The Forest That Was Left Standing

The Forest That Was Left Standing

Ask why there is still a rainforest here, when there is farmland in every direction for a hundred miles.

The answer is not that nobody wanted it.

The answer is that parts of it could not be entered. This grove belonged to a god. That stand of odum was where the ancestors were. This stream had a day. That tree could not be cut, and the man who cut it would answer for it, and everybody knew which tree. There were sections of forest a hunter would not enter alone, and days on which nobody hunted at all, and species nobody in that village would eat because their grandmother's line did not eat them.

Call it superstition if you like. It functioned as a closed season, a protected species list and a nature reserve, enforced without a single ranger, for several hundred years.

Kakum was gazetted in 1931 and became a national park in 1992, and the forest elephants and the bongo and the yellow-backed duiker are in there because of a rule written by people who never used the word conservation.

Now walk out onto the canopy bridge at six in the morning, when the mist is still sitting in the valley and the hornbills are going over, and understand that you are standing in a taboo.

If you visit Ghana. Kakum National Park, 30 km north of Cape Coast. The canopy walkway is 40 metres up and 350 metres long, and it sways.