Pangolin Conservation in Cameroon: Forests, Baka Knowledge, and Cross-Border Trafficking

Published 15 June 2026 — alphapanga.com

Cameroon occupies a pivotal position in African pangolin conservation. The country sits at the convergence of two of the most important tropical forest biomes on the continent — the Guinea-Congolian forest block extending west towards Nigeria and the northern margin of the Congo Basin rainforest, the second-largest tropical forest on Earth after the Amazon. Within these forests, three pangolin species coexist: the giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea), the white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis), and the black-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla). All three are classified on the IUCN Red List as endangered, and all are listed under CITES Appendix I, prohibiting commercial international trade. Cameroon’s forests are also home to communities — above all the Baka people — whose intimate ecological knowledge of forest animals, built over centuries, represents a research resource that conservation organisations are only beginning to engage with systematically.

Three Species, Three Ecological Niches

The giant ground pangolin is the largest of the four African species, with adults occasionally exceeding 1.5 metres in total length and 30 kilograms in weight. In Cameroon it occupies lowland and submontane forest, preferring areas near water where the large Macrotermes and Trinervitermes termite colonies on which it primarily feeds are most abundant. It is a ground-dwelling species that digs extensive burrow systems, sometimes sharing abandoned aardvark or warthog burrows. Camera trap detection rates for the giant ground pangolin in Cameroon are low even in protected areas, reflecting either genuinely sparse populations or the species’ tendency to avoid camera trap devices, which emit heat signatures and clicking sounds.

The white-bellied pangolin is substantially smaller, with adults typically weighing one to three kilograms. It is the most arboreal of the African pangolins, resting and foraging in the lower forest canopy as well as on the ground, and its slender prehensile tail — absent in the ground-dwelling African species — allows it to grip branches during foraging. In Cameroon it is considered more common than the giant ground pangolin, and it appears more frequently in bushmeat markets, community trapping records, and camera trap footage from multiple forest zones including logging concessions.

The black-bellied pangolin, also called the long-tailed pangolin, is the most arboreal and most aquatic of the four African species. It is active by day more frequently than the other species, has a proportionally longer tail, and is often recorded crossing water. In Cameroon’s humid forest zone near the coast and in the cross-border forests with Equatorial Guinea, it is present but less well documented than the white-bellied species. Its diurnal tendencies make it somewhat more accessible to community hunters than the strictly nocturnal species, which may contribute to localised hunting pressure.

Campo-Ma’an National Park

In the extreme south of Cameroon, close to the border with Equatorial Guinea and within range of the coast, Campo-Ma’an National Park covers approximately 2,640 square kilometres of lowland Atlantic coastal rainforest. Gazetted formally in 2000, though with earlier forest reserve status, Campo-Ma’an is part of the Tri-National de la Sangha conservation complex and represents one of the most floristically diverse forest areas in Central Africa. Camera trap surveys conducted under WWF and WCS auspices have recorded all three pangolin species present in Cameroon, though density estimates remain uncertain due to the methodological challenges of surveying cryptic nocturnal species.

The park faces significant pressure from its immediate surroundings. The port town of Kribi lies north of the protected area and is connected to regional commodity supply chains that create both economic opportunity and illegal trade risk. The Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline corridor passes through the region, and the associated infrastructure development brought labour influx and bushmeat demand that local conservationists documented during pipeline construction. A palm oil concession controversy in the park buffer zone in the 2010s drew international attention to the governance challenges of maintaining conservation integrity in economically marginal border regions.

Despite these pressures, Campo-Ma’an’s coastal forest block is considered ecologically functional and capable of supporting viable pangolin populations if hunting pressure can be managed. The relatively low road density within the park interior limits access for organised trafficking networks, and WCS’s engagement with local ranger forces has improved protection in core zones.

The Baka and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

The Baka are a hunter-gatherer people whose ancestral territory spans the forest zones of southeastern Cameroon, northern Congo Republic, and northeastern Gabon. Numbering somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 individuals across this range, the Baka have lived within the Congo Basin forest for at least several thousand years and possess detailed ecological knowledge of forest fauna and flora accumulated through continuous intimate interaction with the ecosystem.

Baka knowledge of pangolins is extensive. Pangolins are recognised not as a single category but as distinct species: elders interviewed in ethnobiological surveys consistently distinguish between ground-dwelling and arboreal species by their ecological behaviour, scent, preferred habitats, and the characteristics of their digging and nesting sites. This species-level discrimination is scientifically accurate and predates formal taxonomic description by Western zoologists by centuries. The Baka hunting tradition uses techniques tailored to each species: tracking ground pangolins by scent and disturbed soil, locating arboreal species by listening for feeding activity at night, and identifying den sites by smell.

Historical pangolin hunting among the Baka was subsistence-driven and governed by community protocols that effectively limited offtake. Pangolins were associated in some Baka cosmological systems with forest spirits and good fortune, and certain community roles or ritual periods involved pangolin hunting restrictions. The disruption of these cultural frameworks through sedentarisation, missionary activity, and integration into the cash economy over the twentieth century removed many of the traditional constraints on hunting. The arrival of urban bushmeat buyers willing to pay premium prices for pangolins — a price premium driven by Asian trafficking demand and urban Cameroonian bushmeat markets — transformed what was subsistence hunting into a commercial activity operating at a different scale.

Conservation organisations working in southeastern Cameroon have engaged with Baka communities in multiple capacities. Early conservation programmes in the 1990s and 2000s were sometimes criticised for displacing Baka communities from protected areas without consent or compensation, creating adversarial relationships that undermined community-based conservation. More recent programmes have sought free, prior, and informed consent from Baka communities, involved Baka trackers as paid wildlife monitors, and incorporated traditional knowledge into camera trap placement and species identification protocols. The tension between conservation objectives and indigenous rights remains live and politically complex, but field practitioners increasingly recognise that Baka ecological expertise is an asset rather than a threat.

The Nigeria Trafficking Corridor

Cameroon’s longest international border is with Nigeria to the northwest and west. The Nigeria-Cameroon border stretches over 1,700 kilometres and includes large sections of remote Cross River forest and savanna zones that are extremely difficult to patrol. This border is recognised by TRAFFIC and UNODC as one of the highest-volume wildlife trafficking corridors in sub-Saharan Africa, and pangolins move across it in both directions depending on market demand.

The primary pattern documented in seizure data involves pangolins and pangolin scales originating from Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Congo being trafficked through Nigeria as a transit hub, typically exiting via Lagos or Kano towards China and Vietnam. Nigeria’s large diaspora trading networks, its high container shipping volumes, and the involvement of organised criminal networks with experience in other commodity trafficking have made it a regional hub for wildlife crime. Nigerian enforcement actions have produced some of the largest single pangolin scale seizures on record, reflecting both the volume moving through the country and improving enforcement capacity.

Cameroon-side enforcement is complicated by the country’s geography, by resource constraints on MINFOF (Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife) rangers, and by the informal economy role that bushmeat and wildlife trade plays in border communities with limited alternative income sources. The Cameroon Wildlife Conservation Society and WWF have supported training of eco-guards and intelligence-sharing frameworks with Nigerian counterparts, but coordination across an international border between two different enforcement systems with different legal frameworks and priorities remains inherently difficult.

Legal Framework and Enforcement Gaps

Cameroon’s Wildlife Law of 1994 provides the foundational domestic legal framework for wildlife protection and designates pangolins as Class A protected species — the highest protection category — prohibiting hunting, possession, and trade. Penalties under the law include imprisonment and fines, and Cameroon is a signatory to CITES. In practice, prosecution of pangolin trafficking cases has been uneven. Low-level bushmeat traders are occasionally prosecuted, but organised trafficking networks operating above the community level have historically faced little legal consequence in Cameroon’s court system.

TRAFFIC’s analyses of Cameroonian court records from the 2010s found that wildlife crime convictions were rare relative to the volume of documented offences, and that sentences imposed were typically at the lower end of the statutory range. The situation has improved somewhat as wildlife crime received higher governmental priority following international pressure, but the enforcement gap between law on paper and enforcement on the ground remains substantial.

Conservation Priorities for Cameroon

Field conservationists identify three priority interventions for pangolin conservation in Cameroon over the next decade. First, systematic camera trap surveys across the logging concession network — which covers approximately 7 million hectares and is largely outside the national park system — would provide the first landscape-scale population data for all three species and identify which concession management practices are compatible with pangolin persistence. Several certified logging concessions have already implemented wildlife monitoring protocols, and pangolin data from these operations could anchor a broader survey framework.

Second, community-based monitoring programmes incorporating Baka trackers in protected area ranger teams would leverage traditional ecological knowledge while providing income alternatives to hunting. Successful models from the Dja Biosphere Reserve and from Congo Basin programmes in the Republic of Congo demonstrate that trained community monitors with standardised protocols can generate scientifically credible wildlife abundance data while simultaneously reducing poaching pressure within their home territories.

Third, transboundary law enforcement coordination between Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, and Congo Republic is essential for disrupting trafficking networks that operate across borders. Bilateral and multilateral protocols exist in principle under the Congo Basin Forest Partnership and the ECCAS regional framework, but operational information-sharing between national wildlife authorities in real time — the level of coordination needed to intercept shipments — remains inconsistent and resource-constrained.