Lese farmers of the Ituri Forest

The Lese Dese of the Ituri forest of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo are forest farmers, and Ngodingodi is a typical Lese village. Mupenda built the village on its present site when he was a newly married young man and needed to find suitable land to clear and cultivate. His stepfather's village is less than a kilometer away, and the two villages work and socialize with one another daily. Mupenda lives in the village with the families of his three married sons. He now has two wives; he took a second wife when his first wife failed to conceive, a common occurrence in this region of Africa. Of his three daughters, only Manjeke survived through puberty. She has recently married an industrious young Lese man, who, as tradition dictates, gave her father a bride wealth that included a kitunga (basket made from forest materials) of seed peanuts and several chickens. She will soon move to a nearby village to live with her new husband.

Gamiembi, Mupenda's youngest son, is building a new mafika (kitchen shelter) at the entrance to his mud hut. Each family has its own hut, mafika, and cooking fire. The women of Ngodingodi have been out in the forest all morning Cutting the broad tilipi; leaf Megaphrynium macrostachyum) with which to shingle the roof of the mafika. Huts, mafika, and the men's social-gathering shelters (called baraza) are all made from small trees and saplings tied firmly together with tough, flexible strapping; this binding is made by carefully splitting a palm vine that grows more than thirty meters (one hundred feet) in length. The mafika has open sides, whereas sleeping and food storage huts have latticework sides covered completely with mud. Huts are usually built in December at the end of the heavy rains when the soil is still wet and easily mixed into mud, which, when applied to the hut walls, will have time to dry over the next two months of the annual dry season. The dry season is never totally dry, but at least it rains less often and less heavily. By early afternoon the women are back with their bundles of leaves. Alimoya, the oldest woman in the village, sits down with legs outstretched beside the pile of leaves. She methodically splices leaves together in wads of five with the aid of a small knife fashioned locally from metal smelted by the Zande in the northern savannas. Next morning, before the sun rises high the the sky and before the leaves begin to dry and curl, Gamiembi and his brothers will climb on top of the mafika. Starting from the bottom, they will overlap the leaves into a waterproof roofing that, once held down with saplings or split bamboo, will last for three to five years. As Alimoya works on the leaves her co-wife, Uboobi, sets out again for their shamba (garden) to dig up some manioc and cut down some plantains for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast. Their task complete, Uboobi adjusts her sling slightly to let her baby Tofi nurse, places four or five large pieces of firewood on top of her already laden food basket, and, with the expertise of a weight lifter, hoists the cargo onto her back and adjusts the tumpline across her forehead.

As I follow Uboobi back to the village, I am reminded how hard Lese women have to work to provide for their families. Uboobi's days are always busy with child care, food preparation (which includes gathering, cleaning, peeling, pounding, and cooking), cutting and hauling firewood, carrying drinking water and her husband's washing water, washing clothes and cooking items, and working in the fields. In contrast, the men have few demands on them other than field clearing and live a much more leisurely existence.