Doli: Translating an African environmental history of loss in the Sangha river basin of equatorial Africa

The essay is an exercise in translation. It examines doli, a conceptual cat egory of historical and environmental knowledge and explores how the Mpiemu in the Sangha basin of the Central African Republic use that category to u nderstand and debate change. It evaluates the historical claims, categories and epistemologies of Mpiemu people and shows how translating this categor y is intimately connected with environmental relations and environmental ch ange within the Sangha basin. In tales, narratives and non-narrative object s and sites, Mpiemu recalled the environmental interventions undertaken by expatriate concessionary companies and the French colonial administration i n the Sangha forest. These interventions promoted forest clearing and funda mentally altered relations of authority, and different groups of Mpiemu int erpreted them differently through the lens of doli. Their interpretations w ere shaped by their encounters with a World Wide Fund for Nature forest con servation project, which administered a park and reserve that limited peopl e's activities in the forest. Some Mpiemu who lived in close proximity to t he park and reserve invoked these genres to mourn and protest the loss of s evered cords that once linked them to broader networks of political economi cpower and to ancestors who had successfully accumulated wealth through the se networks. Through doli, Mpiemu sought in different ways to reassert thei r historical sense of entitlement to forest places, space and resources, an d to remember and to reproduce the relations that bound together past, pres ent and future people.