Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/203

Human Ecosystems: Botam-Tai District dynamic and better organised cultures around it. Although it will have been a refuge from slave trading, as both the Bonny and Imo Rivers were major routes, slave trading will have had the overall effect of inhibiting population growth.

Until the end of the last century the Ogoni probably lived in the more accessible areas of the Ogoni Plain, farming, fishing and hunting: along the Imo River, on the navigable creeks in the South and West, and along the Bori River. The most important settlements were Eleme, Nchia and Bori (transit points in the slave trade), and the major European influences were from Bonny and Opobo on the coast and missionary activity from east of the Imo River. Apart from small hunting camps and some nomadic movement there was very little settlement in the interior of the Ogoni Plain until the turn of the century.

Settlement was encouraged by population growth resulting from the ending of the slave trade and the pacification of the local people by the British (and conceivably by a desire to escape British taxes). Farming settlements were established in the forest, and from a small base in the 1920s the population grew very fast, women having from 4 to 8 surviving children.

Up to 1940/50, the forest would have been cleared to establish land title and to provide new farmland. However because land was until then relatively plentiful, farmers would have been happy to return to land to re-farm it rather than to take on the extra work of clearing new forest.

It seems that the present day forest shrines are the sites of early settlements, sometimes no more than single family homesteads, suggesting that some settlements failed or were abandoned like the more modern abandoned Korobo compound at Gbene-Ue. Some may have been burial grounds.

17.6 MODERN SOCIETY

By the 1930s the Ogoni Forest would have been substantially depleted, as useful tree species were removed, as animal species were hunted (elephants and chimpanzees were probably near extinction by then) as patches of farming and fallow land became larger, and as exotic trees invaded the landscape (primarily oil-palms which will not grow in high rainforest). However with long fallow periods the ecosystem would have remained viable, able to withstand shocks such as drought.

However accelerated population growth, caused by a combination of a peaceful settled life, high agricultural production and health services began to push the human population beyond ecological viability by about 1960. The last substantial areas of forest (apart from the shrines and the riverine forest) were cleared at this time.

Thus a vicious cycle commenced: growth of a human farming population on a fixed area of land, causing fallow periods to become shorter and thus the sandy, easily leached soils to become increasingly degraded, demanding harder work for lower yields of cassava which is all that can be grown on the impoverished soils. With each cycle the soils become more impoverished and the pressure on the land becomes greater, while the population continues to grow.

Today the pressure is so great that wet areas, previously not farmed, are being pressed into service for quick cassava crops in the dry season, thus threatening dryseason water sources. Even the forest shrines (the last forests and symbols of cultural pride) are being destroyed to provide extra farm land and those that remain are tiny, surrounded by a sea of cassava and fallow land and, in their degraded state, prey to uncontrolled bush burning. 201