When Bihini Won wa Musiti Jean began working in forest conservation in the Congo Basin back in 1982, in Central and Western African regions the idea of conserving nature was still that to preserve wildlife, people had to be kept out of natural areas. This approach has often caused more problems than it has solved, both historically and in regions where it is still present today. But during Bihini’s long career working with people from all walks of life in the Congo Basin, he has seen great progress made in understanding how conservation can serve communities, forests, and species at the same time.
In conversation with Nina Seale, he discusses his long career, his concerns, and the highlights from working with Synchronicity Earth’s Congo Basin Programme partners as one of our Congo Basin affiliates.
A forest identity
According to your biography, you first trained as a vet before studying applied environment and biology. What made you move from medicine to wildlife?
Bihini: I think it’s connected to the origin of my name. My name is Musiti, which means forest. I was also born in a remote area, where the culture of the communities was close to gathering, fishing, and hunting rather than raising large livestock. So, the forest has always been my concern. After my studies, I was initially recruited to work for a poultry company, but when the funding was no longer available, I was looking for another job and the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) was looking for research assistants. At first, I was just looking for a job, I wasn’t attracted to the idea of working on protected areas, but then the longer I worked there, the more I was attracted to the natural world. Then I realised that my name was connected to the nature, and that by doing my job I was protecting my name.
Bihini’s conservation career began with working in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s national parks, such as Garamba National Park. Image: Nuria Ortega/African Parks Network CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
Reconnecting conservation with community
So, your career really began with developing your passion for forests, but most of your career has been about working with people and communities. When do you think you realised how important it was to work with people to protect forests?
Bihini: At first, I was working with the rangers who were doing anti-poaching patrols and counting animals. But in the beginning working with rangers was not giving me an opportunity to connect with people because, at that time, at the level of state institutions, there was not yet a participatory resource management approach and conservation was not envisaged for people. It was about keeping the protected areas separate from people by telling them not to come in and that they couldn’t do what they wanted there.
But I began to understand that the centre of conservation was people when many conflict resolution processes started in the national parks. People were being arrested for poaching and claiming their land, because their land had been used for the national park. After that, I understood that people were central for what we were trying to do.
Land management should not only serve nature, but it should also enable communities to use their land sustainably. From that moment on, we decided to take a people-centred approach, to listen to their requests and to find out how not to put them aside, but to take their needs and the needs of the protected area into consideration. You cannot separate the two.
If there was already bad feeling between the communities and the rangers, how hard was it to try to recover those relationships?
Bihini: The role of the traditional chief was quite important. They were real problem solvers when the tension was too high and nobody was able to listen- they would open up the discussion. There were those who agreed that the land should be used for protected areas, and the way that they were putting across the issues was different from those who were expressing the wish to desert the protected area around their village.
The diplomacy of traditional chiefs was invaluable for reconciling local communities and rangers in the national parks. Image © Chris Scarffe
Bringing in diverse perspectives
That’s really interesting. However, your work with the Conference of the Central African moist forest ecosystems and the partner organisations in our Congo Basin Programme has not just focussed on the chiefs, but others in the community who don’t have as much influence, and even those whose needs have been historically marginalised, such as women and Indigenous Peoples. At what point in your career did their voices start to be successfully included in conservation decision-making?
Bihini: All this started in 1996, when the realisation came that during discussion forums concerning forest, there were less voices from Indigenous Peoples, there were less voices from civil society, and also less voices from the private sector.
At that time, I was a programme officer, and we started thinking about how to bring all those constituencies together and have