Sunday, May 23, 2010
The pride of the community.
In my country Nigeria in West Africa, in a rural village, before cultivating for the season, there will be a ritual where the whole community will gather together and perform rituals to mark the beginning of the cultivating season. Few women appointed by the elders will cook and serve the community from the remaining of the last year’s crops. The drum beat will welcome in the TEK group to the crowd to educate the people about the cultivating season and what their roles will be. They have traditional environmental knowledge of the land, the crops, yam tubers, species, habitats and forest. The land use and management must be beneficial to the whole community, yielding for economic stability of the community. The oldest forest manager will assure people for equal participation and benefit for every community. During the ritual ceremony, the oldest farmer alive will tell stories and origins of the land, crops, forest habitats etc, and others will listen with pride. EJ is not the issue, no land displacement because the land is attached to the people and their generation and has histories behind them. Everything is originated and natural. Tradition rules everything. What do you guys think of the difference?
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Thank you for sharing this, Obioma. While TEK survives in many parts of the world, like the Nigerian communities you have described here, there is also significant loss of TEK everywhere, including Nigeria. For e.g., one recent report from allAfirca.com states that: "Nigeria loses about 350,000 hectares of land every year to desert encroachment. This has led to demographic displacements in villages across 11 states in the North. It is estimated that Nigeria loses about $5.1billion every year owing to rapid encroachment of drought and desert in most parts of the north." Have you heard of this? What do you think? Is this an example of a climate justice challenge?
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