Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/213

Human Ecosystems: Anyama District In especially favoured conditions where the soils are deep and very fertile the giant Silk Cotton Tree, Ceiba pentandra, towers above the forest canopy.

On the flood plains the forest is less even, depending on the susceptibility to flooding and the height of the water table. Generally, there is more undergrowth, and there are shorter trees with buttresses, stilt roots, peg roots (pneumorrhizae) and knee roots. Here are to be found substantial areas of oil palm and rattan-palm forest.

Anyama lies in the natural oil-palm zone and under natural conditions the palm would have been conspicuous where ever the land was not permanently flooded and where conditions did not favour the development of lowland tropical rainforest (palm trees will not grow under heavy shade). It is people who have moved the oil-palm belt North as they have converted the lowland rainforest belt into derived savannah dominated by the useful oil palm.

Naturally, the swamps carry the lowest species diversity with large patches of raffia-palm forest. On drier land, there is oil palm forest, interspersed with broad-leaved forest with rattan palm growing up trees that are frequently stilt rooted.

18.5 NATURAL AND VIABLE SOCIETY

As elsewhere in the Delta, people have been a part of the landscape for hundreds of thousands of years. But it was the appearance of viable people, about 5000 years ago, which began the alteration of the ecosystem to suit people's needs: the banks of the Ekole Creek would have been very attractive for settlement. The populations of some of the slower moving animals such as the hippopotamus (the most dangerous large mammal from people's point of view) may have felt the impact of people's hunting, while their dogs would have worried smaller faster moving animals such as duikers. However the overall impact of early people was small and easily absorbed by the ecosystem.

In more recent times, like much of the interior of the Niger Delta, the more accessible parts of the Anyama district may have been a place of refuge from more dynamic and better organised cultures around it (for instance Benin and Warri to the West). The interior will have been a refuge from slave trading, although because the Ekole Creek was a slave-trading route, the activity would have had the overall effect of inhibiting population growth.

The Anyama people are part of the Central Delta group and Anyama specifically seems to have been settled from the area around Ogbia sometime in the 19th century although, on such an accessible site, there may have been a hunting and fishing camp already. Given the limited dry land, colonies went out to found new settlements resulting in the 17 Anyama communities of today.

It is conceivable that the impetus to the settlement of Anyama arose for two reasons. First because of the decline of the slave trade, making the site on the Ekole Creek a safer place to live; and second with the development of the palm oil and timber trade with Europe in the middle of the 19th century, in which the Ekole Creek was an important route. Anyama was considered important enough by the British to have a District Officer in 1928.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, a human population, having grown due to the ending of the slave trade, would have had a substantial impact on the ecosystem, which nonetheless would have remained dominantly forest, albeit depleted of the larger more valuable trees in the more accessible areas. With an insatiable demand for palm oil the oil palm forests would have been opened up for exploitation and the palm favoured in many other areas. The more settled life encouraged by the British for easy economic exploitation, and improved health care, initially encouraged by the missions and later by 211