Research group SHOC and the FORAGENCY team are proud to announce the first FORAGENCY publication by researcher Etienne Gontard, via this link.
In, “Weaving the Future: Duiker Hides Trade and the Aka in Colonial Central Africa” , Etienne Gontard studies how, between 1920 and 1950, duikers were killed on an unprecedented scale in the Upper-Sangha and Lobaye riverbeds, peripheral portions of the French colonial empire. This exploitation was driven by the needs of the metropole’s leather industries, and executed first hand by semi-nomadic hunters-gatherers, the Aka. This chapter intends to craft an environmental history of this short-lived commodity and its world, inhabited by changing technologies and social relations, and the long-term changes induced by colonisation in Central Africa.
For more info on the publication, click here.