We proceed on our trip across Benga territory, a heavenly area located on the Gabonese coast: Cape Esterias.

The Benga essentially live from the sea, in one way or another: offshore fishing, onshore clam picking, mangrove crab trapping, and even sea water turtles catching, a highly controversial activity as we witnessed last week.

We’re now turning to crab fishing with two short films, one featuring a young trapper telling us how hard his job is getting, and another that’ll take us to pick up the actual crab pots with a group of trappers.

So to start with, here’s Tataka, descendant of a long lineage of trappers, seeing his livelihood decrease as the resource gradually fades. Between the exploitation of sand and the destruction of the mangrove to build houses, the crabs aren’t finding the place too settling these days…

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Linguist : Patrick Mouguiama-Daouda

Image and sound : Muriel Lutz

Editing : Caroline Laurent

As a reminder: Benga is spoken on the Gabonese coastal zone (Cap Esterias and Cap Santa Clara), north of Libreville. Benga people also live in Equatorial Guinea, especially on Corisco island. Fishing is their main traditional activity.

Benga is a Bantu language from the Niger-Congo family. The extensive linguistic classification of the language remains complicated: there are similarities with languages spoken further north, but also with languages spoken in the east (languages of the Kota-kele group).

Today, less than 1,000 people are capable of using the language and this figure is constantly decreasing, partly because the community is progressively merging with the Myéné community nearby.