Gabon: Chinese businessmen to dam the Pygmy and Bantu people’s sacred Kongou Falls

Local pygmy and Bantu ethnic groups have revered the Kongou Falls for centuries, and it is easy to understand why. The falls begin as a steep set of rapids that fracture in half a dozen directions, funneling churning chutes down sheer cliffs into frothy pools. Farther down, two branches of the Ivindo River gush down twin falls known asthe Sun and the Moon.
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This was once untouched forest, but last year a Chinese crew showed up
with a letter from the Ministry of Mines authorizing it to begin
working. A Chinese consortium planned to build a huge dam, which would
power a mine and a railway to move the ore south. Tomo Nishihara, a
conservationist working for the Wildlife Conservation Society, was
worried. The boundaries of Ivindo and another park to the north,
Minkebe, had been drawn to exclude the mine, which had been left idle
as Gabon grew rich on oil. “There are other places that it could have
been built,” he said of the dam.

“But I was told this project was authorized at the highest levels.” Mr. Nishihara had been through this before. Sinopec, the Chinese state oil company, turned up in 2006 in Loango National Park, a lush coastal preserve where elephants wander the beach. Armed with a government letter, the company began seismic testing in the park, setting off loud blasts in its search for oil deposits. And it provided little food for its workers, who hunted the rare wildlife, according to local park officials. “The question is not just this waterfall, beautiful as it is,” said Marc Ona Essangui, an environmental activist here. “This is about whether the government will live up to its commitments” to the Gabonese people. In neighboring countries, impoverished hordes have razed and burned their forests to plant crops and make charcoal.

They have slaughtered the gorillas, elephants, chimpanzees and hippos in jungles for meat. But the Gabonese flocked to cities, living in comparative splendor. Governed by the wily President Omar Bongo since 1967, Gabon has never had a coup or a civil war, a rare achievement for a nation surrounded by unstable, war-torn states. Fueled by oil, the country’s economy was more like that of an Arabian emirate than a Central African nation. For many years Gabon was said, perhaps apocryphally, to have the
world’s highest per capita consumption of Champagne.

Mr. Bongo, one of Africa’s wealthiest men, bought peace with cash, according to diplomats and analysts here, using a bloated bureaucracy to put a chicken in almost every pot. Generous payoffs and the threat of prison have silenced political opponents. Mr. Bongo, a self-proclaimed nature lover, also set aside 10 percent of Gabon’s land as national parks in 2002, pledging that they would never be logged, mined, hunted or farmed. But that commitment is running into an economic reality: the country needs a new way to generate money. Local pygmy and Bantu ethnic groups have revered the Kongou Falls for centuries, and it is easy to understand why. The falls begin as a steep set of rapids that fracture in half a dozen directions, funneling churning chutes down sheer cliffs into frothy pools. Farther down, two branches of the Ivindo River gush down twin falls known as the Sun and the Moon.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/world/africa/22gabon.html?_r=2&hp