Viande de Brousse: What is Bushmeat?

What is Bushmeat?

Bushmeat refers to the meat of wild animals, hunted from forests and mountains. Viande de Brousse is the French translation. (French is spoken in much of Congo, a legacy of Belgian rule). It's a complicated phenomenon. Follow the link for an article Roger wrote on the global bushmeat trade for Portland-based environmental journal Bear Deluxe.

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Welcome!

This is a project of Roger Peet and Ryan Burns; a bushmeat food-cart serving up information and interpretations of the history and present of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its peoples, forests and creatures, and of the glutton world that has chewed it ragged. Our aim with this object and the situations we place it in is to shed some brief light on a subject deeply shadowed by greed and complicity. The intersection of ecological devastation and explosive economic growth, the knife's edge where survival and catastrophe force impossible choices, and the bitter recapitulations of history and its cruelties are our subjects. Our medium: a food-cart, cut from historical and metaphorical cloth, serving the severed hands of Chimpanzees.

Why hands? They are one of the choicest and most expensive cuts of bushmeat on the market. We believe that their popularity is partly an echo of Colonial Belgium's brutal enforcement strategies, where the hands of thousands of Congolese were cut off in an effort to maintain slave labor regimes in the rubber forests. Severed hands have been given an arcane value by world capitalism's penetration of Congo.

We are trying to talk about who eats what. We want to know who gets to eat and who goes hungry, and we want to know what is destroyed to fill these bellies. Two and a half centuries after King Leopold's colonial edicts began arriving from Belgium, the vast heartland of the African continent is still pulsing to the beat of his dark drum. We want to bring that chilling music back to the West, to dip our fingers in the complicity that binds us together as consumers, and offer a taste to all.

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What is Bushmeat?