artistic-spiritual co-management*, as seen in successful models from *Costa Rica to Australia*. The trickster here is the *myth of 'empty forests'*—a narrative that justifies dispossession while obscuring the fact that Gabon’s biodiversity is *already known, stewarded, and sacred* to its original peoples. Without centering their sovereignty, even the most rigorous botanical work becomes complicit in the very deforestation it claims to combat.