Indigenous Baka people accuse African Parks of “cruel and inhumane” abuse at the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo

Prince Harry is a member of African Parks’ board. As is Hansjörg Wyss, founder of the Wyss Foundation.

Odzala-Kokoua in the northwest of the Republic of Congo is one of Africa’s oldest National Parks. It was created by the French in 1935. Since 2010, it has been managed by a not-for-profit company called the African Parks Network.

The park hit the headlines this weekend with allegations of rape and torture by guards paid and managed by African Parks.

As Ian Birrell reports for the Mail on Sunday, Prince Harry was president of African Parks for six years and last year became a board member. African Parks manages 22 parks in 12 countries covering a total of 20 million hectares.

“What they are doing is cruel and inhumane”

Birrell spent several days in Odzala-Kokoua and reports “appalling stories of brutality, rape and torture involving this conservation militia”. The Baka Indigenous People who live in and around the park told him that African Parks’ guards were preventing them from entering the forest where they have traditionally gathered food and medicines, as well as hunting and fishing.

Four men told Birrell that they were held all day, chained together, by six African Parks’ guards. The guards ate the honey that the men had collected from the forest. At night, the guards took the men to a river and pushed their heads under water and whipped them with belts.

One of the men said,

“Some guards are bad people and their activities should be stopped. What they are doing is cruel and inhumane.”

And another said,

“African Parks can be so cruel to the Baka. Why should our people be prevented from accessing the forest? It is the reason for our life. Going into the forest now feels impossible after what happened.”

A Baka woman was raped by an armed guard while holding her one-month-old baby. The guard was dismissed from African Parks and jailed for a short time. A compensation court ordered the guard to pay £1,300 to the woman, but she told Birrell she had only received £520. The money went on medical treatment.

Her husband told Birrell that, “After the rape, the health of my wife is not good. Everything I earn goes for her health and the baby’s health.”

One Baka man was arrested and handcuffed after climbing a tree to collect honey. Six African Parks guards held him and his family in the forest all night. Then they tortured him. The guards took off his clothes, lit candles and dripped hot wax on his back. They whipped him with their belts while his wife and seven children watched. “I was very scared,” he told Birrell. “I thought I would die, and seeing my wife and children crying made it even more painful.”

Since then, he has not been back in the forest and his family can no longer eat honey. “Life is very hard,” he said.

Another Baka man told Birrell that he and his wife were assaulted by five African Parks guards while hunting. The guards beat both of them hard. Then the guards put him in prison for eight months. He lost weight and his health suffered as he went hungry and thirsty.

A community leader said that a Baka man had died a week after being beaten and jailed. He did not receive treatment for his injuries. His wife died three weeks later, leaving five children. Four years ago, another victim was shot in the arm trying to hide from an African Parks patrol.

A teenage boy said he was groomed for paid sex by one of the guards. When he visited the hospital feeling sick, doctors found that the abuser had injured his groin and given him a sexually transmitted disease. Three months later, the guard was sacked. But he left the area before criminal charges were brought, and he is still on the run from justice.

Medical staff were intimidated to cover up the guards’ abuse. A doctor told Birrell that armed African Parks guards would go into a local hospital “once or twice a week” to stop patients from telling doctors about abuse at the hands of guards. He said it was common to see guards threatening people inside the hospital.

He told Birrell that,

“Even when we were writing our reports, they would lean over, not wanting us to tell the truth because it would be bad for their funders to see the cases.”

Reports of problems at Odzala-Kokoua go back decades

In 1993, Oxfam published a report titled “Hunters and Gatherers in Central Africa”. The Baka were formerly referred to as Pygmies. Oxfam’s report notes that,

In Congo, for instance, while the Pygmies’ traditional knowledge will be used in the buffer zone around the Odzala National Park, the core area will remain sealed, and rights to the park itself will be vested in the Park rather than in the Pygmies.

In August 2013, a Kola Indigenous man from Olleme, Odzala-Kokoua National Park, was assaulted by wildlife guards in the forest near the Lekoli river.

Survival International informed African Parks about the attack. The following year in a meeting with Survival International, African Parks’ community manager admitted that they knew about problems with corruption, violence, and poaching by their guards.

In 2017, Survival International published a report documenting how Indigenous Peoples in the Congo Basin “are being illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation”.

In a memo dated 18 September 2020, Katherine MacGregor, then-US Deputy Secretary of the Interior, noted that her Department “was made aware of allegations of human rights violations involving African Parks Foundation (APF) that were summarily dismissed by APF after finding no fault”.

But in a footnote (30, page 9) she points out that:

“Each of the allegations involved investigations that were opened and closed within six weeks and either managed or conducted by APF.”

In May 2023, Survival International wrote to Prince Harry to warn him about the “appalling human rights abuses” being committed by its guards. A spokesman for Prince Harry’s foundation, Archewell, told the Mail on Sunday that, as soon as he became aware of the allegations, “he immediately escalated them to the CEO and chairman of the board of African Parks, the appropriate people to handle next steps”.

African Parks’ response

On 27 January 2024, African Parks stated that it “has a zero-tolerance policy for any form of abuse and is committed to upholding the rights of local and indigenous people”.

African Parks has hired a law firm to carry out an investigation.

African Parks accused Survival International of not providing “any and all facts they had”. Survival International responded by pointing out that African Parks “know all about the abuses”. In addition, Survival International points out,

Victims are understandably deeply scared about their details being shared - the husband of a woman who was raped by African Parks guards told Survival researchers that when he complained to the park authorities, he was held captive and beaten for nine hours.

Colonel Theodore Golo is a former army officer who was the area’s top government official for two years. He told Birrell that,

“There are a lot of problems with the guards. Indigenous people are the best keepers of the forest and fauna. They know everything about the forest. They keep it better than we do and better than foreigners.”

“This is not conservation, it’s destruction”

While the Baka are facing human rights abuses at the hands of African Parks’ guards, tourists can fly by private plane from the capital Brazzaville to stay in comfort in the park’s “Odzala Gorilla Discovery Camp”. They spend almost US$10,000 to take part in a four-day gorilla-spotting trip.

Survival International has set up a petition urging the funders and supporters of African Parks to stop violating the Baka’s human rights:

The biggest funder of African Parks is Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire businessman. He is also a board member of African Parks. In 1998, Wyss founded the Wyss Foundation, based in Washington DC, to fund conservation.

In 2018, the Wyss Foundation launched the US$1 billion Wyss Campaign for Nature which was a key organisation in promoting the campaign to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 (30x30). Survival International described the 30x30 proposal as “The biggest land grab in history”.

Fiore Longo, campaign director at Survival International said,

“Conservation areas are war zones for indigenous peoples. These organisations say they are saving nature, but in reality they are overseeing the abuse and destruction of the very people who have looked after these forests for millennia.

“If Prince Harry and other celebrities really want to save the planet, combat racism, fight for social justice and support human diversity, they should be supporting Indigenous Peoples. As the Baka put it, this is not conservation, it’s destruction.”

One Baka man told Birrell that,

“The forest was left to us by our parents and ancestors. Everything we have is found in the forest – our food, our medicine. We suffer so much without it. They are destroying our heritage and our people.”

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