Pygmies' existence under threat
Updated on 10 July 2007
Nick Paton Walsh reports from the Central African Republic on how the pygmies way of life in under threat from deforestation and discrimination.
They're a wandering pygmy people who live by hunting.
The men folk have been hailed as the best dads in the world - Aka pygmy fathers have their infant within arm's reach almost 50 percent of the time.
Aka pygmies have lived undisturbed in the Central African Republic for thousands of years but now, their very existence is being threatened by the de-forestation of their land.
Now they are being forced to move, but to a place where they're not wanted.
In the sweltering heat of central Africa, the forest is disappearing, and taking its people with it. Its bounty has sustained life for centuries, but logging is changing that.
The Aka pygmies are indigenous to the forest. But today they are forgotten, blighted by malaria, eye infections, even leprosy.
Children's stomachs are swollen because of worms and they live on the edge of society.
We visit their group of huts and a new settlement has been carved into the forest.
It's not hard to work out why they're discriminated against.
The village chief complains they're treated a bit like slave labour.
He said: "The people of the village use us to work in the fields. They don't give us the pay the owe us. So we can't go to the market to get what we need."
As we're filming, a man arrives who seems to think he somehow owns the pygmies as he found them in the forest.
But logging means their lives could get still worse.
A report last month said a third of this region's forest is marked for logging, and only a tenth protected.
Wood is yet another resource being fought over in Africa.
The unique culture of the Aka pygmies under threat as industry cuts into their habitat. The United Nations think there are 60,000 of them in this region, four times the tally the government give.
Their future in this changing world, a struggle to stop becoming a shadow on the landscape.
