Aka Cosmos

The world of the Aka is one of what they know.  They are rarely educated in a formal setting so their knowledge of the world tends to be exaggerated in some sense.  The group believes in two types of "god" figures although they do not overly worship either.  The first is a creator god, Bembe, who is thought of as the one who put everything where it is, the Aka believe that Bembe worked very hard on creating everything there is now, and because of this Bembe has gone into eternal slumber or retired.  The other spirit that now guides and watches over the material world in Dzengi who is seen as the spirit of the forest.  He is the one who gives the Aka everything they have, the Aka will make sacrifices for Dzengi during the spring and fall.  These two spirits are traditions within the Aka which seem to be dying off as more and more Aka move out of the rainforests and into actual cities and communities.  Ceremonial dances are held frequently to ensure the productivity of the hunt, but also on the occasion of a death.  To deal with private matters, more intimate rites may be performed, perhaps with the assistance of an nganga.  An nganga is essentially the Aka version of a shaman and he tends to also serve as a consort to the spirit world, usually with the help of hallucinogens.  The Aka are also people who have a set of cultural taboos, known as ekila, which serve as a spiritual and moral guidance.  The Aka also tend to believe in a connection that each individual has to the spirit world, which can be tapped into with the help of an nganga.

World of the Aka

The Aka use a set standard on values of each person in the tribe.  Everyone has some sort of job within the community that benefits the tribe as a whole.  Aka society is acephalous and highly egalitarian.  During the dry season, when camps are closer together, communal net-hunts are arranged, and several camps will join together.  Men, women, and children may participate, one group acting as the “beaters” flushing game out of the bush toward the surrounding hunting nets where a second group of participants waits with spears ready.The majority of work done by the men is hunting, sometimes these hunting parties can be gone for days tracking animals on a hunt.  The women of the tribe will also be involved in the hunt sometimes, but they also gather many fruits and nuts off the trees in their habitat.  Gathering activities also vary by season, though many fruits, nuts, fungi, and the leaves of Gnetum africanum are gathered opportunistically, as are forest snails and tortoises.  The men also serve as the primary educators of the children and will take them almost everywhere they go.  There is a understanding that the children need to know what they can obtain from the forest at an early age, as well as to be able to understand what they can and cannot eat.  The advancement of technology in the area has called for the Aka to come out of the forest and work traditional crop fields, something the Aka are not accustomed to.  Since colonial times, Aka have started to travel outside of their communities and work in small rural villages and towns, usually on farms.  This allows for little income and many Aka see it as a obstacle in their daily lives.  The Aka want to stay connected to their traditional past.

Tropical forests of southwestern Central African Republic: Homeland of the Aka

The Aka tend to live in dense rainforests in the Congo and in the Central African Republic.  They live in a tropical climate and the dense, humid forest in this region is heterogeneous in composition. 
The area is covered by solid ground semideciduous forest, but has areas with solid ground evergreen forests, swamp or marsh forests in the riverine valleys, and open savannah.  Secondary forest also exists in regions recently abandoned by slash and burn agriculturalists.  Game and wild species vary across these various forest types and Aka hunt a number of species in each environment, but will tend to hunt whatever they can find.  The Aka are hunter gathers so the primary role men play are to hunt and gather food for the rest of the tribe, they spend the majority of their time doing this.  
The northern part of the region the Aka inhabit has a tropical climate with two seasons, and the southern part a subequatorial climate with four seasons.  Average rainfall throughout is approximately 1700mm (1407-2381 mm), and the mean annual temperature is 24.5 degrees centigrade .

History of the Aka

The Aka people are not literate therefore they do not have nay written history or recollection of their people's history.  Everything everyone Aka knows about his or her ancestors and their tradition is passed on by word of mouth through generations. The Aka live in the northwestern region of the Congo Basin, in the tropical forests of southwestern Central African Republic (CAR) and northern Congo-Brazzaville.  They primarily live and work off of the rainforest even though some men travel into cities to look for work.  The Aka identify themselves as "peoples of the forest" and tend to refer to outsiders as "peoples of the village".  The Aka are have become specialized in several aspects of the rainforest including the gathering of honey for which the locals are willing to pay good money for.  Their is group identification within the Aka with several farming clans having emerged these Aka travel more and interact with society much more often.  The Aka will set a core nuclear family in a tribe and these families work together to obtain things like food and water.  With European colonialism in effect in the 18th century, many other African tribes were pushed into Aka lands.  This led to these outside clans becoming affiliated with and eventually incorporating themselves into the Aka tribe.  From 1910 to the 1940's the Aka were under French Equatorial Africa, and during this rule the French tried to put tribes people of Africa into more modern societies, but this failed and led to many more Africans traveling into Aka lands.  This then led to an increased demand for bush meat and new ways of hunting were established making it easier for the Aka to obtain food during hunting, it also made hunting easy enough for women of the tribe to participate in the activity.  Today the Aka are again being forced out of the rainforest and finding work on coffee farms.

Intro to the Aka

The Aka people are a nomadic Mbenga pygmy people. They live in southwestern Central African Republic and the Brazzaville region of the Republic of the Congo. An ecologically diverse people, they occupy 11 different ecological zones of the Western Congo Basin.The Aka are estimated to number between 30,000-40,000 people living throughout their territories.  The local population in any one area varies continuously as individuals come and go, visiting relatives in other areas for lengths of time.