An Abandoned Village

This village, photographed in the vicinity of Djolu, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was at the edge of the secondary forest on a tertiary road. As explained, the entire village had been abandoned when the chief had died -- the people had picked up all of their belongings and moved to a new site. It was said that a village might also move when the local resources had been exhausted as the result of too much human pressure on the fragile ecosystem.

That is one of the reasons that the maps I saw were so inaccurate. Villages named no longer existed as depicted, or they had moved to another place, and were the same name, or the name had been changed to "big such-and-such" or "new such-and-such." A perfect case of recycling, the left behind houses decayed and melted back into the earth, and eventually the land was engulfed again by forest.

Photo by D. Messinger