We wander like birds

He then outlined a historical role for the French in which they would intervene in this ancient and unchanging place and people in order to intensively exploit the labor and resources that the "M'Bimou" circumscription contained.43 This intervention took on a real urgency for Pouperon and his colleagues in the Sangha basin, for they were engaged in a crucial struggle with Germany for access to African labor and forest commodities. While French explorers and administrators in the first decade of the twentieth century took pains to historicize the wanderings and wars of riverine dwellers, they made only passing references to Mpiemu participation in these histories of movement. Mpiemu speakers, it seems, moved compulsively and without reason.

Why did French colonizers make these distinctions between the Mpiemu and other Sangha populations, and why did they see Mpiemu movement as ahistorical? French colonizers believed that instability and movement marked peoples who were "uncivilized" and without history. Because riverine populations were more strategically located along the banks of the Sangha River, explorers surely had longer and more intensive contact with them. Late-nineteenth-century Mpiemu, however, lived along the peripheries of these routes of access, and they may not have been compelling subjects of study and control. But this notion of ahistorical wanderers may not be just an artifact of French observers' ignorance or lack of concern. Explorers encountered many populations who were just as mobile as the Mpiemu. Quite possibly, they perceived riverine people as "superior" to those living deep in the forests. For instance, at least one early-twentieth-century administrative report parsed Sangha basin populations by their "degrees of human evolution."44 The "Bombassa" (Bomassa), who lived in larger villages along the Sangha and had access to both interior peoples and European traders, ranked higher for the French than nomadic people living in the forests, as well as some peoples residing along smaller rivers. The report does not mention Mpiemu speakers at all, but later administrators may have appropriated this ranking when they complained in 19o7-19o8 that the "indecisive, unstable and nomadic tribes" of the M'Bimou circumscription frequently fled to German Cameroon to escape taxes and labor demands.45

For the French, the dynamics of European territorial competition and African wanderings and wars provided ample justification to intervene in the Sangha basin and to claim access to valuable forest commodities. French intervention would bring history to Sangha populations like the Mpiemu by settling them in newly designated circonscriptions and harnessing their labor to gain access to the forest's ivory, rubber, and animal skins.

Indigenes and "Flight" After 1920

From the 192os on, French official interest in Mpiemu history and movement developed in tandem with a more concerted effort on the part of France to build a colonial state in the Sangha basin. This endeavor intensified following the Kongo Wara rebellion, which swept the upper and lower Sangha basins between 1928 and 1931 and precipitated a brutal French military suppression, administrative redistricting, and extensive village resettlements.46 As they undertook more interventionist schemes to extract taxes and labor for roads, rubber tapping, and food cultivation, administrators increasingly defined the mobility of Sangha populations (and particularly Mpiemu mobility) as a problem. Mpiemu movement hampered French control over their labor, food, and taxes. By the 1950s, some administrators would look back on the history of Mpiemu mobility and contend that it resulted in the disappearance of the Mpiemu altogether. From the 192os through the 195os, administrators sought to prevent indigenes (natives) from fleeing across district, circumscription, and colony boundaries. Redoubling their efforts to contain Mpiemu, BaAka, and other populations within colonial boundaries, administrators believed that a stable, docile population would enable them to construct an administrative infrastructure and to gain ready access to forest and agricultural products.47 To their dismay, these efforts produced limited results, as the Mpiemu continued their peregrinations in response to the ravages of sleeping sickness and opportunities for paid work with expatriate commercial enterprises. Efforts to establish a policy toward BaAka (Babinga) sedentarization also foundered.