The essay is an exercise in translation. It examines doli, a conceptual category of historical and environmental knowledge and explores how the Mpiemu in the Sangha basin of the Central African Republic use that category to understand and debate change. It evaluates the historical claims, categories and epistemologies of Mpiemu people and shows how translating this category is intimately connected with environmental relations and environmental change within the Sangha basin. In tales, narratives and non-narrative objects and sites, Mpiemu recalled the environmental interventions undertaken by expatriate concessionary companies and the French colonial administration in the Sangha forest. These interventions promoted forest clearing and fundamentally altered relations of authority, and different groups of Mpiemu interpreted them differently through the lens of doli. Their interpretations were shaped by their encounters with a World Wide Fund for Nature forest conservation project, which administered a park and reserve that limited people's activities in the forest. Some Mpiemu who lived in close proximity to the park and reserve invoked these genres to mourn and protest the loss of severed cords that once linked them to broader networks of political economicpower and to ancestors who had successfully accumulated wealth through these networks. Through doli, Mpiemu sought in different ways to reassert their historical sense of entitlement to forest places, space and resources, and to remember and to reproduce the relations that bound together past, present and future people.
